by Imbolo Mbue
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Far more than was appropriate, we wondered about what went on inside the twins’ hut. Our mothers wondered too, as must our fathers, though they would never debase themselves to ponder it openly. More than once we heard our mothers saying that it was possible the twins slept on the same bed, Jakani on the right, Sakani on the left, arms around each other. We imagined they were speaking in a parable of sorts, because we knew with certainty that, although men could hug and hold hands with each other, there were certain things men did only with women, things like sharing beds, and lying on top of each other late at night to breathe heavily and cause the bed to squeak, the kind of things that our parents did when they thought we were sleeping, and which we couldn’t wait to do one day, because we could tell from how frequently they did it, and from our fathers’ grunts and our mothers’ muffled moans, that it would be a delightful thing to do.
When we were younger, one of us had woken up at an evil hour with a bladder spilling urine and gone outside to empty it, only to see something she wished she had never seen. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have gone outside alone. We left our huts at night only when accompanied by a sibling, but this one of us had no other sibling besides a little brother, who would have been of no use as a companion, so she’d gone over to her parents’ bed, to wake her mother up, but her parents were not in their bed. This one of us had hurried through the parlor and out the back door, believing she would find her parents outside—perhaps they’d gone out to urinate together—but when she stepped outside, she saw nothing of them. She only heard their moans coming from inside the kitchen. Our friend immediately lost the urge to urinate. She thought about hurrying back to bed, but the part of her made of curiosity had tugged her to look through a hole in the bamboo kitchen wall. In the dim light of a kerosene lamp, she saw it clearly—her parents naked, her mother lying on her back with her legs spread wide and feet high, her father’s head deep between her mother’s thighs. Our friend ran back to her bed and hid under her blanket, her heart loath to slow its pounding, her eyes unable to shut, until her parents returned early in the morning with the blanket on which they’d been lying on the kitchen floor. They took a new blanket from under their bed, climbed into bed, and covered themselves as innocently as if they hadn’t just been doing unspeakable things to each other on the kitchen floor. The next morning, fatigued from struggling to unsee what she’d seen, the one of us had been unable to get up in time for school. When we asked her during recess why her feet appeared to be as weak as grass, she told us about her night, and a few of us told her that we’d seen similar things, and that, whatever she did, she could never tell her parents that she’d seen them, for it would make them ashamed of themselves, and making one’s parents ashamed of themselves was never a good thing.
We believed Jakani and Sakani did no such things; what they felt for each other was more akin to what our parents felt for us than what our parents felt for each other, but we couldn’t know this with total certainty, for the twins were palm nuts that could never be cracked open. They did and said nothing besides what they needed to do or say to bring us healing and peace. On the occasions when they took someone into their hut because a ritual couldn’t take place anywhere else, they wiped away all memory, so that the person exited the hut with no awareness of what he or she had seen or done. That, we were convinced, was what happened to our fathers right after the village meeting.
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Much as the men of Kosawa recognized the danger the twins’ hut posed, there was no better place for them to go to prepare for a potential confrontation with soldiers. It is likely that, in those hours after the village meeting, some of our fathers cowered when the twins told them to enter the hut, while the rest of them urged the frightened ones to stand tall and be men. Or maybe Jakani chanted a solo that made everyone file in like ants marching at their leader’s command. Ultimately, all of the men must have entered the hut, which was why Kosawa was quiet after we returned to our huts. Inside the twins’ hut, we believed, Sakani gave the men a pre-battle potion to drink, to erase their anxiety and fortify their minds. We imagined that Jakani asked them to kneel in the center of the hut before calling upon the Spirit to possess them with a fearlessness so all-consuming they would overcome our enemies as utterly as the light overcomes darkness at dawn.
The men walked out of the hut in the morning with no memory of what had been done to them; we know this because our fathers’ memories of the previous day were still intact, but none of them could recall what they’d done from late that night to the dawn of the next day. It was thus evident to all of Kosawa that, with the power bestowed upon him by the Spirit, Jakani had reached into the men’s brains and turned off their memories. He must have restarted them only when the men were at a safe distance from his hut, after they’d left the confines of where the spirit and human worlds intersect. Our fathers, if they’d been aware of what the twins were doing to them, wouldn’t have complained, knowing that everything the twins did was for the good of Kosawa. They would have been thankful that, in briefly shutting down their consciousness, Jakani had protected them from coming face-to-face with the Spirit, an experience no mortal could survive.
* * *
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We had as good a time in class that morning as we’d had in months. When Teacher Penda lectured on the government, we tried not to laugh as he stressed that it was made of the country’s most intelligent men. At the end of the lecture, one of us asked him to tell us more about His Excellency—what made His Excellency such a great president? Teacher Penda told us to list some traits a person needs in order to be a good leader. We called out several—friendly, kind, funny, respectful. Teacher Penda told us that His Excellency had all of these traits and more. His Excellency was the smartest man in the world, he said; not many countries were blessed to have a president like ours. We did not argue; we’d lived long enough to know he was simply saying what he was paid to say.
When he wasn’t saying what he needed to say, Teacher Penda told us many truths. By the time we were eight, we knew more about where our oil was heading than our grandparents and their parents ever did. We knew because Teacher Penda taught us about America—how people there lived in big brick houses, and how they loved to mash their potatoes before eating them with objects called “ferks.” He taught us how to speak English, though we could never speak it as well as the American overseer at Gardens. Sometimes we used English words when we played, saying things like “who cares,” and “absolutely not,” and “holy shit,” to impress one another.
Once, one of us, feeling confident in his ability to speak English, had shouted out a greeting to an overseer who was visiting our village. Like the overseers before and after him, this American man lived in the brick house atop the hill facing the oil wells and the laborers’ camp, a house as big as all our huts combined. The loneliness thrust upon him might have been why he visited our village that day, to feel any kind of human touch. The man’s car had barely entered Kosawa when we gathered at the entrance to Woja Beki’s compound, singing: Motor car, motor car, I love you, motor car, take me to the capital, I want to be a capital. When the driver opened the door for the American to exit, we angled for the best position to watch him. As he was walking toward Woja Beki—who was grinning like the idiot he was—our friend shouted, “Hello, man,” which is how Teacher Penda had told us Americans greeted each other. Our mouths dropped. What was he doing? He had no right to speak to the overseer as if he were a friend. We saw the fear in Woja Beki’s eyes too. How would the overseer react? The overseer turned to face us, smiling. His eyes embraced the eyes of the one of us who had called out the greeting, and he said, “Well, hello to you too, my little friends.” We burst out laughing, poking each other in delight. Did we just make friends with an American? For days afterward, we couldn’t stop asking our friend to tell us how it felt to attract the attention of a man from Ame
rica.
A few months later, on a day when our class was only half full because most of our friends needed to stay home due to a high fever or bad cough or an inexplicable rash and a multitude of symptoms, we talked about that afternoon during recess. We wondered if America was populated with cheerful people like that overseer, which made it hard for us to understand them: How could they be happy when we were dying for their sake? Why wouldn’t they ask their friends at Pexton to stop killing us? Was it possible they knew nothing of our plight? Was Pexton lying to them, just as they were lying to us?
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Some of our parents weren’t even born when Pexton first arrived, back when the valley contained only Kosawa and footpaths lined with trees around which animals frolicked and birds sang. “Rest assured that we won’t be here for long,” the government men accompanying the oil explorers told our grandparents, when they came out of their huts with open mouths and hands on hips to see the strangers who’d appeared in their village. Even after a detailed explanation of the mission, our people still couldn’t understand why the oil-seeking men couldn’t plant palm trees and make palm oil if it was oil they wanted. When Woja Beki—who had just taken over leadership of the village after the death of his father, Woja Bewa—asked this question of the government representatives, the representatives told him that the oil beneath our valley was a special kind, it was the kind that allowed cars to move, a clarification that made our grandparents look at each other in mutual amazement—they had seen cars in Lokunja but they’d never wondered what got the cars to move. The representatives told them that drilling for oil would bring something called “civilization” to our village. One day, the government representatives said, Kosawa would have a wonderful thing called “prosperity.” Could the men explain “civilization” and “prosperity” in our language? our grandparents had asked. The government men had said it was impossible for them to explain such terms fully, because it would be hard for our grandparents to understand what they’d never witnessed or considered a possibility. But as soon as “civilization” and “prosperity” arrived, they added, our grandparents would be in awe of what a beautiful life they offer; they would lose all comprehension of how they and their ancestors could have lived without the wonders heaped upon them by the rapidly changing world around them. They would pour libations over and over to thank their ancestors. They would sing songs of gratitude to the Spirit every morning for having put oil under their land.
Our grandparents had rejoiced upon hearing this.
They believed Pexton’s lie, and for a long time our parents did too, convinced that if only they remained patient the thing called “prosperity” would arrive like a cherished guest for whom the fattest pig had been slaughtered, and all of Kosawa would live in brick houses like the one Woja Beki would eventually own.
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Though our hatred of Pexton multiplied as we got older and our indignation deepened, we couldn’t deny the fact that Pexton had offered our grandfathers jobs and a chance to partake in the wealth that would be created from the drilling. Pexton had told our grandfathers that if they came to work for them, for a certain number of hours a day, and did as they were told to do, they would earn a fixed amount of money a month. Our grandfathers, however, had no interest in losing ownership of their lives—every one of them had turned down Pexton’s offer and returned to the thrill of killing for food as trees were felled all over the valley to make room for the oil field and pipelines and Gardens.
By the time our fathers came of age, around when Pexton began drilling its third well, it had become clear to everyone in Kosawa that the only way to partake in the oil wealth was to work for Pexton. But every time our fathers went to Gardens to apply for work, the supervisors told them that there were no jobs—all the jobs had been taken by men brought in from villages around Bézam, men whose brothers and uncles and cousins and tribesmen worked in government offices and had no doubt conducted secret meetings and signed cryptic documents to ensure that whatever prosperity the oil wells brought would be reserved for their families and clans and tribes. Our fathers had no one in Bézam to speak up and scheme for them to get the coveted jobs, so they had continued hunting and fishing before spills covered the big river, just like their fathers before them. Meanwhile, men from far-off places came to live in Gardens to do jobs that came with the privilege of living in brick houses and getting monthly envelopes of cash, money that allowed these laborers to build fine houses in their ancestral villages and send their children to schools in Bézam so the children would one day get office jobs and drive cars like American people, cars our parents’ children could only dream of touching.
We despised those laborers.
They’d been given what should have been ours, and yet they shot us glares reserved for vermin whenever we sat next to them in the bus that ran from Gardens to Lokunja; a bus meant for them which Pexton allowed us to use out of solidarity, yes, but still, a bus that took them from our land and brought them back to our land.
We hated how, whenever a pipeline spilled in our farms, it took them days to fix it, after which they told our parents that all they needed to do to reclaim their farmlands was to remove the topsoil and toss it aside. When our parents tried to explain that doing so wouldn’t work, since the poison went deep and the oil spread wide, and that perhaps the best solution would be for Pexton to get better pipelines, the laborers chuckled and asked if we expected Pexton to pack up and leave just because we didn’t like them.
After these exchanges, the laborers returned to their houses to breathe the same air as we did, but not to drink the same water, or eat the same food—they had enough money to buy all of their food from the big market, and Pexton made sure that their water came in through pipes, not from a well, which was why their children weren’t dying like us. When their children fell sick, there was a doctor from Bézam among them, someone Pexton paid to heal them so that their parents’ minds would not be disturbed and their fathers could focus on doing the work that had to be done. When one of our fathers had asked at a village meeting if he could take his sick child to the doctor there, in case that medicine man had herbs Sakani didn’t have, the Leader shook his head and said that it was best to keep the children separated—why confuse them about how the world works?
* * *
The weekend after the captivity, while our fathers rested and our mothers did chore after chore, some of us loitered in front of Lusaka’s hut, hoping to hear the Pexton men and their driver crying and begging for their freedom, likely having realized that we would never let any soldiers find them. Our mothers repeatedly yelled at us to leave the area, even as they frequented the hut, to take meals to Lusaka’s wife so that she wouldn’t have to shoulder all the burden of feeding the hostages. We knew our mothers went to Lusaka’s hut not only to deliver the food—we usually ran such errands for them—but also to ask Lusaka’s wife if she could let them into the makeshift cell so they could spit in the Pexton men’s faces, tell them what despicable creatures they were, slap them, kick them, bang their heads against the ground for all the children Pexton had killed.
Lusaka’s wife never allowed our mothers into the room to do it. She said no even to the mothers whose departed children still appeared in their dreams nightly, clothed in white, with tears in their eyes, speaking no words but showing every desperation to understand why they were dead, longing for their mothers but unable to touch them, the space between them never narrowing no matter how hard the mothers ran toward them for a hug and an up-close look to ensure they were well-fed in the world beyond.
“I don’t think it right to mistreat the men on top of what they’re enduring,” Lusaka’s wife told our mothers. Her duty, she said, was to keep them alive by feeding them. Still, she confessed, she couldn’t stop herself from fantasizing about the best way to make them suffer a pain similar to the one she daily bore, the unbearable grie
f she would do anything to be free of for a moment. She’d thought about putting poison in the captives’ food, she told our mothers, but she didn’t want their deaths to be quick. She’d thought about letting them starve to death, but her husband and the village men would never allow it, and there really wasn’t much she could slyly do to harm the captives, since her husband and the elders had frequent meetings in the parlor to devise their next steps.
It was at one such meeting that the elders decided to forbid all the members of Woja Beki’s household from going past the village entrance or visiting another hut; keeping them at home was the only way to guarantee that they wouldn’t run to Gardens or the district office to report the ongoings. We were in support of the measure when we heard about it—we’d always despised the two children in that house who were our age-mates; we had been excluding them from our games long before the dictate. It grated us how they loved to talk about sitting on “couches” in their “living rooms,” and eating with “ferks.”