by Imbolo Mbue
The Sweet One and the Cute One made more visits after that, to help us with the preparation for her journey. We decided to tell no one in the village, not even Yaya or Juba, until she had gone to Bézam—with the Sweet One, under the pretense of representing Kosawa in a reading competition—and had all the right papers she needed to travel, and until we had a date for her departure. We knew she would tell no one, because the weight of the journey was severe, and the more she carried in her heart, the less she spoke.
* * *
My mother always cautioned me against dwelling on the past and the future. What happened will never unhappen, she liked to say; what is to happen will happen—better you focus on what’s happening in front of you. But on evenings like this, when I find myself sitting alone on the veranda—Yaya and Juba in the hut; Thula in America for several months now; my friends and cousins busy with their own concerns—I hear no other voices except those of the past and the future. They sit on either side of me, fighting over my mind. Remember what happened, the past says. Consider what might happen, the future says. The past always wins, because what it says is true—what happened lives within me, it surrounds me, ever present. I cannot trust the future and its uncertainty.
* * *
—
I see the past in Juba’s eyes, the blankness that appeared within hours after the massacre. He can’t unsee what he saw. None of us can. He can’t unhear the sound of those guns. None of us ever will. He’s a child present but gone, so young in age, so battered in spirit. I hear his brokenness when he asks me to tell him: Do I think his father will ever return? What did Bongo do wrong? Could we please leave Kosawa? He’s scared because he’s the last male left in our family—Big Papa is gone, Malabo is gone, and now Bongo too—how long before it’s his turn? Would Jakani bring him back a second time if he died again? he asks. I hear his anguish when he tells me that he wishes he could understand all that has happened to our family. I’ve done my best to explain what I can; I’ve told him that too many things in life cannot be reconciled, though I wish for his sake that it weren’t so.
He asks me to buy him drawing books and crayons every time I go to the big market. Morning, afternoon, evening, there’s no way of knowing when he’ll feel an urge to draw. He has filled a dozen books with pictures. He draws things I don’t understand—a man’s face with features scattered all over, mouth on the forehead, nose on his cheekbone; fishes and trees in the sky, standing in the place of clouds; the sun and the stars falling down. I ask him why he draws that way, why he can’t draw things the way they are. He says he doesn’t know. He can’t explain, but I know it’s grief.
I see his heartache when he goes to Yaya’s bed and lies next to her. He’s eleven, an age by which every boy in the village has gotten rid of his yearning for affection, busy as they are preparing for their rite of passage into manhood, but Juba is not ashamed to tell his friends that he’d rather not come with them to make new slingshots so they can go bird hunting, he’d rather spend the afternoon with his grandmother. I hear him say it and I know it’s the pain. I see it in how eager he is to help me feed Yaya, how he rushes to fetch a cup of water for her, how gentle he is when we roll her from her side to her back at least four times a day so she doesn’t get infected with bedsores. I hear it when he asks me if Yaya will ever walk again, why her legs stopped functioning the day we returned from Bézam with the news. I tell him that heartbreak is the worst malady.
* * *
For the five years before Thula left, I woke up every school morning and fried eggs for her and Juba, two eggs each. No one in Kosawa eats eggs on a regular basis—chickens lay eggs only so often, and it’s best to leave the egg to one day become a chicken and feed an entire family than to break it and barely fill one stomach—but I made sure my children ate eggs, because Malabo believed they were good for the body, and he wanted me to feed them to his children as often as I could. During those five years, I bought the eggs in the big market, using the money the people from the Restoration Movement gave us. It was the money Pexton gave, after the Restoration Movement fought them on our behalf.
The fight happened in America, so we didn’t get the joy of seeing the look on the Pexton people’s faces when they realized they’d lost a battle to us. But my cousin Tunis told me that he heard from someone in Lokunja that there hadn’t really been a battle, that Pexton had gone to the Restoration Movement and given them money to pass on to the people of Kosawa alongside their condolences after news of the massacre reached America. Pexton wanted to show how much our suffering pained them, they wanted to demonstrate their commitment to work closely with the Restoration Movement to improve our lives, but everyone said that they’d only given us the money so that the insults being flung at them on both sides of the ocean would cease, and all the people who had stopped buying oil from them would resume doing so, and Pexton would be able to say, Look at what we’re doing, we’re helping the people of Kosawa, so how are they not benefiting from our presence?
Pexton claimed they had nothing to do with what the soldiers did that day. They said all they ever did was pay the government for the right to drill our land—why should they be responsible for our government’s incompetence? His Excellency must have been furious when he heard that, his people must have made threats, but we heard nothing of that—they needed to be united against us. Pexton wanted more of our oil. Our government wanted more of their money. His Excellency wanted more of the world’s finest things. Eight years after the massacre that left Thula unable to speak for eleven days, Pexton is still on our land.
* * *
The first time the Restoration Movement came to see what was happening in our village, they were represented by five people—the Sweet One and the Cute One; a man who looked like he could be from our area but was from the neighboring country; and a man and a woman from America, both around my age and wearing brown shorts and hats with strings tied around their chins, their faces approaching the hue of a ripe apple.
They walked around the village and saw the pipelines and the places where crude oil had spilled over the years. We took them into the forest, and they saw farms that had been rendered useless after fires; they examined the shriveled-up products of our soil. They took pictures of waste floating on the big river. They pointed at leaves with holes and said it was from acid rain; they explained to us that our rain long ago stopped being pure water. We led them to see the graves of the children; we saw their lips moving as they counted the smallest mounds. They looked toward Gardens and saw the gas flares.
When we gathered in the square for a meeting, the American man and woman repeatedly sighed and shook their heads while the Sweet One spoke, though they couldn’t understand our language. The Sweet One told us that the American man and woman had wanted to see us for themselves: they knew stories like ours existed, because fighting for people like us was what they did, but they’d never seen a case like ours, this magnitude of subjugation. The American man and woman gave our children books and sweets that tasted like honey. They wanted to be hugged, we could tell, the woman especially, her eyes full of tears, but they didn’t ask for a hug, and as much as we would have loved to hug them in appreciation, we did not deem it proper to behave as such with Americans.
No one had told us they’d be coming, so we had no food prepared for them. When a few women joined their heads together in conversation and then asked the Sweet One if their group could wait so the women of Kosawa could kill and roast a couple of chickens, the Sweet One whispered to the American people, who smiled and told him to thank us so much, how very kind of us, but they’d already eaten. As they were leaving the square to get into their car to return to Bézam and then America, someone burst into song, and soon all the women and girls, myself included, were singing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sung, and yet I joined in adding a third part to the melody, every woman swinging her hips and raising dust, our voices soaring, first with a song of gratit
ude, asking the Spirit to bless our visitors for coming to see us, then the song from the tale our mothers used to tell us when we were children, the one about the three little fishes who escaped the belly of a monstrous creature by itching the insides of its stomach for so long that the monster got a stomachache and vomited them out. The Restoration Movement people swung their hips alongside us, the American woman red-faced and runny-nosed and crying hard. Somehow the drums appeared. As the men beat them in unison, we sang the fishes’ plea: This story must be told, it might not feel good to all ears, it gives our mouths no joy to say it, but our story cannot be left untold.
* * *
—
A month later, the Sweet One and the Cute One began coming to see us by themselves.
Though they live in Bézam and travel to other villages as well, they always seem to have time for us, staying with us when a new death adds to our sorrow, sleeping on our bare floors if they have to, or at the Sweet One’s uncle’s hut in one of the sister-villages.
The day they brought the Pexton money, they told us, before handing it to us, that we didn’t have to take it. They said that no amount of money could undo what Pexton had done to us, but we took it anyway, because, much as we hated them, we needed their money to help us carry on after all we’d lost. Besides, it was our money, from our oil.
The Restoration Movement men said the money was just for the time being, to help us dry our tears. They said their people in America would get us more money for every spill that has ever happened. They would make Pexton pay for the toxic waste on the river, and the dirt in the air, and the poison in the well water, and for the farms that might not be fruitful for another generation, and why not for the children who never got a chance to grow up, and the parents whose broken hearts will never heal.
After they’d done all that, they said, they would ask Pexton to clean up our land so Kosawa could return to the state it was in when our ancestors first arrived here. But that would all take years, they cautioned; some of us might not be alive to see a restored Kosawa and a new envelope of money, in which case it would go to our children.
They gave us the money from Pexton in large straw bags.
A straw bag for each of the ninety or so huts of Kosawa, handed to the head of the family. I was the head of my family. What woman dreams of becoming the head of her family? I never wanted such a burden—I’d seen what it had done to Malabo’s relationship with Bongo—but there I was, extending my hand and receiving the money, more cash than my husband made in the last three years of his life combined.
Someone started a story that the money we received couldn’t have been all the money Pexton had given, that the people at the Restoration Movement office in Bézam must have kept some of it for themselves, and that the Sweet One and the Cute One must have taken their cuts. The rumors flew from hut to hut, some saying that the Restoration Movement was giving us only what they thought would make us happy; perhaps we should go to Gardens and ask a supervisor to tell us exactly how much their people in America had sent us. Tunis is the one who told me about the rumor. He said Malabo’s cousin Sonni—who had become our new village head after the massacre—had asked him to help put an end to the rumor. I’d never liked Sonni and his manner of taking too long to think before speaking, and I doubt Malabo would be happy to see that someone whose presentation reeked of weakness had become leader of Kosawa, but I agreed with Sonni on this: If we learned that the Restoration Movement and the Sweet One and the Cute One had kept some of the money for themselves, what would our recourse be? Would we start a fight against the very people fighting for us?
* * *
—
The straw bag sits in a black box under my bed, the same one Malabo used to store the money he brought back from selling his game in the big market. He never brought back much money. Mostly coins, just enough for food and clothes and medicine, things we needed. The only money he left for me before his departure was money his father had left for him—several bills Big Papa had put in an envelope the day Thula was born, which he told Yaya to give Malabo after he died so that Thula would never want for anything.
Big Papa wasn’t a man who demonstrated his love in the words he spoke or the looks he gave, but he was a man who, as often as he could, did what love ought to do. Few people recognized that. His own sons struggled to—they couldn’t see beyond his inability to be the kind of father they wanted. They did not share my admiration for how he moved to Kosawa as a young man, and how he worked for years on the farm of Woja Beki’s father, who gifted him the land on which our hut now stands, in gratitude for Big Papa’s hard work. They dismissed the fact that, bamboo by bamboo, Big Papa built our hut and outhouse by himself, every evening, after working all day on the farm. I reminded Malabo of this whenever he came to me grumbling about something or another his father had done or not done because of his mood. I said to him: Your father can do only what he has the capacity to do; surely, it must pain him to fail you. But Malabo couldn’t look past his disappointments and the many sad evenings of his childhood. Though Big Papa had stopped his yellings and beratings by the time I married Malabo—he was mostly just melancholic—memories of his transgressions were still fresh within his children. I never spoke about any of this with Yaya. She was Big Papa’s wife—I couldn’t put her in a position to speak ill of her husband—but I imagine it hurt her more than it did me, how people looked at him as if he were just a level above Konga.
Even children laughed at Big Papa behind his back, calling him Bitter Face and Fire Eyes; they never got to know what more lay behind that countenance the way I did. Yes, it wasn’t a pleasure to look at the face, but I rarely thought that the anger on it was directed at me—something in his eyes told me that he yearned to be happy, but he was too consumed with despair and knew of no way to free himself from it. People wanted me to say that living in the same hut with him was akin to eating sour leaves for dinner every night, but I could never say that, because Big Papa was good to me despite himself. No, he never uttered a good morning to me, and when I placed his food before him his gratitude came out as a grumble—many were the times when I found myself alone in the parlor with him and had to find a reason to escape lest that glare of his scorch me—but he went to the forest to hunt food that I would eat. If his mood allowed, he split wood for me to cook with. When my daughter was born, he held her and rocked her to sleep.
* * *
On most nights now, when all is quiet, I think of Big Papa sitting on the veranda in silence. I think of Bongo singing during his baths, his songs more melodious than ever after he met Elali. Mostly, though, I think of Malabo, my husband, my heartbreaker. I think of how perfectly flawed life was the day he walked up to me at my friend’s hut.
That was back before Cocody and I were friends, when she was just my friend Uwe’s friend. Uwe and I were in Kosawa so she could see Cocody and I could visit my aunts who live here. I had just turned nineteen. I remember I wore a layer of anxiety that day—I’d reached marriage age with no one handsome in sight. A man in my village named Neba was my only option, but I couldn’t look past his nostrils, which flared like a windswept skirt. “How could you turn down a man because you hate his nose?” my mother had sighed. “How could I not, when I would have to look into the thing every day,” I’d replied. When my mother cautioned me to lower my standards, I laughed. Neba would be good to me, I knew, but would that suffice for a marriage?
Malabo showed up at Cocody’s hut, looking for his best friend, Bissau, Cocody’s husband. I saw his cheekbones, sharp as a spear’s edge, and a pointy beard to match. What a face. What a man. Could any man alive be more viciously gorgeous?
Every time I visited Kosawa after that day, my eyes labored in search of him from my arrival till my departure. Cocody and I would walk past his hut at least twice every visit. Whenever I saw him, I pushed out my chest to display the largeness of my breasts, patting dry any sweat on my face as Coc
ody laughed the laughter that everyone knew belonged to her only: ka ka ka oh. My efforts, though, had no effect on Malabo—he wouldn’t notice me until the day he was ready to.
It wouldn’t happen till several months later, one afternoon when we were laughing on Cocody’s veranda—me, Uwe, Cocody, and her friend Lulu. Malabo appeared from nowhere and stood in front of me. “I just want to say that I’ve never seen teeth as beautiful as yours,” he said. I died. I came back to life and died again. Weeks later, he would tell me that the whiteness of my teeth must make the clouds feel inferior, and I would tell him that the sharpness of his cheekbones made knives envious, but on that afternoon, there would be no words coming off me. With the full brightness of his eyes on me, I forgot how to produce sound. Embarrassment would have killed me if it were a disease. He told me that he’d seen me around the village and had wondered what I did to keep my teeth so white. Palm kernel oil, I wanted to say; I swish with it every morning. “Whatever you’re doing,” he said, “keep doing it.”