by Wole Soyinka
She bends over and pats me, repeating my name. I rise slowly. I am trying to listen to the sound of my name as it crawls on her tongue. A violent chill rushes through me, digging through my skin, flesh and bones. I am afraid. Jjaja’s tenderness is eating me up. I can’t see, can’t think, can’t walk normally. I shuffle behind her, clutching on to her hand. I am a goat being propelled to the slaughterhouse.
The woman smiles at me. A big, happy smile like the one Jjaja gave me this morning. Her smile widens to expose the whole set of her teeth. The man only glances at me. When I turn to look at him he looks away and focuses on my rolled-up grass mattress in the corner of the room. I am scared of him. Scared of the oversized, full-length green kitenge and the matching headgear. I am scared of his big belly that cannot be hidden by this large attire. He looks like the men I have seen in Nigerian movies. Mukulu says such men hide wickedness behind big stomachs and full-length outfits. If Mukulu could wake up now, he would tell me to keep away from these strangers.
‘Mutabani wange!’
The woman speaks, calling me her son. Her words rattle in my ears like falling pieces of scrap metal from a truck. She jumps off the mat and hurries to take my hand. I withdraw it and she instead strokes my head, grazing the open sores in my burning scalp.
Jjaja snatches my hand and forces it into the woman’s. ‘Joshua, dear, she is your mother. The one who gave birth to you. And he is your father. I finally found your parents.’
I stare at Jjaja in bewilderment. I know that Mama died. Aunty Lito told me. ‘Don’t call me Mother. Call me Aunty Lito. Your mother died. She used to be my friend. Even Karo was your mother’s friend. She took care of you when you were a baby. Before she brought you to me. The parents who gave birth to you are both dead.’
According to the jumbled details of my life, my birth parents are dead. And dead people can only resurrect when Jesus comes back – so Aunty Lito used to say. But Mukulu told me Jesus will never come back, so dead people will never be resurrected.
‘My parents died, Jjaja. Aunty Lito told me. Even Mukulu told me so.’
She smiles. Not the rabbit smile. This time her teeth are barred. She is grinning. ‘If I say that these are your parents, it means they are.’
‘Mukulu told me I am his grandson. I want to stay here.’
‘Shut up now and listen to me. You are going away with your parents. Now!’
‘Going’ dashes towards me like a rock let free from a catapult, shattering my ears. This is a nightmare. I am settled into Mukulu’s home. Mukulu’s love gives me strength to endure Jjaja’s cruelty. This is home. I can’t go away from Mukulu. I glance in the direction of the room where Mukulu is snoring. I need him to walk through the bedroom door and explain all this. He is the only one who can save me from these lies. But I know it would take pouring a basin of hot water on him to make him wake up.
Jjaja talks on. I listen with my ears closed, see with sightless eyes. I am choked up by my own helplessness. The woman has her hand clutched around mine. Jjaja is giving me away. I hate her. I hate the new clothes she gave me. I hate smiling Drogba!
Suddenly the man rises off the stool, steps towards us and within moments he has me lying across his chest in a manner one carries a newborn baby. I wriggle and scream. He cups my mouth.
‘Behave, you devil!’ Jjaja pinches my ear.
By the half smiling, half glaring look on her face, I know that I have lost my life once again. I have lost four lives in my ten years of existence. I am leaving. Again.
The person who opens the door is tall and skinny. His shoulders are hunched as if weighed down by his long arms. He is dressed in a sleeveless white T-shirt with a shredded hem, and a pair of loose pink-flowered shorts from which two long legs descend to the ground and end in two gigantic ostrich feet.
Ostrich feet waves to the man and woman, who immediately dash back to the car and drive off. I stand in sheer confusion, terrified of whatever will happen to me in this strange place. Ostrich feet shows me the way through a winding trench of a white corridor. I count my steps, one by one, steadying myself, spreading my arms to keep balance. The white walk is scary. The smooth white tiles are thorns under my calloused soles. The white ceiling is Jjaja’s water drum sitting on my head. The white walls are the open jaws of a python.
The corridor ends in a semicircle of six closed doors all painted black. Six doors arrayed hand in hand. I step aside to let him pass. He looks at me head to toe, and smiles before reaching into his pocket for a bunch of keys. He easily spots the key that opens one of the two doors in the middle of the semicircle. Another wave signalling me to enter. The room is dark. I raise my face to look at him, hoping he will see the terror in my eyes.
Our eyes lock. He opens his so wide that the whites of his eyes threaten to swallow me up. For a moment I pray that Mukulu will appear from along the corridor and ask me to take his walking stick and wait for him outside. I see myself outside, hurrying into the friendly darkness of Kikuubo slums, smelling the stagnant sewage that always welcomed me home to Mukulu’s house.
A rough tug on my shoulder wakes me from my daydream. The room lightens as soon as I step inside. A small room housing a spiral staircase that leads to an ascending fierce darkness. An overwhelming urge to turn back and disappear jumps to me. I want to shove backwards, knock over Ostrich feet and disappear down the white corridor. But I can’t. The white corridor has turned black. And Ostrich feet is right behind me. The lock clanks. The spiral opens into another white corridor. It seems like the lights in this house depend on human presence; coming to life soon as we enter a room, and dying as soon as we leave.
Another semicircle of closed doors. More lights coming to life. A beautiful white bed squatting lonely in the middle of a large room. This time Ostrich feet enters before me, and in a few strides he is sitting on the beautiful bed. I did not see him shut the door, did not hear the lock clank but I feel the locked door behind me. Just as I am beginning to think Ostrich feet is mute, he speaks.
‘Take off your shirt.
‘Put it down.
‘The jeans . . .
‘I mean take them off!
‘Put them down.
‘Turn around!’
I stand in naked shame, my eyes glued to the white tiles beneath my feet.
He jumps off the bed and wades past me to the door. ‘Dress up.’ He slams the door behind him.
The morning is as white as the sheets I slept in, as white as the pyjamas Ostrich feet gave me last night. I don’t know if I slept at all. All I know is that Ostrich feet dragged me by the collar and buried me inside the white sheets I was afraid to sleep in. He warned me I would wake up dead if I left the bed before he came back. Then tears started gushing down my cheeks. The tears are still flowing. Under my cheek is a damp patch of drying tears: a large blot of shit on the white sheets!
Ostrich feet scares me but he is not as scary as my strange surroundings. Not as scary as the prospect of never seeing Mukulu again. This cannot be my new home. I don’t see myself, Joshua Mondo here. I belong to Mukulu’s mud-and-wattle house. I belong with the trenches, stagnant waters, rubbish heaps, broken bottles, rotting dogs. I belong in Kikuubo. I belong with Mukulu’s drunken love and Jjaja’s sober hatred.
Key turning. Lock clanking. Ostrich feet.
‘Good booooy.’ He hurries to pull out the sheets he tucked in last night. Then he reaches for my hand to pull me out of bed. His hands are so soft they feel like a ripe avocado.
‘I can see you didn’t get out of bed. Big bro is always right, you know. Do as he says and you will always be a good boooy. Now come on, Kato is waiting for you.’
The white walk down corridors, staircases, and through black doors leads us to a boy whom I at once guess is Kato. He is seated alone at a round table making sketches on the glossy black surface with his forefinger, and shielding whatever he is sketching with the palm of his left hand. He pauses, gazes at me. His face looks angry. Lips bunched. Nose flaring. But I can’t s
ee the same anger in his eyes.
Ostrich feet waves me over to the pulled-out chair facing Kato. I can’t take my eyes off Kato. I am trying to know him. Trying to find out if he, too, was brought into this house by the man in the Nigerian attire and the woman with a wild headscarf. Was he deceived that they were his parents? Did he leave behind people like Mukulu who love him?
Ostrich feet bends over the table and says something to Kato.
‘No! I don’t want to go there again. Help me big bro.’
‘Stop it.’
‘I can’t go there again.’
‘I said stop it!’ Ostrich feet bangs the table. The bang hits directly into my bladder. I jump off the chair and press my legs together to contain the rebellious urine but it spills. Through the white pair of shorts, down my legs, to the rubber sandals Ostrich feet gave me this morning.
‘And you? Going anywhere?’ Ostrich feet glares at me.
I slump back on the chair.
Kato has resumed sketching, forefinger grazing the table like it would perforate through the wood. The left hand shielding his sketch is trembling. He keeps glancing at me as if it is my fear that he is sketching.
I’m Going to Make Changes to the Kitchen
Ondjaki
how terribly absurd
it is to be alive
Luis Eduardo Aute, Sin tu Latido
I’ve picked my ashtray up again.
My little ashtray, made by hand and with feeling.
Feelings are like ashes – suggestions of past attachments and pleasures.
The kitchen is empty. Silent. My ashtray survived all the kitchen earthquakes. Tiny little ashtray, made from sweat and pieces of me. In the small hours. Far from the kitchen.
Near to me, I have an unlit cigarette, an old lighter cased in dark wood, a lit incense stick, a window onto the unlit world, two or three lit stars, brown sandals, a faint smell of rice, a fresh teardrop and my ashtray. My ashtray.
The unlit cigarette greets my dry, desiring lips. I smoke a sort of future. A sense of peace takes hold of my hands and breasts. I savour the prospect of the pleasure that will soon be ignited.
The ritual is underway. The smoking will come later. The burning in the eyes, the itching of the hands.
‘You shouldn’t smoke so much.’
Father smokes more than I do. And he hasn’t the habit of lingering over yet-to-be-lit cigarettes. I discovered the ritual by chance. In a protracted search for a lighter. Rituals come to us to show us how to survive our other routines.
I won’t enter the kitchen with the unlit cigarette. I try not to mix private rituals and marital environments. Or, to put it more openly: perhaps everything in the kitchen has become invadingly private.
‘Above all else, you must love your husband.’
The lighter is the same one as always. That’s why I call it old.
It hides from me on Sundays. Doesn’t want to be found. But I know of plenty of matches in this house. It occurs to me that matches can ignite kitchens as well as cigarettes.
But I resist.
‘Everything has to be at peace in the house, so that you can love your daughter.’
If one day my daughter turns out to be a smoker, I’ll have to give her a simple lighter. I’ll have to remember to say to her: with this lighter, if you have the heart and your fingers have the will, you can ignite a kitchen. She’ll laugh. Assume her mother is being playful. You shouldn’t play with fire, Mother. Well no, dear. But there are kitchens and there are kitchens. Here’s hoping you never need to know about fire.
The lighter is the same one as always because it hides from me but wants to be found. The kitchen never hides.
When I light the incense, the lighter licks at the smell of cinnamon, lavender, opium. A lit incense stick is not much like a star, but I think of stars whenever I light incense. These associations of ideas have never been explained to me. Since being married, I’ve lost any sense of what the word kitchen means to other people.
‘You have a home to care for. Everything else is of little relevance.’
Father likes words. He likes the word relevance.
The smoke from the lit incense tells me stories. Recollections of people from different cultures, people I’ve never been acquainted with. Paths. Myths. Pains suffered by women other than me.
‘Perhaps it’s time you thought less about yourself.’
The smoke of the lit incense lets me know if there’s any wind in the heat of the night. The dense lonely night.
I keep the house lights switched off so as to watch the red breathing of the incense. And there is wind. A mild, windy-breeze.
‘Keep the house tidy. The home clean.’
Outside my window is the switched-off world. Because I believed in it when it was switched off. I’ll have to unbuild it first, then rebuild it anew. In celebration, if possible. In rediscovery. In bloom.
The world appears switched off to a woman who looks at the world from her window and feels switched off from it. The woman has an unlit cigarette in her dry mouth. The woman has a quarrel with her kitchen. Or perhaps with more than just that.
I call my window ‘window to the switched-off world’, obviously, because I wanted a different window or a different world. A world with a different kitchen.
When I light an incense stick, I think of stars. When I visit lit stars, by looking at them, I think of the desert.
‘In short, you will try to be a dedicated wife.’
Because the desert could be the mirror the stars use to revive their shine. The prints left by camels’ feet are not tracks, they’re not boundaries: they’re mysteries. Poems we can’t see or digest. It’s impossible to see so close up.
One day, my daughter’s eyes will surely shine with passion. Love will harbour in a new quay. Without saying a word, like a mature woman, she’ll surely present the shine for me to comment upon. Here’s hoping I have the clear-sightedness and courage to warn her: tell your partner not to get too close, or he might lose sight of you. ‘Oh, Mother!’ my daughter will say. And she’ll understand.
My sandals are always close to my body. Grounded, airy and malleable. Unlike men.
‘You must be patient with your husband. Patience and dedication.’
The sandals take me from the kitchen to the living room, and from the living room to the bedroom. They protect me from the coldness of the floor; they don’t protect me from the coldness of the kitchen. They make me walk almost silently. If I leave them in the bedroom, it’s because I require absolute silence. I haven’t left them in the bedroom today, and so I talk.
I wanted a salty smell to come in through a gap in my window. Not necessarily the sea. Perhaps a forest, perhaps a mountain. Spaces of freedom and positive emptiness. Places the sandals have yet to show me.
I have my sandals close to me. As comfort, as a second skin.
From the kitchen comes the innocent, Indian smell of rice. Gentle basmati afternoons. The poetry of my hands in contrast to the drama of my nights.
‘You have to find a way to understand him. To understand and accept.’
Garlic in the rice and on my nails. I don’t wash them properly. To leave traces. A bay leaf. A little salt. I remain still while it gently bubbles. I leave the kitchen and await the smell of readiness in another room. The basmati of my past, without the collateral damage caused by certain flights. A tranquil time when I was the wife of a tranquil man. A man who laughed and cried. I’d started to cook rice at night, as is done in other homes.
Sometimes this strange stillness comes to me, even when I’m unaccompanied. I can tell by the smell that whatever’s cooking has reached its optimum point. I’m hesitant. Lately I’m hesitant whenever I have to enter the kitchen.
Still. I try to get myself moving.
More than everything else, what’s taken me by surprise is a teardrop. They don’t usually come so early.
Worried, I realise disorder has entered my tears. I usually sense the approach of feelings tha
t bring their onset. Light tremors. Particular thoughts. Queries and poems.
I call it the unexpected teardrop, and its coming could be worrying. A certain existential tiredness. The end of prolonged pressure. This teardrop, today’s teardrop – I think – is different. It announces, if anything, a new season. I’m crying because the tough times will soon be over. I’m crying because the past is too recent, as are the words. I’m crying because I’m rediscovering myself.
‘Is it really so hard for you to understand that this country is at war?’
Is it really so hard for you to understand, Father, that I never wanted war in my home?
I’ve picked my ashtray up again.
I light the cigarette. I extinguish the flame beneath the rice. I like the rice to cook through in the leftover steam. Let it soften; allow the taste of garlic to intensify.
I made this ashtray with my own two hands and all the feelings I had back then. I made it for you. You still shared cigarettes and moments with me. You flew different planes from those that drop bombs on people. Our relationship was far from war, from the screaming, the bombs. Our kitchen, the wood that you polished, rested undisturbed every night. The small hours were ours. Far from the kitchen.
‘Perhaps your seeking God might be a solution.’
Father hadn’t yet started with his ridiculous advice. Our daughter could greet you before bedtime.
I didn’t want to know the number of your plane. I found out because they told me unexpectedly, and no one can constantly guard against being given the key to their suffering. I don’t know how long it will take us to forget – will we forget? – the number of times you, the way you, the brutality with which you ripped out the cupboards in the kitchen. I found out what your plane was called today. The bombs. I found out everything. Though really I knew all along. Knew from your eyes, from your hands ripping the love from our home, tenderness disappearing out the window. At the beginning of our life together, I said let’s escape this war. It’s too late, you said. I was pregnant; you were busy with your flights.