by Wole Soyinka
My voice. My silence.
My heart, frightened and wrecked.
The kitchen is empty.
I switch off the stove and ask myself again how my ashtray survived all the kitchen earthquakes.
There is great disquiet in our house. There’s our daughter who needs raising.
I smoke the cigarette.
I want to change out of my skin.
I look at the ashes in my ashtray, like feelings that lack density. I’m left holding onto nothing. Like soldiers after violent combat, that’s to say, like their losses. What they lose of themselves.
I just wanted to tell you: I’m going to make changes to the kitchen.
Translated by Jethro Soutar
Rag Doll
Okwiri Oduor
In the thick yellow air, the wind hums in the bramble, pushing engorged berries against the twigs, so that thorns prick them and the jam inside starts to trickle out.
Tu Tu and Mama wear matching lace dresses with bows sewn on to the back. They each try on a wide-brimmed hat that they found fluttering in the dust devil outside their window, and when it falls over their faces and covers their eyes, Mama pulls at the latch and tosses the hat back to the dust devil.
With her hands on her hips, Mama says to the dust devil, ‘Next time, bring us something we can use, you hear?’
Tu Tu imagines it – the dust devil will knock on the dusty pane and say to Mama, ‘Here are some things you can use, Solea,’ and there, on the window ledge, shall be poinsettias and sugar icicles and browning pages from autograph books, pages that read, ‘Just wake ’em up in the usual way, Spencer – we’ll leave “Flight of the Bumble Bee” for some other time.’
Mama takes out jute bags from the pantry and they pull strings out of their corners and fasten the strings like ribbons round their tresses, and then they bow at each other and giggle like girls who fry their hair and light scented candles and go to the cinema with silk handkerchiefs pinned to their cardigans.
Hand in hand, they march across the yard, crumbling anthills beneath their bare feet, singing,
Snuff out the sun
And pour porcupine juice
In Tu Tu’s keyhole.
They pick only the crimson berries, the ones that pulsate and burst in their fingers, and they tie them inside the scoop of their frocks, and the hot jam runs down their legs and glues together the spaces between their toes.
In the dying light, they race each other across the yard, fireflies crackling in their hair, lighting their path. Tu Tu slips on a moist snail and she clutches at the hem of Mama’s frock so that Mama slips too, and the two of them crumple down in a heap, laughing and sputtering until their panties are soaked and their tresses are filled with dead grass and earthworms.
When the dust devil comes back, Tu Tu and Mama run to the window and pull at the latch and push their heads outside. This time, the dust devil has brought them a porcelain jar with a chip broken off its mouth. Mama takes it in her arms and cradles it, singing,
Girls are dandy,
Made out of candy.
She takes Tu Tu’s hand and they stand in the musky bathroom and untie the scoops of their frocks, letting all the berries fall into the old tub. They sit inside the tub, porcelain jar nestled between them, and they knead the berries between the heels of their palms until the jam becomes a kind of sticky red treacle.
They hear the milkman whistling out in the yard, and Mama calls out, ‘Oe! Kinu, bring the milk here!’
The milkman comes in, gumboots squelching, leaving ace-shaped prints on the wood floor. ‘Solea?’ he says, peering into the hallway.
‘In here.’
Kinu slowly pushes the bathroom door. It creaks, as though resenting his touch. He emerges piecemeal – elbow, shoulder, chin, ear, eyes. His face is crinkled, half anxious and half apologetic, as though he yearns both to come in and to flee.
He places the bottles by the tub, puts on his hat and says, ‘Me, let me go now,’ as though anyone has stopped him from going.
But he does not go. Tu Tu sees him stand in the hallway and peer through cracks in the door. He watches Mama pour all the milk in the tub, watches them lay steeping inside it. Tu Tu does not know when Kinu leaves. Her thoughts wander off without her noticing it, and she thinks of blaring fire engines and of pigeons pecking at crumbs on the windowsill and of tiny globs of snot that someone flicked from their nose. Then she remembers Kinu watching them and looks, but he is gone already.
Tu Tu and Mama are at the Oasis of Grace church. On the outside wall of the church is marked:
Bricks for sale,
Each for 2/=
Adjacent to the church is a field where golden star grass rises ten feet in the air, hiding a grave whose epitaph reads, ‘They went off together.’
Tu Tu and Mama sit down on the headstone.
‘Where did they go off together?’ Tu Tu asks Mama.
‘Do you really want to know that?’ Mama says.
‘I do want to know.’
‘The church sent some of its members on mission duty to Kindu Bay. They rode in the pastor’s Toyota station wagon, twenty men and women, each squeezed so tight that they coalesced, and when the pastor’s car rolled, they became a dollop of flesh, indistinguishable, each of their peculiarities – whether they liked their maize boiled or roasted, or whether they chewed mints or sucked them – gone, and so all twenty of them were buried together.’
Tu Tu and Mama bend backwards over the stone, their tresses grazing the dirty terrazzo of the mass grave. Their distended navels pop out and poke through the fabric of their frocks, and their nostrils flare and gnats dart into them.
Abandoning the headstone, they climb a tree, higher and higher, to the very top branches. They sit there, swinging their legs below them, toes wiggling and the coarse wind scratching the soles of their bare feet.
‘Look at the stone angels,’ Mama says, pointing further out in the field.
Tu Tu sees them, an entire battalion of them, standing tight-lipped, watching them.
Mama climbs down the tree. ‘Come, let us look.’
Tu Tu jumps down from the tree, scraping the back of her thighs against the rough bark. The hem of her frock tears. Mama lifts the frock up to Tu Tu’s waist. She scrutinises the scratches on her thighs.
‘You are bleeding,’ she says. ‘Does it hurt?’
Tu Tu nods.
Mama spits into her hand and rubs the saliva over the scratches. ‘There now, it won’t hurt any more.’
They wander to the stone angels, hand in hand, chanting,
Suzie my best friend,
Come out and play with me
I’ve got a dolly – see
And an apple tree.
The stone angels are scattered over the yard, as far as the eye can see. Some have wings spread out, flapping in the air. Some have swords held menacingly across their chests, ready to slay any brutes that cross their paths.
In a corner of the yard, where a fig tree was felled by the wind, one stone angel lies face down, her open mouth filled with earth. Tu Tu and Mama stare at her.
‘Is she still alive?’ Tu Tu asks.
Mama pokes the stone angel with a twig. The stone angel does not move. Mama throws the twig away and falls down to her knees. She picks the stone angel up and brushes earth from her eyes and nose. Her arm is broken off and lies on the ground.
‘Look,’ Mama says, and Tu Tu leans in to see the words inscribed on the stone angel. The words say,
Mbekenya Mwisya,
She started out so well.
Mama hugs the stone angel to her breasts. ‘She started out so well because she had been standing upright, but then the wind tipped her over and she broke her arm and now the other angels don’t want her any more,’ Mama says. ‘We have to take her home with us, Tu Tu. She is lonely.’
That night, Tu Tu brings out a bowl of wheat flour and warm water, and Mama makes some wheat glue. They bend over Mbekenya the stone angel and put her arm bac
k together.
‘Bring me a needle, Tu Tu,’ Mama says, and when Tu Tu does, Mama inscribes one more line on to the stone angel, so that now the words on her say,
Mbekenya Mwisya,
She started out so well . . .
But her story is not yet finished.
The sky is melting and the marsh is roiling, and Tu Tu and Mama take out empty milk cartons and fill them with air and bring those with them for extra supply. They swim all the way down to the bottom of the marsh, where the sludge is hot and bubbling.
Later, they lie down on their backs with their arms folded beneath their heads, and they stare out into the sky and watch dandelions quiver, and when it starts to rain, they stick their tongues out and taste the beautiful, terrifying creatures of the far-off sea.
‘Oh, how I miss the seaside,’ Mama says.
‘What do you miss most about it?’
‘My brother Haji,’ she says. ‘He rose from the green bog of Old Town, among cawing ravens and the dusty deflated umbrella bodies of decaying sea urchins. His stick went kong-kong-kong on the narrow coral-paved streets and on the sagging fish-stuffed bellies of alley cats. He was blind, you see.’
Tu Tu turns on her side, so that she watches Mama’s face as she speaks. She stares at the dimple on Mama’s chin and at the slight severing of Mama’s earlobe from the side of her face, as though she had once enraged a person and they had pulled at her ear too hard, almost tearing it off. Mama’s eyes are set deep inside her sockets, and her irises dance maddeningly, even as she fixes Tu Tu with an unwavering stare.
‘Your brother,’ Tu Tu says, ‘where did he go?’
Mama plucks at a blade of grass and nibbles on it. ‘Through the town.’
‘Did you go with him?’
‘All the time. I described to him the things he could not see.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like the men sitting in their fruit-filled rickshaws or on their cabbage-laden donkeys. The ships on the sea, too. I told Haji that they were large iron snails crawling slowly, leaving a trail of thick, white mucus on the blue water. I told him that no matter how hard one stared at the iron snails, one could never see them move. They only moved when one was not looking. Some had names like M. V. Britannia and Tausi Ndege Wangu.’
Tu Tu watches a pair of marabou storks forage, their feathers turning green in the steaming marsh.
‘When the sun was high up in the sky,’ Mama says, ‘we sat beneath the tamarind tree, where the housewives of Old Town hurled mouldy biriyani and polyester rags and orange peels and month-old foetuses. Sometimes we found nice things there.’
‘Like what?’
‘Once we found a child’s caramel smile, and we took turns wearing it on our faces. Another time we found a billy goat that could turn into a beautiful woman in the night. Once we found a mganga from Zanzibar who knew how to remove seven-headed jinnis from inside people. Another time we found the music of the muezzin trapped inside a cooking fat tin.’
‘Did you sit beneath the tamarind tree even when it rained?’
‘Aisha took us in then. She owned the tea shack down the street. She spent her days standing at the door of her shack, staring up at the sky, mulling over whether or not it would rain. Well, when it did, she came out waving a stick at us, cackling that we would catch colds and die. She gave us boiled blue marlin and rock buns and coconut milk to warm us up, and as we ate, she cut Haji’s hair and plaited mine and snipped our toenails with a razor.’
‘Why did Haji not come to the big city with you?’
Mama sits up, bringing her knees up and hugging them. ‘He tried to come with me,’ she says. ‘We didn’t have any money, so the conductor only let us ride in the luggage compartment of the bus. All was well until we got to Voi. The sea must have realised then that Haji was gone. It started heaving, throwing a frightful fit, and all the ships on it and all the beasts inside it crushed in a pile of mangled iron and rotten wood on the seashore. So Haji had to disembark and return quickly-quickly to calm the sea. And every time he ever tried to leave, the sea would not have it.’
It is dark now. Tu Tu and Mama walk home slowly, exhausted from their swimming, drowsily chewing on stalks of grass.
The wooden beams above Tu Tu’s head hem and haw, and the walls lean closer. They like to do that, the walls, to play Broken Telephone. When someone says a thing, the walls lean in to catch snatches of it. The walls then tell these words to other walls, stretching them and smothering them in turn, so that when you finally hear them, the words have become tiny, pea-shaped whispers that would burst like maize grains if one held a candle to them.
Tu Tu seeks out her mother, finding her in the grotto they once dug out in the backroom. Mama sits by the window, tipping back and forth in a rocking chair.
The rocking chair; they found it broken and discarded near the marsh, and they put it on their backs and brought it home and fixed it. They cut rattan with a penknife and soaked it in glycerine and plaited it, and when the rattan made cuts in their arms, they spread cow lard and saliva on the cuts.
They did that with everything they own – found it and put it on their backs and brought it home and fixed it. Their house, too. It had been thrown away in the dumpster behind the market square, and they put it on their backs and climbed the hill, singing Ten Green Bottles, and when the last green bottle fell from the wall, they put the house down and built a home.
Mama’s face is to the window, spangled, golden beads dancing on it. Outside, the guava tree shakes, its glossy leaves rasping, the quilt that hangs on its branches flying, dragging in the grass.
‘Catch it!’ Mama says, her voice shrill.
Tu Tu chases it down like a cockerel. She catches it and it squirms and squirms and she restrains it beneath her arm. She closes the door and kneels by Mama, the quilt spread out before her. She plucks out red-headed caterpillars and yellow beetles and little black jack needles.
A few months back, they made a dozen trips to the seamstress’ stall, filling their pockets with rags that the seamstress no longer wanted. When they had gathered enough, they sat down on the kitchen floor and darned and embellished and overcast, and the rags became this quilt which they lie on each night and dream grainy rayon dreams, dream of silver coins spinning and spinning and disappearing beneath dressing bureaus, dream too of butter-smudged fingers scratching at bumps in walls.
‘They don’t want us here, Tu Tu,’ Mama says.
‘Who?’
‘Them,’ she says, pointing out the window at the bramble.
‘The berries?’
‘No, Tu Tu. The people out there. We make them uncomfortable.’
‘How do you know they don’t want us here?’ Tu Tu says.
The walls fidget about, blabbering indecipherable things. Mama raises her hand to shush them. She says to Tu Tu, ‘Come I show you.’
Mama takes Tu Tu to the kitchen. ‘This was here when I got home from the posho mill.’
The carcass of a cat is hooked to the wall above the door, wire poking through the back of its neck. Flies swarm about it, buzzing, their backs sparkling. Draped over the back of a nearby chair is the cat’s skin, like a scarf that someone forgot.
Tu Tu retches into the washbowl. Outside, Kinu the milkman whistles, bottles clanging in his crate. Tu Tu and Mama watch as he stands his bicycle against a tree, as he takes out their milk and places it on the doorstep.
‘Kinu,’ Mama says. ‘Do you like cats?’
‘What?’
‘Cats. Do you like them?’
‘I do not really care for them.’
‘But you would not hurt them, would you?’
‘By God, no.’ Kinu has his half anxious and half apologetic face again. ‘It was the chief and his cronies that did that. Me, I am just a milkman, what could I do to stop them?’
‘Well, then?’ Mama says, but it is not a question, rather, a command.
Kinu takes his hands out of his pockets. He takes the cat down from the hook, holding
it as gently as if it were a newborn infant.
Mama fetches a hoe and they go out to a clearing by the bramble. Mama chooses a spot between two clumps of aloe vera. ‘Well, then?’
Kinu places the carcass down, and he begins to dig.
‘You have to make the hole deep, else the stray dogs will burrow in and take it out.’
Kinu digs and digs until Mama says, ‘There, now.’
He buries the cat.
Mama says, ‘If you scrub your hands out in the back, I will make you some tea.’
Tu Tu watches Mama light the kerosene stove and put on a sufuria of water and milk. When it boils, she adds tea leaves and masala and sieves it and pours it into three cups. She hands one to each of them.
Sipping on his tea, Kinu says, ‘Why did your mother name you Solea, like the petroleum jelly?’
Tu Tu almost chokes on her tea. She had never considered the fact that Mama might have a mother herself. In her mind, Mama had always just been.
‘Why do you assume that it is my mother that did?’
‘It is not?’
‘Well, if it had been, she would have named me something that had spirit. Like Mbekenya Mwisya.’ Mama sips on her tea. ‘Do you want to see her?’
‘Who?’
‘The stone angel.’
Kinu nods. Mama takes his tea and places it in the washbowl.
‘Well, then?’ she says, and it is a command for him to rise up and follow her.
He stands by the side of the bed, stroking the stone angel’s face. Mama pats down Tu Tu’s tresses. She whispers, ‘Would you like it if Kinu became your father?’
Tu Tu tries to imagine the things that Kinu would do if he were her father. He would sip water from a glass and pass it to Mama, and Mama would sip it too and pass it back to him. And the water glass would go back and forth between them, until the water became a piece of string at the bottom of the glass, and the mouth of the glass would have bubbles of spittle from both their lips. Then Kinu would clip the branches of the pear tree and build a new pantry at the back of the house for their berries.