Africa39

by Wole Soyinka

Sparkling fear-foam, and roaring.

  She sits up, disoriented, unable to see for the drawn mustard drapes so just sitting there, baffled, unclear what’s just happened, or why she was crying, or why she’s just stopped. With the usual questions: what time is it? where is she? In Ghana, something answers, the bulbul outside, so-called ‘pepper birds’ bemusedly joining the racket in ode to oblivion to things that don’t work. So not night-time, then: pepper birds, the morning in Ghana, the place that she’s moved to, or fled to.

  Again.

  Without fanfare or forethought, as flocks move, or soldiers, on instinct, without luggage, setting off at first light: found the letter on a Monday, in the morning, in Boston, sorting mail at the counter (coffee, WBUR, ‘a member station supported by listeners like you’), bills for school fees, utilities. One dropped to the floor. Rather, floated to: pastel blue, flimsy, a feather, slipping silently from the catalogues of Monday’s thick mail. A proper letter. And lay there. In the white light of winter, that cheap airmail paper no one uses any more.

  She opened it. Read it. Twice. Set it on the countertop. Left for the flower shop, leaving it there. Came home in the dark to the emptiness, retrieved it. Read again that Sena Wosornu, surrogate father, was dead.

  Was dead and had left her, ‘Miss’ Folasadé Savage, a three-bedroom house in West Airport, Accra. Stood, stunned, in her coat in the kitchen and silence, soft silver-black darkness, tiles iced by the moon.

  Monday evening. Left Friday. JFK to Kotoka. Nonstop. Without fanfare.

  Just packed up and left.

  Now she squints at the darkness and makes out the bedroom, unfamiliar entirely after only six weeks. Unfamiliar shapes, shadows, and the space here beside her, unfamiliar entirely after sixteen years, still.

  She touches her nightdress, alarmed at the wetness. She peels the drenched satin away from her skin. She touches her stomach as she does when this happens, when fear hovers shyly, not showing its face yet, when something is wrong but she doesn’t know what or with which of the offspring that sprang from this spot. And the stomach answers always (the ‘womb’ maybe, more, but the word sounds absurd to her, womb, always has. A womb. Something cavernous, mysterious, a basement. A word with a shadow, a draft. Rhymes with tomb). She touches her stomach in the four different places, the quadrants of her torso between waist and chest: first the upper right (Olu) beneath her right breast, then the lower right (Taiwo) where she has the small scar, then the lower left (Kehinde) adjacent to Taiwo, then the upper left (Sadie), the baby, her heart. Stopping briefly at each to observe the sensation, the movement or stillness beneath the one palm. Sensing: Olu – all quiet. The sadness as usual, as soft and persistent as the sound of a fan. Taiwo – the tension. Light tugging sensation. But no sense of danger, no cause for alarm. Kehinde – the absence, the echoing silence made bearable by the certainty that if, she would know (as she knew when it happened, as she knew the very instant, cutting pastel-blue hydrangea at the counter in the shop, suddenly feeling a sort of seizure, lower left, crying, ‘Kehinde!’ with the knife slipping sideways and slicing her hand. Dripping blood on the counter, on the stems and the blossoms, on the phone as she dialled, already knowing which it was; getting voicemail, ‘This is Keh—’ call waiting, clicking over, frantic sobbing, ‘Mom, it’s Taiwo. Something happened.’ ‘I know.’ She knew as did Taiwo the very instant that it happened, as the blade made its way through the skin, the first wrist. So that now, a year later – more, nearly two years later – having neither seen nor heard from him, she knows. That she’d know). Last, Sadie – fluttering, butterflies, a new thing this restlessness, this looking for something, not finding it.

  Fine.

  Sadness, tension, absence, angst – but fine, as she birthed them, alive if not well, in the world, fish in water, in the condition she delivered them (breathing and struggling) and this is enough. Perhaps not for others, Fola thinks, other mothers who pray for great fortune and fame for their young, epic romance and joy (better mothers quite likely; small, bright-smiling, hard-driving, minivan-mothers), but for her who would kill, maim, and die for each child but who knows that the willingness to die has its limits.

  That death is indifferent.

  Not she (though she seems) but her age-old opponent, her enemy, theirs, the common enemy of all mothers – death, harm to the child – which will defeat her, she knows.

  But not today.

  The fear recedes. The roaring persists. The rough snuffling slosh of the broken machine. The heat grows assertive, as if feeing ignored.

  The bedsheet and nightgown go suddenly cold.

  She gets out of bed, knocking her knee as she does, quietly cursing the house, its deficient A/C. The night watchman Mr Ghartey was meant to have fixed it, or meant to have had his electrician-cousin come fix it, or meant to have called the white man who installed it to come fix it – the plan remains largely unclear. ‘He is coming’ is the answer whenever she asks. ‘I beg, he is coming.’ For weeks now, hot air. But the relationship is young, between her and her staff, and she knows to go slow, to tread lightly. She is a woman, first; unmarried, worse; a Nigerian, worst; and fair-skinned. As suspicious persons go in Ghana, she might as well be a known terrorist. The staff, whom she inherited along with the house and its 1970s orange-wool-upholstered wooden furniture, sort of tiptoe around her, poorly masking their shock. That she moved here alone. To sell flowers.

  Worse: that she arrived on that Saturday, from the airport, in the morning, in the white linen outfit and open-toe shoes and, alighting the cab, said, ‘How are you?’ incomprehensibly, with British a and American r. Worst: that no man alighted the taxi thereafter.

  That she shook their hands, seeking their eyes.

  That, leaving her suitcases (three? were there more? was this all? a whole life in America?) by the cab, she proceeded directly to the wall to put her face in the crawlers. ‘Bougainviiiillea!’ Still incomprehensible.

  That she greets them in the morning with this same odd ‘How are you?’ and thanks them as bizarrely for doing their jobs. ‘Thank you’ to the houseboy when he washes her clothing. ‘Thank you’ to the cook when he sets out her meals. ‘Thank you’ to the gatekeeper when he opens the gate and again as he closes it.

  That she smokes.

  That she wears shorts.

  That she wanders around the garden in these shorts and a sun hat with cigarettes and clippers, snipping this, snipping that, hauling her catch into the kitchen, where she stands at the counter, not pounding yam, not shelling beans, but arranging flowers. It amuses her, always has, this disregard of Africans for flowers, the indifference of the abundantly blessed (or psychologically battered – the chronic self-loather who can’t accept, even with evidence, that anything native to him, occurring in abundance, in excess, without effort, has value).

  They watch as research scientists observe a new species, a hybrid, herbivorous, likely harmless, maybe not. Masked, feeding her, washing for her, examining her clothing when they think she’s not looking, whispering, watching her eat. She hasn’t yet told them that she once lived in Ghana, that she understands all they say in hushed Twi about her flowers, flowered nightdresses, distressing eating habits like pulling out and eating the weeds (lemongrass). She learned this from her father, who spoke the major Nigerian languages plus French, Swahili, Arabic, and snatches of Twi. ‘Always learn the local language. Never let on to the locals,’ he’d say, a cigar at the end of its life on his lips, giving birth to a laugh – upper left.

  There it is.

  The movement she was feeling for.

  Left upper quadrant, in the vicinity of Sadie but closer to the heart, not a tugging or a tightening or a throbbing of dread but an echo, an emptiness, an emptying out. A familiar sensation. Not the one she was feeling for, fearful of (auguring harm done the child) but remembered, unmistakable, from four decades prior, a memory she forgot she still has.

  She sits back down absently, abandoning her mission, whatever it was, a word with
Mr Ghartey perhaps, or a smack to the side of the wall-mounted machine, or a fresh set of bed sheets, a post-nightmare drink.

  And thinks: odd, to be returned to the death of her father, which she thinks of so rarely, as one recounts dreams, out of focus, diluted, not the event but the emotion, a sadness that’s faded, dried, curled, lost its colour. The event she can see clear as day even now: Lagos, July 1966, the short chain of events. First: the waking up gasping, cold, thirteen years old, all her posters of the Beatles stuck with tacks to the walls, sitting alarmed in the dark with that space in her chest, unfamiliar with the feeling (the same odd emptiness as now). Second: making her way from her room down the hall, to her father’s room, forgetting that he’d travelled to the North, gone to see about his in-laws, her ‘grandparents’, the Nwaneris, whom she’d never actually met and never would. No one said it. Never him, her kind, broad-shouldered, woolly-haired father, who wept for the loss of his bride every night, kneeling down by his bed beneath the portrait above it, Somayina Nwaneri, fair, gold-eyed. A ghost. Twenty-seven.

  Fairy ghostmother.

  Had bled out in labour.

  A stranger to Fola, no more than a face, so unusually pale that she looked in her portrait as if she’d been born without blood, cut from ice. Still so pretty. Stuff of legend. Local celebrity in Kaduna, Igbo father as famous for his post in the North as for plucking one rose from the grounds of the mission and marrying her, a Scotswoman, auburn-haired Maud. And the rest of it: shame, stillborn son, successive miscarriages, the shaking of heads and the wagging of tongues, see, the Scotswoman can’t bear the Igbo man’s child, then the one white-skinned daughter, the magic mulatto. Little princess of Kaduna. Colonial Administrator’s daughter. Won a bursary to study nursing in London after the war, promptly met and immediately married Kayo Savage, Fola’s father, lawyer, late of the Royal Air Force. Felled in childbirth, etc. No one said it. No one mentioned that they never came to see her, Rt. Hon. John and Maud Nwaneri, never called nor sent a gift, but she could guess it: that they blamed her for their only daughter’s early death, as she would come to hate them for his.

  But not yet.

  First: waking at midnight with space in her chest. Second: slipping down the hallway to her father’s bedroom, vacant. Third: ascending to his empty bed, still warm with scent (rum, soap, Russian Leather) and covering her face with his thick kente blanket, then lying, unmoving, eyes open, heart racing. Still as a corpse, swathed in cotton and sweating, with the A/C not on, with her father not there, gone to Kaduna that morning, having heard from some friends that the Igbos in the North were in trouble again.

  ‘Again?’ she’d sighed, sulking, loudly slurping her breakfast (gari, sugar water, ice), already knowing he was going by his having prepared this. ‘A bush girl’s breakfast’ as he called it, mocking. Powdered yam in ice water, her favourite. If this grandfather of hers was as rich as they said, with his Cyclone CJ and his split-level ranch, then why must her father go ‘check on him’ always, she’d asked, crunching ice, but she knew. He had to go, always, to appease them, to redeem himself, to beg again forgiveness for the death of Somayina (which was, technically speaking, not his fault but hers, infant Fola’s, the doctor’s at least, or the womb’s).

  ‘They’re always in trouble, these Igbos. Na wow o.’

  ‘Your mother was an Igbo.’

  ‘Half.’

  ‘That’s quite enough.’ But when she looked he was laughing, coming to kiss her head, leaving. ‘I’ll be back before Sunday. I love you.’

  ‘Mo n mo.’

  There was no equivalent expression for I love you in Yoruba. ‘If you love someone, you show them,’ her father liked to say. But said it nevertheless in English, to which she’d answer in Yoruba, ‘I know.’

  Mo n mo.

  Out the door.

  Just like that.

  Stood, set down his coffee cup, kissed her on the forehead once, hand each on her Afro puffs, walked out the door. Gone. Woolly hair and woollen suit and broad and buoyant shoulders bobbing, bobbing, bobbing out of view. The swinging door swung open, shut.

  Fourth: fourteen hours later in his bed beneath the blanket, sliding down beneath the kente into darkness, absence, scent and heat, a still and silent ocean. And remaining. In the quiet. Lying ramrod straight, not moving, knowing.

  That something had been removed.

  That a thing that had been in the world had just left it, as surely and simply as people leave rooms or the dust of dead dandelion lifts into wind, silent, leaving behind it this empty space, openness. Incredible, unbearable, interminable openness appearing now around her, above her, beyond her, a gaping, inside her, a hole, or a mouth: unfamiliar, wet, hollow and hungry. Unappeasable.

  The details came later – such as details ever come, such as one can know the details of a death besides one’s own, how it went, how long or calming, cold or terrifying, lonely – but the thing happened there in the bedroom. The loss. Later, if ever alone, she’ll consider it, the uncanny similarity between that and this moment: alone in the dark in the sweltering heat in a room not her own in a bed far too big. Mirror endings. The last of a life as she’d known it, at midnight in Lagos, never suspecting what had happened (it simply wouldn’t have occurred to her, that evil existed, that death was indifferent), yet knowing somehow.

  This was the event for her, the loss in the concrete, the hours in which she crossed between knowing and knowledge and onwards to ‘loss’ in the abstract, to sadness. Six, seven hours of openness slowly hardening into loneliness.

  The details came later – how a truckload of soldiers, Hausas, high on cheap heroin and hatred, had killed them, setting fire to the mansion, piling rocks at the exits – but the details never hardened into pictures in her head. So she never really believed it, not really, couldn’t see it, never settled on a sight that would have made the thing stick, put some meat on the words (roaring fire, burning wood), put a face on the corpses. The words remained bones. They were no one, the ‘soldiers’.

  They were shadow-things, not human beings. The ‘Nwaneris’ were what they’d always been: a portrait on the wall, a name. A pallid cast of characters. Not even characters, but categories: civilian, soldier, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, villain, victim. Too vague to be true.

  And not him.

  It was him. He was there without question (though they never could confirm it, his bones turned to ashes, in REM, dreaming, his ‘Fola!’ two bubbles), as rampant anti-Igbo pogroms kicked off the war. But she simply couldn’t see him, not her father as she knew him, as she’d seen him from the table, bobbing, bobbing out of view. It was someone else they’d killed that night, these ‘soldiers’ whom she couldn’t see, this ‘victim’ whom they didn’t know, anonymous as are all victims.

  The indifference of it.

  This was the problem and would be ever after, the block on which she sometimes feels her whole being stumbled: that he (and so she) became so unspecific. In an instant. That the details didn’t matter in the end. Her life until that moment had seemed so original, a richly spun tale with a bright cast of characters – she: motherless princess of vertical palace, their four-storey apartment on Victoria Island; they: passionate, glamorous friends of her father’s, staff; he: widowed king of the castle. Had he died a death germane to their life as she’d known it – in a car crash, for example, in his beloved Deux Chevaux, or from liver cancer, lung, to the end puffing CAOs, swilling rum – she could have abided the loss. Would have mourned. Would have found herself an orphan in a four-storey apartment, having lost both her parents at thirteen years old, but would have been, thus bereaved, a thing she recognised (tragic) instead of what she became: a part of history (generic).

  She sensed the change immediately, in the tone people took when they learned that her father had been murdered by soldiers; in the way that they’d nod as if, yes, all makes sense, the beginning of the Nigerian civil war, but of course. Never mind that the Hausas were targeting Igbos, and her father was a Yoruba, and her g
randmother Scottish, and the house staff Fulani, some Indian even. Ten dead, one an Igbo, minor details, no matter. She felt it in America when she got to Pennsylvania (having been taken first to Ghana by the kindly Sena Wosornu), that her classmates and professors, white or black, it didn’t matter, somehow believed that it was natural, however tragic, what had happened.

  That she’d stopped being Folasadé Somayina Savage and had become instead the native of a generic war-torn nation. Without specifics.

  Without the smell of rum or posters of the Beatles or a kente blanket tossed across a king-size bed or portraits. Just some war-torn nation, hopeless and inhuman and as humid as a war-torn nation anywhere, all war-torn nations everywhere. ‘I’m sorry,’ they’d say, nodding yes in agreement, as one says I’m sorry when the elderly die, ‘that’s too bad’ (but not that bad, more ‘how these things go’ in this world), in their eyes not a hint of surprise. Surely, broad-shouldered, woolly-haired fathers of natives of hot war-torn countries got killed all the time?

  How had this happened?

  It wasn’t Lagos she longed for, the splendour, the sensational, the sense of being wealthy – but the sense of self surrendered to the senselessness of history, the narrowness and naïvety of her former individuality.

  After that, she simply ceased to bother with the details, with the notion that existence took its form from its specifics. Whether this house or that one, this passport or that, whether Baltimore or Lagos or Boston or Accra, whether expensive clothes or hand-me-downs or florist or lawyer or life or death – didn’t much matter in the end. If one could die identityless, estranged from all context, then one could live estranged from all context as well.

  This is what she’s thinking as she sits here, wet, empty, a newly wrecked ship on a beach in the night: that the details are different but the space is unchanging, unending, the absence as present, absolute. He is gone now, her father, has been gone for so long that his goneness has replaced his existence in full. It didn’t happen over time but in an instant, in his bedroom: he was removed, and she remained, and that was that.