Say You're One of Them (Oprah's Book Club)

by Uwem Akpan

  The passengers became restless again, and a din rose above the TVs as everybody began to talk at the same time. Some said they knew the dead they had seen on TV and shouted their names. Others said this could not be their Khamfi—the multiethnic, multireligious city a mere two hours north of the motor park.

  The Khamfi they saw that evening was the corpse capital of the world. Churches, homes, and shops were being torched. The sharp, unblinking eye of the news camera poured its images into the darkening bus, bathing the refugees in a kaleidoscope of color. Jubril could sense this effect behind his eyelids as the camera zeroed in on charred corpses sizzling in electric-blue flames. Cries of fury poured into the bus from the TV screens, heightening the agitation of the refugees. Jubril listened for the voice of the chief but did not hear him. Was he still in his seat? Was he asleep? Why did he not say anything when everybody else was talking? He turned his ears more deliberately in the chief ’s direction and then his eyes.

  The refugees rose to their feet at the sight of hungry-looking almajeris running around with fuel and matches, setting things and people afire. They were much younger than Jubril’s friends Musa and Lukman. In the bus, anger replaced shock and passive complaints. It was not really the sight of corpses burning—or the businesses of their southern compatriots being leveled by firebombs, or the gore when some of the kids were fried in gas before they had a chance to use it—that roused the refugees. All over the country, people had developed a tolerance of such common sights; decades of military rule, and its many terrorist plots directed at the populace, had hardened them. What riled them was the sight of free fuel in the hands of almajeris.

  The shouts of the refugees rang out into the approaching darkness and rallied the people outside the bus. The verandas emptied, and everybody came together, milling about the bus like winged termites around a fluorescent bulb. Hearing the word fuel made Jubril uneasy. He remembered Lukman and his gas jar and the matches in his pocket. He remembered Musa and his sword. He remembered the crowd chasing him up the wide valley, the gunshots, the stones. It felt as if all the people around him were Lukman and Musa and would soon smoke him out. His wounds seemed to burn under his clothes. He hid his face and tried to breathe normally.

  “Where’s our driver?” Madam Aniema shouted, as if someone had hit her. “Is he back with the fuel yet?” The shock of hearing such anger in a sweet woman’s voice almost made Jubril open his eyes.

  “The driver has not come back yet!” Emeka said.

  “Are those children using fuel or water?” she continued.

  “Water ke? Fuel!” Tega said.

  “Who give dem fuel to burn people when we no fit get fuel tlavel home?” Ijeoma said.

  “Our fuel, our fuel . . . southern oil!” some of the passengers began to chant.

  For a moment it sounded as if the bus would explode with anger. Finally Jubril opened his eyes.

  The toilet line had melted into the crowd, because those who had been sitting on the floor were now standing. Jubril could feel Monica right behind him, her child wailing into the commotion, kicking and flailing his tiny hands. Monica, in an attempt to soothe him, kept tapping her feet to rock him, breaking the monotony of his cry. Jubril pressed against the person in front of him to make room between his back and Monica.

  “Who dey give dis Muslim kids dis fuel?” Monica said.

  “Politicians!” Emeka said. “They’re using southern fuel to burn our people and businesses!”

  “Nobody go touch our oil again,” Monica said. “Dem dey use our oil money to establish Sharia, yet dem done pursue us out of de nord!”

  The bus filled with loud plans about how best to stop the government and multinational oil companies from drilling for oil in the delta. Some said they would have to put this into effect as soon as they reached home and started cursing the driver for delaying their departure.

  “You be against national interest . . . national security!” said one of the two police officers as he pushed his way onto the bus. He was pointing a pistol at everybody, waving it from side to side. The people pushed into the seats, some climbing on top of others to get out of his way. When he had come midway into the bus, his colleague appeared and covered him with an AK-47.

  “Na our oil!” Monica said to the first officer.

  “Who’s talking?” the officer asked.

  “Na me,” she said.

  She pushed forward fearlessly with the baby, even as others were backing away. She shoved Jubril aside, then handed her baby to someone. She gathered up her long dress with both hands, as if she were going to wade into a knee-deep stream. “I say, na our oil,” she said again to the police. “We dey democracy now, you hear?”

  All eyes had turned from the TVs to the confrontation between Monica and the police. Some were begging her to calm down. For Jubril, it was not just that he felt this was the wrong time to challenge the police; he also did not like the fact that a woman was standing up to the law. Maybe he would have taken it better if the bus were filled with only woman passengers and the officer of the law was also a woman. Monica was standing right in front of Jubril, just her body separating him from the gun. He tried to ease back into the crowd, but nobody would let him; nobody wanted to take his place. So he just stood there staring vaguely at Monica’s calves and feet, holding his breath and praying that the police would not open fire.

  “Who be dis woman?” said the police.

  “Daughter of oil,” Monica said. “And who be you?”

  “You are asking me?” the officer said.

  “Yes?”

  “I dey warn you o, stupid woman. You done lost your mind to dis Sharia wahala!”

  “I say you get ID?” the woman said. “Or dem done send you to kill us?”

  “ID? Why should I show you my ID?”

  “Come, woman, you better behave o,” the other officer said from the door. “Or soon you go be daughter of bullets.”

  “Oya . . . go ahead,” Monica said. “If you finish killing me, then kill my baby, OK. . . . Wetin I get for dis world again?”

  “We just dey enforce government order!” the police retorted. “Government order!”

  “We no dey military government,” Monica said. “We dey for democracy now.”

  “Shut up. . . . Government is government! Government oil. Federal government oil, you hear?”

  The officer at the door backed out of it and fired warning shots into the night sky. The sounds of people running and scrambling outside entered the bus.

  Inside, the refugees hushed, even Monica. She stood there as if she was expecting the bullets to hit her. The police asked the man holding the baby to return him to Monica. The man started trembling, as if suddenly the child had turned into a viper. Monica took her baby reluctantly from the man, not so much because of the officer’s order, but because fear of the police could have caused him to drop the child. She sat down on the floor like a zombie. When the police went away, she began to cry, pacing herself with periods in which she rattled on about her dead husband and children.

  THE TOILET LINE AGAIN revealed itself as most people in the aisle sat down. A few more had joined the line, pushing Jubril back several spaces, toward the front of the bus. He now stood next to the chief—who sat quietly, as if the recent turmoil had happened on another planet—facing the back of the TV set. He Jubril no longer needed to close his eyes. Everybody from the back of the bus to those a few seats from where he stood looked in his direction, inches above his head. He studied them, the colorful light from the TV dancing, an artificial beauty playing on their gloomy, misery-stained faces. He watched anxiously, sweeping the entire width of the bus with wary eyes, eager to read the true nature of what they were seeing.

  Some of the refugees were crying, but others began to cheer as the TV broadcast more action-packed scenes from Khamfi. Columns of adult northerners and southerners wielding automatic rifles and machetes were battling each other. Madness whipped up the red dust of Khamfi. Many neighborhoods bu
rned, littering the heavens with funnels of smoke.

  Emeka stood up, threw his monkey coat on the floor, and started cheering. “That man with the big gun in the group to the left is my cousin!” he said. “The man with lots of rosaries and scapulars wrapped around his rifle . . .”

  “Your real cousin?” Madam Aniema asked.

  “Absolutely. . . . His name is Dubem Okonkwo. I am Emeka Okonkwo.” He pointed again at the screen. “That one is my friend . . . Thomas Okoromadu Ikechi. . . . That bare-chested muscular one in brown trousers. We’re all from Anambra.”

  “Oh, you come flom Anambla?” Ijeoma said.

  “Kpom kwem!” Emeka said, his eyes fixed on the screen. “Come on, Tom, give it to them. Give it to them. . . . Blow the head off that pagan Muslim with firebombs!”

  “I come flom Anambla also o,” Ijeoma said. “Na my prace o.”

  But Emeka did not pay her any attention. “My Dubem, give them the fight of their lives. These people have to be taught a lesson.”

  “Yes, dis countly berong to us too!” said Ijeoma.

  The fight on TV went on, at times the Christians gaining an upper hand, then the Muslims dominating. For many on the bus, perhaps Khamfi looked more like some of the towns down south, in the delta, that General Sani Abacha had sent soldiers to obliterate because the natives had asked for their land to be developed after four decades of neglect and environmental degradation by government-multinational oil companies. Government troops had stormed the delta with tanks and rocket launchers and terrorized the people. Some reporters said it was the perfect excuse for the government to rein in the increasingly rebellious oil villages of the delta. Others said it was easier to drill oil in land not cluttered by hungry, illiterate natives, who stood around begging for food, water, and medicine. Whichever the case, the few survivors had fled and become refugees in big, multiethnic cities like Lagos, Kaduna, Jos, and Khamfi.

  As Emeka urged his people on, Jubril touched the chief ’s shoulder lightly and bent down to whisper in his ear.

  “Who told you to touch a royal father?” Chief Ukongo hissed.

  “Mmmh,” Jubril mumbled, and stepped back.

  Nobody was listening to them: they were all glued to the TV. Even those in the toilet line had turned around to watch. They inched backward each time someone got out of the toilet. It was as if nobody could afford to miss a thing.

  “Wait a moment, who are you?” the chief asked Jubril, as if he had just noticed the boy. “Don’t hang around me!”

  “Yessa,” Jubril said.

  Some people stared at them, angry because the chief ’s voice had distracted them from the TV. But the old man was unfazed. He fanned himself slowly. From his demeanor and commanding voice, it was not hard to see that he once enjoyed honor and close ties to the generals. Now, though his fortunes had depreciated since the introduction of the so-called democracy and he may have even lost weight, he refused to believe that he had degenerated to the level of this dirty, arrogant teenager.

  “I say, who are you?” the chief repeated. “You seat thief . . . who are you?”

  The boy whispered, “No . . . Jubril . . .”

  Realizing that he had given his Muslim name, Jubril straightened up immediately, his heart pounding. He looked around to see whether anybody had heard him, but nobody was paying attention. Jubril faked a smile, pulled closer to the chief, put a finger in his mouth to alter his accent, and said, “Sa, I mean Gabriel . . . G-a-b-r-i-e-l . . . angel of God!”

  “I don’t care about any angel of God. . . . Remove that stupid finger from your mouth. You are disgusting!”

  “Just shut up, you two,” Emeka said.

  “Where two of una dey when police come here?” Ijeoma said. “Why you no talk den? Make you no disturb our cable TV o!”

  “Cowards!” Monica spoke for the first time since the police incident. “Royal fader, my foot!”

  “I say everybody shut up,” Emeka said again. “I dey watch my people do combat! You get relative who dey do Schwarzenegger for cable TV before?”

  “You dey ask me to shut up, huh?” Monica said.

  “By the grace of God,” Emeka said.

  “Wait, you and me go wear de same trouser today!” the woman said.

  “Too many madwomen in this bus today,” Emeka said.

  Monica carefully put the baby on the floor, got up, and tried to gather her clothes for a fight. But she found that cumbersome. She wanted to remove her long dress altogether. But her neighbors held her back and tried to talk her out of causing trouble. They admonished Emeka for calling her a madwoman. “I for teach you lesson now now!” Monica managed to say to Emeka.

  Jubril was unsure about how well he had corrected his mistake. The chief ’s face was blank, so he started to relax again. He thanked Allah that Emeka and Monica and Ijeoma had distracted the bus the way they did. He considered this another miracle and celebrated it in the depths of his being. Actually, Monica’s action had lessened the ill will he had felt toward her. As she was challenging Emeka, he had been rooting for her to make more noise, to antagonize Emeka so the focus of attention in the bus would never come back to him and the chief.

  Now Jubril allowed three people to pass him in the toilet line, just to make sure he remained behind the middle TV. He shut his eyes again. He shifted his wrist nervously in his pocket. Mentioning his real name was a close call.

  JUBRIL WAS NOT USED to being called Gabriel, though it was an old, new name. He had always been ashamed of what his mother told him about his pre-Muslim, Christian roots. Now he tried to repeat “Gabriel” quietly to himself many times, as if he were reciting his tasbih, in a bid to get used to it. He did not want to be taken unawares again. “Na just a name,” he said to himself. “Just a name. Jubril and Gabriel dey mean de same ting.” He started to imagine himself in his father’s village and hearing people calling him, “Gabriel, Gabriel.” He imagined himself turning immediately to the source of the call. He imagined himself awaking in the morning as soon as he heard “Gabriel.” He learned to spell it backward. He started to sing the name in his mind, but he was having problems with the J and G.

  Before the riots, it had pained him that his personal story was not as straightforward as he would have wanted. Over the years he did everything he could not to remember the parts that he knew. If people said anything about the delta or about the Atlantic Ocean, he would quickly change the subject, because, in his mind, that was the shameful place of his birth. He equated southerner with infidel, and even when someone told him there were Muslims in the south, especially among the Yorubas of the southwest, somehow his mind had refused to accept that these southern Muslims were real or genuine. He felt privileged to be a northerner and did everything to groom that part of his identity.

  When people talked about the oil wealth of the south, he would feel anger rising in him and wonder why Allah would have given the oil to the land of the infidels. So he was relieved when during the recent campaigns, some politicians started telling the crowds that the crude oil actually belonged to the north and not to the people who lived in the oil fields of the delta. Like many, Jubril was swayed by their spurious argument: that the oil deposits in the delta were the result of years of sediments being carried from the north by the River Niger; the politicians wondered why the delta people should then claim the oil as their own; they wondered why they should ask for a bigger budgetary allocation from the new, democratic government. As they spoke, Jubril, who had skipped taking the cows to graze, had applauded and roared with the crowd. Though he could not read properly, he gladly received two copies of the booklet that propagated these arguments, one for himself and the other for his mother. Other northern politicians who came to town but did not say the oil wealth belonged to the north or that they would introduce total Sharia did not get a big crowd.

  Now Chief Ukongo’s sarcastic “Who are you?” cut deep into Jubril’s soul. The events of the previous two days had knifed through his Muslim identity. Running in the b
ush from Khamfi, Jubril’s mind had become a whirlwind of questions: Allah, is it true that once a person is baptized, as my mother said I was at birth, he remains a Christian forever, never able to remove the mark from his soul? Are you punishing me for this infant baptism that I did not choose? You know that as long as I can remember, I have always felt every inch a Muslim, and to prove my steadfastness, I did challenge Yusuf ’s apostasy and sacrificed his brotherhood to you. . . . If the world will not accept me as a southerner-northerner, will you also condemn me as a Christian-Muslim? Though I was attacked by Musa and Lukman for being a fake Muslim, Allah, please, give me the wisdom to convince the Christians in this bus that I am truly one of them. Lead me home, merciful one, lead me to peace. . . . Allah, your religion of Islam is a religion of peace.

  Suddenly there was chaos in the bus. The irresistible pull of the cable pictures was gone, replaced by grainy black-and-white pictures of refugees in a police-and-military barracks in Khamfi. The images were unsteady, as if the local cameramen were trembling with the pain of their compatriots while filming. When the pictures steadied a bit, you could see the people who had been displaced. They sat everywhere, in the fields, on the verandas, and some were still running into the barracks. Many were like the people in the bus or in Lupa Motor Park, clutching the few belongings they could escape with.

  The passengers were now standing, agitated, searching around for the cause of the change in TV stations. The first person to find his voice was Emeka. He pointed at the screen and shouted, “My cousin, my cousin. . . . Let me see my cousin! Let me see my friend! Give us cable TV.” Then he pointed at the police officer who had the remote control, and everyone glared at him. The officer dangled the remote from his fingers like it was the ultimate symbol of power.

  “Which cousin? Shut up!” said the officer to Emeka. “Listen, dis foreign TV channels dey spoil de image of our country. Dese white stations dey make billions of dollars to sell your war and blood to de world. . . . We no bad like dis. OK, why dem no dey show corpses of deir white people during crisis for TV? Abi, people no dey kill for America or Europe?”