Butter Honey Pig Bread

by Francesca Ekwuyasi

  BUTTER HONEY PIG BREAD

  BUTTER HONEY PIG BREAD

  FRANCESCA EKWUYASI

  A NOVEL

  BUTTER HONEY PIG BREAD

  Copyright © 2020 by Francesca Ekwuyasi

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

  Suite 202 – 211 East Georgia St.

  Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6

  Canada

  arsenalpulp.com

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada, and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program), for its publishing activities.

  Arsenal Pulp Press acknowledges the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, custodians of the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories where our office is located. We pay respect to their histories, traditions, and continuous living cultures and commit to accountability, respectful relations, and friendship.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.

  “Ships,” words and music by Ikon Ekwuyasi, from the album Hungry to Live: An Audio Documentary, copyright © 2018 Syndik8/Freespirit/Notjustok Distro, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission of the artist

  Cover art by Brianna McCarthy

  Cover and text design by Jazmin Welch

  Edited by Shirarose Wilensky

  Copy edited by Doretta Lau

  Proofread by Alison Strobel

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

  Title: Butter honey pig bread : a novel / Francesca Ekwuyasi.

  Names: Ekwuyasi, Francesca, 1990– author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020020646X | Canadiana (ebook) 20200206478 | ISBN 9781551528236 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551528243 (HTML)

  Classification: LCC PR9387.9.E355 B88 2020 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  For my grandmother,

  my brothers,

  my family by blood and by choice.

  Pain-eater fast today; starve yourself a while

  Prologue

  WE ARE KIN.

  Here at the in-between place, we are one being, eternal, moving in rotation to the flesh realm only because we must. As sure as the tides, as sure as the sunrise, bound to the rhythm of its particular dominion—we must.

  “I” is only a temporary and necessary aberration. “I,” “Me,”—such a lonely journey! We separate, single out to “I”s and “Me”s, only when we traverse between realms, when we take breath and body. Only because we must.

  But we always return to We, you see? Because we must.

  We sing reminders to the “I”s. We sing them back home in time. We sing them to a doorway.

  Death is only a doorway.

  We are Ọgbanje.

  Contents

  1 Butter

  2 Honey

  3 Pig

  4 Bread

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Butter

  Kambirinachi

  IF YOU ASK KAMBIRINACHI, THIS IS HOW SHE’LL TELL IT:

  There was a spirit, a child, whose reluctance to be born, and subsequent boredom with life, caused her to come and go between realms as she pleased. Succumbing to the messy ordeal of being birthed, she would traverse to the flesh realm, only to carelessly, suddenly, let go of living like it was an inconvenient load. Death is only a doorway, and her dying was always a simple event; she would merely stop breathing. It was her nature. The dark tales of malevolent spirit children, Ọgbanjes, are twisted and untrue. It was never her intention to cause her mother misery; she was just restless. It was just the way.

  The time before her final birth, in an attempt to make her stay, her mother marked her with a red-hot razor blade, just as the Babalawo instructed. Three deep lines at the nape of her neck, below the hairline, smeared with a pungent brown paste that burned and burned. All this so the Ọgbanje would stay bound to its body, and if not, at the very least, she would recognize it should the child choose to be born again.

  The child died, of course.

  She returned again. And maybe she took pity on the woman, or perhaps she was bored with the foreseeable rhythm of her existence, but this time she chose to stay. And the three horizontal welts on the back of her neck signified to the woman, her mother, that this was the same child. It might have been a coincidence; perhaps the woman’s mother-in-law (she’d never liked the woman, found her haughty) marked the child in secret to torment her.

  Nevertheless, for Kambirinachi, living was a tumultuous cascade between the unbearable misery of being in this alive body indefinitely and an utter intoxication with the substance, the very matter, of life. When there was peace, life was near blissful, but otherwise, Kambirinachi’s childhood was nightmarish for her mother. Ikenna was an exhausted woman, a woman made hard by nearly two decades during which her body betrayed her. Or, as some might put it: almost two decades of being plagued by an Ọgbanje that caused her three late-term miscarriages, one stillbirth, two dead infants, and a dead toddler. She used to be much sweeter, softer, kinder, but it’s impossible to go through that particular brand of hell and stay untouched. She couldn’t help it; she hated the child a good portion of the time. And the child, too, must have hated her, after making her wait and suffer, only to wail the way she did—unprovoked, inconsolable, and seemingly interminable. To preserve her sanity and, frankly, the child’s well-being, Ikenna retreated inside herself, saving all tenderness for her husband, and leaving only a barely concealed indifference for Kambirinachi.

  KAMBIRINACHI WAS ELUSIVE. Even if she was sitting right before you, her absence would be palpable. As an eleven-year-old, her attention was always elsewhere.

  “Where is Kambirinachi today?” her father often teased, childlike, a broad smile stretched across his bearded face to reveal crooked and tobaccostained teeth.

  Kambirinachi chose that smile to be her anchor when the songs calling her back home were most persistent. One doorway back home was the unfinished borehole in the backyard, covered in flimsy, rotted wooden boards, with an opening just wide enough to swallow her small body and water just deep enough to drown her. Really, anything that would kill her was a doorway. The songs and voices of her Kin were loud loud shouting; it shocked her that nobody else could hear them. They made her accidentprone. The unfortunate thing tripped on stones that weren’t there and ended up with broken bones that couldn’t entirely be explained. She would go to sleep healthfully robust but wake up with blistering fevers. So she learned to think of her father’s smile and to sit still until the voices grew muffled and she could carry on with her adventure of the day.

  Any thoughts of the future worked like a loosened tap that let the voices of her Kin rush out in a high-pressure stream, so she also learned not to think too far ahead. She thought of things she liked about being in her alive body: the smell of dust rising from the ground outside when heavy rain struck the earth, the burnt-sugar coconut taste of baba dudu. She thought of things she disliked: the sound of her mother’s voice when it was hardened by anger—she was angry often—the fervour in the pastor’s voice when he shouted on Sundays—he shouted often—about hellfire, Holy Ghost fire, and God smiting his enemies. She thought backward, about the in-between place before birth and aft
er the hollowing of her body: her home—the place where she could become the things she loved most, where she would join the rays of sunlight and sing sing in sharp tones, high and joyful.

  It struck in her a sadness, the pitying kind of sorrow, to know the things that alive bodies could never be.

  There were lovely things about being alive, she had to remember, like the taste of guavas. Their existence filled her with so much joy that it burst out of her in gleeful laughter. This is how she ate them:

  She found the sharpest knife in the kitchen, hiding it if her mother was near, the woman could shout, eh! She held the blade as far away from her body as her thin arms would allow—because images of her throat, tattered and bloody, flashed through her mind whenever she saw a knife (knives could also be doorways)—and sliced the bumpy emerald skin off, always trying and often failing to make a single long ribbon of the tart rind. After taking delicate bites of the soft pink flesh, shallow bites to leave the grainy seeds undisturbed, until the fruit became a knobby, slimy ball, she would pop the entire thing into her mouth, and spit out the fruit’s tiny seeds, one by one, all sucked clean.

  KAMBIRINACHI DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ANY FUTURE—how could she?

  Even if she struggled past the voices, she couldn’t have imagined a future that involved leaving Abeokuta, studying fine arts at a university in Ife, meeting a person who would want to keep her, or becoming a mother, for that matter.

  But before all that, how could she know, that day when she found herself in her father’s decrepit Peugeot 504 pickup, that she was being taken to boarding school in Lagos? Queen’s College in Yaba. She would be a QC girl. She couldn’t dare imagine that far.

  So you’ll understand her confusion that day, dazed by the sweltering heat—for as long as they’d owned the truck, the A/C had never worked. Her mother sat in the driver’s seat in a faded adire iro and buba, talking talking.

  “Kambirinachi, you have to behave o! But don’t worry, it’s a good school. It’s far, but not that far, we will visit every two two weeks. Don’t cry, biko, it’s okay.”

  But even as her mother said these words, her voice strained against the jagged emotions she attempted to mask by clearing her throat. Kambirinachi let tears fall freely down her face. She looked to her father leaning against the dusty truck window, his weathered face inches from hers, the smell of chewing tobacco on his breath.

  “Kambi, my girl, be a big girl now, okay? Ebena akwa nwa m. Don’t cry.” He smiled despite his sadness.

  “See you soon, Papa.” Her small voice shook with a question mark. “In two weeks?”

  “In two weeks, my darling,” he reassured her. “If it weren’t for this rubbish car with only two seats, me sef I would be coming with you.”

  Her mother started the car and a blast of heat filled the bottom of the pickup. Kambirinachi moved her legs to touch the Ghana must go shoved underneath the rusted metal of the passenger seat. Her father had filled it with tins of powdered milk, Milo, Golden Morn, and guavas—eight of them, tied tight in a black polyethylene bag. She watched him wave as the truck pulled out of the compound, watched him grow smaller and smaller as the distance expanded between them, waving all along. She waved back furiously, sobbing quietly.

  It wasn’t until he was entirely out of sight, until she thought about seeing him again, in two weeks, the future, that the voices started their song again. At first, a single voice, high-pitched and familiar. And then another. More and more, until they were an overlapping riot of noise. Hard and harsh, relentless waves.

  You won’t see him again. He will die.

  She clutched her ears; they were inexplicably hot. She cried out through her tears, “No, no, please.”

  “Ewo, this girl, you’ve started again. It’s okay!” her mother said.

  Ikenna wanted to be firmer, but the tremor of the child’s voice softened her. She felt warm wetness slide down her plump cheeks, found that she, too, was crying. She wiped her tears with the back of her hand, pretending they were only sweat.

  Taiye

  TAIYE AWOKE TO A WARM SLICK OF DARK BLOOD sticking between her lean thighs. Menstrual fluid soaked through her green underwear and made a splotchy maroon map on the orange batik sheets of her bed. In recent mornings, since moving back home to Lagos, she awoke to thoughts of her bees; they lived in an olive-green hive underneath the dappled shade of the palm trees clustered in the backyard. Among the palms, lush bougainvillea cascading over the fence between the neighbour’s compound dropped bright pink paper blooms like blessings upon the hive. Taiye had been romanced by the notion of keeping bees since she was a small girl, so the moment the dream was within reach, she seized it and clutched it tight. And learned hard lessons on loving the living.

  On that particular morning, her first thoughts were of her sister, Kehinde.

  Taiye stretched, breathing in deeply.

  On the exhale, she whispered, “May I be safe,” and hoped that her words would fall upon open ears. Kehinde was coming home with her husband. Taiye hadn’t met him yet. She hadn’t seen her sister in a long time.

  “May I have peace.”

  She peeled off her damp underwear, pulled the stained sheets off the bed, and threw them in a pile at the corner of the bathroom. With a wet washcloth she wiped crusty streaks of drying blood from her thighs, and then inserted a silicone menstrual cup, discoloured to a light brown from many years of use, to catch her period as it left her body.

  With her footsteps muffled by the plush emerald carpet of the hallway, she walked toward her mother’s bedroom. The heavy wooden door squeaked in its tired frame when Taiye slowly pushed it open. Her mother, a soft lump underneath white sheets, was illuminated by slits of light escaping past heavy red curtains into the otherwise dark room. She listened for gentle snores and shut the door quietly behind her.

  “May I have joy.”

  Early in the morning the house existed in a quiet hush, a spell destined to break moments after a power outage, when the generator would roar electronics back to life. Taiye liked quiet. She wondered if, and how much, it would change when Kehinde and Farouq arrived.

  When she’d arrived almost a year ago with intentions to stay, she found the house in a sort of passive disarray. Thick cobwebs hung in dirty grey clusters in every corner. A layer of dust had settled in and covered all the surfaces. Really, the house seemed untouched, as if no one lived there. Hot rage shot through Taiye’s travel-worn body at the sight of the place, because she’d paid a housekeeper to clean and cook for her mother. And when she saw her mother, saw how prominently the delicate bones of her clavicles pushed so taut against sallow skin, saw her sunken cheeks and the utter joy that brightened her face when Taiye appeared, she choked on the gasp that threatened to escape her throat. She’d embraced her mother, and then marched to the kitchen, where the plump housekeeper was eating a large portion of amala and chicken stew. Taiye said, “Please finish your food. I’ll pay you for next month, but you have to leave today.”

  Afterward, before unpacking, Taiye had tasted egusi soup from a pot in the fridge and found it flavourless and void of feeling. She threw it out and made a tomato stew with azu eke, smoked mackerel. She served it with boiled yam to her mother, who devoured the whole thing and licked the plate clean.

  Now, walking down the stairs, Taiye was careful not to step on the cat, Coca-Cola; the ancient and volatile black thing slept curled up in the corners where the spiral steps changed directions. The cat moved out of the way and trailed behind Taiye into the kitchen.

  “May I be healthy.”

  Although it was still a soft whisper, Taiye’s voice filled the high-ceilinged kitchen. She filled a fire-blackened stainless-steel kettle with tap water and placed it on the gas stove. As she sat by the window, she let the cat curl up in her lap, and they waited for the water to boil.

  A shrill beep from her phone told her that an email awaited. Even before reading it, Taiye knew she wouldn’t reply.

  Subject: I’m Sorry


  Banke Martins

  April 23, 2017, 7:43 AM

  To

  Taiye, I know it’s been a while, but your phone is still disconnected, and you haven’t answered any of my previous emails. I’m really sorry about the letters, can we please talk? I heard that you had to go home. Something about your mother. How is she? Please write back.

  Banke

  Taiye rolled her eyes and put her phone down. Banke was a former lover, a flash in the pan. A mistake. The heat of Taiye’s anger had fizzled out, and in its place was utter disinterest.

  As a detour from the undesirable path down which her mind wanted to wander, Taiye abruptly decided that she would make a cake to celebrate Kehinde’s homecoming. And jollof rice with smoked fish, curried chicken, and soft-boiled eggs.

  “A feast,” Taiye said, and lifted Coca-Cola’s soft body from her lap to the cold tiled floor.

  She made a cup of Lipton tea with condensed milk and honey—the first offerings from her beloved hive. She fished a foil-wrapped block of butter out of the overstuffed freezer to let it thaw on the counter by the open window. Then, she listened for the low humming of her bees.

  This is how you make a salted caramel chocolate cake for your twin sister whom you haven’t seen in … God, a long time. In hopes that you avoid talking about the things you haven’t been talking about and just eat in silence. For the batter, you will need as much butter as you can manage without leaving your cake too dense and greasy. Taiye would die in pure bliss if she were to drown in a tub of good butter, so she used plenty. You should use a little over two cups of all-purpose flour, three quarters of a cup of unsweetened cocoa powder—preferably fair trade; no need to have the exploited labour of children on your hands just for chocolate—a teaspoon and a half of baking powder, a quarter teaspoon of baking soda, a half teaspoon of salt, and three large eggs. You may add a cup of sugar, but Taiye used a cup of honey instead. And finally, some vanilla extract.