Butter Honey Pig Bread

by Francesca Ekwuyasi

  I laugh and say, “Mami, this is Farouq.”

  “Ehen, so this is the reason you haven’t come home since abi?” She clasps his face between her small palms, studying him after he plants kisses on both her cheeks.

  “I hope the heat doesn’t kill you with this bush on your face,” she says to him, and to me, she teases, “He’s handsome sha, even though he is oyimbo.”

  Farouq laughs and says, “It is a pleasure to finally meet you, ma.”

  “Oya, you people, go and settle. Your sister and I will finish cooking.”

  I am relieved that she seems lucid, and I choose not to be alarmed by the desperate thing flickering in her eyes. It is so subtle, but I recognize it well.

  TAIYE AND ME, our bedrooms are next to each other on the third floor. Mine is a large room with a twin bed covered in brightly coloured tie-dye linens tucked in the corner farthest from the door. The polished wood vanity with an ornately framed four-foot mirror sits across the room from the bed exactly how I left it. On it are my old things: tubes of sticky fruit-flavoured lip gloss, stacks of Vogue and Time, half-empty bottles of nail polish—their shimmering contents long dried—and a tattered French-English dictionary, my initials written on its spine in thick black marker. On the floor, against the wooden base of the vanity, are stacks and stacks of books: novels and poetry collections; a mixture of secondary school–assigned literature by Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Cyprian Ekwensi, Ama Ata Aidoo, Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Wole Soyinka; and books that sixteen-year-old me read voluntarily, like Harry Potter and Purple Hibiscus and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. They are covered in a uniformly thin layer of dust. I devoured these books; every single one of them drew me in with its words until I was so deep in each world that any ending seemed too abrupt, and I would just sit with the closed book on my lap, the characters like old friends to whom I had just said good night. I would have to wait a while for the lingering aroma of one story to fade from my mind before diving into another.

  I don’t think my things have been touched at all since I left. The floors have been swept, the bed made, and the worn red rugs that used to cover the white tile floors replaced with these woven multicoloured square ones, but aside from that nothing has changed. The framed posters of Bob Marley and Fela Kuti still hang above the headboard, and they rattle against the wall when Farouq throws himself onto the bed and moans into the pillow.

  “Finally, finally,” he says. Then he looks at me with heavy-lidded eyes and asks, “Sleep or food?”

  I laugh because I know that he will fall asleep before he chooses, but I suppose that is a choice. I open the windows and the sliding glass door leading out to the narrow balcony, and by the time I turn around he is asleep, with his hands tucked under the pillow and his feet hanging off the side of the bed. When I slip off his shoes and remove his socks, he stirs and mumbles something about being ticklish.

  WHEN HE WAS FOURTEEN, Farouq left his mother’s tired one-bedroom flat in Aulnay-sous-Bois. She sent him to live in the fifteenth arrondissement with his father, a man she had fallen in love with during her first summer in Paris, a man whose last name Farouq bore but whom he barely knew.

  The story goes that his mother, only a few months off a cramped flight from Tangier, met his father at her uncle’s café near Parc de Belleville in the twentieth arrondissement. An anti-xenophobia rally had been organized in the dimly lit tea shop. He was slightly older, a thin baby-faced activist with reluctant patches of wiry reddish hair on his face. It was a poor excuse for facial hair, but she found it adorable. She looked at him for a long time and found him beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that later during the same week, when they were alone in the small flat he shared with two other men, she slipped off her emerald-green hijab, unpinned her thick henna-reddened curls, and let them tumble softly down her round shoulders, so that he could see that she was beautiful, too.

  Because her family was devoutly Muslim, they asked her not to see him. Because she was strong-willed and in love—or merely intoxicated by the idea that someone she wanted also wanted her—she saw him anyway. After many secret evenings full of ripe fruit, music, and cheap wine, she became pregnant. I can only imagine the fear that must have gripped her gut when she found out, how difficult it must have been to come clean to her family. She was only nineteen years old. They never married, and apparently, Farouq’s father outgrew his activism and settled back into his life as an upper-middle-class white boy.

  Farouq traces his interest in racialization and critical race studies to his fifteenth birthday—the year he moved in with his father, who ceaselessly tried to hammer whiteness into him. He couldn’t be Farouq and Étienne—the name his father had chosen for him. He had to be one or the other. Maghrebian or French—that is, white. His obsession is the force behind his doctoral research. Three months ago it took him back to Paris, where he spent weeks holed up in the special collections reading room of the Sorbonne Library, wielding his keen intellect in an attempt to sort out the angst that his family stirs up in him. He Skyped me at four a.m. once, drunkenly ranting about growing up Moroccan in Paris without ever having been to Morocco: the absurdity of the prejudice he endured, the fucked-up way that white supremacy slyly slips a chip on your shoulder, only to turn around and innocently question its position there. A few times, he moved into French and spoke too quickly for me to follow, pausing and smiling sweetly at my interjection of “English, please.” This, his obsession, brought him here with me, as part of an agreement we half-jokingly made between glasses of wine on his thirty-sixth birthday: he comes to Lagos with me now, and I’ll go to Tangier with him in a few weeks.

  I watch Farouq’s chest rise and fall in tune with his audible breath, his snores in ragged inhales and silent exhales. Let me tell you a secret: sometimes I scheme, I keep myself scarce from Farouq, but only to stoke his longing. No other reason, I swear. My mother, in dramatically different ways, kept herself scarce from my father, and I have never seen any human being adore another as thoroughly as my father did my mother. I want that so bad, you don’t know.

  AFTER A QUICK BATH I DRESS AS QUIETLY AS I CAN, walking on the tips of my toes so that I don’t disturb Farouq, who has twisted his body into a shape that will undoubtedly leave him hurting when he wakes. I am incredibly tired, but I want to stay awake until nighttime and counter any jet lag. I put on a baggy white T-shirt over shorts and walk past Taiye’s room on my way downstairs. I look inside to see two open suitcases with clothes spilling out of them onto the white tiled floor. There is a crumpled orange towel on the red and blue paisley rug at the foot of her bed. She is still so messy. She’s been home for months and doesn’t seem to have fully unpacked.

  A delicious aroma floats up the stairs and pierces the air around me. Downstairs, besides the sizzle and sigh of wet food on heat, the only sound in the kitchen is a melody that our mother is humming. I don’t recognize it.

  Taiye is at the stove pouring cooked white rice out of a bright green plastic colander into a large stainless-steel pot of bubbling stew.

  She looks at me with a smile. “How far?”

  “I dey, I bathed, and Farouq is asleep.”

  Sitting on the counter by the window, our mother looks me up and down, her smile sweet. “My darling, how are you?” she asks. Before I can answer, she adds, “Your sister is preparing a feast—there’s even cake!”

  “Nice! What kind?”

  “Chocolate,” our mother says.

  “And salted caramel,” Taiye adds.

  “Fancy,” I say.

  “Is Farouq allergic to anything, or like, is there stuff that he won’t eat?” Taiye asks, a wooden spoon stained dark red in her right hand, her head cocked to the left.

  “At all,” I scoff. “He eats everything.”

  Taiye nods.

  “I want to help. What can I do?” I ask.

  “Uhhh.” Taiye absentmindedly rubs her thumb over the finger-length scar that runs from the indent of her right dimple to the f
aint cleft of her chin. “Yeah, you can fry some plantains.” She gestures toward a red plastic basket sitting on top of the fridge.

  “Sounds good.” I reach up to collect the basket, inside of which are half a dozen large plantains that have ripened to near complete blackness.

  “Actually,” Taiye says, her eyebrows shooting up in excitement, “we can make mosa!”

  “Mosa!”

  Kambirinachi

  QUEEN’S COLLEGE IS AN ALL-GIRLS SECONDARY SCHOOL IN YABA, Lagos Mainland. Kambirinachi hadn’t visited Lagos in her present incarnation, but she remembered it vividly. She had seen it many times. One time before before, she borrowed the body of a taut and agile dancer at Fela’s Shrine in Ikeja. She longed to feel the thing that made bodies move so exquisitely, with such blissful urgency. Feet stomping, hips swinging, waist and ankle beads jiggling and clashing against each other, transforming the dancers into human shekere, percussion in time with the musicians’ cries, chest and body undulating in rhythm to Fela’s instruments. It had been quite the time.

  Now, she was in Lagos again but confined to the school compound (confined to a breathing body that required sustenance and upkeep in fastidious ways that she had not anticipated, particularly now that neither of her parents were present to scold her).

  Kambirinachi had cried until she fell asleep as her mother drove her along the dilapidated Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. She’d woken up to the creaky grumble of the pickup’s engine and the sound of her mother chewing roasted groundnuts from a cone of newspaper nestled in the folds of fabric on her lap.

  “Kambi,” her mother had said. “You’ve woken? We’ve almost reached.” Ikenna handed the half-full cone of nuts to Kambirinachi. “Take.”

  “Thank you, Ma,” Kambirinachi said.

  She repeated it when her mother dropped her off at her aunt’s two-bedroom flat in the dusty staff quarters of the school campus. Ikenna gave her a small wad of faded green twenty-naira notes.

  “Keep it well o,” she said, voice stern, eyes soft. “Don’t let anybody steal it or push you up and down, okay?”

  “Yes, Ma,” Kambirinachi said, but Ikenna was worried. Kambirinachi was so small for her age. Chineke! she thought. So small and so strange. These other girls will eat her alive!

  She turned to her sister, Anuli, who leaned against the pickup with a pitying smile curving her plump black-lined lips. Ikenna’s expression asked if she was doing the right thing.

  Anuli nodded slowly. “Nwanne mu nwanyi enyela onwe gi nsogbu. She’s with me. Don’t worry, eh?”

  Kambirinachi looked unblinking at her mother’s face, until tears spilled out of her eyes. She tried her very best not to think about the next time she would see her, lest the voices of her Kin return to drown her.

  She asked, “You will come in two weeks?”

  “Yes, Kambi, me and Papa will come in two weeks.”

  THAT WAS A MONTH AGO. Her parents hadn’t visited in two weeks like they’d promised, but they had phoned Aunty Anuli to say they would be there that coming weekend, on Visiting Day. It was a difficult thing to refrain from thinking about the future, especially when the present was so … tedious. Kambirinachi found it tiresome, navigating the social landscape of secondary school, while also trying to understand advanced math and memorize the periodic table. Kambirinachi excelled in part because of her ability to tip herself over like a cup of water and become absorbed in any given moment, but mostly because of her deep terror of the voices. She had already earned a reputation as an efiko, a nerd. She had heard what some of the other girls whispered about each other, the causticity of their words. She did not want to be on the receiving end of that, so she kept her madness, her magic, quiet. So quiet that it was painful.

  She was in Dan Fodio House, named for Sultan Usman Dan Fodio of Sokoto. Kambirinachi knew of Dan Fodio from before before. She’d played with his dazzling Fulani Muses—most Muses are dazzling; that is how they inspire. They shared stories of his sheer brilliance, throwing around the term “revolution” quite a bit, but Kambirinachi was preoccupied with his poetry. She started to remember, she laughed about it quietly, and then she stopped, for fear that she would incite a visit from the Muses, her old friends. It had been too long now, and they might condemn her choice to live out this fragile human life. No, they certainly would; it was an unnatural thing.

  The thing she loved, the thing she knew would help her manage the waves of tedium interspersed with the angsty melodrama and cruelty of teenage girls, was art class. And Mr Obasa, the junior school art teacher. Kambirinachi patiently sat through forty-five minutes of art history and theory so that she could unleash her mind in the half hour of drawing practice. In still life, she would follow Mr Obasa’s instructions: “Draw what is in front of you.”

  It took several classes for Kambirinachi to remember that the things she saw in front of her were not always apparent to others. Not everyone could see the rot before the rot, growing in small scaly patches around the large green and yellow mangoes arranged on the fabric-draped stool. That kind of decay told Kambirinachi that the person who picked the fruit, whoever they were, had a head full of ill intention. But Mr Obasa appreciated her “imagination.” He was impressed by her talent. Only eleven and she had a distinct style, somewhat bizarre and vaguely disturbing but distinct, nonetheless.

  AUNTY ANULI LIVED IN A SMALL TWO-BEDROOM FLAT on the ground floor of one of the several bedraggled five-storey blocks of flats in the school staff quarters. She lived with her husband, Ugo, and their six-year-old son, Junior. The three of them slept on the queen bed in the master bedroom, and they used the second room to store all the foodstuffs that overflowed from the kitchen cabinets, some old furniture, and a navy blue and red portmanteau filled with sequined George wrappers and embroidered silks from their wedding a decade ago. The day before Kambirinachi’s arrival, Aunty Anuli asked Ugo to cram as much of their things as possible into the cluttered closets and stack the rest against the wall to make room for the new twin mattress she had bought for her strange niece.

  Kambirinachi was grateful to be sleeping at Aunty Anuli’s place instead of boarding on the other side of campus, where if you weren’t claimed by a senior student as a school daughter, you could be awoken before everything alive in the world to fetch bucket after bucket of water for the seniors in your dormitory. Kambirinachi still had to fetch water some mornings, when there was no power for the water pumps. Three full buckets: one for the kitchen, one for Junior, and one for herself. She was slow, but Aunty Anuli never complained.

  The thing is that Anuli was afraid of the girl. Even though Ikenna had stopped referring to the child as an Ọgbanje, Anuli could not surrender the thought. She was a pious woman, insisting that her husband and son join her at the crack of dawn in prayer and devotion. On the second or third morning of prayer, she caught Kambirinachi with a vacant look in her wide-open eyes, mumbling something indecipherable under her breath. Maybe she was only praying, but Anuli found it unnerving and decided it was best to leave the girl alone. Best not to anger the thing.

  Kambirinachi let the month blur by so that when Visiting Day arrived, she burst with joy at the sight of her father’s face and threw herself into his arms. For Ikenna, the distance had made her fonder of her strange child. Kambirinachi tried to commit every single detail of the visit to her knotty, mosaicked memory, so that when the day was over, when her parents had driven back to Abeokuta, and the fear started to slither into her mind, beckoning the voices to join in, she could go back and savour a particular moment. Like sitting in the pickup, on her father’s bony lap, her mother smiling, and the taste of Mr Bigg’s fried rice and chicken in her mouth.

  Taiye

  HOME FROM THE AIRPORT, Taiye retreated to the kitchen to let Mami, Kehinde, and Farouq embrace. Things felt a bit tense, a bit like all the sweetness was a trick, and a rage would rise up soon enough. Though their mother’s rage hadn’t reared its head since Taiye had been home.

  In the kitchen, Taiye checked on
the browned pieces of curried chicken roasting on a tray in the oven. Realizing she’d forgotten to stop by the Falomo market to buy tinned tomatoes, she decided to make do with whatever was in the cupboard: maybe palm oil, maybe crayfish, maybe some efirin. Perfect for native jollof, actually.

  Rummaging through the cupboards brought to mind a former lover, Kessie, with whom jollof rice had been a topic of heated contention. Kessie was a stubborn woman from Cape Coast, Ghana, whose hedonistic hunger matched Taiye’s near perfectly; their perversions complemented each other’s gorgeously. They’d dated one stunning London summer and allowed things to peter out in early autumn when Kessie went back to school in Leeds. “Dated” is a bit of an overstatement; they’d slept together, frequently, for four months. For Kessie, it was entirely physical. In her words, she “wasn’t a lesbian or anything …” She had just been “bored with men,” and Taiye was “convincing in her advances.” Though it was she who came on to Taiye. But Taiye wasn’t concerned with the details; their ridiculous chemistry had been enough for her. They’d had many Nigerian jollof versus Ghanaian jollof arguments, but Kessie despised cooking and could never defend her claim. So Taiye always won.

  Former lovers aside, this is how you make native jollof rice, or, in Efik, iwuk edesi. Because you forgot to buy tinned tomatoes, but you promised your family jollof rice. Everyone knows that you do not casually break promises of jollof rice and survive unscathed to tell the tale. You will need two cups of rice, preferably long-grain white rice, but really, any type of rice will do. You will also need a quarter cup of palm oil, some smoked fish—eja osan would be your best bet—one large onion, a half cup of dried prawns, ground peppers, two tablespoons of ground dried crayfish, one tablespoon of puréed tomato, a small bunch of chopped efirin, half a tablespoon of salt, and a cup of beef stock or two bouillon cubes.

  Taiye washed and set the rice to boil until it was nearly fully cooked. She poured the palm oil into a hot pan and let it smoke and settle before adding the sliced onions. She added the tomato and pepper purée, the crayfish, the smoked fish, the bouillon cubes, and some water. Then she put the lid on the pot and let the stew bubble and reduce. The aroma eh, the depth of flavour that crayfish adds to any dish is incredible. Taiye checked on the chicken again and turned the oven off.