La Bastarda

by Trifonia Melibea Obono

  Published in 2018 by the Feminist Press

  at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  First Feminist Press edition 2018

  Copyright © 2016 by Trifonia Melibea Obono

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Lawrence Schimel

  Afterword copyright © 2018 by Abosede George

  Published by agreement with Flores Raras, Spain

  All rights reserved.

  This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This book is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  An earlier version of chapter 3, The Indecency Club, was published on Words Without Borders in 2017.

  Lawrence Schimel would like to thank the Banff International Literary Translation Centre for a residency, where much of the first draft of this novel was completed.

  First printing April 2018

  Cover and text design by Suki Boynton

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Obono, Trifonia Melibea, 1982- author. | Schimel, Lawrence, translator.

  Title: La bastarda / Trifonia Melibea Obono; translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel.

  Other titles: Bastarda. English

  Description: [New York: Feminist Press, 2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017056597 (print) | LCCN 2018005564 (ebook) | ISBN 9781936932245 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Orphans--Africa, West--Fiction. | Fang (West African people)--Fiction. | Women--Africa, West--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PQ8619.O26 (ebook) | LCC PQ8619.O26 B3713 2018 (print) |

  DDC 863/.7--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056597

  For all those who suffer due to, or advocate in favor of, a way of life adapted to individual and collective freedoms.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  DEDICATION

  Barefoot Osá

  The Man-Woman

  The Indecency Club

  The Road to Ebian

  Celebration

  Punishment

  The Forest

  Afterword

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR & TRANSLATOR

  ALSO BY FEMINIST PRESS

  ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS

  BAREFOOT OSÁ

  My grandfather was upset that I wanted to find my biological father. That’s why he called a family meeting first thing in the afternoon with two goals in mind: the first, to convince me that my father was a degenerate; the second, to accuse me of betraying the principles of the Fang people. He was seated in a comfortable armchair near the main door to our kitchen, a lean-to made from wood and thatch. He stared at me disappointedly.

  “What you have done, my girl, merits the worst punishment according to Fang customs,” he said, pointing an accusatory finger at me. “You know that I’m right. You belong to my tribe. You have nothing to do with the man who”—he stammered, trying to find the right word—“with that scoundrel, if he can be called only that, who did the simplest of things so that you were born. The brother of your mother is your father. That’s what tradition dictates!”

  Then he ordered me to cut his toenails. Instead of choosing a new razor blade, I picked out a well-sharpened knife. Over the years, my grandfather’s nails (belonging as they did to a seventy-year-old man who almost never wore shoes) had hardened into my personal burden—I was the one who was forced to look after them and even the soles of his feet, which regularly suffered serious wounds. People called him Barefoot Osá because of this disgusting habit of his.

  I worked in silence, as people often do. My grandfather only bothered to come all the way to the kitchen when he needed a favor, or if someone within the polygamous family that was the product of generations of Fang tradition disobeyed him. That particular afternoon his anger fell on me, his sheltered granddaughter, the girl who everyone called Okomo, the motherless orphan.

  My mother got pregnant when she was nineteen and died while giving birth, her death brought about by witchcraft. From that moment I was declared a bastarda—a bastard daughter. I had been born before my father paid the dowry in exchange for my mother. That’s why society looked at me with contempt and people called me “the daughter of an unmarried Fang woman” or “the daughter of no man.”

  Barefoot Osá ordered me to sit after I’d finished cutting his toenails. He gave me an accusatory look. I knew he was about to start lecturing me. He rid himself of the pipe that yellowed his teeth each day. Just then, his second wife, my grandmother’s rival, twenty-eight years her junior, joined the argument. “I’ll kill her. I’ll make her pay for all the pain she put me through when I was a girl. I don’t understand why Osá put that witch in charge of my education. Well, it shouldn’t surprise me. It’s tradition. Damned tradition! And then he wants me to call her Mother-in-law. Mother-in-law of what? How I hate her!” the younger woman said from her own kitchen, built some months ago right next to our own following a family conflict that had resulted in a pool of blood. My grandfather’s two women had come to blows after a neighbor called me a bastarda. Not that she was the only one.

  My grandfather Osá’s hoarse voice brought me back to the real purpose of this family meeting. I desperately wanted to know who my father was, but the entire family, including my grandmother Adà, was trying to stop me from finding out. They called him a scoundrel and warned me that they would never let me go to him.

  As he continued glaring at me, my grandfather began a boring lecture that I already knew by heart. I was so sick and tired of listening to the adventures of our tribe’s founders, brave men who I was supposed to be proud of. For the millionth time he described the honorable life of Beká, the patriarch of our lineage. His existence had been so fruitful that he brought thirty men and forty women into the world, in addition to fighting against the mitangan occupation.

  As my grandfather recited Beká’s many accomplishments (including his resistance against the Spanish), he grew more and more excited. So excited that he asked for a glass of water to soothe his parched throat. As I served him, he noticed that my grandmother, busy shelling peanuts, wasn’t paying any attention to him. This only worsened his mood. But he continued speaking, moving to sit on the bed in front of the one occupied by his first wife. They stared at each other with mutual disdain across the fire, where I had placed a pot full of roots a few minutes before.

  My grandfather propped up his feet near the burning logs to warm them a bit. From that position he warned me to pay no heed to village gossip and to start thinking of normal womanly things.

  “Why don’t you talk about braids and hairdos, taking care of the house, and other such nonsense? Besides, now that you’re sixteen years old and your monthly cycle has begun, some man is sure to notice you. Then I will collect the dowry for you. I don’t want you to make the same mistake as your mother. She never learned a woman’s place in Fang tradition. She lived much too freely.”

  My grandmother remained silent, barely looking at me out of the corner of her eye. She was the only source of information I had to guide me when her husband was among us women. I was afraid of him. Very afraid. And it wasn�
�t just me—she was afraid of him too, as were all the other grandsons and granddaughters assembled in the kitchen at that moment. We were all terrified of the melongo, a wooden stick kept on the roof of the House of the Word that was used to punish anyone who broke with Fang tradition.

  My grandmother’s reticence during the conversation only served to make her husband even angrier. He began to blame her for my curiosity. He insisted that she should control everything I said and thought, since we went everywhere together. Unlike my grandmother, his second wife showed signs of life. She spoke from her own kitchen, separated from ours by just a wall. The portly young woman demanded her right to have a say in family matters.

  “Is this what you call a family, Osá? You’re meeting with Adà, your first wife, to give Okomo advice without inviting me.”

  My grandmother countered immediately, crushing any hopes her rival had of participating in our affairs.

  “My family is made up of myself and my descendants. You’re just a spoiled brat that doesn’t know anything about life. Fool!”

  With a machete, my grandmother began to beat against the flimsy calabó-wood wall separating the two kitchens while I crossed my arms over my head in self-defense and moved a safe distance away. When the noise finally ceased, my grandfather returned to his speech. Still visibly angry, Osá advised me not to imitate his first wife’s aggressive behavior but rather the admirable conduct of our tribe’s founders.

  Our tribe had managed to cross enormous rivers, climb mountains, and kill animals that stood in the way of their nomadic lifestyle until reaching our town, Ayá Esang. Therefore, it was our tribe and not the tribe of my irresponsible father (as my grandfather liked to emphasize) that had achieved great things in the past and founded a town of thousands of inhabitants. What I needed to do whenever I was insulted in the street, whenever I felt alone and saw other girls with their fathers, was focus on remembering the heroes of old and the successful males who had fathered many children.

  My grandmother didn’t like this final statement one bit. She told me to ask Osá if there were any women in our tribe since he had failed to mention any in his collection of heroes, but I didn’t obey. I was forbidden to talk back to anyone older than me, especially my grandfather, a hero who, during the Spanish occupation of Guinea, had planted coffee and cacao, his greatest pride. He had also built a large factory and had married a girl who between the ages of fourteen and twenty had given the tribe five male offspring. Since marrying his second wife, my grandfather was called nnom ober djom (“the old man with a treat”) behind his back by the young men in town, who were jealous of his new wife’s youth and who boasted that they were the true fathers of the progeny he took such pride in.

  While I listened to my grandfather’s tedious ramblings, shouts began to emanate from the kitchen next door. My grandfather’s second wife was subjecting her three-year-old son to a brutal beating for having wet the bed. This was the same educational method she used with Plácido, her orphaned sixteen-year-old nephew, when he didn’t behave properly. She had brought him from their hometown for the sole purpose of serving her. The boy’s cries came to an end after she yelled an emphatic “You’d better eat or I’ll kill you” at her weak-bladdered son.

  The second famous person from our tribe that my grandfather spoke of was Ondó, a celebrated man who had fought against the mitangan, married twelve women, fathered seventy children, and devoted the final years of his life to sleeping with married women. This last quality, my grandmother dared comment, had brought him considerable fame, but had also gotten him involved in vengeful fights with some of his lovers’ spouses; there was even an attempt on his life. He fled to other parts of Fang territory, braving wide rivers and impenetrable forests until he founded a new village. “A new village! Now that’s something to be proud of!” my grandfather declared.

  THE MAN-WOMAN

  Osá had not just come to the kitchen to order me to stop looking for my father. No. After several hours of venerating his male ancestors, he calmed down and, ceasing to gesticulate with his hands, approached the hearth, where he tenderly called me Granddaughter. The use of that term meant he was going to ask me for a favor. A favor for Granddad? I worried, tugging at the uncomfortable braids my grandmother had made with fine thread three days before. I hated them. I wanted to live with my head shaved, without so much fuss. But my grandmother forbade it, since a woman should always be beautiful. And never ask questions.

  My grandmother hated questions and any conversation that wasn’t about how she could get her husband to return to their conjugal bed. But the years went by, the village aged, I grew a little more each day, and Osá never returned to his first wife’s bed. That’s how things were until I turned sixteen.

  I became an adult as soon as I got my period, and my grandfather began to give me responsibilities, but never any affectionate kisses, though I was always showered with them by my mother’s cousin whenever he visited. Uncle Marcelo was an isolated man who lived outside of society because he was a fam e mina or “man-woman.” The men of the tribe accused him of this both in public and in private.

  One day, it was announced in the House of the Word that the tribe no longer considered him a man due to his unmanly nature and, above all, his failure to consummate any of the marriages arranged for him. The men in my tribe traveled from town to town and, in exchange for dowries, brought wives back for him. But these were marriages in word only, and ended quickly. My uncle Marcelo’s behavior became a topic of quite heated dispute within the tribe. The older men shouted at him in the House of the Word, “You are not a man! A real man sleeps with women and fathers children.”

  My grandfather felt responsible for Marcelo. After the sudden death of Marcelo’s father due to witchcraft, in keeping with tradition but without Marcelo’s consent, he took on the role of father to the man-woman, who now lived mostly in the jungle. Marcelo led a mysterious life, and I was his only friend in town. We got along very well together, but I didn’t understand the reasons why I had ended up becoming a mediator between him and the tribe.

  My grandfather’s order disguised as a favor was very clear: “Tell this man-woman to do his duty by the tribe and follow tradition.”

  Is that all? I asked myself, glaring at my grandfather’s back. He was already on his way out of the kitchen as his first wife took over the task of lecturing me on how to behave.

  Beside the fire, as she placed crushed tobacco inside her lower lip, my grandmother told me that Marcelo’s dwelling was cursed because he took in people who were not at all normal. Trying to make sense of my grandmother’s accusations and mutterings, I eventually came to some understanding of what her husband’s request entailed. Even so, I didn’t realize the extent of the mess I’d been saddled with until I arrived at my uncle’s home in the village. On the way there later that afternoon, I passed through various streets, playing with pets and seeing barefoot and half-naked children. I wore sandals and a popó dress that was too big for me. I knew Marcelo had returned from the forest just the day before. Whenever he came to the village he looked for me, gave me a kiss, and took me wherever I asked him to. It was rumored that he could be my father.

  When I arrived, I knocked on the door to the house several times until a woman named Restituta appeared. She was a thorn in my grandfather’s side because she lived with my uncle and no one knew why. After we greeted each other with smiles, she let me come inside. His home was divided into a living room, dining room, and kitchen. Both of us took a seat in the living room, where a very complicated painting called Guernica hung on one of the walls; on the others I could see photos of my uncle embracing different women and men. The space held an old three-piece furniture set.

  The woman who had opened the door for me was missing a leg, so I’d helped her sit down. The door to my uncle’s bedroom was closed. She asked if my grandmother knew I had come.

  “Yes, why?”

  “I’m surprised. Your grandmother blames your uncle for this year’s
poor crops.”

  “She blames my uncle?” I said, my eyes widening.

  “Yes, just what you heard.”

  At that moment Marcelo appeared and gave me a kiss on the cheek. He sat down beside Restituta and asked me to sit on his lap, so I did. Both of us smiled, and it seemed like a good moment for me to tell him why I was there.

  “My grandfather insists you do your tribal duty.”

  On hearing this, my uncle got very angry. I felt so stupid. He stood up, furious, and called my grandfather all sorts of names, saying he was meddling in his life and how it bothered him that he’d sent me as the messenger. He asked me something that made me feel even more stupid than before: if I knew what my grandfather meant with this business of doing his tribal duty. I of course had no idea, but his companion jumped in to explain that my grandfather’s demand referred to “his member.”

  “What do you mean ‘his member’? What member? What do you mean?” I asked, bewildered.

  “Be quiet!” My uncle sat down on the floor in front of me and took my hands in his own, caressing them nervously. He called me an innocent little girl.

  “They demand that he offer the tribe his virile member,” Restituta said.

  My uncle was becoming more and more agitated. It was clear that he was hiding something. I felt I needed to know what problem the only person in the world who had kissed me like a father was facing. But it wasn’t just that. He’d sometimes speak to me of my mother’s childhood, her affairs with boys, and her stormy relationship with my grandmother and grandfather. He was the only person who told me any details about her life, and I hoped that one day he’d tell me who my real father was so I could go and find him. But when I did ask, he always fell silent. “Ask your grandparents” was all he’d say.

  Calmer now, my uncle returned to his seat and took my hands again. He began to cry as he tried to explain what Restituta had said. “The tribe demands that I impregnate my sister-in-law, the wife of your mother’s brother. But I can’t sleep with her for many reasons.”