A short story by ANGELA AMALONYE NWOSU
It was the dream again. Earth and Wind began that conversation about the name of a place, that conversation that usually led to an argument. Wind would ask Earth what the name of her country was. Earth would hesitate before saying she did not know. A few moments later, she would scratch at her navel, digging up strange fruits, before saying that maybe the name of her country is West Africa. Wind would roar with laughter and do the triple dance of mockery in which he would become a whirlwind, a tornado, and a hurricane all at once. When he calmed down from the wild dance, he would say that the name sounded like that of a region, not a country. Earth would start getting irritable, but Wind would persist.
“How can you not know the name of the place where you dwell? You have lived here for centuries…”
“And you, have you not lived here just as long?”
“My name is Wind,” roared the Wind, “and I roam the Universe.”
In reply, Earth furiously dug up more strange fruits before declaring her name as the foundation of the world.
“Okay, ok, what is the name of this street?”
“Which street?”
“This one you live in now, this one facing us…”
“I do not see anything in front of me…”
“You cannot see…you know what?”
“What?”
Wind would say that Earth was ashamed to identify with her dwelling place and Earth would become bitter about Mr Wind’s insolence. A fresh argument would begin about who came first after the huge void…
I was tired of this recurring dream. The first time I had it, it made me laugh – in the same way that Tom & Jerry made me laugh. I thought it was one of the quaint things about sleep. Then it kept invading my sleep until I told the old woman. I had thought she would give me a prescription that would make the dream stop. She gave me no such prescription. She did say that dreaming could sometimes be a burden, but that I should pay more attention to the dream. I did have the dream again, only this time as Wind howled, making jest of the Earth, she bragged to Wind: “In the middle of the new millennium, a child shall be born who is neither male nor female – neither from here nor there – who shall give this country a new name.” The old woman said nothing when I told her of the recent addition. She just nodded quietly and smiled. I did not quite like telling my dreams because I did not like my dreams to be laughed at or to be told that I am taking the pranks of the imagination seriously. I often wonder if some dreams are not truer than reality. Anyway, this time I had to shelve my apprehension because of the recurrence of the dream.
The next morning, I told my dream. Father was getting into his work clothes behind the tattered brown curtain that divided our tiny room into a public and a private space. Mother was planning to go harvest and sell some vegetables from her farm near the valley of dirt. It was a no-man’s land where all kinds of things got dumped. Once, a day-old baby was found in the dump and the local government officials made a big show of saving the baby. No one mentioned anything about the skinny scavenger from our street who had found the baby. My twin brothers and I moved with routine expertise as we sorted out stuff around the tiny space. My father was the first to offer a translation. He opined that since the last dream occurred on the eve of the Independence day anniversary, it must be about our country. My mother declared that she believed the prediction of Mama Earth and that someday there would be world peace. Father scoffed, saying that someone was letting her former Jehovah’s Witness sentiment get the best of her. Mother opened her mouth to say something. I feared that an argument was coming, but she closed her mouth, then, proclaimed the devil a liar. I thought that was the end of the argument, but the junior twin said the dream was about my hidden shame for being born in a slum.
This time there was silence. We all seemed to have suddenly lost our tongues, while an angel passed through to ward of ill feelings. Mother coughed away the silence and asked the junior twin if he had gone to borrow one of those silly books again. He shook his shoulder in a protesting manner and sat at the edge of the only sofa in the room. The senior twin took his hand in solidarity while Father hastened through a one-minute lecture about not reading books that would turn the head upside down.
“Look, I want all of you to be educated, but do not presume you will know more book than a library. Slum or no slum, your umbilical cords has fertilized the earth of this neighbourhood…”
My brothers and I flinched involuntarily. The senior twin would not let go. “You can hate what you love,” he said.
Father and Mother exchanged glances and stopped any further argument by sharing out the day’s work. I went about my chores like someone who had woken up in alien territory. And even when I got to the Red Zone to get the day’s laundry, I was not in the least inclined to share in the usual early morning banter. The RZ ladies as they are called usually smoked and lazed around in the daytime but got busy at night. According to Aunty Afutanwe, who became my friend, they were chickens in the morning and lions at night. I had laughed when I first heard that. But this morning not even Aunty ’Futanwe could make me smile. I focus on the over-bleached skin of most of the ladies – with green veins sticking out like hungry snakes on patches of yellow pigments. Even as I did the laundry at the backyard, the words echoed in my head. Hidden shame. Here was the only place I know as home, except for the ones I create in my dreams. I loved this place so much that I made enemies from that love.
I remembered one afternoon a long while ago. Walking home from school with other neighbourhood girls, someone from a different group wanted to know where we were going. A girl from our group made an angry face and asked whose business it was where we were going. Not aware that it was a continuation of a classroom scuffle about elegance and sophistication, I promptly announced the name of our area. The other girls laughed and clapped their hands saying that they now understood our uncivilized behavior. I pretended not to understand their mockery, but that did not shield me from the anger of girls from my street. One girl came up to me and asked why I had not lied about where we live.
“Because I live there.”
“Don’t you want to rise above the slum?”
I was beginning to get annoyed. “Living there does not make the slum my destiny. It is just a passing phase…”
“It is already part of your destiny,” another girl shouted. Others sighed and wondered how come they always got stuck with the old woman’s loony. They crossed over to the other side of the road while two of the girls wagged their fingers at me implying I would get a beating if I dared joined them. Only my good friend, Koshemani, stayed with me. We walked toward the footpath that led home through a different route.
It is funny how something reminds one of other things. Thinking back now, I guess I must have supposed that being poor was better than being deceptive. It would have been too much for me to add deception to the burden of poverty.
But what if I did hate this place indeed? What if I hid my hatred well in my dreams? Have I not wished millions of times to suddenly wake up on a treasure island? Have I not wished to build modern castles in our area so that at least we would not have to share the same maggot-infested, pitiable back- houses? I have wished to build fountains of clean flowing water so we do not have to trek three or four-streets away just to buy water from those who made money out of boreholes. Always I had this obsessive wish to have a better life than my parents – a life of respect and dignity. Maybe there are some dreams that spring from shame. But I did love this place with a passion. Back when we were in the first leg of Junior Secondary, we were asked to write an essay about My Best Place. Koshemani, who I mostly call Koshe, was adjudged the best writer. But when an excerpt from her essay was read out, I realised they were my own words.
The excerpt read: My best place is where I live. It has a number of names. Some call it a slum, others say a ghetto sounds better. Some call it neighbourhood, others say odourwood is more like it. But I love it with all my heart because that is where I dare to be myself. And in spite of what it is, it has stories and so must have some meaning. When the excited teacher finished reading, Koshe winked at me. I gave her a weak smile. My own essay did not show such eloquent articulation. I had hurried through mine that night because I had this huge laundry from Babilandy’s, our landlord. Later, Koshe apologized for stealing my idea. I laughed merrily at the idea of my having a thought that could be stolen, then I said that it was a relief that words were free and did not have to be bought. How was I to know that one time in the future I would make some kind of living by selling words?
It was not only the young people that lied about their home address. There was that lady who called herself Tokunbo, because she was supposed to be born in London. She re-imagined her life and told so many lies about herself that her fiancé called off their wedding plans when he trailed her home one day. The disappointed lover told the busybodies that had gathered for the scoop that he could forgive infidelity but not a bad case of low self-esteem. Someone shouted that he was a liar and another said that if it had been a case of lover catch lover, the scene would have been something like cutlass jam cutlass. I felt bad, as did some other girls, because Tokunbo had promised that she would find us a spot in the wedding scheme. I was dreaming of being a flower girl. There was also the case of Alibaba, who lied to hide his identity as a conman and used his room as a hideout. One day, three guys who looked like movie ‘bad men’ beat him to a pulp before he was hurled into a black Mercedes 190 car. We never saw him again, but the neighbourhood imagination kept him alive through tales that continue to be passed on. People said that he sold houses that were not his and that he was the reason why landlords put warning signs of Not for Sale in front of their houses. Some said he procured rare guns for the new wave of armed robbers and was a genius at planning robberies. Others said he duped foolish oyinbos who thought they could continue to rape Africa through their greed. The most bizarre story was that he was friends with Clifford Orji, who was arrested under the bridge near our area for selling human parts to ritualists seeking unlimited money and power. I used to wonder why Alibaba lived like a mouse if any of the stories about him was true.
At night lying on the mat with my two brothers, they painstakingly explained they were not trying to hurt me. I reassured them of my understanding. Most times, talking was a big deal for my twin brothers. I used to fear their taciturnity would cost them their freedom in the hard neighbourhood, but they had grown up as tough as other boys their age. I told them I was grateful for their insight and they soon rewarded me with their froggy snores, which I never got used to. Sleep eluded me. Still thinking about the morning incident, I agreed within myself that one could hate what one loves, yet I could not deny my deep love for this place of my birth. If one could just overlook a number of things, the eyes would open up to the simple pleasures of the neighbourhood. Forget the smell of the gutters, try not to be hypnotized by its perpetually dark waters filled with a lifetime of bacteria and diseases.
Sometimes we do our best to rid the area of its dirt. We dig up age-long tins, plastics, and lots of rubbish, yet they seem to appear right back. A boy had observed that not even archeologists would have much success in getting to the root of the dorti. The truth was that there were no proper garbage disposal mechanisms, so most people just dump garbage into the gutters – with the result that mosquitoes multiplied in alarming proportions. Bored kids would get into trivial arguments about which mosquitoes actually cause malaria, but it did not really matter. We were sick with malaria all the time, so much so that I had convinced most of my friends that all the mosquitoes had to be the carriers of this deadly disease. Although the need to find the cure for malaria was not the main reason I became an apprentice to the old woman, it could have sufficed. I was drawn to the deep and herbal powers of leaves. Koshe had been concerned about me, praying the old woman would not give me extra eyes.
Forget the shapeless rectangles called houses, they were just a cluttered mess like packed sardines. Overlook the constant darkness due to power outages, which in any case was not a pain we bore alone. The whole country suffered from total blackouts and this increased the noise pollution. Most times, the generators rattled or purred nonstop spewing deadly fumes of carbon monoxide as if it was the new smell of incense. Mother liked to burn incense at night and, thankfully, it was a smell I liked. Do not be deceived though, the constant blackouts did not affect the nightlife. After all, most of the night joints had stand-by generators to prolong the pleasures of the night. Coloured bulbs would glitter at night, bulbs with three dominant shades of red, blue and green. When I was much younger, I used to think the colour of the night was a moving rainbow. There was also the tantalizing smell of pepper soup and other mouth-watering delicacies designed to make the night longer than the day. There was a special fish dish on the menu called point and kill. The customers chose the fresh fish themselves by pointing out which one they wanted. I knew about these things because sometimes the smell and wonder of the night made me and my friends hide behind the beer parlours. And Mother used to work in one of these joints as a pepper soup cook. The music was sometimes loud and electrifying, at other times mellow and sensuous. There would be the spontaneous dancing, the rootless arguments, most times induced by drunkenness. There would be smooching, cursing, smoking, and all the things that made the night long, long enough to keep dawn at bay. In short, our area at night could be described as the slum of a thousand cars.
Thankfully, the slum was not only a spectacle of poverty or all about bad smell. It was also not all about the night crawlers or the rain floods. I do like the sound of falling rain but after the downpour most houses, including ours, will be flooded. I will not describe the feeling because it is not a situation I wish on my enemies. Not that I have any. It was nice to know that there were slum dwellers who had excelled to the point where they had become the pride of the nation – slum alumni who gave us the courage to dream, such as footballers who have become little gods in European leagues. There were many others who had excelled in the fields of music and acting. These people help us dare. Because of them, Koshe could dream of becoming the first female Head of State in our country. She preferred that title to President. There was also Ms Shadodo, a very eccentric lady with a Ph.D in science whose extremely fair complexion could make her pass for a white woman or even a Chinese because of her face structure and petite stature. But she was neither white nor Chinese. She was from a riverside village in the deep South, where some of their ancestors we hear, were actually white men, which accounted for such names as Brown, White, Macpepple and Green. If you must know, Ms Shadodo’s real name was Lolo Strongface. It was such a great relief to us that she did not look like her surname. If anything, she had this melancholic aura about her that made her look like those trapped heroines in fairy tales waiting for a charming prince to rescue them. She was clearly trapped in a time that has come to define her life. We do not know the whole story, but we knew it was about love and a broken heart. She had caught her groom with her younger sister and she had gone berserk. As the story went, she had wandered through the streets talking and laughing with the air for a whole year before the slum claimed her. However, it was neither her complexion nor her story that drew us to her, it was the fact that she had turned her one room into a library. Virtually every space in her room was filled with books. She told us stories about books and countries, about heroes and villains, about foreign myths and local facts. It was after one such telling that I began to be interested in our culture. I began to have arguments with myself, really like an internal monologue; so what if I call on my ancestors, not that I know much about them, but what could be pagan in calling upon them for help or clarity, after all they are on the other side… have become spirits… okay, ok, why in the old testament will the people keep referring to the God, god? Of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob…
At first, Ms Shadodo lent us books without charging a fee, but even this broken hearted damsel that had melted into the shadow of her sadness had to eat. She began to charge a small fee, which we did not mind paying. We read all kinds of books. At one time, Hardly Chase was the rave. He was discussed as if he lived next door to us. It was at that time that some of us began to curse and swear “You this soonoofaabeech!” It would take several years later for me to understand that phrase. Shadodo, who was first nicknamed shadow before little kids turned it into a song that ended with “Shadodo,” was happiest when she talked about books. We called her tree of books in reverence. It was she who got me interested in mathematics as she explained calculus to some older kid. “If you know calculus, you will grasp the meaning of infinity,” she said. I did not understand what she meant but those words never left my mind. She was treated with questionable admiration. It was really not clear whether the adults feared, admired or utterly despised her. Then she began to lecture us girls about love and what to expect and one day the lecture was just a sentence, “I tell you, it is better to trust in Satan than in man-love.” Not really thinking about the words, most of us chanted the sentence into our homes and into adult ears. The men just waved away the words feeling sorry for that “love-sick old maid who badly needs a lay.” For the women, it was another matter. The word satan seemed to be an opportunity to deal with that mbamiri woman who was actually a mamiwota. They marched down to her room, my mother inclusive. They warned her not to corrupt their daughters, that her experience did not foreclose their daughters’ destinies. They asked: “How many stories or retold experiences can shield the heart from pain?” After that confrontation, Shadodo lost her ability to speak and shaved off her long hair. We felt heartbroken too, as if we had betrayed a great love. But even in her silence she continued to lend out books for a small fee. To show her how sorry we were, we started bringing her little gifts such as fried bean-cakes and whatever we could lay our hands on. To show us her continued love, she accepted our gifts and wrote things for us to read. It was not the same thing as hearing the joy of her voice, but writing was a better alternative to utter silence.
Then there was Mister Kasidi, who, as the story went, was actually born in the heart of the city. It was believed that a series of misfortune had forced his parents to our neighbourhood. Some people whispered that his parents’ descent from grace to grass was because his father had dabbled into the untamed darkness of seeking the impossible. I used to wonder if all of us living in the slum also dabbled into that isolated darkness. Well, there were those who did not believe those stories because Mister Mobosi, Kasidi’s father, had a good heart and his wife was always giving out sweets and damp biscuits – not that slum kids cared whether the biscuit was damp or crunchy. They were good people, this later group argued, even though they seemed not to belong to any religion. Kas – that is, Mister Kasidi – did not have a fantastic physique. He was no six-footer, but there was something about him that made him appear tall. He usually wore flowing, sleeveless gowns with a V-cut neck made from the adire material. A few people had said that he wore this because it was the cheapest form of clothing. He wore braids like a woman and also wore an earring on his left ear. This one got many tongues wagging. Some said they would have understood if he was trying to imitate Bob Marley or pretending to be a descendant of the original Ethiopian rasta, but to go around wearing the face of a woman was a taboo of sorts. There were those who said he was a priest of Shango. Others whispered that he smoked himself into hallucinatory fits. In spite of these things, there were teenagers who admired him very much. It did not matter to them that he was unemployed and only wrote freelance articles for newspapers. Most mornings, he would walk to the newsstand scanning papers to see if his articles had been published. He had sunken eyes, and this was attributed to his constant use of the kerosene lamp for reading. Older kids swore that Kas had read more books than Shadodo could ever stack. His nose would have been perfect if not for something like a wrinkle on the tip, which made it seem to be smelling something bad at all time. Thankfully, he had dimpled cheeks that sort of neutralized the nose defect. Despite his excellent command of the English language, his very charming smile, and the fact that girls followed him the same way rats followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin, many people paid no mind to the man with a woman’s face – the king of loafers. Then, one day, we saw him on television reading a poem he entitled Interrogating the Chair Above. In our slum, watching TV was a communal concept. All the watchers do not necessarily have to be packed in tiny rooms because, in most cases, most of us just flock outside by the window to catch glimpses of programmes we could not really decipher. Once, we had a black and white TV that would have fared better in a museum for ancient TVs. It however did not matter that this old TV, which had four legs like a radiogram, needed to be boxed constantly for pictures to show and even to facilitate sound. People still flocked by our window. In the end, my father had to give it out – a move that made me very happy because that TV had become an object of bitter memories for him, my father that is. If a football match was interrupted by a power outage or a technical fault from the already ancient and beyond-repair machine, Father would fly into a blind rage. First of all, he would bless his old master, who had given him the machine as a parting gift before relocating to England – igi-lan-di! – a place he would have been with his master if not for woman-palaver and the fact that I happened without being planned for. At the beginning, Mother would lash out at him, shouting that Father had robbed her of her dream of becoming a doctor. Much later, she just ignored him and sometimes would even offer him a drink of ogogoro to help him calm down. In time, even though father did not approve, we joined the throng of communal TV watchers. At one time, Shadodo had a very small one that could have passed for a transistor radio. She let us sit in her room to watch because we could not have seen even a glimpse if we stayed outside by the window. So, on the day Kas appeared on TV voices rang out like calls to prayer from a minaret and us slum dwellers ran out in different stages of un-readiness to catch a glimpse of a fellow slum dweller who had before our very eyes become a slum genius. It was the best ten minutes of our lives. For one, there was no blackout in those ten minutes. And in those ten minutes most of us had real visions of dreams that came true.
I think his poem focused on the state of the nation, for he talked about our leaders’ lack of vision due to the intoxication of power. He spoke big-big grammar. He declared like an oracle that the government was bent on turning the citizens into walking zombies. He brandished phrases like someone who was himself intoxicated with words – decadent illusions, hollow dreams, futureless future, self reliance, and not dancing for the west. Those were the ones I got. He brandished a lot more and ended with a kind of twisted humour when he wished that God should rethink the world by starting over from in the beginning. He got a standing ovation not just from the handful of in-house audience but also from us – not that we quite understood him. We were ecstatic and something akin to speaking in tongues followed as everyone talked at once. My mouth was open for a long time, for I never knew that witnessing a moment of success could feel like a moment of bereavement. It was as if I had become disembodied, so I began to pinch myself and even when I got home I jabbed myself with a needle and the trickling blood assured me of being among the living. By the next day, Kas had become a hero and no one minded his woman-face anymore. Although his TV appearance did not bring any visible financial improvement, we heard that Kas got a handsome grant from a foreign organization with which he started a writing association known as The Living Muse. It was not hard getting members. They met and read their works on the last Sunday of every month. I was appalled when I noticed that a few of the young ladies in the writing club smoked, but they smoked not like the RZ ladies. These ones smoked as if it was a way to write and I began to think, maybe that was why Kas smoked like a chimney and drank so much. The old woman had told me once that some creative people were drawn to destruction in order to create and make old things new. I did not get that one at all, so I asked: “Why would anyone care to make old things new?” She answered that “every new thing was once old and every old thing has a potential to be new.” I still did not get it, so l let it go.
I use to think that the members of the writing club were just unserious people looking for ways to waste time and get cheap attention as they gathered outside the building where Kas had a rented room, just a few blocks from his parents’. Then one day I watched them from behind a room and I was enthralled by their attitude of joyful nonchalance. It was in their casual but peculiar way of dressing and in the way they carried on as if they were from a planet lined with euphoria and ecstasy. Then there was the lady with the long braids whose voice must have been a nightingale’s. She was reading something: There is a faceless struggle inside me. I try to fight it at all angles and meet only a dead end like an endgame, so my root laughs at my dreams, so this is my heart dying, so this is my tongue confessing love to my dying heart which is awaiting an easterly miracle… As the horizontal revelation washed over me, I stood rooted for a while wondering at this brilliant talent and for a fleeting moment I wished I could smoke and write. Even when I found my legs, I floated to the backyard and watched as they argued and cleared away chairs and bottles. I heard Kas telling the lady with the long braids that she has improved a lot and she laughed into his face as if it was a sculpture of happiness. I must have stayed at the backyard forever, because when someone touched me from behind I jumped with fright. It was Kas.
“Kpakpando, why are you hiding from the muse?”
I searched frantically for my voice praying I should not disgrace myself in front of such a VIP. “Sir, forgive me, I was only just listening – the lady from the poem… I mean the poem from the lady with the long braids was, is, good, it made me rooted.”
His nose twitched and I thought he was going to laugh as words just tumbled out of my mouth. But he just looked at me as if he had discovered a part of me that I was not aware of.
“Why don’t you come and be part of the reading one of these Sundays?”
“I am usually busy,” I spluttered.
“So, how come you were not busy today? Do you pick leaves on Sundays too?”
“No…no…I … today I had to mind the house and Nji is having a quiet time, she is eating the leaves of prayer, she is sending light into the world.”
He lit a cigarette before asking if I also ate the prayer leaves. I answered “yes.”
“So, why are you not eating with the old woman today?”
“I was at war with myself.”
“Interesting, interesting – you know, Kpakpa, you are a very unusual girl. I am going to create a forum for young people like you to come and read stories and poems written by you guys.”
“Me? No, I want to be a surgeon!” I said with passion.
He smiled and said “Well, you may have a surgeon’s hand but your heart is a poet’s.”
As I walked home thinking about everything, I saw two hearts dancing ahead of me. I made to catch them, but they flew into my mouth, down my throat and into my belly. When I woke up the next day, I felt strongly that I had dreamt the part about the hearts.
Kas kept his words and the interested teenagers became a part of the writing group. My work with the old woman did not give me the time to participate diligently, but I was happy when a young guy from our area won a poetry competition at the national level. His picture, with that of Kas, appeared on the arts page of all major newspapers. The boy also got a cash prize. Kas became a super-hero.
Now you could say this was a slum of a thousand cars and monster floods and aggressive anopheles mosquitoes and quaint people, but you would be missing something if you did not mention that it was also the slum of the farting dance. Although almost everyone in the area spoke pidgin English, we the people of the slum come from all over the country and we love to co-exist in peace. That is not to say fights do not erupt constantly. One time though it was as if the devil himself was the brain behind the fight that nearly wiped out the area. Ethnic voices suddenly rose up in bitterness and misdirected patriotism. Suddenly people allowed the ghost of the civil war into their hearts and the divided groups hurled obscenities at one another. I still don’t know how the old woman managed it, but it was she who suggested that dance, which she originally dubbed the unity dance. The dance was held on April Fool’s Day. It was a dance in which we poured out our anger on the blind leaders of our nation. We made effigies of these leaders and beat them into pulps the same way we used to beat Judas the thief who killed and ate Jesus. That was an Easter dance – no, parade – we used to have as children. Being that everyone was allowed their own effigies, we could do as we liked with them and I used to think that if these leaders could see their mutilated effigies, they would suddenly remember death and become humble. So you might say we had all these things, but more than anything it was this dance of venting and farting that put us on the news map of the nation. Our dark-eyed leader had heard about our acts of treason and a whole neighbourhood was put on trial. We were charged with about a thousand things, including witchcraft and coup plots. We heard the dark-eyed leader was so vexed that he made a rare appearance to address the nation and summed up his anger thus: And they shat on my head, my effigy head.
