The Language of Night
Uchenna Awoke
Nkwo is sitting in the housefront, drenched in glares and hisses from passers-by. She is waiting for the day the villagers will drag her to the public square, pour petrol on her, scratch a match and set her ablaze like they do to anyone who is a witch.
She comes to the housefront every afternoon to sit (in the shadow thrown by the dirty brown walls and corrugated tin roof of the house) and stare into space. It is so hot it feels like she is locked in a metal tank in the room. The house blocks off the angry glare of the sun as it walks past on its majestic stride towards sunset. Nkwo desires to get the last wafts of fresh air before the mob finally sets upon her.
Her husband, Ogbonna, built the cement house after they got married. He used to live in one of two smaller huts annexing the main house as a bachelor, a tin and mud matchbox he inherited from his father. He is the first son, and it is the tradition in Ede village for the first son to inherit his father’s compound. After their marriage they relocated into the new house and converted the annexes to kitchen and storehouse.
Ogbonna was a motorcycle mechanic then, a cheerful young man with a big bright laugh and hair like a pile of cotton wool on top of his head. His biceps glistened as he worked in his workshop located along the main road, a few poles down the road from the house, near the village intersection: one road leading to the Catholic church, one to the community school, one coming towards his house, and the other going to the market, like a big long X. She enjoyed watching the sweaty knots of his muscles as he worked whenever she took his lunch to him.
He is retired now and no longer goes to his workshop, a thatch shed that has now fallen. He mostly sits in the wide compound to watch his grandchildren at play. Like other compounds in the village, the house has no fence and commands a view of the dusty potholed main road and a plank-and-zinc barber shop over the way. A baobab towers at the threshold of the compound just a short walk from the road, thick and leathery with age, its foliage an umbrella shielding the entrance from the harsh rays of the tropical sun.
The compound is a playground for children in the neighborhood. Ede is a small village, a cluster of cement and mud houses with rusty tin roofs like a congregation of matchboxes. Ogbonna’s compound is most central to the space that used to be the village square where meetings were held before the advent of village halls. Time and development have nearly merged the space and the compound, so it is easy for children to congregate there for their plays, especially on moonlit nights.
Circuits of children playing kpakpankolo kpankolo watched by their mothers sitting in front of their doors with proud eyes, fat backsides protruding over short wooden stools, are not an unusual sight. Some are Ogbonna’s grandchildren, others children from the neighborhood. The younger kids would make several trips to their mothers to lodge complaints against bullies. Once in a while two kids fly at each other like cocks in a fight. Mothers take sides, sometimes nearly coming to blows, sometimes retiring indignantly to their rooms with their child in tow, buttocks wiggling angrily in their wrappers.
Nkwo is immune to this, magical afternoons and charming domestic fracas, as she sits and stares listlessly across the play groups over a distance of thirty-five years. The weather appears a bit cloudy, a translucent silver covering over the village, but then she makes out a beautiful young woman as she emerges from the translucence, a newlywed sitting in the empty compound, hair braided and flowing over delicate shoulders. Her slender, fresh body wearing the coating of honeymoon has the dark-brown sheen of a guanabana seed.
Nkwo recognizes herself, the young version of herself. Ogbonna was sitting close to her, broad shouldered and hirsute. He was saying something, speaking in the silver accents of love, his voice deep like a musical pottery drum. Something he said made her laugh, the delicate and streaming laugh of a happy woman, a woman being loved and giving back love, and then she collapsed into his powerful arms, both of them looking towards the baobab tree with hope that bloomed in its evergreen leaves. Even the mist could not conceal hope’s rays in spears of sunlight that pierced the foliage.
The mist clears, unveiling imperfections in the baobab, funguses feeding off the tree and flourishing green against the host’s pale yellow leaves, parasites breathing life and fertility, and bearing sugar-coated fruits. Nkwo, now a dry woman with thinning hair and a ruined face, sits alone away from the tree. Ogbonna sits further away from her, no longer the broad-shouldered man he used to be, but a shrunken man with black kohl of tiredness rimming his eyes. He has little or no time to spare for her because his many grandchildren left him exhausted with their fighting, howling and whining.
A passer-by, a woman who lives a few houses away, greets Nkwo with a long sizzling hiss that tears into her train of thought, severing her communion with the past. The children at the playground are looking sweaty, dusty and tired; their mothers silhouettes of spectators at their doors in the setting sun, leftover of buttocks spilling over the edges of stools. The road is not yet busy. It is not yet the rush hour when traders and artisans returning from the market cross the compound on their way home. Some of them stop at palm wine and pork bars at the village intersection. Some have looped this habit into a tight rope and hang it around their necks. They are the ones that drink away their money and work menial jobs for the rest of their lives to the detriment of some unfortunate woman they are keeping at home as a wife.
Nkwo retires again into the shelter of her thoughts after the woman has passed. The past is a good place to hide, a sanctuary. It is therapy for her. Memories are her only true friends and companions in these critical times. Her monthly cycle used to visit at irregular intervals, sometimes in dirty muddy-colored tight-fisted trickles, and sometimes in the color of the night. She sought help from doctors and herbalists and churches. She swallowed so many capsules and tablets she started to smell like a clinic. Nurses sewed her up with needles like a piece of clothing. Pastors spanked her flesh red in a bid to chase the demon of irregular menstruation out of her. Herbal concoctions became her drinking water.
Her real nightmare started after Ogbonna married a second wife who had a baby for him in the first year of their marriage. As if to stitch up her humiliation, Ogbonna’s third wife had a set of twins from her very first conception. In all, he has nine children from his second and third marriages. He has grandchildren. Echegu, Nkwo’s only child (God bless Oyoyo’s soul), is his fifth child. Echegu is now married. She is not happily married after three miscarriages. Maduka, her husband, has suffered four sacks from his jobs since their marriage.
“Your daughter must quit her marriage to this other man,” the priest of Oshuru, the ragged old man with long dirty dreadlocks, said when Nkwo consulted him. “By dedicating her to Oshuru, Echegu was yoked with the fiercely jealous deity that is bent on frustrating her marriage. She is Oshuru’s bride, and Oshuru is a very jealous spouse. She must hasten things before Oshuru begins to demand human blood in anger,” added the priest, his soulless eyes staring listlessly away like a serpent’s.
When she asked the priest for a solution to her ailment, this small man with hair that ate up his flesh, this man sitting on a layer of rock and facing the sunrise, shirtless with a large mole on the small of his back, this man who would not explain things properly to worshippers who come to the shrine—he searched for the answer in the rising sun and said there was none. Nkwo went away despising him with skin-crawling loathing.
The entire village holds her responsible for this streak of bad luck that has visited her daughter and her husband. They accuse her of witchcraft, saying she ate up the children God had put in her womb, and now her thirst for blood has caused her to feed on the lives of the babies in her daughter’s womb. She has to pay the price all witches pay. In some cases, they are stoned to death. They are dragged to the public square, tied down in the middle of a mob of villagers, and pelted with rocks. The mob would disperse after the rain of rocks ended in a bloodied mess. In other cases, they are medaled with tires, baptized with petrol, and swabbed with match flame.
Nkwo lets out a long hiss.
Obeta, Ogbonna’s third wife, is returning from the market with a basket on her head. Nkwo utters a word of greeting, but instead of her mouth, Obeta answers with her nose and walks past her. Her grandchildren break away from the play group and sprint towards her to get their gifts of bun and groundnut. Obeta had returned from an omugwo to one of her daughter’s homes with gifts of a new wrapper and jewelry. Every morning she would come to the door and hold the new wrapper to her nose as if savoring the smell of newness.
Ogbonna comes to the doorway to welcome Obeta. And then he asks one of his grandchildren to take a chair out for him under the legendary baobab, the same place he will have his dinner. He begins to feed his nose with snuff. Now and then he sends out a projectile of kola nut-colored spittle. Sometimes the brown spittle knifes through the broad air, making a fine arc.
Nkwo remembers when they used to sit together under the baobab and look up the tree with hope that greened in its foliage. Ogbonna wasn’t the first man that came to marry her. He was the fourth. She was young—about sixteen—and beautiful then. She had been full of life and dreams of motherhood, like the baobab before the corruption, before the parasite. Ten years after the marriage, a child had still not showed up. She had begun to panic. What if she was infertile? Such a possibility was unimaginable though. There was no history of infertility in her family of birth. It was not just in their genes. Every woman who had been born and married out in her family had been fruitful. They were born six in the family, all female except one, and all were married and fruitful. She could not be different.
It is sundown, and traders and artisans are now returning in their numbers from the market. Night will then throw its blanket over the village. Sometimes it does that with one deft swing of its arm, sometimes more slowly. The passers-by keep throwing a hostile eye at Nkwo, muttering and calling her a toothless ugly barren image of a witch as she waits for the predictable end.
The sun finally falls. As the women and their playful children retire to cook supper, Nkwo shrinks into her lonely room, like a forlorn chicken on an early roost. The mob has failed to show up again today. She wishes they would stop prolonging her agony as she reaches for her oil lamp and scratches a match. A quiet, soulless room lights up unveiling a bed with a clean blanket; a large Ecolac trunk that contains her wrappers; a back chair; a wardrobe; a wooden table with a mirror, a face powder, a small steel pot of kohl, and photo albums. Other little things are arranged clinically along the walls. She hisses at the orderliness of the room. She would rather have the room in a tumble. She would love to have a room that stank of urine, a grandchild who would wet the mattress black until the air thickened with the smell, a child she would spank silly when he misbehaved, a child in whose defense she would engage other women in a fight.
The clatter of plates and the percussion of pestle and mortar reach her ears from the kitchens of the other women, Ogbonna’s wife Obeta and his daughters-in-law. Supper is usually eaten outdoors under the long endless savanna of a moonlit sky. The mothers and fathers sit in circles with their children. Ogbonna sits a little away as if watching over them. Nkwo relishes the sibling rivalry that expresses itself in a large bowl of food. If there is no moon and supper is lit by the faint glow of an oil lamp, the setting reminds her of stories from the Arabian Nights her widely travelled uncle used to read out and translate to the village kids when she was a girl still living in the village of her birth. She hisses again. She has long lost her appetite, for what is food if it is not round in shape? What is supper without squabbles of her own grandchildren and little acts of stealing fish?
She slowly walks back to her bed to begin another long night. She knows the night inside out. She understands the language of the nightly winds. She understands their emotions better than anyone else, their silences and accents. Sometimes they are quiet with sympathy, sometimes they howl with mocking laughter at her. She can tell each snorer next door by the rhythm of his breathing, its nuances and modulations. She knows the number of beats in every thunder roll, how many times the cockerel crows before daybreak, and how many times an owl hoots from the baobab. She can tell the taste of nocturnal tears from its cryptic melody. She knows that, at dawn when she opens her door, the monster will be waiting somewhere around the door to usher her into a new day.
When at last they come for her, it is in the night. She follows them quietly, four men wearing yellow faces, ribbons of palm frond across their mouths to seal the lips. The fronds are a symbol of silence, of sacredness. Duty expresses itself in the lines etched to their foreheads. The winds are tongue-tied. Ogbonna watches from his door, as helpless as a leaf in the wind.
As they lead her through the conspiracy of darkness towards the public square, Nkwo remembers how it all started that sweltering afternoon. It was another boring day when the room grew too hot for the sleep that thickened on the eyelids. She was sitting in that accustomed position. The sun was burning, and steams swam like waves in a sea of gold. Oyoyo, her husband’s second wife, was writhing on a mat under the eaves a short distance away. She was heavy with a child and dragged herself around like a tired old locomotive. She was naked to the waist, restless and irritable, hissing and spitting with self-disgust.
Ogbonna rushed off and returned with Naze the midwife, a little woman with a limp on the right leg. Naze midwifed the birth of almost all the children in the village and saw to their circumcision. For this, she was a terror to kids. A stubborn child would pounce on an errand he earlier scorned at the mention of Naze and her sharp razor blade. Naze was an expert at midwifing and, in less than the time it took Ogbonna to fetch her, Oyoyo was delivered of a baby girl.
Nkwo helped in whatever small way that was required of her. Obeta was away to the market, leaving the responsibility to her alone. She was expected to stand at the edge of the village and, in a raised voice, announce to the village the birth of a new baby, so that men, women and children would troop into the compound to sing, laugh and touch the baby with tender fingers. But events overtook that ritual with what Oyoyo did after she regained consciousness. She called for the baby and in a most unheard of demonstration of charity, she handed the baby to Nkwo saying, “You are its mother. Take her, nurse her, train her; she’s all yours.”
The unexpectedness of her gift struck Nkwo dumb as it did others around. She and Oyoyo were bitter rivals. Nkwo had strongly opposed her husband marrying a second wife. When Oyoyo moved in, Nkwo had welcomed her with hostility and made her life unbearable in order to protect what was hers. But things had taken a turn. Success had met her at the doorway and rubbed shit on Oyoyo’s tongue. There was nothing she did not do or say to Nkwo during their many quarrels. Her mouth had bent from pursing her lips with contempt for Nkwo. Of all her atrocities against Nkwo, the most hurting was when she said that Nkwo was only wearing the garment of a woman; beneath the garment, he was a man.
Fellow women filled the compound and sang kpakpakparegede for the baby. They made songs urging the child to honor and respect its parents. They marked their foreheads with odo until it shone yellow. Nkwo named the child Echegu, for she was the most unexpected of gifts. When it cried for hunger, she took Echegu to Oyoyo to be breastfed because her breasts were shrunken and dry. Because Oyoyo wanted the baby to know only one mother—Nkwo—and to avoid any emotional attachment with Oyoyo, little Echegu’s tiny mouth was prematurely plucked off the breast of the woman who gave her life. Nkwo started to feed her with pap and baby food.
But every night, a cat appeared in the room and peered at Nkwo and little Echegu. Its hypnotic eyes shone in the dark like large glow-worms. They vanished as quickly as a dash of fireflies in the night when she lit the oil lamp. Sometimes the baby squealed all night after the cat had gone. Nkwo knew that the world was full of evil. It was a world of men with evil in their hearts, men whose hearts were as cold as stones, witches and wizards that dwelt in the long black bodies of cats.
The day the baby clocked three months, Nkwo snuck her out to the village of her birth. She must dedicate her to Oshuru, the deity that protected the weak and defenseless from the strong and vicious. She went on backroads and over hills. Beyond the valley, men appeared, like columns of ants, in a battlefield, coated in a swirl of dust, their cries drowned by the faint resonance of steel. After the dust settled, all that remained was the trail of a fierce battle—the ruins of a fallen village: crumbled walls squatting in rough heaps, human bodies and carcasses of animals reverting to soil.
Nkwo’s father used to take her on pilgrimage to Oshuru’s shrine as a child. One day, on their way, he told her the story of how Oshuru came to be: “Our community came under a deadly attack during a boundary war with another community a long time ago. Our enemies almost wiped out our community. The only survivor, a man named Ishiayanashi, escaped and travelled to a distant land in search of fortification. He returned with Oshuru, built a shrine for it, started life afresh, married wives and had children by them. Since then, the deity has kept a jealous eye on him and us, his descendants.”
Nkwo entered the thick grove home of Oshuru. She stood on a sacred rock and raised the baby in her hands. And then she spoke in a keen voice: “This child was given to me by a benevolent co-wife, bringing to an end my years of misery. With this baby she wiped away my tears. She comforted me for the mockery and sideswipes I have borne for years. I dedicate this child to you. As she was given to me, I am giving her to you. I totally surrender her to your will on her ascension to womanhood. Guide and protect her from the evil of man, I beg of you, great god of the helpless.”
The grove trembled. Nkwo felt the strong omnipotent presence of Oshuru. She realized with a deep sense of relief and certainty that her prayer had been answered. Somewhere in the armpit of the cave sat the dreadlocked priest of the shrine, his face in deep shadow turned away from the worshipper, as Nkwo turned and started to walk out of the shrine with the baby. She walked with buoyant and assured steps.
Back home, she devoted her life to raising Echegu. She fought for her, pounced on her bullies and wrestled women and neighbors in defense of her. The child grew into a plump beauty with a long line of suitors waiting at her father’s door, until one of them snapped her up the way a hungry lizard snaps up an insect.
A shove sends Nkwo to the ground, wrenching her mind back to the present as they arrive at the public square. They form a ring around her. The first man steps forward and begins to tie her legs and hands around the ankles and the wrists. The young man—he is young enough to be her grandson—is tying away all his life’s furies, exerting all his strength into each wrench that betrays his hate. The tightness of the rope is enough to saw off her wrists and feet, but Nkwo feels no pain, only the pressure.
The second person sprinkles petrol on her. He bathes her in it, making sure he empties the gallon, and then he spits on her and moves back. The third person strikes a match. He plays with the flame, his face set and yellowed. Suddenly he casts the flame at her from a safe distance. Nkwo squints at the flame that streaks through the blackness of the night towards her, an orange-colored penance.
