Akwaeke Emezi

The future fans out in brilliance, powered by imagination and ego and
hope and a thousand other things, but all that glory can be condensed across
time into the choice to sit and write words down. It doesn’t even have to be
done well—that’s what revision is for. It just has to be completed. There is
such a space, a stretch of desert, between imagining something, writing it,
and then finishing it. Execution is a particular discipline, something built
out of corded rigor, tight and greased with sacrificial blood. There are many
components to this spell: how to make the task at hand the only one that is
real; how to work when you don’t want to; how to summon your want and
collar it for your purposes, setting it to work.
I bribed myself with the future. I dangled the things I wanted in front of
my greedy eyes, and in the flush of that desire I reminded myself that
writing five hundred words right now would reel in the world I wanted.
There is always something you can do right now; there is always a first
step, no matter how small it is. Seeds are often tiny, and it means nothing
about what they will grow up to be. You plant them anyway, and that’s what
making the work is.

De retour à la maison, l’Ada dénoua son mouchoir et le tint en l’air, déplié. Il y avait trois marques brunes, deux pour ses narines, une pour sa bouche. Nous aurions aimé qu’elle le conserve, mais les humains sont ainsi. Les choses importantes leur échappent dans l’instant, quand la sensation est vive et qu’ils sont assez jeunes pour croire qu’elle perdurera. Plus tard, l’Ada garderait un souvenir étrangement vif de cette nuit, comme l’un des rares moments véritablement heureux de son enfance. Ce moment-là, quand nos yeux se sont ouverts dans la poussière de la place du village et que pour la première fois nous étions en éveil dans son royaume comme dans le nôtre, ce moment-là semblait fait de pure lumière. Nous formions un seul tout, ensemble, en équilibre pour un bref instant de velours d’une nuit villageoise.

I learned other things in Aba: that a mother you see once a year is a
stranger, no matter how much you cry for her in the long months when
she’s gone. That if my father is a man who will wield a machete at the
NEPA worker who came to check the meter, then I cannot tell him what our
neighbor who took my sister to the hospital after the pickup accident did to
me, because at twelve I am entirely too young for that kind of blood on my
hands. They treated that neighbor like a hero; he called my sister his little
wife for years. We can, I promise you, bear much more than we predict.
I told a friend some of this during a lunch in Lagos—not the parts about
myself, just about the bodies and the curfews and the ritual kidnappings
they called Otokoto and the time they burnt down the mosque and killed
every Muslim person they could find, murdering three hundred Northerners
in the two days after the lorries arrived with the bodies from Kaduna, when
we got five days off from school and stayed at home and saw the ashes in
front of the Customs House. I told her how a classmate had joked with me
then that I should be careful. “You know you resemble a Northerner,” he
said. I told her about the rumors of a Muslim man who could pass for Igbo,
and so when they came for him, he joined the mob and killed his own
people to stay alive, to prove he was one of us. I told her about the woman
next door, whose gateman was a shoemaker from the North, how she hid
him and his five-year-old son in their boysquarters. When the child heard
the noise in the street, he tried to run out to see what it was, but she caught
him and beat him and sent him back. He was five. We shared an avocado
tree with their compound.
We were sitting in Freedom Park when I said these things, and my friend
stared at me the whole time, horrified. “You’re making that up,” she said.
“Are you serious?”
“It was Aba in the nineties,” I reminded her. “I thought everyone in
Nigeria grew up like this.” I hadn’t expected her to be surprised. She was
Nigerian too, after all, and older than me. Surely, she’d seen worse things.
“No, everyone did not grow up like that!” She was agitated. “Why don’t
you write about this?”

Ma mère ne dort pas de la nuit
Elle s’inquiète. C’est dans l’ordre des
choses
Quand des dieux froids vous donnent un
enfant.
Je dors comme une gousse d’opium.

Elle s’inquiète. C’est dans l’ordre des
choses.

Si jeune et déjà folle, voyez-vous :
je dors comme une gousse d’opium.
Les jours de répit, je hurle.

Trop jeune et déjà folle, voyez-vous,
les autres impatients de me prendre,
Seuls les jours de répit, je hurle,
carcan de chair et peau brûlante.

Les autres impatients de me prendre
de boire à mes abîmes.
Carcan de chair et peau brûlante,
J’ai voulu mourir de ce corps.

J’ai bu moi-même à mes abîmes,
ma mère ne peut me protéger.
J’ai voulu me soustraire à ce corps,
les spectres la menacent de leurs griffes.

Ils salivent au pied de son lit.
Quand des dieux froids vous donnent
leur enfant,
assurez-vous de la garder en vie.
Ma mère ne dort pas de la nuit.

5. « Nous l'avons ignorée aussi gentiment que nous en étions capables – ce corps était à nous, pas à elle ; cette fille était à nous, pas à elle, il fallait qu'elle comprenne où s'arrêtait sa juridiction, et que pousser plus loin était un blasphème.
L'Ada a eu recours à un psy pour accompagner notre projet de ciselage, et nous avons découvert que les humains avaient des termes médicaux – des mots pour désigner ce que nous essayions de faire –, qu'il existait des procédures, changement de sexe, transition. Nous savions que ce que nous projetions était juste. Même les aspects de son corps qui déplaisaient autrefois à l'Ada s'étaient émoussés depuis que nous avions laissé Saint Vincent aux commandes. Et puis, les larges épaules qui se resserraient en hanches étroites et petites fesses étaient enfin à leur place. Les vêtements d'homme tombaient convenablement sur ce corps : nous étions beau. » (pp. 210-211)

I felt heavy my whole life.
I always thought that death would be the heaviest thing of all, but it
wasn’t, it really wasn’t. Life was like being dragged through concrete in
circles, wet and setting concrete that dried with each rotation of my
unwilling body. As a child, I was light. It didn’t matter too much; I slid
through it, and maybe it even felt like a game, like I was just playing in
mud, like nothing about that slipperiness would ever change, not really. But
then I got bigger and it started drying on me and eventually I turned into an
uneven block, chipping and sparking on the hard ground, tearing off into
painful chunks.
I wanted to stay empty, like the eagle in the proverb, left to perch, my
bones filled with air pockets, but heaviness found me and I couldn’t do
anything about it. I couldn’t shake it off; I couldn’t transform it, evaporate
or melt it. It was distinct from me, but it hooked itself into my body like a
parasite. I couldn’t figure out if something was wrong with me or if this was
just my life—if this was just how people felt, like concrete was dragging
their flesh off their bones.
The fugues were short absences that I became grateful for, small
mercies. Like finally getting to rest after having your eyelids forced open
for days. I hid them from my parents and grew out my hair, thinking that
the weight dropping from my head would lighten the one inside of me. It
worked—not by making anything lighter, no, but by making me feel more
balanced, like one weight was pulling the other and the strain on me had
been lessened. Perhaps I had just become the fulcrum, the point on which
everything hinged, the turning. I don’t know. I just know that I hurt a little
less with each inch of hair I refused to cut.
Looking back, I really don’t know what I thought it was going to protect
me from.

He said nothing more to Kavita about his shame,
or the new headstone, or the photographs. Kavita said nothing to him when
she took them out of the drawer and arranged them in an album, which she
hid under her side of the mattress. She pored over it for hours when Chika
was out of the house, trying to find the child she’d lost, trying to commit to
memory the child she’d found.

“Hello?” she called, wiping her forehead. “Is anyone around?”
Footsteps came down the corridor; then Elizabeth appeared, hazy behind
the green mesh of the mosquito net. She was wearing shorts and a singlet,
as tall as she’d ever been. Juju stood with a polite smile as Elizabeth
unlatched the door.
“Good afternoon,” she said, wincing a little at how formal she sounded.
“I’m Aunty Maja’s daughter?”
Elizabeth stared at her for a moment, her face blank, and Juju stared
right back. She remembered Elizabeth’s face, but back then Elizabeth had
been a lanky, dark-skinned child with threaded hair and puffy dresses. Now
she had shaved off her hair, and Juju felt herself staring at all that skin, from
her scalp to her arms and legs, even the smooth cleavage that the singlet
couldn’t quite cover. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Juju blushed.
“Oh, Aunty Maja,” Elizabeth finally said, after a forever of staring
silence. Her voice was deep and sweet. “You’re Juju. Come in.” She moved
aside to make space and Juju tried to walk through the doorway, but it was
impossible to do so without brushing against Elizabeth, who didn’t move.
She just smiled and looked down as Juju squeezed past. “It’s nice to meet
you,” she said, and Juju wondered if she heard a trace of amusement in her
voice.
“You, too,” she said.
Elizabeth latched the door again and led them into the kitchen. “Do you
want something to drink?”
Her question seemed to come from a great distance. Juju had been
watching her legs, the smooth bulge of her calves, the soft places behind her
knees, barely paying attention to what she was saying. She had been
looking at girls that way, with an interest in the texture of their flesh, for
some time, but she was always afraid that they’d catch her and see into her
head, into the places even Juju was a little scared of seeing. So she avoided
Elizabeth’s eyes, in case Elizabeth saw how much she wanted to put her
mouth on the back of her neck. She looked up, down, over at the kitchen
tiles, anywhere but directly at this tall and beautiful girl. Later, once they
were together, Elizabeth told her it was the most adorable thing she’d ever
seen. Juju had expected to collect the guavas and leave, but somehow she
was answering yes to the glass of water and then they were talking and it
was a few hours before she finally left with the fruit.
The next time they’d met, Elizabeth had come to Juju’s house, bringing
jam jars for Maja, who insisted that Juju invite her into her room, thinking
they would become friends.
Elizabeth kissed Juju for the first time that day, quickly, on her way out.
“You don’t need to be so afraid,” she’d said. “I like you, too.”
And that was it, that was how Juju got a girlfriend.

The girl broke into tears and all Kavita could feel was drained. It was
interesting, she thought, how people mourned Vivek. Somehow she felt like
they didn’t have the right to cry in front of her. After all, was it their son
who had died? Was it them that had held that baby on the day he was born?
No, it was just the two of them together in the hospital as Ahunna died, just
Kavita and her child in that bed, all mixed up in love and uncertainty, Chika
beside them like an afterthought. She regretted what had happened next—
the depression that followed, when she pulled away from her child in grief.
She should have held him tighter, as the world was whirling around them. It
had always been her and her baby.
The loss of him felt cumulative, as if he’d been slipping away so slowly
that she’d missed the rift as it formed in his childhood. It was only once
he’d become a man that she realized she couldn’t reach him anymore, that
he was gone, so gone that breath had left his body. No one else could feel
that lifetime of loss. No one else had lost him more than she had, yet they
cried in front of her as if it meant something. They’re still children, Kavita
tried to tell herself, not mature enough to do her the courtesy of keeping
their tears in their bedrooms, among their own complete families. But still
she thought of them as selfish brats without home training or compassion or
empathy, and this in turn made her angry at these girls she knew she still
loved, somewhere under the rage and pain and the grief that she felt
belonged to her and only her.

3. « Mais sachez que la présence d'Asughara ne signifiait pas notre absence, non, jamais. Nous avons reculé quand elle a fait irruption au premier plan, c'est vrai, mais nous sommes en nombre et elle n'était que l'une d'entre nous, une bête, une arme qu'il fallait actionner. Nous l'avons laissée chevaucher l'Ada, nous avons lâché la bride – cette histoire a autant d'épaisseurs superposées que nous. En voici une : l'histoire des autres dieux.
Nous vous avons parlé de certains d'entre eux – Yshwa, par exemple. Ala, qui contrôle les divinités mineures, notre mère. Mais il y en a d'autres, et quiconque s'y connaît un peu le sait, sait pour les divins passagers clandestins qui accompagnèrent notre peuple volé par les corrupteurs, ce que les ventres des caravelles emportèrent à travers les flots houleux, les masques, la peau à l'intérieur du tambour, les mots sous les mots, l'eau dans l'eau. Les histoires qui survécurent, les nouveaux noms qu'ils adoptèrent, l'humeur de dieux anciens se répandant sur une terre nouvelle, la musique emportée avec eux, identique à la musique abandonnée là-bas. Et bien sûr, les humains qui survécurent, les élus parmi eux, ceux en blanc, ceux qui agitent des coquillages et des minerais, ceux qui sont chevauchés, choisis, ceux qui suivent, travaillent et servent parce que l'appel passe dans le sang, peu importe le nombre d'océans où vous semez la mort.
Ces humains nous reconnaissaient facilement ; c'était comme s'ils nous humaient sous la peau de l'Ada ou nous sentaient dans l'air qui palpitait autour d'elle. » (pp. 101-102)