The Untold Marriage II

“Patience,” my grandmother’s voice admonished, “is the secret to understanding stories.”

                The red cleared. The girl’s belly was big like she swallowed a big stone. She looked older than her age. The girl was sweating. An old woman cleaned her face.  A leg popped out in her vagina. It was red again.

                The now happy-man-formerly-sad-man ran around naked. He cried. He pulled out his hair with his hands. He tore his shirt. Some women walked out. They held their hands as they walked out of the house. This house.

                The cornrow-girl-like-me was travelling. And something came out of the calabash and entered me. A new story entered me. It scared me. I began to see the past. I cried.

                I was born in a place where I was not wanted. You see, it is hard to have two breasts and not have the perfect skill of peeing into a bottle without spilling some liquid on the bottle. The air was quiet. It was said that I was supposed not to be. Someone broke the law. Someone allowed me live.

                ‘Who allowed me live?’

`              From the still air, my grandmother’s voice came out: “find the answers yourself. Travel. Free your thoughts and allow the air fill you in.”

                “Travel?”

                “Seek and ye shall find. However, when ye find, don’t ask the whys, take it as it cometh to thee.”

                I folded my arms and thought about this new revelation from my grandmother.

                “Where shall I travel to?”

                I could see her floating away. Her features shook like the unsettled nature of a stream. She began to dance and loud drums rose to fill the space.

When the spider says he is wiser

The lion roars in anger

the lion sends his wife the serpent

to spit her viper on the spider

Their efforts lead to new anger

Turmoil rings in the land

Only the spider knows why

Because, his is a circular journey

A web.

                “What is this?”

                There was no response from the voice. The song sung was beautiful and bitter in my ears. I stood still. I wanted to drink more of the song. The voice continued:

See her here, see her here

Let her come and aid our conversation

                “Who?”

                “Ina mama ka.”

                “What language have you used to communicate with me? I don’t understand what you are saying.”

                The forgotten language of our fathers is what I use. I meant:  “Your mother.”

                “Where?”

                “Travel.” At the mention of this single word, there was a strange silence. Everything was numb for a while. I found myself swimming in the words hanging in the air. Then later, in the white calabash. I swam till I didn’t know where I was. But i saw a woman, beautiful and sad. She sat in the city where  the formerly happy man and the formerly sad man were. It seems she could not see me. I touched her. She turned and didn’t notice anything.

                “Mother?”

                She heard the voice. I think she heard it because she looked around. I wanted her to see me, touch me and rub my hair and to pamper me and tell me why she couldn’t see me. I wanted hear what happened. I needed to hear her untold story.

                “Mother?”

                She stood up and walked away while I followed her.  Cars wheezed by and a man was riding on a donkey. The man on the donkey said: “Ina ini”. No response.  My mother or the woman walked on with her head counting the sands on the earth. I followed.

The Untold marriage(Zainab)

                Marriage killed me.

                The tale was told to me by grandmother who I met on the other side. Listen, as I narrate what she told me.

                She started like this: “Your father married you and you died.”

                The invincible birds gulped the introduction, the floating trees moved back and forth, and the air’s music metamorphosed to eerie whispers.

                My ears were opened to drink the remaining stories. Instead, my grandmother put her hands in the air and produced a white calabash filled with water.

                “Seeing is better than listening.” 

                She dropped the calabash gently and it floated. I looked inside.

                “Remember,” my grandmother said, “you can never change the past.”

                “Is this the past?”

                “The past is what you make it. Define your past.”

                “How can I achieve that?”

                “Watch the story with three eyes.”

                I looked inside. I saw a young girl with cornrows. She was hawking oranges around town.

                “Is this the beginning?” I asked.

                “There is no beginning and an end. There are only stories. How it is told doesn’t matter. Follow the journey.”

                “I am confused.”

                My grandmother was gone. She floated in the air. I peered into the calabash. The girl who was hawking oranges was in an office. Time shifted. Then I began to realize the similarities between me and the girl. She wore the same cornrows. I stirred the water in attempt to take the event to the past but it only moved forward.

                Two men talked under an almond tree. The tree shed tears of yellow leaves. They spoke in a voice that sounded like the buzzing of moths. One of the men looked healthy and the other looked poverty stricken. I was studying their faces curiously. My studies produced no result.

                From the air, a strange voice emanated: “Stories are journeys. Concentrate less and get results.”

                One of the men brought items from a brown moving iron. The other smiled and carried what the other man brought. Later, one of the men cried like a woman and another barked like a dog. One walked away looking sad and the other looked happy. The formerly happy one was sad and the formerly sad one was happy. One of the men brought the girl with the cornrow to the now happy-man-formerly-sad-man.

                Now, I saw the girl. She was in a new house. She cried. Everything went red. The water turned to red.

                “I can’t see anything.” I cried.

                “Patience,” my grandmother’s voice admonished, “is the secret to understanding stories.”

                The red cleared. The girl’s belly was big like she swallowed a big stone. She looked older than her age. The girl was sweating. An old woman cleaned her face.  A leg popped out in her vagina. It was red again.

                The now happy-man-formerly-sad-man ran around naked. He cried. He pulled out his hair with his hands. He tore his shirt. Some women walked out. They held their hands as they walked out of the house. This house.

                The cornrow-girl-like-me was travelling. And something came out of the calabash and entered me. A new story entered me. It scared me. I began to see the past. I cried.

                

The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi

“Sometimes it can be hard to really love someone or something when you can’t see anything of yourself in them.”

                I never knew about the mythical story behind the birth of twins in Nigeria until I read Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl. Jess, the heroine, lost her twin sister some years ago. The dead twin, however, struggles for re-existence in Harrison’s house.

                The myth is used as a metaphorical representation of culture clash. In the west, Jess is described as mad while in Africa, the belief is that the spirit of her dead twin must be appeased before she lives freely.

The Famished Road by Ben Okri

”A man can wander round the planet and still not move an inch. A man can have so much light in his mind and still not see what’s right in front of him.”

Yes, it is true: “Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence.”  He paints (not write) each situation.

The Famished Road narrates the politics, history and future of a nation using the Nigerian Abiku myth. What /who is an Abiku? Simply put, a child born to die. 

The Abiku myth also has a universal feature.

Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

Imagine yourself riding in a torrid bus filled with passengers; the day’s heat is also dancing in the bus. In a corner of the bus, you hear someone snivelling and changing seats. Why? He was consistently brushed by another passenger (maybe an old man). Now, how would you narrate the story?

                Exercises in Style tells the above story in ninety-nine amazing ways. The author experiments with voice, point-of-view, symbols, and metaphor, just to mention a few.

                Every writer or aspiring author, in my opinion, needs this kind of writing exercises. It encourages one to experiment with various forms of narrating a story.

Finding the star in Ben Okri's STARBOOK

STARBOOK is not an ordinary book. It is eerie and enigmatic. The story was passed onto the author by his mother.

There are different books in this book. Each book is weaved around a single theme. It talks about the quest of artists and art; the struggles of an artist in the contemporary world and importance of history in art.

                The strength of the book, to me, lies on the excellent use of African oral tradition. The author uses riddles, parables, paradoxes, songs and aphorisms to drive home his points. Simply put, this is a re-awakening of African narration.

                The sentences are simple but complex.  

                

Related losses in Ben Okri’s Dangerous Love

The novel captures the different faces of love an individual can encounter in a life time. First, love between man and wife (characterised by extra-marital affairs); second, love for a chosen career and third, the love that exists between citizens and country.

                Through out the novel, there is a constant revelation of the various kinds of love. Omovo, the main protagonists knows love but later realises his definition of love metamorphoses as events unfold.

                With an excellent eye and ear for detail, Okri tells a tale that is characterised by the African folkloric tradition.

News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

You are welcome to Colombia: a home of green land, bright sun and blue seas. The creatures of the environment enjoy the cool air and tales told by the whispering trees. Things changed as time progressed. The birth of one man changed the beautiful face that was once Colombia. The man's name is Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria. He changed the scheme of things and introduced a monstrous existence with his mixed acts--drug sales, murder, kidnapping and internecine wars.

Give it to Gabriel Marquez narrating the ordeal faced by some citizens during these ugly times with an angry-beautiful pen. He was vested with the job of narrating things as they were in those bloody years in Medellin, Colombia. As usual, he didn't fail the reader. Every page flourishes like a flower with a thorny stem.

The kidnapped characters in the book begin to lose their mental stability as they were isolated and put away from the outside world's reality. After they were release, one could still feel their suffering as they struggled with memory and fitting into normal live. Columbia, one may conclude, will never forget those years with a book like this.

It is a story worth reading!

China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston

You don’t need to be a sinophile to enjoy this book. It is a tale that uncovers the remarkable experiences faced by a particular generation of a Chinese family; their journey to the Golden Mountain (the US) and the incidents they witness on the so-called Golden Mountain.

The author narrates, beautifully, the ‘good, bad and ugly’ nature of living as an immigrant. It is a beautiful-cocktail-story. However, one must sip it gradually to avoid an intoxication caused by the unapologetic movement between times.

‘All that you’ll and feel will be illusion’

                Through the eyes of the young narrator, the reader is forced to either sympathise or empathise with the families in the book.

Memories of My Melancholic Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, the protagonist (Mr. Unknown), made a call to Rosa Carbacas, to request for a strange birthday gift. The request...

                Fortunately or unfortunately, the gift changes his perspective about life and love. It is a tale about the meaning of age(ing), love, sadness and happiness. A tale that covers the importance of memories and most importantly,society's definition of old age.

“What happens is that you don’t feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.”

                Every sentence in this book is pregnant with numerous meanings. Read it.

No One Writes to the Colonel

I just finished reading Marquez's novella bearing the above title. It is a story about a retired colonel. The colonel, as we are made to know, fought relentlessly in Macondo ( the fictional setting of Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude ). Unfortunately, the colonel has not received his pension for over fifteen years. He continues to wait for the mail or pension cheque but it never arrives.

Many things add up to his sad life: his extreme state of squalor, his wife's bad health, the death of his son and the gory pictures he sees in his dreams.

The colonel's son, Agustan, left a rooster which becomes a treasure in the colonel's house. Accurate attention is given to the rooster. A symbol of hanging onto the son's memory can be seen from the way the colonel treats the rooster.

However, the end is rather shocking.

It is a good read!