“No. It’s called hydrangea.”
As I went into the kitchen to open the store for Agatha to get a coconut out I kept asking myself what Ikem might be up to. Was it Chris? Had their relationship, dangerously bumpy in recent months, taken a nose-dive now for the crash? Ikem always avoided complaining about Chris to me. Was he going to break his own scrupulous practice for once? When I returned to the parlour he had lifted the vase of flowers to his nose and was sniffing it.
I ate my corn with ube and he his with ube and coconut in alternate mouthfuls. Outside, the storm raged the way I like my storms —far away, its violent thunder and lightning distanced and muted as in a movie. I would have felt completely comfortable if Ikem had not been behaving a little strangely. Let’s hope it’s the storm, I prayed. Tropical storms can do so many different things to different creatures. That I have known from childhood. My older sister Alice always ran around the yard, if our father happened to be out, singing a childish rain song:
ogwogwo mmili
takumei ayolo!
Finally exhausted she would come indoors shivering, eyes red and popping out, teeth clattering away and make for the kitchen fire. As for me whom she nicknamed salt, or less kindly Miss Goat, on account of my distaste for getting wet, my preference was to roll myself in a mat on the floor and inside my dark, cylindrical capsule play my silent game of modulating the storm’s song by pressing my palms against my ears and taking them off, rhythmically. There was for me no greater luxury in those days than to sleep through nightrain on a Friday knowing there was neither school nor church in the morning to worry about.
“When you were little,” I asked Ikem, “what did you do when it rained like this?”
“But I told you it never rained at all in August. We had a month of dry weather called the August Break.”
“OK! In July then, or September.”
“When I was really little I used to take off my scanty clothes and run into it.”
“Singing ogwogwo mmili takumei ayolo?”
“Did you sing to the rain too?” He fairly jumped with excitement.
“No, but my older sister did.”
“Oh… what did you do?”
“I listened. The rain sang to me.”
“Lucky girl! What did it say, the rain?”
“Uwa t’uwa t’uwa t’uwa; tooo… waaa… tooo… waa Dooo—daaa… Booo—baaa… Shooo—shaaa… Cooo—caaa… Looo—laaa… Mooo—maaa…” “Pooo—paaa,” said Ikem. “Great song!”
“BB, you may be wondering why I am behaving so strangely today. Well, I’ve come on a mission the like of, which I’d never undertaken before… I’ve come to thank you for the greatest present one human being can give another. The gift of insight. That’s what you gave me and I want to say thank you.”
“Insight? Me? Insight into what?”
“Into the world of women.”
I held back a facetious comment trembling on my lip. Ikem’s sudden change and extraordinary manner forbade its utterance. I held back and listened to this strange annunciation.
“You told me a couple of years ago, do you remember, that my thoughts were unclear and reactionary on the role of the modern woman in our society. Do you remember?”
“I do.”
“I resisted your charge…”
“It wasn’t a charge.”
“It damn well was! But I resisted. Vehemently. But the amazing thing was that the more I read your charge sheet…”
“Oh my God!”
“… the less impressive my plea became. My suspension from the Gazette has done wonders for me. I have been able to sit and think things through. I now realize you were right and I was wrong.”
“Oh come on, Ikem. You know I detest all born-again people.”
“Don’t be facetious!”
“I’m sorry. Go ahead. What happened?”
“Nothing happened. It simply dawned on me two mornings ago that a novelist must listen to his characters who after all are created to wear the shoe and point the writer where it pinches.”
“Now hold it! Are you suggesting I am a character in your novel?”
“BB, you’ve got to be serious, or I will leave. I mean it. I’m already losing my train of thought.”
“I won’t breathe another word. Please go on.”
“One of the things you told me was that my attitude to women was too respectful.”
“I didn’t.”
“You bloody well did. And you were damn right. You charged me with assigning to women the role of a fire-brigade after the house has caught fire and been virtually consumed. Your charge has forced me to sit down and contemplate the nature of oppression—how flexible it must learn to be, how many faces it must learn to wear if it is to succeed again and again.”
He dug his hand into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper and carefully unfolded it on his knee. “I wrote this strange love-letter last night. May I read it?” I nodded.
“The original oppression of Woman was based on crude denigration. She caused Man to fall. So she became a scapegoat. No, not a scapegoat which might be blameless but a culprit richly deserving of whatever suffering Man chose thereafter to heap on her. That is Woman in the Book of Genesis. Out here, our ancestors, without the benefit of hearing about the Old Testament, made the very same story differing only in local colour. At first the Sky was very close to the Earth. But every evening Woman cut off a piece of the Sky to put in her soup pot or, as in another version, she repeatedly banged the top end of her pestle carelessly against the Sky whenever she pounded the millet or, as in yet another rendering—so prodigious is Man’s inventiveness—she wiped her kitchen hands on the Sky’s face. Whatever the detail of Woman’s provocation, the Sky finally moved away in anger, and God with it.
“Well, that kind of candid chauvinism might be OK for the rugged taste of the Old Testament. The New Testament required a more enlightened, more refined, more loving even, strategy—ostensibly, that is. So the idea came to Man to turn his spouse into the very Mother of God, to pick her up from right under his foot where she’d been since Creation and carry her reverently to a nice, corner pedestal. Up there, her feet completely off the ground she will be just as irrelevant to the practical decisions of running the world as she was in her bad old days. The only difference is that now Man will suffer no guilt feelings; he can sit back and congratulate himself on his generosity and gentlemanliness.
“Meanwhile our ancestors out here, unaware of the New Testament, were working out independently a parallel subterfuge of their own. Nneka, they said. Mother is supreme. Let us keep her in reserve until the ultimate crisis arrives and the waist is broken and hung over the fire, and the palm bears its fruit at the tail of its leaf. Then, as the world crashes around Man’s ears, Woman in her supremacy will descend and sweep the shards together.
“Do I make sense?”
“As always. Go on.”
“Thank you, BB. I owe that insight to you. I can’t tell you what the new role for Woman will be. I don’t know. I should never have presumed to know. You have to tell us. We never asked you before. And perhaps because you’ve never been asked you may not have thought about it; you may not have the answer handy. But in that case everybody had better know who is now holding up the action.”
“That’s very kind of you!”
“That was the first part of this love-letter, the part I owe specifically to you. Here’s the rest.
“The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest. But they are not the only ones. There are others—rural peasants in every land, the urban poor in industrialized countries, Black people everywhere including their own continent, ethnic and religious minorities and castes in all countries. The most obvious practical difficulty is the magnitude and heterogeneity of the problem. There is no universal conglomerate of the oppressed. Free people may be alike everywhere in their freedom but the oppr
essed inhabit each their own peculiar hell. The present orthodoxies of deliverance are futile to the extent that they fail to recognize this. You know my stand on that. Every genuine artist feels it in his bones. The simplistic remedies touted by all manner of salesmen (including some who call themselves artists) will always fail because of man’s stubborn antibody called surprise. Man will surprise by his capacity for nobility as well as for villainy. No system can change that. It is built into the core of man’s free spirit.
“The sweeping, majestic visions of people rising victorious like a tidal wave against their oppressors and transforming their world with theories and slogans into a new heaven and a new earth of brotherhood, justice and freedom are at best grand illusions. The rising, conquering tide, yes; but the millennium afterwards, no! New oppressors will have been readying themselves secretly in the undertow long before the tidal wave got really going.
“Experience and intelligence warn us that man’s progress in freedom will be piecemeal, slow and undramatic. Revolution may be necessary for taking a society out of an intractable stretch of quagmire but it does not confer freedom, and may indeed hinder it.
“Bloody reformist? That’s a term of abuse it would be redundant to remind you I have had more than my fair share of invoking against others across the years. But I ask myself: beyond the pleasant glow that javelin of an epithet certainly brings to the heart of the righteous hurler what serious benefit can it offer to the solution of our problems? And I don’t see any.
“Reform may be a dirty word then but it begins to look more and more like the most promising route to success in the real world. I limit myself to most promising rather than only for the simple reason that all certitude must now be suspect.
“Society is an extension of the individual. The most we can hope to do with a problematic individual psyche is to re-form it. No responsible psychoanalyst would aim to do more, for to do more, to overthrow the psyche itself, would be to unleash insanity. No. We can only hope to rearrange some details in the periphery of the human personality. Any disturbance of its core is an irresponsible invitation to disaster. Even a one-day-old baby does not make itself available for your root-and-branch psychological engineering, for it comes trailing clouds of immortality. What immortality? Its baggage of irreducible inheritance of genes. That is immortality.
“It has to be the same with society. You re-form it around what it is, its core of reality; not around an intellectual abstraction.
“None of this is a valid excuse for political inactivity or apathy. Indeed to understand it is an absolute necessity for meaningful action, the knowledge of it being the only protective inoculation we can have against false hopes and virulent epidemics of gullibility.
“In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.
“Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention. Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.
“I didn’t owe this insight to you, BB. I drank it in from my mother’s breast. All I’ve ever needed since was confirmation. ‘Do I contradict myself?’ asked Walt Whitman. ‘Very well, I contradict myself,’ he sang defiantly. ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ Every artist contains multitudes. Graham Greene is a Roman Catholic, a partisan of Rome, if you like. Why then does he write so compulsively about bad, doubtful and doubting priests? Because a genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.
“Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion. But it will not be in the complex and paradoxical cavern of Mother Idoto.”
He tossed the handwritten paper across to me, saying, “I must go,” and beginning to put his shoes back on. I stared at the paper, at the writing—elegant but at the same time, immensely powerful. He got up. I got up too and walked up to him. Impulsively he circled me in his embrace. I looked up at him and he began to kiss me. Everything inside me was dissolving; my knees were giving way under me; I was trembling violently and I seemed to be struggling for air.
“I think you better go,” I managed to say. He released me slowly and I sank into a chair.
“Yes, I’d better be going.”
And he was gone, not for now as I and perhaps he too thought, but forever. The storm had died down without our having been aware of it. All that was left of it now were tired twitches of intermittent lightning and the occasional, satiated hiccup of distant thunder.
8
Daughters
IDEMILI
THAT WE ARE SURROUNDED by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant. But even they must concede the fact, indeed the inevitability, of the judiciously spaced, but nonetheless certain, interruptions in the flow of their high art to interject the word of their sponsor, the divinity that controls remotely but diligently the transactions of the marketplace that is their world.
In the beginning Power rampaged through our world, naked. So the Almighty, looking at his creation through the round undying eye of the Sun, saw and pondered and finally decided to send his daughter, Idemili, to bear witness to the moral nature of authority by wrapping around Power’s rude waist a loincloth of peace and modesty.
She came down in the resplendent Pillar of Water, remembered now in legend only, but stumbled upon, some say, by the most fortunate in rare conditions of sunlight rarer even than the eighteen-year cycle of Odunke festivals and their richly arrayed celebrants leading garlanded cattle in procession through village pathways to sacrifice. It rises majestically from the bowl of the dark lake pushing itself upward and erect like the bole of the father of iroko trees its head commanding not the forest below but the very firmament of heaven.
At first that holy lake was the sole shrine to Idemili. But as people multiplied and spread across the world they built little shrines farther and farther away from the lake wherever they found good land and water and settled. Still their numbers continued to increase and outstrip the provisions of every new settlement; and so the search for land and water also continued.
As it happened, good land was more plentiful than good water and before long some hamlets too far from streams and springs were relieving their burning thirst with the juice of banana stems in the worst years of dry weather. Idemili, travelling through the country disguised as a hunter, saw this and on her return sent a stream from her lake to snake through the parched settlements all the way to Orimili, the great river which in generations to come strange foreigners would search out and rename the Niger.
A deity who does as he says never lacks in worshippers. Idemili’s devotees increased in all the country between Omambala and Iguedo. But how could they carry to the farthest limits of their dispersal adequate memories of the majesty of the Pillar of Water standing in the dark lake?
Man’s best artifice to snare and hold the grandeur of divinity always crumbles in his hands, and the more ardently he strives the more paltry and incongruous the result. So it were better he did not try at all; far better to ritualize that incongruity and by invoking the mystery of metaphor to hint at the most unattainable glory by its very opposite, the most mundane starkness—a mere stream, a tree, a stone, a mound of earth, a little clay bowl containing fingers of chalk.
Thus it came about that the indescribable Pillar of Water fusing earth to heaven at the navel of the black lake became in numberless shrine-houses across the country, a dry stick rising erect from the bare, earth floor.
It is to this emblem that a man who h
as achieved wealth of crop and livestock and now wishes to pin an eagle’s feather on his success by buying admission into the powerful hierarchy of ozo must go to present himself and offer sacrifices before he can begin the ceremonies, and again after he has concluded them. His first visit is no more than to inform the Daughter of the Almighty of his ambition. He is accompanied by his daughter or, if he has only sons, by the daughter of a kinsman; but a daughter it must be.
This young woman must stand between him and the Daughter of the Almighty before he can be granted a hearing. She holds his hand like a child in front of the holy stick and counts seven. Then she arranges carefully on the floor seven fingers of chalk, fragile symbols of peace, and then gets him to sit on them so lightly that not one single finger may be broken.
If all has gone well thus far he will then return to his compound and commence the elaborate and costly ceremonies of ozo with feasting and dancing to the entire satisfaction of his community and their ancient custom. Then he must go back to the Daughter of the Almighty to let her know that he has now taken the high and sacred title of his people.
Neither at the first audience nor at this second does Idemili deign to answer him directly. He must go away and await her sign and pleasure. If she finds him unworthy to carry the authority of ozo she simply sends death to smite him and save her sacred hierarchy from contamination and scandal. If, however, she approves of him the only sign she condescends to give—grudgingly and by indirection—is that he will still be about after three years. Such is Idemili’s contempt for man’s unquenchable thirst to sit in authority on his fellows.
The story goes that in the distant past a certain man handsome beyond compare but in randiness as unbridled as the odorous hegoat from the shrine of Udo planting his plenitude of seeds from a huge pod swinging between hind legs into she-goats tethered for him in front of numerous homesteads; this man, they said, finally desired also the ozo title and took the word to Idemili. She said nothing. He went away, performed the rites, took the eagle feather and the titular name Nwakibie, and returned to tell her what he had done. Again she said nothing. Then as a final ritual he took shelter according to custom for twenty-eight days in a bachelor’s hut away from his many wives. But though he lived there in the day for all to see he would steal away at dead of night through circuitous moon-swept paths to the hut of a certain widow he had fancied for some time; for as he was wont to ask in his more waggish days: why will a man mounting a widow listen for footsteps outside her hut when he knows how far her man has travelled?