Yaya

If there is one regret I have about my marriage, it’s how little I laughed. So much to laugh about in life, and yet I deprived myself. Why? Because my love for my husband demanded that I not bask in bliss while he tottered in sorrow? Because, what really is there to laugh about in this world? But there’s so much to laugh about. Only now, as I lie on this dying-bed, do I realize it: life is funny. People fighting over a piece of land that none of them can take along when death comes—how is that not funny? Everyone wanting something to make them happy, only to realize once they get it that they want something else to make them happy—how is that not funny? Life is a chase after the wind, meaningless, ridiculous. How could that have eluded me? Why did this world become amusing only when I realized I was about to leave it? Perhaps it’s because I now have nothing but time to spend thinking about how sad it is that I didn’t long ago realize it and laugh more. Alas, it’s too late for me to start doing so—the closer death gets, the less I care about the present. My thoughts are mostly of the past, the things I’ve seen. On sleepless nights, as I await a new day exactly like the old one, I think of the events that laid the setting for what would happen to my family, to my village. I think of stories my husband used to tell me on his better days, like how he once spent two weeks on a beach.

 —

He was young back then, several years before we met. Three men from Europe were passing through Lokunja, on their way from Bézam, heading to the coast, where they would get on their boat to sail back home. They had lost one of their guides and were looking for a hard worker to serve as replacement; my husband heard about the opportunity from someone who knew about his discipline and thought he’d be good at it. This was long before he moved to Kosawa to work for Woja Bewa, taking care of his farm. He knew a guide job had its benefits but, like the rest of us, he was wary of men from Europe, these men who had come to make themselves masters over us. Soon, though, he found out that the men were going to pay him well and that his duties would take him to the ocean. He’d never been near the ocean; no one from our area had ever seen it. We knew it existed a great distance away, but not many of us wondered about it—we had streams and rivers, they were sufficient. But my husband wanted to experience more than was sufficient. So, fearful though he was of what unstated dangers might be involved in the guide job, he agreed to do it for a chance to see the ocean.

The day he set out with the men was the first time he’d ever been in a car.

He and the other guide traveled in the open space in the back of the car. In those days our country was mostly a landscape of densely packed trees, an odd village here and there, not much to see. My husband made a fire and cooked for the European men whenever their group stopped to spend the night in villages along the way or, if there were no villages in sight as darkness approached, in whatever seemingly safe spot the group settled in along the forest paths. His co-guide was from the Bézam area and had a sharp ear; the man had learned English and served as the Europeans’ interpreter throughout the trip. The co-guide instructed my husband on how warm to make the men’s bathing water, how long to roast whatever creature he’d spotted and killed for them, how to prepare and serve the dried fruits and sweet things the Europeans had brought from their country. The guide told my husband that the Europeans and their friends, stationed in towns around the country, were people of great curiosity. He said that the Europeans had traveled here to understand what kind of people we were, why we behaved the way we did, how they could help us so we could live better lives.

My husband let the other guide talk for most of the trip; it made the hours spent bobbing in the back of the car more bearable. Besides, the man couldn’t have been silenced—he seemed incapable of keeping to himself the wonderful changes these European men had brought to the country. In his estimation, the Europeans’ arrival had carried the brightness of dawn. Despite there being much he didn’t like about his masters—how they spoke to him as if he were a dog, for example—he loved that they were giving him a chance to separate himself from his age-mates. His eyes shone when he talked about strolling around his village wearing clothes his masters had given him, the looks of envy his friends gave him, close as he was to becoming a European man himself. Though he missed his wife’s cooking when he traveled, he enjoyed eating his masters’ leftover food and drinking whatever alcohol they couldn’t finish, even if the drink was nowhere as good as palm wine. He hoped the masters’ mission would be successful. If everything went according to their plans, he said, people in every village in our country would soon be speaking English and wearing fine clothes and reading books and eating sweet things and owning cars, and maybe, he added wistfully, a child of his would one day own a car too, and he would get to sit in the front, no longer in the back.

 —

My husband couldn’t recall how many days it took to arrive at the coast; he had stopped counting after Day Two, deciding it best to be mindless of how far he was from the only world he knew. When he finally entered the coastal village of the European men’s departure, everything about it was like his birth village except for one thing: the smell of its air. It was distinct, a scent he couldn’t describe to me because, he said, it wasn’t sweet, not exactly, it wasn’t delicious in the way a pot of stewed chicken smells, but he could taste it and swallow it. It was an entirely new sort of pleasure for his tongue, this air the ocean was directing his way. He’d inhaled it, savored it, eyes closed, over and over.

He ran to the beach as soon as he was done helping the masters get settled in the village head’s hut. The horizon was the first thing he noticed, its curve and expanse. “How can I describe it?” he asked me. “How can I help you conjure such an enormity?” Looking at it, he was suddenly aware that he was a mere speck in life’s infinite wonders. He realized he was everything and nothing. He sat down on the sand, open-mouthed, slack-armed. He remained on that beach for hours, while the village’s children swam in front of him, splashing water against each other. He was still there when fishermen began returning with their catch. Some of the fishermen looked at him on the sand with his mouth agape and laughed—they’d seen the likes of him before, one of those from the hinterland who had never seen blueness without end. That evening, he saw the sun enthroned at the horizon. He watched it bow before the earth. When he touched his cheek, there was water on it; that was the only time he ever cried as a man.

He slept on that beach for two weeks, while the other guide slid into the bed of a husbandless woman with whom he had an arrangement (the masters left on the third day; the boat that took them brought new masters, four Europeans who wanted to stay in the village for a while). Some of the men from the village offered my husband space in their huts, but he thanked them and said no—he’d soon be returning to sleep in huts for the rest of his life, but he would never again sleep on a beach once he left. In the evenings, he took beach strolls and bought dinner from women selling freshly caught grilled fish marinated in salt, pepper, ginger, and garlic; covered with sliced red onions; served with fried ripe plantains and a peppery dipping sauce. After the descent of darkness on full-moon nights, when the villagers came out to the beach to sing and dance, he helped the men beat their drums. For the first time in over twenty years of life, he was happy. But he knew that he couldn’t remain in that village: a man belongs with his people, among those who share his ancestors, not with strangers, no matter how beautiful their land.

   

I remember still, when I was a little girl, a day when two Europeans and their interpreter came to Kosawa. They came to tell us about their Spirit. They said their Spirit would bring us out of the darkness we didn’t know we were living in. We would see the light.

The men were covered in mosquito bites and sweating, though it was a cool day, no sun in sight. One of them was old enough to be a grandfather, and yet there he was in our midst, saying he couldn’t die until he’d told us the truth. We later found out that this man had been traveling across villages since he was young, convinced he’d someday meet fertile hearts on which the seeds of his words would germinate and grow. He hoped that the fruits born of those seeds would in turn travel far in our part of the world, causing all spirits to bow in surrender to his Spirit.

We gathered in the village square to hear them talk, not because we cared to but because our woja at the time believed all European men had guns—why risk being killed if we could simply lend them our ears for an hour? Their interpreter, a young man from the third of the five sister-villages, began the meeting with a song. Clapping his hands, he sang with his eyes lifted to the sky about someone who once walked on water, a man who had twelve friends who followed him everywhere—the song made no sense. When he was done singing, the European men delivered a message of how we would live a better life after we died if we turned our backs on our Spirit and chose their Spirit. “You have no ancestors waiting for you in the next world,” they said to us. “Your ancestors are burning in a fire—do you want to join them there?” They did not tell us why their Spirit would throw us in a fire when we hadn’t done anything to offend it. We wondered, as we listened to them, why their Spirit was so bitter and irrational. If we closed our eyes and said some words in prayer, the men said, their Spirit would become our Spirit. After we died, instead of joining our ancestors in the fire and burning with them for an everlasting night, we would spend our afterlives in a place where there was no night, just one glorious morning, a place where the roads were straight and shiny, and the gardens had the most beautiful flowers. Everyone loved each other there, and a choir in shiny white robes never stopped singing.

You should have seen how hard my father and the other men of Kosawa laughed after that meeting. This wasn’t the first time they’d listened to such talk, but it never ceased to tickle them. They laughed even harder whenever news reached us of how someone we knew in another village had chosen the Spirit of the European men after considering what life in the fire would be like—no water to drink, everyone crying, no one sleeping. One relative, desperate to avoid these European flames, had thrown his family’s umbilical-cord bundle into a fire, believing its power to be false, convinced that the only true power in the world rested with men from Europe and their Spirit. Though the likes of him were few, it revealed to me even then the fickleness of the heart of man.

I remember my father and his brother wiping their eyes after a long laugh. They couldn’t understand how any man whose head bore a large enough brain could believe such nonsense as an everlasting fire. But they wouldn’t have laughed if they’d recalled that, for generations, a different sort of fire had been burning down our way of life.

   

Kosawa was spared when men began arriving from the coast looking for humans to snatch and sell, but we should have known we wouldn’t always be spared calamities coming from afar. The snatchers came generations before I was born. My grandmother told me about them—the story had been passed down to her of the time when men and women from distant villages appeared in Kosawa bloodied and in tears, bearing accounts of how young and old alike had been thrown into chains. The sick had been left behind to die alone, babies flung on the ground so their mothers could be dragged away with warm milk flowing down from their breasts. Those who had escaped had run for countless days before stumbling into Kosawa, their clothes turned to rags. Many more of them made it to one of our sibling-villages. Still in shock, they told our ancestors that they ought to be prepared—Kosawa or one of the sibling-villages was bound to be next.

Our ancestors fed the escapees, and allowed them to make a home among us; their descendants live in our midst to this day, though their blood has long since been diluted by ours. From what my grandmother told me, our ancestors sharpened their spears and created flight paths in the forest. They told their children what to do if the time did come. But the snatchers never arrived. Still, the fear of it happening remained across the eight villages. With every arrival of a new group of escapees presenting stories of villages emptied out by snatchers, our ancestors made more spears and machetes, though the escapees told them that such weapons would be of no use, the snatchers had a thing that spat fire and could fell a man with one click. Even after new escapees stopped arriving, men rarely went alone into the forest to hunt. Mothers told their children to be good boys and girls, lest the snatchers come for them. Few were those who slept soundly through the night. For many years, Kosawa was shrouded in disquiet.

Today I hear children joke about it as they play; they say, Do this, or stop doing that, otherwise the snatchers will come for you. Their friends laugh, and I know they do so only because we were spared. In my girlhood, young women even had a song about a maiden who could find no husband and prayed that the Spirit would send a snatcher for her, a man who would seize her out of her father’s hut and, upon seeing her face, make her his and cast off the chains of her unweddedness. The young women giggled when they sang this song. I loved its melody, but now, in my old age, I wonder, what song would they be singing if we’d been stolen and displaced and no one was left to tell our stories? The ones who were taken, where are their descendants now? What do these descendants know of their ancestral villages? What anguish follows them because they know nothing about the men and women who came before them, the ones who gave them their spirit?

I once asked my husband why he thought Kosawa and the seven villages were spared. Was it because the Spirit had a fondness for us? The story given to us was that the most powerful mediums who’d ever existed walked among our ancestors at that time, and that these mediums had made a burnt offering of newborn pigs, and it was thanks to this sacrifice that the Spirit had caused the snatchers to never find any of our villages. The snatchers, if they’d walked past Kosawa, would have seen nothing of its huts or its inhabitants; they would have seen only the trees and shrubs. My husband had sighed at my question and said nothing, but I’d pushed. With another sigh, he asked me why those who were stolen had been punished for not having powerful mediums in their midst. Why couldn’t the Spirit have shown them mercy in the absence of sacrifice? Besides, he said, we weren’t spared, merely set aside to await the descent of another sort of terror. Which was true. Nowadays young people talk about the oil as if it’s our first misfortune; they forget that, long before the oil, the parents of our parents suffered for the sake of rubber.

 —

The young men who went to work in the rubber plantations did not leave Kosawa or any of the other seven villages with chains around their necks, but it might as well have been so. They numbered in the hundreds, my relatives among them, all taken away by law. Unlike the snatchers from the coast, who had arrived in darkness, these Europeans and their interpreters arrived in daylight. Guns pointed, they declared that every village had to volunteer men to work in rubber plantations—the new country they were building needed all available manpower. The Europeans picked out whatever number of able-bodied young men they needed. Those who resisted were shot dead. They assured families that the men they were taking would return as soon as they delivered their quota of rubber.

Only later would our people learn that, while at the plantations, their sons and husbands were beaten and starved and made to work long after the sun had set. If a man fled without delivering his quota of rubber, the interpreters came for his family. Children were pulled from their huts and beaten in village squares because their fathers had escaped the rubber plantations. Wives were raped. Mothers punched. No one was spared. Rubber was needed in Europe, and it was incumbent upon our ancestors to meet the demand. For the sake of rubber, a generation of our young men was wiped away. How many men from Kosawa died on those plantations? In their absence, the European men took little boys, whom they whipped because the boys couldn’t tap the rubber fast enough. Through it all, though, Kosawa remained standing. Not every village the rubber men visited lived to tell its tale; we heard stories of some that were entirely eradicated.

By the time I was born, there seemed to be signs that peace would return to our area, albeit nothing like what once was. The stories of the snatchers now seemed like legend, and the hunger for rubber in Europe had abated enough that our people’s blood no longer needed to be spilled for it. Still, the fear never left our mothers and fathers that some new demand would arise in Europe and their children would be taken away. As we entered adulthood, though, we saw no signs of a new affliction descending. The European men had been around long enough that we’d begun to fear them less, though we never forgot that they came not to befriend us but to make us do whatever it was that they wanted us to do. They introduced us to money, not because we needed it but because we had to learn how it worked for their sake. They forced their Spirit upon the weak-minded and built a church in Lokunja, not because we had any use for it but because they wanted us to believe that our Spirit was evil, our ways immoral. If they were to make us a part of their world, we had to integrate into our lives the principles by which they lived.

 —

A few years after Bongo was born, we learned that the masters had decided to return to Europe. What a day of rejoicing that was. We would have no more masters. Our children would have no masters; they would spend their lives walking tall on their own land. Looking at my children growing up in a world that seemed in a hurry to distance itself from the one in which I’d grown up, hearing the chants coming from the village school in another man’s language, I’d begun fearing that our ways would vanish in one generation, a shallow river besieged by a ruthless drought. Now I needed to fear no more. The ways of our ancestors could live on for posterity. Though it was too late to go back to living the way our forebears had lived under the laws of the Spirit, and though the departing masters did nothing to undo what generations before them had wrought upon us, we would at least no longer have them chipping away at what was left of our inheritance.

Through Woja Beki, the masters told us that Lokunja would remain the seat of the government for our district—the people who would govern there, from the district officer to the least of them, would be from our area; we would have an understanding with them. The seat of the government for our country, the masters decided, would be in Bézam. The masters believed that the Bézam people were the most intelligent of all the people of our young country. I always wondered how they came to that conclusion. We knew little about these people in Bézam, besides that they lived in the direction from which the sun rises. We did not think we belonged with them any more than we belonged with other people in other parts of the world, but the decision on that wasn’t ours to make. Nor did we have a say in the Bézam man the masters picked to be our president. When that president died—we heard that the Europeans engineered his death after they decided he wasn’t an obedient servant—we didn’t have a say in the man chosen as our next president, the one who now rules us these decades later, the man we call His Excellency.

One night, a decade into His Excellency’s reign, I turned to my husband in bed and asked him which he thought was worse: the European masters, or His Excellency. The madmen who created this farce of a nation, or the servant who took over the task of making sure it never fell apart. My husband shrugged and said he couldn’t decide. Maybe the masters were better, I said. He did not respond. He turned around and went to sleep.