An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  “Nothing to hold on to, nothing to even—nothing. Throughout that day before I saw you on that bridge, I was tired because I had tried, tried, tried to reach him, but nothing, Nonso.”

  She had gone to the river not because she had any strength or will to kill herself but because the river was all she could think of after reading the e-mail for the umpteenth time. She did not know whether she would have jumped off the bridge if he had not come.

  My host listened with a keen ear to her story, only speaking once—to ask her to ignore the chickens that had begun to squawk plaintively.

  “What happened to you is very painful,” he said, although he’d not understood all of it. Her command of the White Man’s language contained more words than he could comprehend. His mind had hovered, for instance, over the word circumstances like a kite over a gathering of hen and chicks, unable to decide how or which to attack. But I understood everything she said, because every cycle of a chi’s existence is an education in which a chi acquires the minds and wisdom of its hosts, and these become part of him. A chi may come to know, for instance, the intricacies of the art of hunting because once, hundreds of years before, the chi inhabited a host who was a hunter. In my last cycle, I guided an extraordinarily gifted man who read books and wrote stories, Ezike Nkeoye, who was the older brother of the mother of my present host. By the time he was my current host’s age, he’d come to be familiar with almost every word in the language of the White Man. And it was from him that I acquired much of what I now know. And even now, as I testify on behalf of my current host, I wear his words as well as mine and see things through his eyes as well as mine, and both sometimes meld into an indistinguishable whole.

  “It is very painful. I am talking like this because I have suffered too much also. I no have father and mother. In fact, no family.”

  “Ah! That is very sad,” she said, putting her hand over her wide-open mouth. “I am sorry. Very sorry.”

  “No, no, no, I am now fine. I am fine,” he said, even though the voice of his conscience was tugging at him for having left out his sister, Nkiru. He watched Ndali rest her weight on her thigh and tilt her body towards the small table centered between them. Her eyes were closed, and this made him think that she was sinking into pity for him, and he feared that she might cry for him.

  “I am fine now, Mommy,” he said even more resolutely. “I have a sister, but she is in Lagos.”

  “Oh, junior or senior sister?”

  “Junior,” he said.

  “Okay, why I have come is because I have come to thank you.” A smile washed across her tearful face as she pulled her bag up from the floor.

  “I believe God sent you to me.”

  “Okay, Mommy,” he said.

  “What’s this ‘Mommy’ you keep saying? Why do you say it?”

  Her laughter now made him conscious of his own feral laughing, which he’d tried to contain to avoid embarrassing himself.

  “Really, it is strange oh!”

  “I don’t have a mother again, so every good woman is my mommy.”

  “Oh, so sorry, my dear!”

  “Am coming,” he said and went to the toilet to urinate. When he returned, she said, “Did I forget to say that I love your laugh?”

  He looked at her.

  “I do. Seriously. You’re a beautiful man.”

  He nodded hastily as she rose to leave and let his heart take temporary flight at this extremely unexpected outcome of what he had been certain would be a disaster.

  “I have not even offered you something.”

  “No, no, don’t worry,” she said. “Another time. I have tests.”

  He thrust his hand out to shake hers, and she took it, her face wide with smiles.

  “Thank you.”

  Guardian spirits of mankind, have we thought about the powers that passion creates in a human being? Have we considered why a man could run through a field of fire to get to a woman he loves? Have we thought about the impact of sex on the body of lovers? Have we considered the symmetry of its power? Have we considered what poetry incites in their souls, and the impress of endearments on a softened heart? Have we contemplated the physiognomy of love—how some relationships are stillborn, some are retarded and do not grow, and some fledge into adults and last through the lifetime of the lovers?

  I have given much thought to these things and know that when a man loves a woman he is changed by it. Although she willingly gives herself to him, once he marries her she becomes his. The woman becomes his possession, and he becomes her possession. The man calls her Nwuyem, and she calls him Dim. Others speak of her as his wife and of him as her husband. It is a mystifying thing, Egbunu! For I have seen many times that people, after their beloveds have left them, try to reclaim them as one would attempt to reclaim property that had been stolen. Wasn’t this the case with Emejuiwe, who, one hundred and thirty years ago, killed the man who took his wife from him? Chukwu, when you laid down your judgment after my testimony on his behalf here in Beigwe, as I am doing now, it was sad but just. Now, more than a hundred years later, when I saw my current host’s heart lit with similar fire, I feared because I knew the potency of that fire, that it was powerful, so powerful that in time nothing might be able to quench it. As he walked her to her car, I feared it would push him in a direction in which I might be powerless to stop him from going. I feared that when the love had fully formed in his heart, it would blind him and make him deaf to my counsel. And I could see already that it had started to possess him.

  OBASIDINELU, oh what substance does a woman bring into the life of a man! In the doctrine of the new religion the children of the fathers have embraced, it is said that the two become one flesh. What truth, Egbunu! But let’s look at the times of the wise fathers, how indispensable the great mothers were. Although they did not make the laws that guided society, they were like the chi of society. They restored order and equilibrium when order became broken. If a member of a village committed a spiritual crime and vexed Ala, and if the merciful goddess—in her rightful indignation—poured out her wrath in the form of diseases or drought or catastrophic deaths, it was the old mothers who went to a dibia and consulted on behalf of the society. For Ala hears their voices above those of the others. Even when there was a war—as I witnessed one hundred and seventy-two years ago, when Uzuakoli fought against Nkpa and seventeen headless men lay in the forests—it was the mothers on both sides who marched and restored peace and pacified Ala. This is why they are called odoziobodo. If a group of women can restore equilibrium to a community on the verge of calamity, how much more one woman can do to the life of one man! As the great fathers often say, love changes the temperature of a man’s life. Usually, a man whose life was cold becomes warm, and this warmth, in its intensity, transforms the person. It grows the small things in his life and puts shine on the spots in the fabric of his life. What the man did every day, now he does more cheerfully. Most people in their lives would come to know that something in them had changed. They may not need to speak of it to anyone. But their faces, the most naked of all features of human physiognomy, begin to wear a hue that anyone who pays attention soon notices. Say, if a man works in the company of other people, one of his colleagues may pull him aside and say to him, “You look happy,” or “What happened to you?” The stronger the affection, the more obvious it will become to others, and my host’s affection for Ndali was tempered by his fear that he was unworthy of her. He resolved that if she ever gave in to him, he would give her the fullness of his heart.

  In lieu of human coworkers, the fowls bore witness to my host’s metamorphosis. He fed them ecstatically after the woman left his house that day. He found the sick rooster who’d developed a wry tail and took it to the edge of the farm, in front of the house and away from the sight of other fowls, and slaughtered it. He let its blood drain into a small hole in the earth, and then put it in a bowl and kept it in the refrigerator. After he’d washed his hands in the bathroom, he swept the large pens that were
parted into halves by wooden walls. He chased a particular kind of lizard which the fowls did not like, the green-headed lizard, into a hole in the ceiling. Then he climbed up a ladder and stuffed a bunched-up rag with palm-oil stains into the hole. When he was done with it, he noticed that the chickens had upturned the basin of water from which they drank, and now it lay, leaning against the thatch wall, an eye-size pool of water anchored in it. Within the puddle lay a patch of sediment that stared back at him like a pupil. As he walked towards the bowl, he stepped on something he discovered to be the rib of a feather. It slid down in a straight line through the muddied earth, tripping him. He fell against the other empty basin, and it balled up into the air and emptied its contents—a mass of dirt, feathers, and dust—onto his face.

  Chukwu, if the chickens were humans, they would have laughed at what his face became afterwards: a rich patch of dirt and mud on his forehead and over his nose. Were I not myself a witness, I would have doubted what I saw in my host that day. For, despite his pain and feeling the spot on his head with his fingers repeatedly and looking at them to see if the wound would bleed, he was happy. He rose, laughing at himself, thinking of how Ndali had sat on the sofa and called him a beautiful man the previous day. He looked down where he’d fallen and saw a shaved part of the floor, which his shoes now wore like an encrustation. On the other side of the pen stood a hen on which he’d almost fallen. It had leapt hysterically out of his reach as he fell, raising dust and feathers with its violent wing flapping. He recognized it as one of the two hens that laid gray eggs. It stood crowing in protest, and others had joined. He left the coop and washed the dirt off himself, and all the while, even when he lay in bed later, Ndali remained in his mind.

  Once he slept, as it often happens when he goes into the unconscious state of sleep, I became stripped of the barriers of his body. Even without stepping out of it, I am often able to see that which I’m not able to see while he is awake. As you know, you created us as creatures for whom sleep does not exist. We exist as shadows which speak the language of the living. Even when our hosts sleep, we remain awake. We watch over them against the forces that breathe in the night. While men sleep, the world of the ethereal is replete with the noise of wakefulness and the susurration of the dead. Agwus, ghosts, akaliogolis, spirits, and ndiichies on short visits to the earth all crawl out of the blind eyes of the night and tread the earth with the liberty of ants, oblivious to human boundaries, unaware of walls and fences. Two spirits arguing may struggle and tumble into the house of a family and fall on them and continue to wrestle through them. Sometimes, they merely walk into the habitations of men and watch them.

  That night, like most others, was filled with the din of spirits and the brass drum of the sublunary world, a multitude of voices emitting cries, shouts, voices, howls, noises. The world, Benmuo, and Ezinmuo—its corridor—were soaked in them. And from a distance, the riveting tune of a flute riffled through the air, pulsing like an animate thing. It remained like this for a long time when, around midnight, something shot through the wall with uncanny speed. Instantly, it ringed itself into a luminous coil that was grayish and almost imperceptible to the eyes. At first it seemed to rise towards the roof, but slowly it began to diffuse and elongate like a serpent of shadows. Then it morphed into a most frightening agwu—with a roachlike head and a portly human body. I lunged forward at once and ordered it to leave. But it gazed at me with eyes filled with hate, then stared mostly at my host’s unconscious body. Its mouth was sticky, glued together as if by some sticky purulent secretion. It kept pointing at my host, but I insisted it leave. When it did not so much as stir, I became afraid that this evil creature would harm my host. I trailed into an incantation, fortifying myself as I invoked your intervention. This seemed to stop the being in its place. It stepped back, let out a growl, and vanished.

  I had encountered spirits like this in my many cycles on earth, and I recall most vividly, while inhabiting Ejinkeonye during the war, that he’d slept in a half-destroyed, abandoned house in Umuahia, and while he was asleep, a spirit materialized with such swiftness that I gave a start. I looked, but it had no head. It was waving its arms, stamping its feet, and gesturing at the stump where its head had been. Egbunu, not even an akaliogoli, those creatures of dreadful forms, had inspired such terrors in a living spirit like me. Then, by some transmutative power, the creature’s head emerged and hung in midair, its eyes glancing about. The headless creature would try to take the head with its flailing hands, but it would swerve that way and the other way, until finally the head floated away the way it had come, and the spirit followed it. I would find out the following day, through the eyes of my host, that the man had been an enemy soldier beheaded while raping a pregnant woman, and had become an akaliogoli. My host, Ejinkeonye, would watch the body of the man being burned the following morning, unaware of what had happened the night before.

  I leapt up presently and tried to catch up with the spirit, to find out why it had targeted my host, but I could not tell which direction it had gone. I found no trace of it on the plains of the night, no footprints on the track of the air, no footfalls in the dark tunneling beneath the earth. The night was full mostly of bright stars in the sky, and a multitude of spirits were about their business around the vicinity of my host’s farm. No humans were about, nor was there even any trace of them except for the sound of cars racing past along some road in an unknown distance. I had the temptation to wander a bit, but I suspected that the agwu I had seen was a vagabond spirit in search of a human vessel to possess, and it could return to try to inhabit my host. So I made my way back to the compound as quickly as I could, projecting through the fence at the backyard, then through the wall into the room where my host lay still deep in sleep.

  AKWAAKWURU, he woke to the wild noises of his crowd of fowls the following morning. One of them was crowing without cease, letting its voice ebb at intervals, then beginning again in a higher pitch than before. He pushed aside the wrappa he’d covered himself in and was starting to step out the door when he realized he was naked. He put on shorts and a wrinkled shirt and went to the backyard. He emptied the last contents of a bag of mash into a bowl and set the bowl at the center of the yard on an old newspaper page. When he unlocked one of the cages, the birds flung themselves at him at once, and in the batting of an eye, the bowl was covered in a goo of feathery beings.

  He stepped back, his eyes scanning them for signs of anything out of the ordinary. He watched one of the hens especially, the one whose wing had caught an errant nail sticking out of one of the cages. The bird had tried to pull itself away from the nail so hard that it had almost ripped out its wing. He’d stitched the wing with a thread the previous week, and now the bird participated in the scramble for the mash with cautious gait, the red thread of the stitching visible beneath its wing. He picked up the hen by its legs. He checked its wings, tracing his fingers around the veins on the end. As he made to drop it, his phone rang. He ran into the house to get it. But by the time he got into the living room, the ringing had stopped. He saw that Ndali had just called him and sent a text message. He hesitated at first to read it—as if he feared that what he would read in the paper would remain for eternity unerasable. He dropped the phone back on the dining table, placed his palm on his forehead, and gnashed his teeth. I could see that he had become sick from the head wound of the previous day. From the top of the refrigerator, he took a sachet of paracetamol and ejected one of the remaining two tablets into his palm. He placed the medicine on his tongue, went into the kitchen, and washed it down with water from a plastic jug.

  He picked up the phone again and read the message: Nonso, should I come and visit you in the evening? Chukwu, he smiled to himself, pumped his fist into the air, and shouted “Yes!” He dropped the phone into his pocket and was almost back in the yard when he remembered he’d merely answered in speech as if she were there with him. He stood by the net door to the yard and typed “yes” into his phone.

  Lit with t
he prospect of meeting Ndali, he gathered some eggs and placed them in the egg-shaped holes on a plastic crate. Then he took hold of the wounded bird once more. Its eyes blinked with fear, its beak opening and closing as he rubbed its head and examined its wings to see if it could accommodate flight. He cleaned the mash tray and placed some mash on it. Something like a half-broken toothpick stuck out of the feed. He picked it up and threw it behind him. Then, on second thought, fearing one of the fowls might find it there and swallow it, he rose and began looking for the stick. He found it just near one of the cages, the one for the small chicks. The stick was on the wet edge of the slab of wood on which he’d placed the cage. He picked it up and threw the stick over the fence into the dump outside his compound. Then he tucked the tray of mash into the bed of one of the two cages.

  By the time he finished feeding the poultry, his hands were almost black with dirt and grime. Dark grime lay in his fingernails, and the flesh of his right thumb looked barbed and was lined with welts. One of the eggs he’d picked was coated with a stiff encrustation of feces, which he tried to scratch off with his fingers, and it was the crust of feces that he now carried in his fingernails. As he washed his hands in the bathroom, he was thinking about how odd his work was and how lowly it seemed to be to one newly encountering it. He feared that Ndali may not come to love it or might even be irritated by it if she came to really understand the nature of his work.

  Chukwu, as I said before, this kind of fear-induced rumination often occurs when people have been made self-conscious by the presence of others whom they hold in high esteem. They assess themselves by focusing on how others would perceive them. In such situations, there may be no limit to the self-defeating thoughts that may form in the person’s mind, which—no matter how unfounded—may consume them in the end. My host did not, however, dwell on these thoughts for too long. He was, instead, in a haste to prepare for Ndali’s visit. He swept the house and the balcony clean. Then he dusted the cushions and sofas. He washed the toilet bowl and sprayed Izal into it and cleaned out the rat feces behind the water drum. He threw away one of the plastic buckets, a paint bucket that had cracked in several places. Then he sprayed air freshener around the house. He’d just finished bathing and was creaming his body when, through the window, he saw her car coming towards the house, flanked on both sides by the plantations.