by Nana Nkweti
“Is your man reading from his book?” Ego’s voice was conciliatory.
“More publicity, more money,” said Jennifer, ready to make peace herself. She pulled her friend close, loosely hugging her about the waist as they looked at their twinned reflections in the bedroom mirror: Jennifer, Ovaltine-colored; Ego, a bittersweet dark chocolate. This woman was an extension of her, her opinion prized. She bent her head to lay it down on Ego’s shoulder, then spoke to their mirrored selves, “You better come through on Friday. Staying at home, eating Jiffy Pop, and watching hipster porn is not an option.”
She watched Ego’s reflection smile back at her. Ego—admittedly “sooo exhausted by the New York meat market”—was becoming a bit of a recluse. Indoors most nights. Getting her kicks from feminist porn—ethical smut starring consenting, well-paid performers with ironic body hair—Xander in muttonchops with chest whiskers peeking up from the V of his flannel work shirt—or Fantasia with Bettie Page bangs and a furry vulva carved in the shape of Cupid’s bow, pointing to pleasure. A simple formula, really: lumbersexual boy meets hipster girl. The course of XXX celluloid love forever running smooth. No complications. No kinks.
Wrapped
It was Friday night, December 31, and a karamu feast celebrating the end of Kwanzaa was well under way when Jennifer arrived at the strange door. She stood there filled with uncertainty, wishing Kwame had picked her up as he had promised. Quelling the urge to tiptoe over yet another threshold, she squared her shoulders and knocked. The door swung inward of its own accord, the sound of ululating and djembe drumming greeted her. Kwame did not. Even though she had texted him that she was right outside.
Two steps into the hallway, a burly man accosted her with a “Free Mumia” flyer and literature on the “Rebirth of the Five Percenter.” She pushed past him into a thicket of damp bodies, lightly perspiring in their voluminous caftans. She straightened the hem of her beige Maison Margiela jacket, then chuckled at her own silliness. No kente dresses for her today. Running late from work, she had barely had enough time to pick up a zawadi from the boutique near her office. Zawadi. That was what the colorfully wrapped Kwanzaa gifts were called. A recently learned factoid come courtesy of a giraffe in a skirt. Earlier that day, she had confessed ignorance about the details of the holiday to Jada, ending in a three-part defense: (a) I grew up in Scarsdale, (b) I went to Yale, (c) my mother is Cameroonian. There is no Kwanzaa in Africa. It’s a holiday created for people whose culture was stolen from them.
Later in the day, a selection from their children’s book division came to her interoffice: Kiana’s First Kwanzaa, a gold seal certifying it as a Coretta Scott King Award winner. The Kiana in question was a young giraffe girl who taught her that umoja meant “unity,” that the candelabra on the table in front of her was a kinara, and that its seven candles represented the seven principles of Kwanzaa. There was something else she tried to remember about fertility and corn, but thoughts of that fled as she spotted Kwame in a corner chair, with a white woman draped across his lap.
There was a tap on her shoulder, a Hey girl. She turned her head, a brusque I’m here with someone on her lips, but it was only Ego. Swiveling back to look across the room, she saw the woman was now leaning on the wall beside Kwame’s chair. Ego pulled at her arm.
“You’re late,” Jennifer said.
“I know,” said Ego, eyes narrowed, as she peered across the room. “Let’s go say hi to those two. That corner looks cozy.”
They walked over together, arm in arm.
Up close the woman was emaciated, near to toppling under the weight of a towering head wrap. This Becky in Badu drag symbolized everything Kwame despised, or so she had believed on those nights kneeling at his knee, a rapt pupil, attentive as he prepared the next school day’s lecture on issues of “cultural appropriation” and “critical race theory.” Who was this man? Who was this woman? Had Kwame been learning her too? Had he taught her to mind him, to want, no, to revel in the pleasure of his yoke? She searched his face for answers. His expression held none.
“Hotep, my sisters,” said Kwame’s sloe-eyed companion, sizing up Jennifer and Ego before wisely walking off.
“Hello,” said Jennifer, then to Kwame, still seated, “hello to you too.” He stood. Hugged her. Then moved to do the same with Ego, who bobbed and weaved away from his embrace.
He folded in on himself, empty arms hugging his own chest. “You ladies enjoying the festivities?”
“It’s an interesting holiday,” said Ego. “Swahili lingo and a candelabra that’s two sticks short of a menorah. Oy vey.” She rolled her eyes and looked at Jennifer, who knew she was just saying this to piss off Kwame. Sometimes her friend was the bitch Jennifer wished she could be.
“Jamila, I think your friend is missing the point,” said Kwame. “She’ll come around. For now, let’s get you ladies some drinks.” He turned and walked off. His signature method for conflict avoidance, one Jennifer had become all too familiar with of late. Infuriating. And probably the reason he’d been stabbed by no less than three ex-girlfriends. Battle wounds, my ass. Serves him right. And not for the first time she wondered what she’d be pushed to, what it would take to truly reach this man. She felt herself moving to follow him instinctively nonetheless. She was pulled backward by another tug on her arm, then Ego’s voice asking, “Who are you?”
“I don’t have time for this,” she said.
“I’m sorry. Are we in a hurry to go walk five steps behind your man?”
“Why did you have to antagonize him?”
“I don’t like him.”
“You barely know him.”
“No. You’re the one who’s acting brand-new. Him, I’ve known for weeks now,” Ego insisted. “I’ve seen him through you. Watched him morph you into some tragic cultural mulatto. Kwame tells you to get braids so you get calluses on your butt sitting for twelve hours, for some treetops-of-the-Serengeti hairstyle you scratch out your head in two days. He tells you what ‘authentic’ dishes to cook, when he’ll come over to eat them, what ‘culturally imperialist’ Western music not to listen to. And you do it. You do it all.”
“You’re full of shit,” said Jennifer, filled with an anger she only dimly registered was displaced. “You just want me to be unhappy like you and your dead prezzes.”
“At least I know what I’m getting with them. Kwame is such a phony. He’s a tyrant in bougie, enlightened-brother clothing.”
It was Ego’s turn to leave her then.
Rooted in place, Jennifer let the drumming, the ululating, the press of bodies push into and over her; felt waves of fury, doubt, and humiliation—shot through with love, still and always love. The man she loved hadn’t noticed, said nothing, nothing about her other zawadi for him, a surprise, a coronation, her crown freshly garlanded by soft and springy sisterlocks.
Shorn
It would be weeks before she left him. Longer still for his own farewell. She cooked him a last supper on one of their final nights together. Unaware of endings when she woke that morning for a bright and early pilgrimage to the market, purchasing the freshest of fish for their six-month anniversary dinner. There were no premonitions as she warmed palm oil, diced onions, sliced carrots. She hummed as she chopped Scotch bonnet peppers and wild turnips and sweet cassava and bruise-colored eggplants. She stirred and simmered. She boiled. The sauce bubbled, filling her kitchen with the tender scent of hibiscus flowers and tamarind. In her nostrils, in her hair.
That night, she lay crisp white linen on the table. When he came to her, she served him, uncovered the dish before him, waiting. For what? Praise? Vindication? This is how her mother must have served the ambassador, she imagined, hovering eagerly, so hopeful in her fawning, even as his wife sat watchful, ever watchful, at the far end of the dinner table.
Jennifer recalled herself, fixed her own plate, sat watchful as Kwame pushed his dish away. She waited for an explanation, for a request to pass the salt or Maggi or hot sauce. Instead he took slow, e
xcruciating sips from his glass of water.
“Eat,” she told him finally, leaning forward, scooping a fine-boned piece of fish to his lips. An offering. “Eat.”
This time, it was her hand he pushed away. “I’m not hungry,” he said. The sound of those words a tumbleweed of thorny hurts and rough disappointments rolling through her apartment, gathering and growing, till finally she spoke.
“Nourishment,” she said, echoing the words of a man she had once thought so wise.
“What?”
“Nourishment, remember? Tradition. You and me, together, sitting around one dish. Eating what I spent the whole damn day preparing. You’ve been asking for this meal for weeks. Been saying how much you wanted some homemade tiebuu jeun, a home-cooked African meal.”
“But it’s not … you’re not really African African, are you?”
What was she then? she wondered. What did he see when he looked at her?
He stood behind her now, kneading her shoulders, pushing pliancy into her flesh, saying, “Jamila, don’t be so sensitive. You know what I meant. I’ve traveled and lived across the motherland. So you tried your hand at making a Senegalese dish. No harm in it, but you’re not Senegalese, right? I mean, sometimes I feel like you’re barely even Cam—”
She pulled away from him then, aching to aim a fist at that flashing eyetooth, leave him gumming his words, their bite stolen. How could he say such things? He sounded so self-assured, so decided, like he had sussed out the mystery of her just by sampling the salt of her moans. But if she thought hard on it, traced the true shape of his thoughts, his patterns, this man thought he had the measure of most things really, so why would something as simple as a woman be unknowable to him?
And then, a turn, a change of tactics. This is where he kissed her bare shoulder, the petal blade of her collarbone. A quizzical slant to his jaw, as Jennifer, become fluent in the lexicon of his body, its tenses and full stops, read all. Fingers pinching pressure points along the bridge of his nose, signaling exasperation, demanding: Why, really why would she make him teach her such hard truths about herself, make him repeat the obvious? Squared shoulders bulged like boulders, resolute, soldiering on because hadn’t he taught her much, he, the authority that they both knew he was, vetted and credentialed, soon-to-be published author of a book on this very subject. Brisk shake of the head—in resignation? in acknowledgment?—that he’d done his part, had he not? He’d taught others, so many others whose flush-faced ignorance was infuriating, and still others sclerotic with misconceptions, but they had learned, he had prevailed. And now that numbing, spirit-deadening smile of his as he saw a finish line beyond her. Because this was the moment in their arguments where she inevitably acquiesced, the moment, only briefly delayed, that her acceptance would come, made all the sweeter for the wait. In this moment, smugness draped on him like a plush robe, he was utterly himself. He was who he had ever been, she’d just been deaf and dumb to it.
When Jennifer was a little girl, carefree, swinging barefoot from sycamore trees, her mother had seen darkness on the horizon and offered protection, rubbed salves of cinnamon and almond oil on her skin, safeguarding a daughter whose blood was too sweet, one who always came home bitten over and over. Jennifer had been immaculate in her oblivion, until a day or so later she would look down in surprise to see pinched and angry flesh, bright shining evidence of her violation. Then and only then was she stung, floodgates of pain and irritation flung open.
This is how she felt now. Stung. Pain freshly exposed, made flesh.
She snatched up Kwame’s plate, marching to the kitchenette, scraped and scraped its heaping helpings into the maw of the sink drain, then switched on the disposal. Its grating sputter and hacksaw grind were the only sound in the room.
He sidled up to her, looming large in the small kitchenette.
“Do you want me to leave, Jamila?”
She let the drone of the drain and running, fleeing water drown out his words, wishing that she could put all of it, all this mess, down this crunching void. What could be severed? What damaged parts, what hidden organs—her spleen, the pulp of her womb—localized whatever made her weak for him? Had it spread too far, oozed and metastasized to every mighty and insignificant bit of her? To the very fingers— knuckles to nailbeds—now hovering over this steel sinkhole?
Kwame’s lips moved, his voice underscored by wailing in her head, by ringing in her ears. He switched off the deafening roar. “Did you hear me, Jamila? Jamila.”
Her hands dropped to the lip of the sink. She raised them again, let the waterfall on tap cleanse the food scraps, took her time lathering and rinsing and drying, before finally turning to look him in the face full on. She took his hands in her clean ones, brought his hands to her face, let their palms cup her cheeks, let what she needed to tell him vibrate through the air and flesh. “Kwame Lucius Johnson. The name is Jennifer. Say my name, Jennifer.”
In a different tale this would have been the end. She would claim her name and herself and that would be that. But this was her love story and she was a tenacious overachiever, willing to adapt, to try and try once more, so nothing happened of a sudden. She wrote pro and con lists on why to stay, why she should leave. Considered every what-if and maybe and someday till one day the exhaustion of it all overtook her. The man and his book were out and about in the world, away on multicity tours, the work they had done together bigger than her, bigger than him. Writ large on best-seller lists. With professional pride, she watched him proselytizing on late-night talk shows, held her breath at his words, found her mirror image in others as cameras panned to studio audiences, their eyes so open, so ready to trust and perhaps obey. She let herself breathe, one wobbly breath after another.
Other steps were harder, of course. A talk, a fight, a break. Yet real endings take a long time so for weeks he loomed large in her memories. A Leviathan. He lingered on street corners, on stoop fronts, at subway exits. She saw him everywhere. Walking the sunbaked streets of Harlem became a study in avoidance, a spiteful child’s game as she hopscotched across hot sidewalks, each time she saw him in the curve of a stranger’s jaw. Even then, her thoughts would skitter, stop at crosswalks to stand and wonder.
Soon she saw the signs, a pattern emerging. He was where his peculiar brand of Africanness was. So she excised it like a vestigial organ. But then, a reclamation, a defining of Africanness for herself as she and Ego took bold steps among the aisles of that African food mart, where she had bought his favorite goat meat. Chose filigreed fabrics and bright threads for an outfit by Abdullah, the Senegalese tailor who had promised, insha’Allah, to embroider wedding robes for her and Kwame.
Months passed. A millennium. Her locks hung long, loosed down her back. The day came when she could spool them. Coil them high atop her head. It was then she took his razor. Felt it—whetstone sharp and ready. Held flush against soft skin. A cut, a slash, a cut again. Fattened cobras on the floor. Korobo now. Her hands gliding across liberated skin. Stung by the sheer pleasure of it all.
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Acknowledgments
Imagining this book in the hands of the people who nourished my creativity on the page, even before I fully embraced it myself, is profoundly meaningful.
My wholehearted thanks go out to the many institutions who granted me the gift of unfettered days, space to commune with kindred spirits, and oftentimes three yummy hots and goose-down cots. Many thanks to the administrators, staff, founders at Kimbilio, Ucross, the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, Byrdcliffe Colony, Wurlitzer Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Clarion West Writers Workshop, and the Hub City Writers Project.
Thank you to the AKO Caine Prize, in particular Dele Fatunla, for giving writers from the continent the glow-up and uplift they more than deserve. Africa is not a country and we’ve still got a world of stories to tell.
To my hardworking editor, Steve Wo
odward, your keen eye for language and generous spirit made me truly feel seen. Thank you for the laughter and for bearing with my nitpicky, writerly ways. A galaxy of thanks to Fiona McCrae and everyone on the Graywolf team for my enthusiastic welcome into your wolfpack. Let’s howl into the wind and be fierce together.
To my steadfast agent Rachel Kim at 3 Arts, your vision for my work and its possibilities is truly appreciated. When they’re etching books directly onto retinas in some future world, I know you’ll sell my eye-rights for millions.
My sincerest thanks to all the teachers who have encouraged me as a writer throughout the years: from that bluestocking of a girl reading Austen and writing Star Wars fan-fics to the writer of this very book, you saw value in my voice. Special thank-yous to Karen Russell, Sam Chang, Kevin Brockmeier, Kate Christiansen, Ethan Canin, Andrew Sean Greer, Lee K. Abbott, Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, Susan Palwick, Toby Buckell, Andy Duncan, and Eileen Gunn.
Another rip-roaring thanks to Karen Russell, my dolphin sister, transmitting to me on those higher octaves. Thank you for being a friend/ mentor/cheerleader who has loved on my work even in the rough. You read this manuscript time and time again and instinctively knew where I was trying to go even when I lost my footing. You are a gift, K-lista.
To Kevin Brockmeier once more, for your Fraggle Rock—loving weird and wonderful ways, for bringing tin robots and the Codex Seraphinianus into my life, and the many, many rec letters, thank you, thank you, thank you. And I still think you’re an elven lord in disguise.
To Deb West, Connie Brothers, and Jan Zenisek, for your patented method of making all paths smooth that seemed so rocky just moments prior, many thanks. Now tell me your secrets.
To every workshop-mate who has touched these pages and given of your time to make them better, thank you. Special shoutout to my homies from the days in them cornfield streets, they’ll be handwritten inscriptions galore on your copies thanking you for editing, home-baked goods, photo shoot collabs, putting up shelves, and more. For now, just know this work IS because you are Christa Fraser, Clare Jones, Matthew Nelson Teutsch, Yaa Gyasi, Alexia Arthurs, Catina Bacote, Sarah Smith, Meredith Blankenship, Ryan Tucker, Shea Lynn Sadulski, Jennifer Percy, Derek Nnuro, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, Kyle Minor, Tom Quach, and Naomi Jackson.
