by Sefi Atta
“Oh, her... She told me... she wants to leave town... after I told her... about the bus crash last night. The driver lost his head. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not predicting the same fate will befall Lubna. Allah will always protect her, but that is what can happen when you go traveling up and down the Death Road willy-nilly.”
Farouk blows out smoke. “Yes, yes, but don’t you yourself want to leave this place?”
“Do you?”
“Only on a day like this when I encounter a lout like that.”
He smokes. My gum is much softer now and is sweetening my temper.
“I just wish people would be more obedient.”
“Like who?”
“Lubna for a start.”
“What else has she done wrong?”
“She is left-handed.”
“She’s always been.”
“It’s most unsanitary. She should have been corrected.”
Farouk smiles. “You two are like husband and wife. Me? I don’t blame her. If I had the opportunity I would want to leave this town. Things are changing too much around here.”
I push the chewing gum to the side of my mouth. “It’s the Americans, you know.”
“Which Americans?”
“The woman with balloons in her breasts.”
He pats his flat chest. “I wouldn’t mind having those.”
“She’s ruining everything. She keeps giving out scholarships.”
Hassan said she used to get attention because of the balloons, then her skin got shriveled up and the balloons began to leak. After that, no one would give her work to do in Hollywood, so she tries to get attention by saving African girls. It is either wild animals, or us, Hassan said.
“The Americans indeed,” Farouk says.
“It’s true. They’re to blame. Hassan watches cable television whenever he goes to the capital. He says they are debauched and greedy. They want to take over all the oil in the world and kill Muslims.”
Farouk tilts his head. “Is it Muslim blood or oil they’re after?”
“I’m not playing. They won’t stop until they succeed, and once they finish with the Arabs they will turn their attention to us. You’ll see.”
Farouk puts his cigarette on the edge of his stall. “But look around you. Who stops you from going to Friday prayers? The Americans? Who makes it a crime to walk around with your hair uncovered? The Americans?”
“I want to cover my hair.”
“What if you don’t? And remember the Christian woman? Who killed her? The Americans?”
“She was being unreasonable.”
“Our sarki barraki should be ashamed for letting that happen over here.”
“She should have stepped aside.”
“But should the men have killed her? And what about the woman in that other town, the one the Sharia court sentenced to death, did the Americans do that, too?”
“No one would have stoned that silly woman.”
“How would you know?”
“Hassan told me.”
“But did the court have to sentence her? Was that just?”
“They just wanted to scare her. They only wanted her to serve as an example for other women who are unfaithful. They wouldn’t have followed through with the sentence. Hassan said the Americans blew it out of proportion. They do that to make themselves look superior.”
“Haba.”
“But it’s true. They are infidels, the lot of them. They worship anyone. They have this black woman on television, Okra. All the housewives in America have fallen under her spell. She gives them gifts and they follow her commands. If she tells them to lose weight, they lose weight. If she tells them to leave their husbands, they will. When she asked them to write letters to protest against the sentence, they did.”
None of them knew exactly what they were protesting against, Hassan said, but they felt better for writing their letters, and in no time they were back to accepting expensive free gifts from her.
“Haba,” Farouk says. “You’re a clever girl, but I’ve never thought what your family teaches is right. Look around and see for yourself who we follow around here, the Arabs or the Americans. I worry for us, really I do, the direction in which we are heading.”
“Fine.”
At least I don’t think I know it all. The business about the Christian woman confused me, to be honest, so did the stoning sentence, and I couldn’t understand when our sarki barraki announced that women could not attend Friday prayers. I once asked Baba, “What does our sarki barraki do?” Baba said, “He passes edicts.” “What are edicts?” I asked. “Edicts are what our sarki barraki passes,” he said. “Why?” I asked. “He passes edicts,” Baba yelled. “I’ve told you already. Why do you persist in asking what he passes edicts for?” Then Mama said, “That man confuses me with his edicts.”
I’m also a bit puzzled by Farouk. His boyfriend is our tailor, and yet our tailor is married. Who will eventually marry Farouk, and can our tailor be sentenced to death for being unfaithful to his wife? How will education help me to make sense of all this when education only made Binta more spiteful?
On the day I met my husband I was as pleasant as possible. I was grateful to be betrothed to him. He kept rubbing my shoulders. He even wanted to take me away right then and there, but Mama said he couldn’t until I had seen my period.
“I can never leave town,” I confess to Farouk. “I would miss my mother too much.”
“I know.”
“She’s kind and loving.”
“I know,” he says, turning his mouth downward.
I forgot about his own mother. I change the topic to cheer him up. “My ambition is to become a housewife.”
“But you are already a widow,” he says.
I forgot that, too. My memory is terrible.
“Who will marry you now?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
He strokes his smooth chin. “Will your father promise you to someone else?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you can’t stay a widow forever. Don’t you think it might be better to further your education?”
“Kai!” I exclaim and spit out the Bazooka Joe on the ground.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“I bit my tongue...”
“The pain will pass.”
“I can’t talk again.”
“Is it that bad?”
I cover my face with my hands. How can Farouk do this to me? He merely pretends to be a woman. He doesn’t know what it means to be one. He will never know what it means to be promised. “My husband died.”
“Are you upset over that?”
“Very.”
“But you never knew him.”
“Still.” At least I have respect for the dead. I get up and tighten my scarf. I can’t spend time with him today or ever.
“Where are you going?” he asks.
Where does he think? When certain friends go running off to capitals and certain sisters can’t keep their big mouths shut, and certain chaperones, who ought to know better, try and lead you astray, where else can you go?
“Home,” I say politely. I don’t look left or right as I approach the road. Farouk has warned me several times not to do that.
“Be careful,” he calls out. “This is a dangerous curve we’re on and there’s no telling what can come out of nowhere and knock you over.”
Some people think he has the gift of prophecy. The way I see it, I’m no longer sure he does. The man does not even know what is happening now.
LAWLESS
We were third-year theater arts students due to graduate in the summer of 1994 when the Abacha regime closed down our university, just two weeks before our convocation ceremony. They announced the closure was for public safety, but who didn’t know they were punishing our students’ union? That hapless body of enthusiasts, still hoarse from screaming “no” to the IMF, had organized a peaceful protest in support of the National Democratic Coal
ition. All they succeeded in rallying were a few area boys, who marched to our chancellor’s office, threw petrol bombs through his window, set a couple of lecturers’ cars on fire, assaulted the cooks in the canteen, while chanting, “Sufferin’ rights for de masses.”
This was just after our president-elect was detained, way before his wife was assassinated. Anyone who dared to disagree with the regime’s constitutional conference was being spirited off by State Security for questioning. Those who could, and would, had fled overseas to claim political asylum. Lagos was not exactly a peaceful paradise when the Lawless was formed. We were not a band of armed robbers, or some student cult. We certainly had no intention of adding to the bloodshed around. I, for one, feared barbarism and guns more than I did the student unionists with their placards and self-righteousness.
The founding members of the group were Crazehead, Professor, Fineboy, Shango and I, Ogun. They were out-of-town friends who asked if they could stay with me until our university reopened, and I said yes. It was the middle of the rainy season, no time to be looking for a place to bunk.
Fineboy was from the Niger Delta, thick-chested, and he had all that Norwegian ancestry working for him. He’d slept with girls from all faculties. The rich ones wouldn’t speak to him after they’d used him. They said he was a bushman: he couldn’t use a fork and knife properly.
Professor was another who had good reasons to begrudge women: his small hands, small feet. Add to that, his back was crooked from scoliosis, so he panicked when he got undressed and couldn’t successfully get laid. To save himself, he wrote poetry. His tributes to Biafra were so masterful they drove a literature lecturer to accuse him of plagiarism. I told the Professor I wasn’t taking any of that tribal bullshit from him. The Civil War ended decades ago and Nigeria was one nation now, united in its mess. He said, “But you don’t know what I witnessed as a boy. My father got shot in the head. My family almost starved. My whole town was razed...” He went on and on until I apologized for my insensitivity and stupidity. The little liar! His family was in France throughout the war. True, true, he was a poet.
Crazehead, now, he had spent more time in Fela’s Shrine than he had on campus. He mixed up his H’s like a typical Ibadan man, had these crowded teeth covered in plaque, and his eyes were perpetually red and swollen. At one point he said he was giving up theater arts to be in an Afro-juju band. “Doing what?” I asked him. “Shaking the shekere?” Crazehead had no musical talent whatsoever, except for singing off-key after he’d smoked a joint. He said the purity of his falsetto intimidated the other band members, so they were jealous and they dropped him. Perhaps it was Crazehead’s belches that overpowered the band. “What the hell did you eat, man?” I once asked when he let out a combination of fried fish, boiled eggs and mango. He rubbed his belly and explained that hactually, ‘emp made him ‘ungry, and he had inherited a susceptibility to food allergies, ‘ence he experienced occasional bloating. I asked him to clean himself up, from all orifices. The guy was a bloody mess. He was the one who asked me to consider using real guns on our opening night as the Lawless. “That’s the trouble with you,” I said. “Too many drugs in your blood. Too many Rambo movies in your head.”
Shango was my right-hand man. We named him after the god of thunder and lightning whom he played in the one-act, written by him and me, though I did most of the creative work because Shango wasn’t exactly what you call “that bright.”The Goethe Institut in Lagos agreed to sponsor us. Shango received a standing ovation for his suicide scene, during which he pretended to hang himself. He was over six foot tall with deep dimples, the darling of our drama association in university. Women trusted him. He and I were roommates in our first year and, I swear, he had lace curtains hanging from our barred windows, a jar of hibiscus on the floor next to his semen-stained mattress. For a while there he was a Buddhist, then a Seventh-day Adventist. Shango was just big for nothing, really. He couldn’t swipe a mosquito without feeling guilty. He wouldn’t even squash the cockroaches that sauntered into our kitchen, snatched bits of bread, and strutted out. Crazehead chased them around and tried to pound them to pulp with his heels. “Leave them alone,” Shango always pleaded. Cockroaches were just trying to survive, like us, he said.
We lived in the two-story house my father had designed in Shapati Town, his hometown. We had a plot number, not a street number, and the street had no telephone lines. My father had had a brick wall built so high that armed robbers would need pole vaults to catapult themselves into the grounds. He must have envisaged them trying despite the odds; on top of his wall were broken bottle pieces, like jewels on the crest of his architectural crown. In our garden was his one concession to my mother, a now empty swimming pool, shaded by her favorite jacaranda and flame-of-the-forest trees. The pool was four feet at its deepest. My father, God rest his soul, could not swim. He had nightmares of dying by drowning, not by the bullet. That fate he never expected in the fortress that was our home.
The garden all but blossomed into a bush after my family was killed. That happened one night while I was accepting my runner-up award for “Mr. Caveman” on campus. I was also in the process of failing my first year in engineering. I came home the next morning with my inscribed “Mr. Caveman” club and found them dead in the dining room. I broke all the windows in the house so that the whole of Shapati Town could hear me crying for them to come back to life, then crawled into the garden and sniffed the grass and earth until I wet myself. Shango found me out there and almost developed a hernia from trying to pull me away. I was clutching the grass and would not let go. Strangely, the blades did not break; they came out by their roots and I believe that was when I kind of lost my mind.
From then on, as a tribute to my family, I placed candles on the pool steps whenever the Lawless performed in the shallow end of the swimming pool. They also served as stage lights in the evenings, unless the rain unleashed on us. Our stage, of course, was missing tiles, and our backstage was a thatched gazebo. Our audience sat on the veranda of the house. They clapped during scenes, oftentimes jeered and shouted out warnings like, “He’s after you,” or “He’s plotting your demise.” One deaf man, who had a wandering eye, sounded a broken gong at the point of Shango’s suicide. A more hilarious death knell I’d not heard. Some audience members, who couldn’t help themselves, ran into the swimming pool and yanked off Professor’s wig, or snatched his wrapper to see what he was wearing underneath. He played the goddess Oya, Shango’s beloved wife, complete with red lipstick and thick Charlie Chaplin-like eyebrows.
Our audiences were people from the neighborhood. They doubled as extras, stagehands, and sound technicians. They improvised. They wanted us to ad-lib. There was no dividing line between them and us, but this wasn’t Wole Soyinka’s intellectual mythology or street-level guerrilla theater. This was theater of the basest kind, theater as it was performed in the villages of old, theater as it was meant to be performed, or so we thought after enough bottles of Star beer. The point was, who said theater was dead in Nigeria?
Toyosi joined the group when we were tired of getting constipated from the roasted plantains and groundnuts we bought from local food hawkers. I was becoming more and more sluggish, particularly doing the acrobatic scenes in which I wrestled with Shango. One night, I tumbled on stage and couldn’t get up again, and there I was, playing Ogun, the god of iron and war.
Toyosi was an actress in a soap opera. Her part had been discontinued due to “lack of funding”—she refused to sleep with the producer. She came to see us after a show, with her plump daughter clamped to her hip.
“I’ll cook for you,” she said, “if you let me stay.”
“No space for you,” Professor said, shooing her away. “I play the women here.”
“Did I say I was looking for a part?” she asked.
“What did you come here for then?” he said, removing his glasses to eye her up and down, as if she was sent to poison us.
Fineboy stepped forward, sticking out his mass
ive chest. “Beautiful lady, we go by aliases in this place. What shall we call you? Nefertiti? Queen Amina of Zaria?”
I couldn’t believe what the bobo was saying.
“Call me whatever you want,”Toyosi said. “Just give me a place to stay.”
“I thought we were friends here,” I said. “I thought we treated people with respect.”
I wanted her to like me more than the rest, even though I was about to let her down. We had no room for one more, let alone a woman with a child. She had cropped natural hair, bleached gold. It made her skin look darker. Her legs were a little bandy, and her expression was, well, sort of bored. I winked at her daughter.
“Hey,” I said.
The little so-and-so began to howl. She bucked and threw her head back. Toyosi tried to hush her. The more she did, the louder the child cried. Then Toyosi unbuttoned her blouse and released the tiniest breasts I’d ever seen on a woman. None of us knew where to look, except Crazehead.
Toyosi eased her nipple into her daughter’s mouth. “You guys should really consider taking me in, you know. I’m writing a play and from what I’ve seen, you need better material.”
“Are you also a Broadway critic?” Professor snapped.
Toyosi smiled. She could have been teasing him.
“I’ve seen what you do,” she said.
Professor’s voice became shrill. “So say thanks then! Isn’t it for free you entered?”
“Enough,” I said.
Sometimes I wondered about him. Why was he so effeminate? Toyosi shifted her daughter higher up her hip. She might as well have yawned. Her daughter was sucking away. She was such a pretty child.
“Em, what do you mean, ‘better material’?” I asked, trying to focus on Toyosi’s face.
“Come on,” she said. “A play about warring Yoruba deities? It’s like drama society in secondary school, not even original. Haven’t you just copied Duro Ladipo’s Oba Koso?”
“Oba Koso is based on the story of Shango. The story of Shango belongs to everyone.”
