Binti--Home

by Nnedi Okorafor

  “And so do I and all my siblings.”

  “Yes.”

  “We carry alien technology.”

  “Yes.”

  The information tried to knock me down and I sunk deeper into meditation. If I wanted to, I could call up a current and send it streaming across the sand. I am Himba, I said to myself between the splitting and splitting fractals of equations, my most soothing pattern. I am Himba, even if my hair has become okuoko because of my actions and even if I have Enyi Zinariya blood. Even if my DNA is alien.

  “Binti,” my grandmother softly said.

  “Why can’t I see it? Why can’t any of my siblings or my father? None of us goes about waving our hands, manipulating objects that no one else can see.”

  “Your father can and does,” she said. “When he so chooses. Didn’t I tell you I’d just communicated with him? You think a son would abandon his mother? Just because he marries a Himba woman and decides to use his harmonizing skill in ‘civilization’ instead of the hinterland?”

  I sighed and pressed my hands to my forehead. I felt so strange. This was all so strange.

  “If you could reach my father, why’d you need me to reach out to Okwu?”

  “To see if you could,” she said, smiling.

  I frowned.

  “Now listen,” she said. “The zinariya cannot just be used. It has to be switched on; it has to be activated. If it is not, you can live your whole life without even knowing it’s in you. As you have.”

  “How does one switch it on?”

  “The clan priestess does it. The Ariya. You will meet her tomorrow.”

  * * *

  I wanted to turn back.

  Oh, I wanted to turn back so badly. Enough was enough was enough was enough. I could have made it home. Then I could have still made the trek out onto the salt trails on my own and caught up with the women and completed my pilgrimage. I could have become a whole woman in my clan, a complete Himba woman. All I had to do was walk into the darkness and use my astrolabe to tell me which way to go. However, we were days into the hinterland and if something did not kill me in the night, my lack of food or a proper water-gathering capture station would.

  Plus, I didn’t want to turn back. Why don’t I ever want to do what I’m supposed to do?

  * * *

  So I went with Grandmother. I went with the Desert People.

  It was another forty-eight hours of walking during the night, sleeping during the day, eating dates, flat bread, and palm-oil-rich Enyi Zinariya stews. Three more times, I saw Mwinyi protect us from packs of predatory animals—once from another pack of wild dogs and twice from hyenas. And I watched the Enyi Zinariya with new eyes; I especially watched their hands.

  In the meantime, I barely touched my astrolabe. There was so much around me to take in; I just didn’t need it. Nor did I touch the pieces of my edan; I didn’t want to think about it. Okwu checked on me once that second day and was even curter than it was the first time.

  You okay, Binti?

  Yes.

  Good.

  That was all. On the third, it didn’t check in at all. I tried reaching it later that day as I had the first time, but it didn’t respond. I wondered what it was doing back at the Root, but I wasn’t worried. My grandmother was in touch with my father, so everyone knew everything anyway.

  * * *

  On the fourth night, the land changed. We simply came to the end of the sand dunes and the beginning of smooth white limestone. And soon after that, we reached a sudden drop and before I could understand what was happening and what I was seeing, I heard joyous ululating.

  Gold People

  The Enyi Zinariya lived in a vast network of caves in a huge limestone cliff. Within the bowels of these caves were winding staircases that led from cave to cave, family to family. Some caves were tiny, no larger than a closet, others were as vast as the Root. Upon arrival, I was taken for a quick tour of my grandmother’s family’s caves. I met so many of her people, young to old, all enthusiastically waving their hands about, that I could not understand the logic of where people lived.

  It seemed everyone could stay wherever he or she was most comfortable, from child to elder. I saw a cave where an old man and his teenage granddaughter lived, the girl’s parents (one of whom was the old man’s daughter) living in a cave connected by a narrow tunnel. The old man and granddaughter were both obsessed with studying, collecting, and documenting stones, so their cave was full of stone piles and stacks of yellowing paper with scribbled research.

  “Best to just have only one cave full of rocks,” her mother told me with a laugh. “Those two are happy together.” My grandmother’s cave was tiny, but sparse and tidy with colorful shaggy blue rugs, delicate mobiles hanging from the ceiling made of crystals one of her daughters had collected, and bottles of scented oils they specialized in making. The room also smelled immaculate.

  It was brightly lit by a large circular solar lamp in the room’s center. What was most striking was that my grandmother’s cave was full of plants. It reminded me of one of the Third Fish’s breathing rooms. There were pots with leafy green vines tumbling out of them hung near the high ceiling beside her bed. There were several large woven baskets full of sand with complex light green treelike succulents growing from them and dry bioluminescent vines that grew directly on the cave’s walls. Right there in the cave, my grandmother was growing five different types of tomatoes, three types of peppers, and some type of fruiting plant that I could not name.

  “I’m a botanist,” she said, putting her satchel down. “Your grandfather was, too.”

  “Was?”

  She nodded. “He was Himba.” And that was all she would say, though there was clearly so much more. I wanted to ask why he left the Himba and if he stayed in touch at all. I wanted to ask how he felt when my father decided to leave and return to the Himba. I wanted to ask if this was where my father had stayed when he was a child. I wanted to ask why she loved plants. I wanted to ask why she lived alone when everyone else in the village lived happily with many, even in the smaller caves. Instead, I looked at my grandmother’s many thriving plants and breathed the lush air that smelled so different from the other caves and the dry desert outside.

  I stopped at a small yellow flower growing from a dry root in a pot bigger than my hand. This was the same type of flower that had been growing on the edan years ago when I’d found it.

  “What’s this one?” I asked.

  “I call it ola edo,” she said. “Means ‘hard to find, hard to grow’.” She laughed, “And not very pretty. Okay, time for you to rest, Binti. Tomorrow is your day.”

  As I had in the Third Fish’s breathing chamber, I slept well here.

  The Ariya

  The Ariya’s cave was a mile from the cave village in the center of a dried lake.

  “Something used to live in it, back when this was a lake,” Mwinyi said as we walked. “Maybe even dug the hole in the rock, itself.”

  “How do you know?” I said, looking at the ground as we walked. At some point, the smooth limestone had become craggy, making it hard to walk. I had to concentrate on not tripping over jutting rock.

  “It’s in the Collective,” he said, glancing at me. “That’s the Enyi Zinariya’s memory that we all can touch.”

  I nodded.

  “But no one knows exactly what kind of creature it was,” he said. He waved his hands before him.

  “Did you just tell her we’re close?” I asked.

  He looked sharply at me, frowning. “How’d you—”

  “I’m not a fool,” I said.

  He grunted.

  I laughed and pointed up ahead. “Plus, I see something just up there. A hole or something.”

  To call it a hole was to put it lightly. The opening in the hard ground was the size of a house. When we stepped up to it, I noticed two things. The first was that there was a large bird circling directly above the opening. The second was that rough stone steps were carved into the s
tone walls of the hole wound all the way to the bottom.

  We descended the steps, Mwinyi going first. I ran my hand along the abrasive wall as I recited soft equations in my head. I called up a soft current and the mild friction from the current and my hand running over the coarse stone was pleasant beneath my fingertips. The deep cavern’s walls were lined with books, so many books. The location of the sun must have been directly above, for the strong light of midday pleasantly flooded into the space. However, along with the light, bioluminescent vines grew in and lit the darker corners.

  She stood in the shadows, beside a shelf of books, her arms crossed over her chest. “You haven’t changed a bit,” she said. Nearly a decade later, her bushy crown of hair a little grayer, her face a little wiser, and I still would know this woman anywhere. Could old women grow taller over the years?

  “Hello, Mma,” I said, looking up at her. I used the Himba term of respect because I didn’t know what else to use.

  “Binti,” she said, pulling me into a tight hug. “Welcome to my home.”

  “Thank you for inviting me,” I said.

  She gave Mwinyi a tight hug, as well. “Thanks for bringing her. How was the walk?”

  “As expected,” he said.

  “Come back for her at sundown.”

  “Ugh,” I blurted, slumping. It was morning and I hadn’t expected this to be an all-day thing. Though maybe I should have; springing things like this on me seemed to be the Enyi Zinariya way.

  Mwinyi nodded, winked at me, and left.

  She turned back to me. “Don’t you know how to go with the flow yet?” she asked. “Adjust.”

  “I just didn’t think that . . .”

  “You saw the Night Masquerade,” she said. “That’s no small thing. Why expect what you expect?” Before I could answer, she said, “Come and sit down.”

  I took one more glance at Mwinyi, who was now near the top of the stairs, and followed the old woman.

  We moved deeper into the cave and sat on a large round blue rug. It was cool and dark here, the air smelling sweet with incense. The place reminded me of a Seventh Temple, mostly empty and quiet. But she didn’t remind me of a Seven priestess at all. She wasn’t demure, she didn’t cover her head with an orange scarf, she wore no otjize, and she got straight to the point. “Why do you think you saw the Night Masquerade?” she asked. “You’re not a man.”

  “Is it even real?” I asked.

  “Don’t answer a question with a question. Why do you think you saw it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Remember when we first met?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why were you out there?”

  “I found that place, I liked it,” I said. “I wasn’t supposed to be out there, I know.”

  “And look where it got you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you hadn’t found the edan, would you have questioned and grown? Would you have gone? And even if you would have, would you be alive now?”

  It came suddenly in that way that it had been for so many months. The rage. I felt it prick me like a needle in my back and my okuoko twitched. I took a deep breath, trying to calm it. “It doesn’t matter,” I muttered, my nostrils flaring.

  “Why?”

  Another wave of rage washed through my body and I angrily reached into my pocket, glad to have a reason to move. I felt my okuoko wildly writhing on my head and Ariya’s eyes went to them, calmly watching their motion. No matter, I thought, bringing out the small pouch. I leaned forward, breathing heavily through my flared nostrils, and wildly dumped it all out before her onto the carpet. The sound of tumbling metal pieces echoed and then came a thunk as the golden grooved center fell out. I motioned to it with my hands to emphasize it all. “Because I broke it!” I shouted, my voice cracking. “I broke it! I’m a harmonizer and I de-harmonized an edan!” My voice echoed around and up the cavern. Then silence.

  I should have treed to calm myself. This was Ariya, priestess of the Enyi Zinariya, I’d just met her, and here I was behaving like a barbarian. “I know,” I added. “I’m unclean. This was why I came home. For cleansing through my pilgrimage. But I didn’t go . . . I’m here instead . . .” I trailed off and just watched her stare at the pieces and the golden center. What felt like minutes passed, giving me time to calm down. My okuoko grew still. The rest of my body relaxed. And my edan was still broken. I broke it, I thought.

  “Unclean? No,” Ariya finally said, shaking her head. “That part of you that is Meduse now, you just need to get that under control.”

  In one sentence, she explained something that had been bothering me for a year. That’s all it was. The random anger and wanting to be violent, that was just Meduse genetics in me. Nothing is wrong with me? I thought. Not unclean? It’s just . . . a new part of me I need to learn to control? I’d come all this way to go on my pilgrimage because I’d thought my body was trying to tell me something was wrong with it. I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself, but I’d thought I’d broken myself because of the choices I’d made, because of my actions, because I’d left my home to go to Oomza Uni. Because of guilt. The relief I felt was so all encompassing that I wanted to lie down on the rug and just sleep.

  Ariya slowly got up, her knees creaking. She dusted off her long blue dress. “Sometimes, the obvious is too obvious,” she muttered, walking away. Then over her shoulder, she said, “Stay there.”

  I watched her ascend the stairs and when she reached the top, she walked off.

  I lay on my back and sighed. “Just Meduse DNA,” I muttered. “Or whatever it is they have for genetic code. That’s all.” I laughed, sitting up on my elbows. My eyes fell on the disassembled edan still lying on the rug. I stopped laughing.

  * * *

  She was gone for what might have been an hour. I’d dozed off right on that round blue rug, lulled by the cool darkness and incense. The sound of her sandals at the top of the stairs woke me. She stepped onto the first stair, paused, and then quickly descended. The moment her upper body came into sight, I saw the creature. Was I seeing what I was seeing? When she reached the bottom of the stairs, I stood up. It was an almost involuntary action. But what else was one to do when a great woman came down the stairs with a great owl perched on her arm?

  The owl was about two feet tall with white and tan feathers, a black bill, a rounded frowning bushy eyebrowed face, and wide yellow eyes. At the top of its head were brown and black feathers that looked like horns. Ariya’s arm was protected by a brown leather armband, but that was all the protection she had. The owl could pluck out her eyes, slash her with its long white talons, slap her with its massive powerful wings if it wanted to. Instead, it stared at me with such intensity that I wondered if I should sit back down.

  “If it’s waiting outside, then it is right,” she said. “It was right there when I came out. Help me.”

  I assisted as she slowly sat down with the owl perched on her arm. I sat across from them and gazed at the enormous bird.

  “Is it heavy?” I asked

  “Birds who spend most of their lives in the sky can’t be heavy,” she said. “No, this one is light as . . . a feather.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “In my forty-five years as priestess, I have not done this,” she said. “Not even once.”

  Suddenly, I felt cold. Very very cold. With dismay. Deep down, I knew. From the moment my grandmother told me about the Zinariya, I’d known, really. Change was constant. Change was my destiny. Growth.

  “Why?” I still asked.

  “Because it’s the only way you can fix it and you have to fix it, so you can use it to do what it needs to do.” The owl hadn’t taken its eyes off of me. “Do you know what zinariya means in the old language?”

  I shook my head.

  “It means ‘gold.’ That’s the name we gave them because we couldn’t speak their true name with our mouths and because that is what they were made of. Gold. Golden people. Their bodies, their ship
, everything about them was gold. They came to the desert because they needed to rest and refuel and they loved the color of the sand . . . gold. Your edan is Zinariya technology; I knew this when I met you. I just thought, since it allowed you to find it, you could solve it without . . . without—”

  “Needing to be activated.”

  She nodded. “No one who was not one of us has ever known about the zinariya and those who marry out or leave, they’re so ashamed of being Enyi Zinariya that they don’t tell their families.”

  “Like my father,” I said. “It’s like having some genetic disease, in a way. If Himba or Khoush knew of it, they’d . . .”

  Ariya smiled. “Oh, they know, someone in those clans knows enough to build toxic ideas against us right into their cultures. That’s really why we are so outcast, untouchable to them. To Himba and Khoush we are the savage ‘Desert People,’ not the Enyi Zinariya. No one wants our blood in their line. Anyway, the Collective knows the names and faces of all your siblings and their children.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling a little better. “Well, that is good.”

  “But that’s all.”

  We stared at each other for a moment.

  “Do you want to do this?” she asked.

  “Do I need to?”

  “Hmm. You’re still ashamed of what you are.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m Himba and proud of that.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Not your grandmother. She is Enyi Zinariya. And we are a matriarchal clan, so your father is, too.”

  “No,” I snapped. “Papa is Himba.” I could feel the sting of my own nearsightedness. It was irritating and pushing me off-balance in a way that made it hard for me to think. My confusion evoked a flash of Meduse anger.

  “Do you want it?” she asked.

  I opened my mouth to answer, but I didn’t speak it because what I’d have spoken was stupid. It was wrong. But it was the truth, too. If I went through with this, I was taking another step outside what it was to be Himba, away from myself, away from my family. I wanted to hide from the owl’s unwavering gaze.