by Rob Spillman
“Has she fallen in love with another man? I hear white women fall out of love as quickly as they fall in love.”
“If you have her telephone number I can take you to the Post and Telegrams Office in Onitsha if you have the money and help you make a call to her,” Ambo suggested.
Onwordi opened the envelope and brought out a photograph. We all crowded around him to take a closer look. It was the picture of the American girl Laura Williams. It was a portrait that showed only her face. She had an open friendly face with brown hair and slightly chubby cheeks. She was smiling brightly in the photograph. Our damp fingers were already leaving a smudge on the face.
“She is beautiful and looks really friendly but why did she not send you a photograph where her legs are showing? That way you do not end up marrying a cripple.”
Onwordi was not smiling.
“So what did she say in her letter or have the contents become too intimate for you to share with us?”
“She says that this was going to be her last letter to me. She says she’s done with her paper and she did very well and illustrated her paper with some of the things I had told her about African culture. But she says her parents are moving back to the city, that the farm had not worked out as planned. She also said she has become interested in Japanese haiku and was in search of new friends from Japan.”
“Is that why you are looking sad like a dog whose juicy morsel fell on the sand? You should thank God for saving you from a relationship where each time the lady clears her throat you have to jump. Sit down and drink with us, forget your sorrows and let the devil be ashamed,” Jekwu said.
We all laughed but Onwordi did not laugh with us, he walked away in a slight daze. From that time onwards we never saw him at Ambo’s shop again. Some people who went to check in on him said they found him lying on his bed with Laura Williams’s letters and picture on his chest as he stared up into the tin roof.
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
• Nigeria •
HALF OF A YELLOW SUN
THE IGBO SAY that a mature eagle feather will always remain spotless.
It was the kind of day in the middle of the rainy season when the sun felt like an orange flame placed close to my skin, yet it was raining, and I remembered when I was a child, when I would run around on days like this and sing songs about the dueling sun and rain, urging the sun to win. The lukewarm raindrops mixed with my sweat and ran down my face as I walked back to my hostel after the rally. I was still holding the placard that read Remember the Massacres, still marveling at my new—at our new—identity. It was late May, Ojukwu had just announced the secession, and we were no longer Nigerians. We were Biafrans.
When we gathered at the Freedom Square for the rally, thousands of us students shouted Igbo songs and swayed, river-like; somebody said that in the market outside our campus, the women were dancing, giving away groundnuts and mangoes. Nnamdi and I stood next to each other and our shoulders touched as we waved green dogonyaro branches and cardboard placards. Nnamdi’s placard read Secession Now. Even though he was one of the student leaders, he chose to be with me in the crowd. The other leaders were in front carrying a coffin with NIGERIA written on it in white chalk. When they dug a shallow hole and buried the coffin, a cheer rose and snaked around the crowd, uniting us, elevating us, until it was one cheer, until we all became one.
I cheered loudly, although the coffin reminded me of Aunty Ifeka, Mama’s half-sister, the woman whose breast I sucked because Mama’s dried up after I was born. Aunty Ifeka was killed during the massacres in the North. So was Arize, her pregnant daughter. They must have cut open Arize’s stomach and beheaded the baby first—it was what they did to the pregnant women. I didn’t tell Nnamdi that I was thinking of Aunty Ifeka and Arize again. Not because I had lost only two relatives while he had lost three uncles and six cousins. But because he would caress my face and say, “I’ve told you, don’t dwell on the massacres. Isn’t it why we seceded? Biafra is born! Dwell on that instead. We will turn our pain into a mighty nation. We will turn our pain into the pride of Africa.”
Nnamdi was like that; sometimes I looked at him and saw what he would have been two hundred years before: an Igbo warrior leading his hamlet in battle (but only a fair battle), shouting and charging with his fire-warmed machete, returning with the most heads lolling on sticks.
I was in front of my hostel when the rain stopped; the sun had won the fight. Inside the lounge, crowds of girls were singing. Girls I had seen struggle at the water pump and hit each other with plastic buckets, girls who had cut holes in each other’s bras as they hung out to dry, now held hands and sang. Instead of “Nigeria we hail thee,” they sang, “Biafra we hail thee.” I joined them, singing, clapping, talking. We did not mention the massacres, the way Igbos had been hunted house to house, pulled from where they crouched on trees, by bright-eyed people screaming Jihad, screaming nyamiri, nyamiri. Instead, we talked about Ojukwu, how his speeches brought tears to our eyes and goose bumps to our skin, how easily his charisma would stand out among other leaders—Nkrumah would look like a plastic doll next to him. “Imakwa, Biafra has more doctors and lawyers than all of Black Africa!” somebody said. “Ah, Biafra will save Africa!” another said. We laughed, deliriously proud of people we would never even know, people who a month ago did not have the “ours” label as now.
We laughed more in the following weeks—we laughed when our expatriate lecturers went back to Britain and India and America, because even if war came, it would take us only one week to crush Nigeria. We laughed at the Nigerian navy ships blocking our ports, because the blockade could not possibly last. We laughed as we gathered under the gmelina trees to discuss Biafra’s future foreign policy, as we took down the “University of Nigeria, Nsukka” sign and replaced it with “University of Biafra, Nsukka.” Nnamdi hammered in the first nail. He was first, too, to join the Biafran Army, before the rest of his friends followed. I went with him to the army enlistment office, which still smelled of fresh paint, to collect his uniform. He looked so broad-shouldered in it, so capable, and later, I did not let him take it all off, I held on to the grainy khaki shirt as he moved inside me.
My life—our lives—had taken on a sheen. A sheen like patent leather. We all felt as though it was liquid steel, instead of blood, that flowed through our veins, as though we could stand barefoot over red-hot embers.
The Igbo say—who knows how water entered the stalk of a pumpkin?
I heard the guns from my hostel room. They sounded close, as though thunder was being funneled up from the lounge. Somebody was shouting outside with a loudspeaker. Evacuate now! Evacuate now! There was the sound of feet, frenzied feet, in the hallway. I threw things in a suitcase, nearly forgot my underwear in the drawer. As I left the hostel, I saw a girl’s stylish sandal left lying on the stairs.
The air in Enugu smelled of rain and fresh grass and hope and new anthills. I watched as market traders and grandmothers and little boys hugged Nnamdi, caressed his army uniform. Justifiable heroism, Obi called it. Obi was thirteen, my bespectacled brother who read a book a day and went to the Advanced School for Gifted Children and was researching the African origin of Greek civilization. He didn’t just touch Nnamdi’s uniform, he wanted to try it on, wanted to know exactly what the guns sounded like. Mama invited Nnamdi over and made him a mango pie. “Your uniform is so debonair, darling,” she said, and hung around him as though he was her son, as though she had not muttered that I was too young, that his family was not quite suitable, when we got engaged a year ago.
Papa suggested Nnamdi and I get married right away, so that Nnamdi could wear his uniform at the wedding and our first son could be named Biafrus. Papa was joking, of course, but perhaps because something had weighed on my chest since Nnamdi entered the army, I imagined having a child now. A child with skin the color of a polished mahogany desk, like Nnamdi’s. When I told Nnamdi about this, about the distant longing somewhere inside me, he pricked his thumb, pricked mine, althou
gh he was not usually superstitious, and we smeared our blood together. Then we laughed because we were not even sure what the hell that meant exactly.
The Igbo say that the maker of the lion does not let the lion eat grass.
I watched Nnamdi go, watched until the red dust had covered his boot prints, and felt the moistness of pride on my skin, in my eyes. Pride at his smart olive uniform with the image of the sun rising halfway on the sleeve. It was the same symbol, half of a yellow sun, that was tacked onto the garish cotton tie Papa now wore to his new job at the War Research Directorate every day. Papa ignored all his other ties, the silk ones, the symbol-free ones. And Mama, elegant Mama with the manicured nails, sold some of her London-bought dresses and organized a women’s group at St. Paul’s that sewed for the soldiers. I joined the group; we sewed singlets and sang Igbo songs. Afterwards, Mama and I walked home (we didn’t drive to save petrol) and when Papa came home in the evenings, during those slow months, we would sit in the verandah and eat fresh anara with groundnut paste and listen to Radio Biafra, the kerosene lamp casting amber shadows all around. Radio Biafra brought stories of victories, of Nigerian corpses lining the roads. And from the War Research Directorate, Papa brought stories of our people’s genius: we made brake fluid from coconut oil, we created car engines from scrap metal, we refined crude oil in cooking pots, we had perfected a homegrown mine. The blockade would not deter us. Often, we ended those evenings by telling each other, “We have a just cause,” as though we did not already know. Necessary Affirmation, Obi called it.
It was on one of those evenings that a friend dropped by to say that Nnamdi’s battalion had conquered Benin, that Nnamdi was fine. We toasted Nnamdi with palm wine. “To our Future Son-in-Law,” Papa said, raising his mug towards me. Papa let Obi drink as much as he wanted. Papa was a Cognac man himself, but he couldn’t find Rémy Martin even on the black market, because of the blockade. After a few mugs, Papa said, with his upper lip coated in white foam, that he preferred palm wine now, at least he didn’t have to drink it in snifters. And we all laughed too loudly.
The Igbo say—the walking ground squirrel sometimes breaks into a trot, in case the need to run arises.
Enugu fell on the kind of day in the middle of the harmattan when the wind blew hard, carrying dust and bits of paper and dried leaves, covering hair and clothes with a fine brown film. Mama and I were cooking pepper soup—I cut up the tripe while Mama ground the peppers—when we heard the guns. At first I thought it was thunder, the rumbling thunder that preceded harmattan storms. It couldn’t be the Federal guns because Radio Biafra said the Federals were far away, being driven back. But Papa dashed into the kitchen moments later, his cotton tie skewed. “Get in the car now!” he said. “Now! Our directorate is evacuating.”
We didn’t know what to take. Mama took her manicure kit, her small radio, clothes, the pot of half-cooked pepper soup wrapped in a dishtowel. I snatched a packet of crackers. Obi grabbed the books on the dining table. As we drove away in Papa’s Peugeot, Mama said we would be back soon anyway, our troops would recover Enugu. So it didn’t matter that all her lovely china was left behind, our radiogram, her new wig imported from Paris in the case that was such an unusual lavender color. “My leather-bound books,” Obi added. I was grateful that nobody brought up the Biafran soldiers we saw dashing past, on the retreat. I didn’t want to imagine Nnamdi like that, running like a chicken drenched by heavy rain.
Papa stopped the car often to wipe the dust off the windscreen, and he drove at a crawl, because of the crowds. Women with babies tied to their backs, pulling at toddlers, carrying pots on their heads. Men pulling goats and bicycles, carrying wood boxes and yams. Children, so many children. The dust swirled all around, like a see-through brown blanket. An exodus clothed in dusty hope. It took a while before it struck me that, like these people, we were now refugees.
The Igbo say that the place from where one wakes up is his home.
Papa’s old friend, Akubueze, was a man with a sad smile whose greeting was “God Bless Biafra.” He had lost all his children in the massacres. As he showed us the smoke-blackened kitchen and pit latrine and room with the stained walls, I wanted to cry. Not because of the room we would rent from Akubueze, but because of Akubueze. Because of the apology in his eyes. I placed our raffia sleeping mats at the corners of the room, next to our bags and food. But the radio stayed at the center of the room and we walked around it every day, listened to it, cleaned it. We sang along when the soldiers’ Marching Songs were broadcast. We are Biafrans, fighting for survival, in the name of Jesus, we shall conquer, hip hop, one two. Sometimes the people in the yard joined us, our new neighbors. Singing meant that we did not have to wonder aloud about our house with the marble staircase and airy verandahs. Singing meant we did not have to acknowledge aloud that Enugu remained fallen and that the War Directorate was no longer paying salaries and what Papa got now was an allowance. Papa gave every note, even the white slip with his name and ID number printed in smudgy ink, to Mama. I would look at the money and think how much prettier than Nigerian pounds Biafran pounds were, the elegant writing, the bolder faces. But they could buy so little at the market, those Biafran pounds.
The market was a cluster of dusty, sparse tables. There were more flies than food, the flies buzzing thickly over the graying pieces of meat, the black-spotted bananas. The flies looked healthier, fresher, than the meat and fruits. I looked over everything, I insisted, as if it was the peacetime market and I still had the leisure that came with choice. In the end, I bought cassava, always, because it was the most filling and economical. Sickly tubers, the ones with grisly pink skin. We had never eaten those before. I told Mama, half-teasing, that they could be poisonous. And Mama laughed and said, “People are eating the peels now, honey. It used to be goat food.”
The months crawled past and I noted them when my periods came, scant, more mud-colored than red now. I worried about Nnamdi, that he would not find us, that something would happen to him and nobody would know where to find me. I followed the news on Radio Biafra carefully, although Radio Nigeria intercepted so often now. Deliberate jamming, Obi said it was called. Radio Biafra described the thousands of Federal bodies floating on the Niger. Radio Nigeria listed the thousands of dead and defecting Biafran soldiers. I listened to both with equal attention, and afterwards, I created my own truths and inhabited them, believed them.
The Igbo say that unless a snake shows its venom, little children will use it for tying firewood.
Nnamdi appeared at our door on a dry-aired morning, with a scar above his eye and the skin of his face stretched too thin and his worn trousers barely staying on his waist. Mama dashed out to the market and bought three chicken necks and two wings, and fried them in a little palm oil. “Especially for Nnamdi,” she said gaily. Mama, who used to make Coq au Vin without a cookbook.
I took Nnamdi to the nearby farm that had been harvested too early. All the farms looked that way now, raided at night, raided of corn so tender they had not yet formed kernels and yams so young they were barely the size of my fist. Harvest of desperation, Obi called it.
Nnamdi pulled me down to the ground, under an ukpaka tree. I could feel his bones through his skin. He scratched my back, bit my sweaty neck, held me down so hard I felt the sand pierce my skin. And he stayed inside me so long, so tightly, that I felt our hearts were pumping blood at the same rhythm. I wished in a twisted way that the war would never end so that it would always have this quality, this quality of nutmeg, tart and lasting. Afterwards, Nnamdi started to cry. I had never even considered that he could cry. He said the British were giving more arms to Nigeria, Nigeria had Russian planes and Egyptian pilots, the Americans didn’t want to help us, we were still blockaded, his battalion was down to two men using one gun, some battalions had resorted to machetes and cutlasses. “Didn’t they kill babies for being born Igbo, eh?” he asked.
I pressed my face to his, but he wouldn’t stop crying. “Is there a God?” he asked me
. “Is there a God?” So I held him close and listened to him cry, and listened to the shrilling of the crickets. He said goodbye two days later, holding me too long. Mama gave him a small bag of boiled rice.
I hoarded that memory, and every other memory of Nnamdi, used each sparingly. I used them most during the air raids, when the screeching ka-ka-ka of the anti-aircraft guns disrupted a hot afternoon and everybody in the yard dashed to the bunker—the room-sized hole in the ground covered with logs—and slid into the moist earth underneath. Exhilarating, Obi called it, even though he got scratches and cuts. I would smell the organic scent, like a freshly tilled farm, and watch the children crawl around looking for crickets and earthworms, until the bombing stopped. I would rub the soil between my fingers and savor thoughts of Nnamdi’s teeth, tongue, voice.
The Igbo say—let us salute the deaf, for if the heavens don’t hear, then the earth will hear.
So many things became transient, and more valuable. It was not that these things had value, it was that the ephemeral quality hanging over me, over life, gave value to them. And so I savored a plate of cornmeal, which tasted like cloth, because I might have to leave it and run into the bunker, because when I came out a neighbor may have eaten it, or given it to one of the children.
Obi suggested that we teach classes for those children, so many of them running around the yard chasing lizards. “They think bombings are normal,” Obi said, shaking his head. He picked a cool spot under the kolanut tree for our classroom. I placed planks across cement blocks for chairs, a wooden sheet against the tree for a blackboard. I taught English, Obi taught Mathematics and History and the children did not whisper and giggle in his class as they did in mine. He seemed to hold them somehow, as he talked and gestured and scrawled on the board with charcoal (later he ran his hands over his sweaty face and left black patterns like a design). Perhaps it was that he mixed learning and playing—once he asked the children to role-play the Berlin conference; they became Europeans partitioning Africa, giving hills and rivers to each other although they didn’t know where the hills and rivers were. Obi played Bismarck. “My contribution to the young Biafrans, our leaders of tomorrow,” he said, glowing with mischief.
