The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  I was angry. It was dark and stinging with mosquitoes. There was no satellite TV in my hotel room. Back in my hospital, the sly Dr. Maleek was positioning himself for the soon-to-be-vacant office of Chief Medical Director. My fellow consultants and contemporaries were attending conferences and seminars from Joburg to Stockholm, touring with escorts of polyglot, lanky ladies leaving trails of perfumes in their wake. I? I was walking dangerous streets with a drunk reeking of beer and week-old sweat.

  ‘That’s Sheesti,’ he said.

  ‘Who, where?’

  He pointed with his jaw, and then he was gone.

  I was afraid. This was precisely the point for me to call it a night. I urgently had to return to the safety of my car and the security of my boys—because scientific research is best conducted with two feet solidly on the ground. Any mugger looking at my clothes just then could reasonably expect to raise three or four hundred thousand naira between my wallet and mobile phones. I was a legitimate target. But the speed of Jonszer’s withdrawal made it impossible for me to remove myself from the area of risk without actually taking to my heels—an undignified option, which was out of the question. I was still undecided when a man stormed out through the huddle. He was carrying a box and cursing under his breath. The scientist in me paused, warring with the human in me, which desperately desired the owner’s corner of my Mercedes. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked, as the man flung the box into the boot of the car.

  ‘I am a detribalised Nigerian!’ he shouted, seemingly, addressing not just all of Lemue Street, but the entire Kreektown itself. ‘My father is Yoruba, my mother is Ibibio!’

  ‘Calm down,’ I told him.

  He only shouted louder: ‘My hospital is in Onitsha! I have lived in Kano! In Calabar! In Lagos!’

  ‘Just like me,’ I told him, but he had slammed the boot shut and stormed back into the house.

  I was free again to go, but by now the human in me was even more curious than the scientist. I approached the house, whose number I now saw was 43. The huddle resolved into two weeping women. The younger was begging the older, who was replying, ‘There’s nothing I can do, now, there’s nothing I can do.’

  I clasped my fingers over the gentle rise of my stomach and, using a voice developed over thirty years of clinical medicine, asked, ‘Are you quite all right? I am Chief Doctor Ehi Alela Fowaka, JP. Is there anything at all I can do to help?’

  I got the polite response that has been my lot, anywhere I go in this respectful country. They greeted me properly, the younger one curtseying, but before they could speak further, I-am-a-Detribalised-Nigerian stormed past, fuming, ‘You are all wizards and witches! I’m sorry! Wizards and witches, that’s what you are!’

  ‘Easy, Denle, this is . . .’ began the younger woman, but the man was having none of it. He had a half-packed bag in his hand, and with the other hand he grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her towards the car.

  ‘Let’s go, Sheesti, before they actually kill you. Wizards!’

  ‘Is because we love you . . .’ began the older, but two doors slammed shut and one very angry Honda swerved away from Lemue Street.

  I was standing before the older woman when suddenly I recognized the transcendental moment of the entire research project. A river of wisdom and calm understanding flowed through me, and I understood how the gurus of the fallen religions of the world can become seduced into the delusion of godhood. I deduced the elaborate social mechanism used by this atavistic society to corral her poor members into communal compliance. ‘You must be Sheesti’s mother,’ I said gently.

  She nodded.

  ‘She looks quite alive to me; why would you hold her funeral?’

  She opened her hands. ‘It has nothing to do with me. It is custom. It is all right for her to marry a foreigner—we encourage our daughters to marry foreigners—but they must take your name and come and live in Kreektown. That is our custom.’

  ‘Otherwise you apply the emotional blackmail of a symbolic funeral?’ I shook my head gently, as nonjudgmentally as it is possible to be without partaking in stupidity. ‘This is 1994, you know, not 1794. We have laws, federal laws. And what does your husband have to say about this?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You don’t mind if I have a word with him? Is he in the square, partaking of this lu—of this custom?’

  ‘He’s inside, but . . .’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry.’ I smiled. This is one thing that thirty years of senior medical practice gives you: the ability to say grave and serious things with a smile. People are used to accepting tough news from doctors. Anyone else brings the news and they go to pieces, or go ballistic, but a doctor—with the experience—breaks it, and you see the difference. I pushed past the woman—now, this is not something I would normally do, pushing myself so precipitately into private affairs, but the things one does for one’s nation . . . I stood in the middle of a large living room—desperately poor, of course, by my standards, but in the context of Kreektown, quite middle-classy, really. There was a colour television, a fancy sofa, and most bizarrely a chest freezer; and in the middle of all that sat a sad-looking man in a wheelchair. ‘Good evening, sir,’ I began.

  He just leered at me. I began to feel vexed. I normally would not have given him a ‘sir’ but for the wheelchair.

  ‘He hasn’t said a word since his stroke in 1989,’ she said, from very close behind me.

  Munificent God! This guru thing was quite exhausting.

  She continued without a break: ‘He has nothing to do with this; it is custom. He himself is an Igarra man. We married in February 1973, and he moved here in April of that very same year. Since then he only visited his own town in Igarra maybe five or six times before his stroke. Is what I told Sheesti . . . Is it cold enough?’

  I touched the bottle of wine she had produced for my inspection from the chest. There was a strong smell of goat meat from the exterior of the bottle, but the cork seemed intact.

  ‘It’s very nice, thank you.’

  She opened it and poured me a glass, talking all the while, as her physical proximity forced me backwards and heavily onto her sofa. ‘Is what I told Sheesti, I told her, “Marry him and bring him here, like I did with your daddy,” but no . . .’ and she went on and on.

  I sat there sipping the wine, ignoring the smell of meat, and trying hard not to stare at Sheesti’s father. The mother was clearly a woman’s woman; her English was as fluent as her Menai and her sentences flowed steadily, brooking no interruption. She manifested the Menai custom of aggressive hospitality, which I was prepared to indulge in this case, since her offering was a sealed, if pathetically cheap, bottle of wine. A few weeks earlier I had been forced to reject an unhygienic offering of locally brewed gin invested with an eye-watering reek, only to observe the subsequent hostility and animosity, which forced my visit to end rather more precipitately than I planned.

  The eyes of Sheesti’s father seemed quite alive, despite the long dribble that led down from rubbery lips to a wet shirt. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from this Igarra man who could not attend the funeral of his Menai daughter who was not yet dead. Yet I was a scientist with a job to do. I turned to his wife, feeling the Igarra eyes burning paralysing lasers into the side of my head. ‘Who is behind this thing?’ I asked, firmly, cutting off her chatter. ‘Who organized this funeral?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and disappeared into the house, apparently to produce some documentary evidence. This was the good thing about dealing with people of a better quality than the Jonszers of this world. Documentary evidence would go down very well on a presidential report. In the meantime, I was forced to return to the scrutiny of the ‘master’ of the house. I wondered whether to attempt a one-sided conversation in which I would supply commentaries, questions, and suggested answers. This was usually not a problem for me. With my thirty years’ experience, armed with a treatment chart, I can hold a ten-minute ward-round conversation with a comatose patient, particularly with a dozen studen
t nurses and doctors clustered around me, trying to pick up useful hints for their viva exams. But there was something about that Kreektown parlour that threw me off my stride. This did not seem the proper forum to review the pessimistic prognoses of cerebrovascular accidents.

  Then she returned. She did not have any facts, figures, or documentary evidence, but she had painted her face, and although she still looked like my mother’s marginally younger sister, she no longer looked like the mother of a woman whose funeral dirge we could hear from the square. Then she came and sat next to me on the sofa, close enough for me to perceive a rather rancid variation on the eau de parfum theme. ‘As I was saying,’ she began, and there was something else in her voice, which was when I looked at the sadness in the eyes of the Igarra man and realised that, president or no president, this fieldwork was ending right there, right then.

  ‘By the way,’ I interrupted kindly, ‘what’s your name?’

  ‘Ruma,’ she simpered.

  ‘Ruma,’ I said, ‘good night.’

  SHEESTI KROMA-ALANTA

  Kreektown | 19th April, 2000

  Ruma aged suddenly and it took the villagers by suprise. It happened in the weekend her headmaster husband died. He had not said a word in the twelve years of his stroke, in the twelve years of his retirement from Kreektown Primary. He was a presence in the house that many imagined she was better off without. Yet once he died she went to pieces, weeping without a break, in spite of how old it made her look.

  I came alone for the burial, without my children and my husband. I stayed at the Kilos Inn at Ubesia, missing most of the silly ceremonies. In the evening when he was already buried, I slipped in to comfort my mother and to leave her the provisions I had bought. Then I left for home.

  I had buried him a long time ago, after all—before his stroke, in fact, on that day that he flogged me after hearing about my kissing the son of Lazarus. After the things he himself had done to me.

  And that would have been it: one more attachment to Kreektown pulled out of my life, leaving just that shrivelling root of my mother. One final visit left to pay . . .

  And then I had the strange meeting with Mata Nimito.

  * * *

  THE DRIVER had been driving fifteen minutes towards Ubesia when I remembered the ukpana leaves. By this time my anger was gone, the anger I needed to walk coldly through my old haunts. The anger I needed to look boldly at my flesh and blood, who had buried me alive.

  Our first son, Moses, was prone to eczema. It had defied Denle’s creams, and I had had a bet with him: Menai children did not live with eczema; they had a weekly bath with ukpana leaves for a couple of months, and that was that. Yet I did not have the Igbo word for ukpana, or the English word either. Didn’t have a clue how to ask for it in any herbal market in Onitsha. I just knew where the ukpana bushes grew in Kreektown, near the abandoned church.

  I had Razak turn around, and we returned to my old hometown. I could not stop thinking of my mother. We had probably had all of an hour together. Ruma had gone from dressing up in skirts to pining for her grandchildren. She did not say a word, but I knew it, now that I was a mother as well. She had made three clothes for them. She had never made me clothes and the lack of practice showed. I had thrown them in the boot, and I will throw them in the bin, but I could not stop thinking of her.

  We got as far as the car could go and I told Razak to stop. It did not occur to me to ask for his protection. Safety was not something one ever thought about in Kreektown. Even in these days of the roughboys, I am not really bothered. I was nearly raped once, outside Kreektown, but he ran away when I lied about my AIDS status. Anyway, the ukpana bushes were still some distance by footpath, so the quicker I left, the better. And I wanted to walk out the silly feelings in my head, not sit in a car and let them fester.

  I saw his singate even before I saw him. He stood in the path, on the bend just before the first clump of bushes. Behind him was the purple-blue of the ukpana sprays, but there he stood, not quite blocking the way, though his presence was enough to have turned me around, had I not walked so far already. Here then was the man I loathed most in the entire world.

  Leaving the People for marriage was not the great unnameable offence it used to be. Too many Menai had died; the end was clear. I had had measles during the Lassa fever outbreak of the ’80s and so did not get the vaccine that had doomed my people. It was obvious that I had to make a future with someone outside my dying nation. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to have looked the other way with Denle and me, but no, he had to bring the weight of our archaic traditions down on the life I could have had. And that was the first nineteen years of my life excised . . . and now here he was, before me.

  The anger blinded me to the obvious questions: what was he doing there, why was he without the helpers who took him around in these latter days of his ancientness? His eyes were shut, as well they should be. His Menai heaven would probably fall at the taboo of a mata locking eyes with a ‘dead person.’ I steeled myself and walked up to him and started past him.

  ‘Sheestumu?’ he whispered. I froze. Mata Nimito named all Menai. He was an old man that the town mostly forgot, until there was a need to remember him: burials, namings, disputes . . . Nobody would ever consider him a friend. There were too many generations between him and us. But he did have that playful way with my name. He let his singate fall and lifted his arms . . . raising the bag of ukpana from his red robes, the leaves plucked just below their nodes, to preserve their potency. I took them, too. It did not seem likely he had a problem with eczema. I put his ceremonial staff back in his hand. His eyes were pinched so tightly shut I wondered if he were now blind. ‘Eniemute?’

  A warm glow started in me. The love for a husband comes from a region of the mind. The love for a father comes from another. There is no crossover. I felt a glow building from a hearth I had thought was terminally broken. I told him of my children, their names. He shook his head impatiently. ‘Eniemute!’

  With a dry mouth, I described Moses: the long limbs he owed to his father, his quick temper . . . Ameizi, he said. I described Cynthia, who looked so much like my baby photograph . . . Anosso, he said, and then I described my baby, Patricia, who had the nurses pledging their sons in marriage . . . Ogazi, he said.

  The naming was complete.

  Then he began to sing my torqwa! I that was dead to Menai! I fell on my knees, enthralled again by the antiquity of my lineage. I knelt there, streaming tears as the poetry of my identity bore me from the caravan of the exiled crown prince through the dunes and the deserts and the savannahs and the forests and creeks of their sojourn. I listened to the descendants of young Auta, trumpeter in the court of the crown prince, Xera, and his wife, Aila, daughter of Numisa, until

  Rumieta Kroma the trader of cloth

  married Teacher Gaius from Igarra

  to birth Sheesti, little mother

  who, with Denle, son of Alanta,

  scion of Esie, built pillars for Menai:

  three pillars of Ameizi, fierce athlete,

  Anosso her mother’s cunning vomitimage

  and Ogazi the fair, for Menai without end . . .

  I gripped my nose, as I rose, caught my breath so tight . . . Only now, hearing my torqwa in the Mata’s voice, did I realise the darkling power of my funeral . . . For the first time since the arrival of my children, I felt they were not stillborn. They were named, properly named from the font of all Menai. I may still languish in that never-never world of a Menai who is neither dead nor ancestor, but in the land of ancestorsMenai, my children were known. Denle could not, could never know the burden of the crush of death.

  I probably thought the Mata was going to fall, for he did sway, and fragile, fragile was the rag of bones and flesh that I grabbed as I found my feet, and held, but fierce, fierce was the grip he locked me in. How long we stood there, racked by dry spasms, I don’t know, how long I stood, crooning over the man I hated most in all the world, until with
a long breath he was stilled and the old body became rigid like a trunk. His arms fell away, but for a thin finger pointing at the singate he had dropped once again to hold me.

  My eyes were red, and I was grateful he was being blind. His onion-thin skin was dry. He smelled of roasted corn. Freshly roasted corn and aged palm wine. He stood erect, implacable, like a sentinel from the past. There was no other word, no bon mots and no goodbye, but I knew it was time to go. What had happened was something that had not happened, could never have happened, but I was gifted with a memory of it.

  I turned and fled to the car, back to 43 Lemue Street in the old village. She did not argue, and I felt like the mother packing the little girl off to college. She packed her property slowly, touching things that would not fit into the car, like she was saying goodbye. Without the anger in my eyes I saw more of her, and although she had never said it in her letters, I knew now that she was dying—for her to leave the living Menai and go with her dead daughter. To break so unceremoniously with tradition. She began to pack her thirty-year-old crockery, the set so special that she never used it, and I sighed and stood up firmly. Ten minutes later we were ready to go. We shut down our Kreektown house for good and went to mine.

  * * *

  Onitsha | 10th September, 2001

  My darling husband did not throw me out, but it was a near thing. He ran his own private hospital with a businessman’s flair. Even before we got married he had built two houses from his steep fees. With me there, less of the fees ended up buying female handbags, and we had added a couple more. Managing tenants and children was enough work for me. He did not talk to me throughout that week I brought my mother home. All he muttered, again and again to my hearing, was ‘Blood is a terrible thing!’ So I moved her to one of our empty flats. That compromise seemed to work.