Say You're One of Them (Oprah's Book Club)

by Uwem Akpan

  In the gloom, Jubril’s heart pounded, overpowered by the man’s plea and the wonder of TV. He thought he had escaped the sight of blood and killings in Khamfi. But, from what he had just seen and heard from Yohanna Tijani, the madness had spread to the south. His mind went back to the mob of Lukman and Musa, and the mob that came to Mallam Abdullahi’s house. He pressed his tongue against his teeth till it began to hurt, hoping against hope that the images on TV were fabricated.

  In the semidarkness, it was easy to see that, apart from the mad soldier who was asleep, the refugees were agitated. Though what the northerner had said touched them, they wanted to know the extent of the damage. Would they make it to the south? Would they be mistaken for a busload of corpses and be impounded by the military? It worried them because since the Nigeria-Biafra War their people had never retaliated against the recurring massacre of their people in the north. Everyone was afraid. It was clear to them that the local channels were not ready to show the extent of the riots in the south. They pestered the policemen for cable TV, for nobody believed the local channels would tell them much.

  “No worry,” the police said, “we no be luxurious hearse, OK? Dem no go intercept us.”

  “We want cable TV o!”

  “When Abacha hanged Saro-Wiwa because of our oil, we saw it first on foreign TV!”

  “When Abacha himself die na foreign press talk am first!”

  The police instructed the driver to turn off the hazard lights and turn on the cabin lights so the bus would not be mistaken for a hearse. The driver did. The passengers’ anxieties rose and fell as the bus skirted the corners, yet some were urging the driver to move faster: death by motor accident seemed more desirable to them than the forms of death meted out by the ethnic cleansers at both ends of their country.

  By the time they started encountering vehicles traveling the other way—mainly tractor trailers and smaller trucks, the kinds that transport cows from the north to the south—even the police officers were eager to know the real situation in the south. All vehicles seemed to be going north, blazing with a full complement of hazard lights and horns. Luxurious hearses were also heading north.

  HAVING LIVED THROUGH THE ordeal in Mallam Abdullahi’s house and having just heard the testimony of Yohanna Tijani about the generous southern Christians, Jubril felt that with heroic people like this, his nation would rise above all types of divisiveness. Instinctively, in his yearning for consolation, he envisioned the different peoples of his country connecting at a deep, primordial level, where one’s life was irreversibly connected to one’s neighbor’s, like a child’s to its mother’s.

  THE FRIGHTENED PASSENGERS HAD now turned inward, for strength, and peace reigned among the different religions on the bus. Everybody seemed tired of screaming about their god in someone else’s face. Meanwhile, the police kept flipping the foreign channels for the updates they wanted. It was not long before the truth was told:

  Breaking News: Reprisal Violence in Onyera and Port Harcourt

  Both city centers were matted with corpses and gore, and the anchor said other southern cities were preparing for vengeance against the Muslims and northerners in their midst. She said buses full of southern corpses were beginning to arrive in Onyera and Port Harcourt. She said that trucks had also begun ferrying corpses of northerners killed in the southern riots back to the north, and that the country was on the verge of a north-south war. She said that what mattered in the conflicts was the fighters’ tribes, insofar as external features and dressing and language could identify them. She confirmed that the government had banned the movement of corpses to check reprisal violence.

  Images of the riots poured into the bus, the cameras pursuing the action as if it were a UEFA Champions League match. The southern youths were uncontrollable and spilled out with their machetes, guns, and clubs in every direction, like the lava of an erupted volcano. They killed and killed, as if in this singular madness they would avenge all the massacres of their people who lived in the north, in the past and in the future. The audio was so clear that the refugees could hear the slurp of machetes slashing into flesh and the final cries of the victims.

  Then, the broadcast split into three interactive frames. One showed the reporter, who was in direct contact with the news anchor in another frame. They discussed the carnage being shown in the third. Then the third frame anticipated and zoomed in on a mosque and expanded to fill the whole screen. The golden dome sparkled in the sun like a bishop’s skullcap, the corners of the mosque reaching up in four beautiful minarets, like carefully sculpted bedposts, the sky above them a rich blue canopy decorated with woolly clouds. The green and white motif of the fenced compound stood apart, like an eternal freshness, from the widening chaos of the city. Then youths with torches surrounded it, smashing doors and windows. The minarets started spewing thick black chimneys of smoke, like an industrial plant. Because there was no wind, the smoke enveloped the golden dome, which caved in before the mosque erupted in a ball of fire.

  The coverage returned to Khamfi, recapping the past two days of crisis. Tempers flared again in the bus. Jubril never thought the people of the south could be capable of such violence. And no one had ever told him that there were northerners who lived in the south, whose lives could be in danger.

  Suddenly, everybody on the bus stood up and cheered, even the police. They were like soccer fans, urging their teams to victory.

  “We’re tired of turning the other cheek!” Madam Aniema said.

  “No more northerners in Igbo land!” Emeka said.

  “Urhobo land for de Urhobos!” Tega said.

  “De Musrims done burn my church four times in Khamfi!” Ijeoma said.

  This shouting had little effect on Jubril. The sight of a mosque going up in flames had given him an instant fever, even though he himself had set churches on fire. It was too much for him, and he wept. Jubril had not cried since the gas spilled into his eyes when he lay among the Christians in Mallam Abdullahi’s house. Now the tears kept coming, and with one hand he caught their watery beads. Sobs shook his body, like that of a convulsing Nduese. He twisted in his seat to shield his face from the TV, and in this valley of tears he forgot himself—and lifted his right wrist to his face.

  HE TRIED TO PUT it back in his pocket, but it was too late. Those who saw it moved away from him, including Tega. Looking at the stern faces around him, Jubril knew it was no use trying to hide. The police asked him to stand up and come into the aisle. They frisked him for firebombs and guns.

  His hand had been sliced off just above the wrist. It had not healed yet and could not be fully straightened. It was covered by a loose ball of dirty bandage, which had all along bulged in his pocket like a gloved fist. The police removed the ban-dage and threw it out the window. The wounded skin of the stump was white and taut.

  Passengers were asking the driver to stop the bus and make Jubril get off. He refused, saying the road was unsafe. Looking at the others, Jubril knew that they were going to lynch him. Trembling more with fever than with fear, he did not shout or struggle against those who started to push him.

  “Stop! Just hold on!” Chief Ukongo intervened. “My people, a tick that sockets itself into your skin is not removed by force. . . . A stone thrown in anger cannot kill a bird . . .”

  “Old man, we no get time for proverb o!” the police told him.

  “My people, how would our Lord Jesus react to a situation like this?”

  “Pagan . . . you know Chlistianity pass us?” Ijeoma said.

  They pulled at Jubril’s shirt and tore it off, watching him the way one watches a wild animal that has just been captured. They acted slowly, deliberately, as if their anger was being bottled up somewhere inaccessible to them.

  “Gabriel, please,” Madam Aniema said, “don’t tell me you are a northerner!”

  Emeka said, “He is. Guilty . . .”

  “Sssh, be quiet!” she shushed Emeka, and everybody else kept quiet as well. “You’re not a Muslim, Ga
briel?”

  “Ah . . . ah . . . I come prom soud, but I be prom nord,” he said with a Hausa accent. “I be Catolic. I do child baftism. Mama say once you be Catolic you be Catolic porever. I want remain Catolic, abeg.”

  “Are you a Muslim?” Madam Aniema asked him again.

  He shook his head. “I no be Muslim again.”

  “I see,” she said, and broke into tears. She tried to appeal to the passengers to give her more time to talk to him, but they pushed her aside. They scolded her for crying, saying she was too emotional to face the truth.

  “Now, let’s be serious,” Chief Ukongo said. “Which north? Which south? Are you from Niger or Chad?”

  “No, Chief.”

  “Are you a mercenary?” he continued.

  “No, Chief.”

  “Because, my son,” he said, “we know some politicians in the north have hired mercenaries from Niger and Chad to fight this Sharia war with Arab money.”

  “Chief, I be one of you,” Jubril said. “I no collect money prom folitician.” His slender body tilted a bit to the left, as if his remaining hand was weighing him down. The stump was unsteady, vibrating, as if it were the source of his fever. Its muscles kept twitching, contracting and relaxing to imaginary grips.

  “I wash my hands of this boy,” the chief said, shaking his head.

  “My village get oil . . . Ukhemehi!” Jubril declared. He again attempted to convey the mangled story of his religious identity, but their murderous looks told him it was useless. These were not the stares of Catholics or born-agains or ancestral worshippers. His conversion meant nothing to them. Their stares reminded him of his fundamentalist Muslim friends, Musa and Lukman.

  When they started jeering at him again, it was not so much at his northern-southern claims, but at his supposed Christo-Muslim identity. They told him to lift up his cut wrist so that Muhammad would come to his help. He did not argue. He obliged them, raising the stump as straight and as high as he could.

  Knowing full well that these people were not going to spare him, he returned to his God of Islam, the one he truly knew, although this journey had permanently altered his fanatic worldview. He flushed the desire to be a Christian from his soul. With all he had seen and experienced, he could not forget the sources of Allah’s help during his flight. He raised his stump for Mallam Abdullahi and his family, for showing him another way. He raised it to celebrate the Christians who had held a Muslim’s prayer mats for him. He raised it for those northerners who had lived their whole lives in the south, who were struggling, like him, with the unsettling prospects of going home for the first time. He raised his arm for Yusuf, who refused, when the crucial moment came, to abandon his faith; he felt one with him, though they belonged to different faiths and worlds now. He saw the stump as the testimony of his desire to follow Allah wherever he led him, of his yearning for oneness with him.

  “CUT HIM LOOSE . . . jou wicked RUF rebels!” growled colonel Usenetok, finally awakened by the commotion.

  The sight of an amputee had caused the soldier’s fragile mind to snap again. He failed to see a distinction between a religion-prescribed amputation and limbs axed off by the RUF. He had lost his mind fighting such savagery in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

  “Soldierman, you want die for dis Muslim?” the refugees warned him. “Dis no be Liberia or Sierra Leone o!”

  “I say cut him loose . . . nowww!”

  Chief Ukongo reminded him, “colonel Usenetok, you are one of us! I keep telling you: respect the democracy you went to fight for . . . here. Respect our opinions!”

  The colonel was not going to beg them to free Jubril. He stormed the kangaroo court and took them all on. He was a soldier fighting with honor, to save a citizen. He fought as if he alone could redeem the military’s image from the untold shame and misery it had brought on the country.

  The driver was forced to stop the bus. The soldier fought on, unafraid, because long before the refugees dragged him and Jubril out and slit their throats, his sacrifices abroad had prepared him for anything. They would have taken the soldier’s body home if the police had not reminded them of the government warning against moving corpses.

  NDUESE STOOD OVER THE two corpses and barked repeatedly into the heavens. The dog mistook the still-twitching, protesting stump as a sign of life.

  My Parents’ Bedroom

  I’m nine years and seven months old. I’m at home playing peekaboo in my room with my little brother, Jean. It’s Saturday evening, and the sun has fallen behind the hills. There’s silence outside our bungalow, but from time to time the evening wind carries a shout to us. Our parents have kept us indoors since yesterday.

  Maman comes into the room and turns off the light before we see her. Jean cries in the darkness, but once she starts kissing him he begins to giggle. He reaches up to be held, but she’s in a hurry.

  “Don’t turn on any lights tonight,” she whispers to me.

  I nod. “Yego, Maman.”

  “Come with your brother.” I carry Jean and follow her. “And don’t open the door for anybody. Your papa is not home, I’m not home, nobody is home. Do you hear me, Monique, huh?”

  “Yego, Maman.”

  “Swallow all your questions now, bright daughter. When your papa and uncle return, they’ll explain things to you.”

  Maman leads us through the corridor and into her room, where she lights a candle that she has taken from our family altar, in the parlor. She starts to undress, tossing her clothes on the floor. She tells us that she’s going out for the night and that she’s already late. She’s panting, as if she’d been running; her body is shining with sweat. She slips into the beautiful black evening dress that Papa likes and combs out her soft hair. I help her with the zipper at the back of her dress. She paints her lips a deep red and presses them together. The sequins on her dress glitter in the candlelight as if her heart were on fire.

  My mother is a very beautiful Tutsi woman. She has high cheekbones, a narrow nose, a sweet mouth, slim fingers, big eyes, and a lean frame. Her skin is so light that you can see the blue veins on the back of her hands, as you can on the hands of Le Père Mertens, our parish priest, who’s from Belgium. I look like Maman, and when I grow up I’ll be as tall as she is. This is why Papa and all his Hutu people call me Shenge, which means “my little one” in Kinyarwanda.

  Papa looks like most Hutus, very black. He has a round face, a wide nose, and brown eyes. His lips are as full as a banana. He is a jolly, jolly man who can make you laugh till you cry. Jean looks like him.

  “But, Maman, you told me that only bad women go out at night.”

  “Monique, no questions tonight, I told you.”

  She stops and stares at me. As I’m about to open my mouth, she shouts, “Quiet! Go, sit with your brother!”

  Maman never shouts at me. She’s strange today. Tears shine in her eyes. I pick up a bottle of Amour Bruxelles, the perfume Papa gives her because he loves her. Everybody in the neighborhood knows her by its sweet smell. When I put the bottle in her hands, she shivers, as if her mind has just returned to her. Instead of spraying it on herself, she puts it on Jean. He’s excited, sniffing his hands and clothes. I beg Maman to put some on me, but she refuses.

  “When they ask you,” she says sternly, without looking at me, “say you’re one of them, OK?”

  “Who?”

  “Anybody. You have to learn to take care of Jean, Monique. You just have to, huh?”

  “I will, Maman.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  Maman heads for the parlor, and Jean trails after. He’s whimpering to be held. I carry the candle. We sit down on our big sofa, and Maman blows the candle out. Our parlor is never totally dark, because of the crucifix in the corner, which glows yellow green. All translucent, as Papa likes to say. Jean toddles to the altar, as usual. He places his hands on the crucifix as if playing with a toy. The glow enters into his fingers, making them green, and he turns to us and laughs. In qui
ck strides, I bring him back. I don’t want him to pull down the crucifix, which leans against the wall, or the vase of bougainvillea beside it. It’s part of my duty to tend to the altar. I love the cru-cifix; all my relatives do. Except Tonton Nzeyimana—the Wizard.

  The Wizard is Papa’s father’s brother. He is a pagan and he is very powerful. If he doesn’t like you, he can put his spell on you, until you become useless—unless you’re a strong Catholic. The color of his skin is milk with a little coffee. He never married because he says he hates his skin and doesn’t want to pass it on. Sometimes he paints himself with charcoal, until the rain comes to wash away his blackness. I don’t know where he got his color from. My parents say it’s a complicated story about intermarriage. He’s so old that he walks with a stick. His lips are long and droopy, because he uses them to blow bad luck and disease into people. He likes to frighten children with his ugly face. Whenever I see the Wizard, I run away. Papa, his own nephew, doesn’t want him in our house, but Maman tolerates the Wizard. “No matter, he’s our relative,” she says. Tonton André, Papa’s only brother, hates him even more. They .don’t even greet each other on the road.

  Though I’m a girl, Papa says that the crucifix will be mine when he dies, because I’m the firstborn of the family. I will carry it till I give it to my child. Some people laugh at Papa for saying that it’ll come to me, a girl. Others shrug and agree with Papa, because he went to university and works in a government ministry. Sometimes when Tonton André and his wife, Tantine Annette, visit us, they praise Papa for this decision. Tantine Annette is pregnant, and I know that they would do the same if God gave them a girl first.

  Without his ID, you’d never know that Tonton André is Papa’s brother. He’s a cross between Papa and Maman—as tall as Maman but not quite as dark as Papa. He’s got a tiny beard. Tantine Annette is Maman’s best friend. Though she’s Tutsi, like Maman, she’s as dark as Papa. Sometimes on the road, the police ask for her ID, to be sure of her roots. These days, my parents tease her that she’ll give birth to six babies, because her stomach is very big. Each time she becomes pregnant, she miscarries, and everybody knows that it’s the Wizard’s spell. But the couple have been strong in their faith. Sometimes they kiss in public, like Belgians do on TV, and our people don’t like this very much. But they don’t care. Tonton André takes her to a good hospital in Kigali for checkups, and Papa and our other relatives contribute money to help them, because both of them are only poor primary school teachers. The Wizard offered to give his money too, but we don’t allow him to. If he gave even one franc, his bad money would swallow all the good contributions like the sickly, hungry cows in Pharaoh’s dream.