Krista > Books: africa‎ (48)

In the fortress of our bodies
May our ideal live on
Mingled with your blood
So that tomorrow they won’t dare,
They won’t dare to murder us.

In the fortress of our bodies
May our ideal live on
Mingled with your blood
So that tomorrow they won’t dare,
They won’t dare to murder us.

All of his torturers sound the same, Fernand can’t distinguish between their voices anymore: similar timbre, just a lot of noise, goddamn hertz. What Fernand does not know is that the general secretary of police in Algiers, Paul Teitgen, made it explicitly clear, two hours ago, that he forbade anyone from touching the suspect. Teitgen had been deported and tortured by the Germans during the war. He could not understand why the police, his police, that of the France for which he’d fought, the France of the Republic, Voltaire, Hugo, Clemenceau, the France of human rights, of Human Rights (he was never sure when to capitalize), this France, la France, would use torture as well. No one here had taken any notice: Teitgen was a gentle soul, a pencil pusher offloaded from the metropolis just three months ago. He had brought his dainty ways along in his little suitcase, you should’ve seen, duty, probity, righteousness, ethics even — ethics my ass, he knows nothing about this place, nothing at all, do what you have to do with Iveton and I’ll cover for you, or so the chief had decided without hesitation. You can’t fight a war with principles and boy-scout sermons.

He thinks of her every day. He cannot keep from doing it. Cannot keep from picking up the scattered pieces of their story, as if he had to put them in order between these walls, give them a meaning in this gray shithole, bulb on the ceiling, bunk stained by former inmates, one toilet between three. Give them a direction, a solid outline, thick, drawn in chalk or charcoal. Three and a half years together: one with the other, one through and for the other. Fernand collects whatever pieces his memory more or less readily restores to him, to form a brick — a cinderblock of love alone capable, in the face of an uncertain future, to break the bones and jaws of his tormentors.

Hélène.

Almost at once she began tapping her fingers on the crutch handles, her throat dry and wanting. She glanced across at the queue, hoping to catch an eye, to ask if someone had a cigarette, but no one looked at her. Nothing else to see in the dawn other than rooftops starting to appear slowly, a series of them, going back and back into the gray light, each straddling something dark and stillborn — the empty rooms of empty homes. So many people had left. Yet even in the ones that were inhabited, there was only darkness. Everyone was here now, in this queue. There was no other life.

She woke with the thirst already upon her, still in her clothes, cold from having slept on top of the covers. Two days, three, since she had last changed; the smell of her overcast with sweat, fried food, cigarettes. Underwear’s stink strong enough that it reached her even before she moved to squat over an old plastic mixing bowl that lived beside the bed. She steadied her weight on the bed frame with one hand, the other holding on to the seat of a wooden chair that creaked as she lowered herself. She didn’t have to put the light on, knew by the burn and smell that the urine was dark, dark as cough syrup, as sickness.

There had been stories about that in the tabloids. About white people losing their jobs, not being able to find any others, of losing everything and having to live on the streets, where they were starving to death. There were photos of white children begging, of white women working as domestics for black families. A world on its head. A world that had been feared by some and that was easy to point at now, these few cases, and to say, “You see, you see.”

This strange eventful history that made a life. Not good or bad — rather, both good and bad — but that was not the point. Above all, they had been,

This strange eventful history that made a life. Not good or bad — rather, both good and bad — but that was not the point. Above all, they had been, for so long, wildly curious. Just to see, to experience all that they could, to set foot anywhere, to speak to anyone, taste anything, to learn, to know.

I’m a writer; I tell stories. I want to tell the stories of their lives. It doesn’t really matter where I start. We’re always in the middle; wherever we stand, we see only partially. I know also that everything is connected, the constellations of our lives moving together in harmony and disharmony. The past swirls along with and inside the present, and all time exists at once, around us. The ebb and flow, the harmonies and dissonance — the music happens, whether or not we describe it. A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself.

To be sixty-five was to know that you dreamed the lazy lunch beneath the plane trees and window shopping along the Croisette, but that death was what was real; to be thirty-two, as Chloe was, meant you could still pretend the inverse was true. And still, why not, for the afternoon, dream?

She had always marvelled at his calm reassurance that everything good in his life would either remain the same or get better. He took good fortune

She had always marvelled at his calm reassurance that everything good in his life would either remain the same or get better. He took good fortune for granted. As though it were impossible that it would abide only for a spell. She had never been able to shake the sense that life was war, a series of battles with the occasional spell of good things.

God forbid she ever say it out loud, but Kúnlé was a much better catch than she expected for Wúràọlá. The longer Wúràọlá had remained single, flitting from one unserious boyfriend to another, the more Yèyé had worried that, when she did decide to commit to one of them, closer to thirty than twenty, she would be left with a pool of expiring men who were unmarried because no one wanted them. On her worst days, she had imagined Wúràọlá ending up with some barely educated drunkard whose parents lived in a house with no indoor plumbing. And how would that have improved on her daughter’s fortunes in this life?

Ẹniọlá pressed his forehead against the window. So what if he was carrying a machete? Holy Michael had not asked him to hurt anyone with it, he was just going to scare people a little. If he could help his mother and sister, could whatever made it possible be as wrong as his father claimed?

Question: If an Egyptian cannot speak English, who is telling his story?

_______________________________

We fall asleep in each other’s arms. We watc

Question: If an Egyptian cannot speak English, who is telling his story?

_______________________________

We fall asleep in each other’s arms. We watch a film together and fall asleep in our outdoor clothes, in each other’s arms, her scratchy head beneath my chin. The grief numbs us both. I find myself measuring for the first time how far America is from Cairo, let alone Shobrakheit. How to bridge this ocean? How to explain all I left behind to get even this far?

We believed, we really believed that the revolution would succeed on the strength of our brotherhood, and the nobility of our cause. Had we been less occupied with documenting the losses, circulating names and dates, video footage, we might have noticed earlier that everything was not as it seemed. There was money pouring in from overseas, along with vested interests. We thought we were toppling a regime, but the whole world was involved. It seems so obvious now, but if you weren’t there, you can’t possibly judge. I can’t tell you what it was like.

William doesn’t even realize what’s at stake when I am asked by shopkeepers and street children and sugar-cane juicers where I’m from. And why should he realize? They ask him too. Those outside of a language, of a culture, see furniture through a window and believe it is a room. But those inside know there are infinite rooms just out of view, and that they can always be more deeply inside.

He dreamt of the days of glory when Jidada was such an earthly paradise animals left their own miserable lands and flocked to it in search of a bet

He dreamt of the days of glory when Jidada was such an earthly paradise animals left their own miserable lands and flocked to it in search of a better life, found it, and not only just found it, no, but found it in utter abundance and sent word back for kin and friends to come and see it for themselves — this promised land, this stunning Eldorado called Jidada, a proper jewel of Africa, yes, tholukuthi a land not only indescribably wealthy but so peaceful they could’ve made it up. His Excellency also saw himself in his dream as he’d been back then — beautiful and brimming with unquestioned majesty, a horse that stepped on the ground and the earth agreed and the heavens above agreed and even hell itself also agreed because how could it disagree? Tholukuthi lost now in Jidada’s past glory, the Old Horse nestled deeper in his seat and began to snore a sonorous tune that the Comrades around him identified as Jidada’s old revolutionary anthem from the Liberation War days.

Don’t even be fooled by how things may appear right now — I mean the terrible roads that kill people, the potholes, the broken sewer systems, the decrepit hospitals, the decrepit schools, the decrepit industrial sector, the decrepit rail system, or should I say a generally decrepit infrastructure. Then of course there’s the poor standard of living, the millions who’ve crossed and still cross borders in search of better, the misery and such things that may look depressing at first glance, that’ll make you think you’re maybe looking at a ruin. All these things happen to countries, it’s a fact of countryness, but rest assured we were in top form once. Plus, the point is not to judge a book by its cover. Because what remains is that Jidada is still a jewel, Africa’s jewel. And that right there is the Father of the Nation’s God-given legacy, reigning over a real gem. And moreover, he liberated and has protected that jewel so that Jidada will never be a colony again!

We heard and told stories of pain, stories of the Seat of Power’s violence so impossible sometimes animals simply tilted heads up and stared into the glowing Nehanda bones — reeling. Tholukuthi through these tales we learned there were in fact many untold narratives that were left out of the Seat of Power’s tales of the nation, that were excluded from Jidada’s great books of history. That the nation’s stories of glory were far from being the whole truth, and that sometimes the Seat of Power’s truths were actually half-truths and mistruths as well as deliberate erasures. Which in turn made us understand the importance not only of narrating our own stories, our own truths, but of writing them down as well so they were not taken from us, never altered, tholukuthi never erased, never forgotten.

When those who know about things say there is no night ever so long it does not end with dawn, tholukuthi what they mean is that there is no night ever so long it does not end with dawn.

A few months before I turned 30, I was told that the National Geographic Channel had picked up a new TV series and I had, amazingly, been chosen as

A few months before I turned 30, I was told that the National Geographic Channel had picked up a new TV series and I had, amazingly, been chosen as the host. This series would take me all over the world to live with different groups of indigenous peoples, participate in their customs and rituals, and learn their stories and myths in the hopes of getting a more full understanding of the veracity and importance of some legendary creatures in their cultures. Despite the fact that the only international trips I’d taken before this were to Montreal’s Biodome for a biology-club field trip in seventh grade, Puerto Rico for a microbiology conference, and a couple of self funded wildlife filming expeditions to Costa Rica, I was naively confident that this series would be nothing I couldn’t handle.

The first shoot of the series would be looking for the truth behind stories of a supposed living dinosaur, Mokele M’bembe, in West Africa, and I had been warned by our series producer Barny and executive producer Harry that it would be my “trial by fire”.

Too many scientists forget that the general public does not consist primarily of other scientists, and most people would rather hear about the possibility of a bipedal intelligent ape walking around the Great North Woods than the reality of the new barnacle you discovered. Run with that — talk about the possibility. It will get people listening. Then you can throw in some stuff about wolverines, the reintroduction of wolves, and pine martens. Make it something that people, real people, will find interesting. Throw in some jokes, give some sexy facts — more people will be interested in your lame barnacle if you lead with the fact that it has the largest penis-to-body ratio of any animal in the world. It’s over six times the total length of its body! And that’s why they call me “Barnacle Pat”… Okay, you see where I’m going. Don’t refuse to talk about something because you think it sounds silly.

It was the first time that an oil drum had washed up on the scattered pebbles of the island shore. Other items had arrived over the years — ragged

It was the first time that an oil drum had washed up on the scattered pebbles of the island shore. Other items had arrived over the years — ragged shirts, bits of rope, cracked lids from plastic lunchboxes, braids of synthetic material made to resemble hair. There had been bodies too, as there was today. The length of it stretched out beside the drum, one hand reaching forward as though to indicate that they had made the journey together and did not now wish to be parted.

You are white and your characters in An Island are black. You are female and your main characters are male. Do you worry that you might be telling stories that are not yours, or is it the responsibility of the writer to try to see through the eyes of others?

This was something that concerned me greatly and still does. I imagine that there will be people who are angered and unhappy and will (possibly justifiably) accuse me of appropriation. What I tried my best to do was to treat the subjects in the book with care – that is partly why the refugee does not speak; I did not want to speak for him. In the end, all of my writing is about trying to understand something. In this case, a large part of what I was attempting was to understand the complex history of Africa – a history made dark and even more complex by the shadow of colonialism. Where do I, as a white African in the present day, fit into that narrative? It is hard to say. This story is part of an ongoing attempt to find out where I belong within this space; it has never been about taking something for myself.

The man raised his eyes. The whites were yellow, the pupils unfocused. He spoke a word that Samuel did not understand, or perhaps had not heard correctly. He took a step forward and the man repeated it, holding out his hand as a beggar might do, as Samuel himself had done as a child with his sister when his family had been forced to move to the city. Then in middle age, his hands as arthritic as an old man from his twenty-three years in prison, he had been sent out begging again. But he had had no child as a prop, no benefit of youth to help him compete with the throngs of young men and women haunting the traffic lights at intersections. Meat on skewers, bananas, fried chicken, stuffed toys, wooden carvings. The lust for acquisition everywhere around him. Always someone hawking, someone buying, and all of it done amongst the traffic as bone-thin dogs dodged cars in search of refuse. The man motioned with his hand again, this time bringing it up to his mouth as one might do with a cup. He repeated the word.

He did not like to leave her yet, and crouched unsteadily beside her, wishing he had a handkerchief or something to wrap around her throat and bind her wound. He thought of what was to come: of covering her with stones. He remembered again Big Ro’s burial, the stink of it. Two murders. Two murders, and Samuel the undertaker for both. What had he done, what could he have done about either of them? He felt the answer rise up in his chest. These memories, these memories, hunting him down, taking possession of him. These memories, and a word now, just a word remembered, that moved inside him, sat on his tongue, waiting there, until he spoke it out loud. He turned his face towards the woman, bent down to her, said, “Violence.”

Your brothers send their greetings and wish me to tell you that they have put in a bid to win the first cinema concession in Hargeisa. I do not know i

Your brothers send their greetings and wish me to tell you that they have put in a bid to win the first cinema concession in Hargeisa. I do not know if it will be granted to them, or to one of those cut-throats on the other side of the ditch, but if you have anything to contribute, manshallah, otherwise I will tell them it is impossible. Some of these sailors return with such good fortune, son, and I hope that one day it will be you stepping out of a car with your suitcases and children and happy wife.

Do you promise me, Manie?
Holding on to him, skeleton hands grabbing, like in a horror film.
Ja, I'll do it.
Because I really want her to have somet

Do you promise me, Manie?
Holding on to him, skeleton hands grabbing, like in a horror film.
Ja, I'll do it.
Because I really want her to have something. After everything she's done.
I understand, he says.
Promise me you'll do it. Say the words.
I promise, Pa says, choked-sounding.

Amor is thirteen years old, history has not yet trod on her. She has no idea what country she’s living in. She has seen black people running away from the police because they’re not carrying their passbooks and heard adults talking in urgent, low voices about riots in the townships and only last week at school they had to learn a drill about hiding under tables in case of attack, and still she doesn’t know what country she’s living in. There’s a State of Emergency and people are being arrested and detained without trial and there are rumours flying around but no solid facts because there is a blackout on news and only happy, unreal stories are being reported, but she mostly believes these stories. She saw her brother’s head bleeding yesterday from a rock, but still, even now, she doesn’t yet know who threw the rock or why. Blame it on the lightning. She’s always been a slow child.

You understand, he says, people don’t always take what you give them. Not every chance is an opportunity. Sometimes a chance is just a waste of time.
Yes, she says. But a promise is a promise.

In any case, they soon come back. The flickering along the wrack continues until morning comes. The sirens, now that night is done, must go back to

In any case, they soon come back. The flickering along the wrack continues until morning comes. The sirens, now that night is done, must go back to the sea and hide — they lost their voices when they died. They cannot sing their secret song, “The Mystery of Right and Wrong”; they know the words but no one who would sing them truthfully to you.

I wasn’t sure if the book was making me worse or if it was all that was holding me together. My supposedly secret illness. But it somehow reassured me to think about the ways my sisters coped. Carmen had her drugs. Gloria had her hypersexuality, though not many people called it that at the time. Bethany had her anorexia. I had my diary and Het Achterhuis, which I kept reading even after I knew it by heart. The thought that we were all freaks made me feel less like one.

Girls, get used to contradictions, truthful lies and false non-fictions. What isn’t there is everywhere; the things which are, are not, you see, however much they seem to be — and what is not is what will be as long as you and I agree.

It struck me that Rachel had been right when she said that history happened not in some nebulous, exceptional elsewhere, but in ordinary concrete places, to commonplace people. My world shrank to this pair of unexceptional streets, to Hans and his family, to Anne Frank and hers. History, the war, the fate of the Franks, were personal, local, terrifyingly actual and immediate. I imagined Hans as a teenager looking out of one of the windows of the house, his hands pressed to the glass as the Nazis marched past, their boots clumping on the cobblestones, row after row of bluff and bravado and menace without purpose, a lethal behemoth composed of men just like the ones who ran South Africa and those who supported them, greater only in number, driven to savagery by a group of men whose madness they need not have fallen for but did for reasons that flattered none of humankind.

In the cold of night, I took off my regulation trench coat and my shirt. I slid my shirt onto your body and tied the sleeves against your stomach,

In the cold of night, I took off my regulation trench coat and my shirt. I slid my shirt onto your body and tied the sleeves against your stomach, a very, very tight double knot that became stained with your black blood. I picked you up and brought you back to the trench. I held you in my arms like a child, my more-than-brother, my friend, and I walked and walked in the mud, in the crevices carved out by mortar shells, filled with blood-stained water, dispersing the rats that had left their burrows to feed on human flesh. And as I carried you in my arms, I began to think for myself, by asking for your forgiveness. I knew, I understood too late what I should have done when you asked me, eyes dry, the way one asks a favor of a childhood friend, like a debt owed, without ceremony, sweetly. Forgive me.

The rumor spread. It spread, and as it spread it shed its clothes and, eventually, its shame. Well dressed at the beginning, well appointed at the beginning, well outfitted, well medaled, the brazen rumor ended up with her legs spread, her ass in the air. I didn’t notice it right away, I didn’t recognize the change, I didn’t know what she was plotting. Everyone had seen her but no one described her to me. I finally caught wind of the whispers and learned that my strangeness had been transformed into madness, and madness into witchcraft. Soldier sorcerer.

I am the shadow that devours rocks, mountains, forests, and rivers, the flesh of beasts and of men. I slice skin, I empty skulls and bodies. I cut off arms, legs, and hands. I smash bones and I suck out their marrow. But I am also the red moon that rises over the river, I am the evening air that rustles the tender acacia trees. I am the wasp and the flower. I am as much the wriggling fish as the still canoe, as much the net as the fisherman. I am the prisoner and his guard. I am the tree and the seed that grew into it. I am father and son. I am assassin and judge. I am the sowing and the harvest. I am mother and daughter. I am night and day. I am fire and the wood it devours. I am innocent and guilty. I am the beginning and the end. I am the creator and the destroyer. I am double.

Now you understand. You arrived on the back of a hyena. The treacherous creature dropped you from afar onto a desert floor. There is nothing here e

Now you understand. You arrived on the back of a hyena. The treacherous creature dropped you from afar onto a desert floor. There is nothing here except, at the floor’s limits, infinite walls. You are an ill-made person. You are being unmade. The hyena laugh-howls at your destruction. It screams like a demented spirit and the floor dissolves beneath you.

When you are several steps away they turn to each other. They suck air in through their teeth in harsh hisses. Five. This is your thought. Against a market. Five. Against a city, a nation. A planet. Women. Five. What do they think they can achieve? They can hiss as much as they wish.

She says your education is not only in your heart anymore: like hers, now your knowledge is now also in your body, every bit of it, including your heart.

That day I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and univers

That day I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t want to be having any kind of voice...
I want a louding voice.

Morufu lie down and press his head to the floor in front of Papa seven times and Papa collect my hand, cold and dead, and put it inside Morufu’s own and say, “This is your wife now, from today till forever, she is your own. Do her anyhow you want. Use her till she is useless! May she never sleep in her father house again!” and everybody was laughing and saying, “Congra-lations! Amen! Congra-lations!”

If it takes two people to make a baby, why only one person, the woman, is suffering when the baby is not coming? Is it because she is the one with breast and the stomach for being pregnant? Or because of what? I want to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than the men?

The real emperor of this country is on his farm tilling the tiny plot of land next to hers. He has never worn a crown and lives alone and has no en

The real emperor of this country is on his farm tilling the tiny plot of land next to hers. He has never worn a crown and lives alone and has no enemies. He is a quiet man who once led a nation against a steel beast, and she was his most trusted soldier: the proud guard of the Shadow King. Tell them Hirut. There is no time but now. She can hear the dead growing louder: we must be heard. We must be remembered. We must be known. We will not rest until we have been mourned. She opens the box.

An Album of the Dead

Twins, bound back to back. A young man caught mid-movement, features a blur except for that open mouth. A boy, lanky and broad shouldered, hands clasped together to beg. An old woman, immobile, defiant, chin up, eyes blazing. A man, face beaten beyond recognition, a series of swollen, broken features. A couple, wife clinging to husband, face buried in his shoulder, his ripped shirt exposing a long, angry cut. Two young men, wild curls thick against their necks, gripping hands, face-to-face, eyes only for each other. A young man, rigid as a soldier, a bloom of dark curls framing a furious and handsome face. A young man, bookish, eyeglasses, trembling, shaking head forcing a sweep of blurry features. A young man, hands bound behind his back, shoulders protruding painfully, a tender neck jutting forward, lips pursed to spit. A girl. A young woman. A nun. Two slack-mouthed beggars, Three deacons, steady eyes. Another girl. A young man, his brother, his father, identical faces, reshaped by blows, equally swollen. A girl buckling from fear, the top of her head, the face twisted in anguish and confusion. A girl, a woman, a young man, an elderly man, a man and his wife, a family of three, a defiant old man, a brother and sister refusing to let go of each other, a bent-backed woman, a tall, lithe boy. A blind man, opaque eyes. Twins again, bound back to back.

Signature: Ettore Navarr, soldato e fotografo
Signature: Colonello Carlo Fucelli, Ricordi d’Africa

“Open her legs.” He is still yelling it, even though they know exactly how his desires must be met. I both died and did not die. A butchery is being performed on me. Then I feel my nostrils being prised open and the muzzle of the gun splaying my nose. I know now that within minutes that gun will explode inside my head.I will not wake from this, I will die with my scream unfinished.

Even as they arrived, these cousins and neighbours, I felt a freak. I could read their minds, by their false smiles and their false gush. I could feel their hesitation and worse, their contempt. I knew they were thinking, Jihadi wife, with the Sambisa filth still clinging to her.

WeeeeeweeeEEEEweeeeeeEEEeeeeeeEEEEEeeeeWEEEEEEeeeeeeEEEeeee. We. On we drone, annoying on, ennuing on with our wheedling onomatopoeia. Udzudzu. Munyini. Vexatious pests! But better than your barking with wet, pungent holes! We? We sing with our dry, beating wings. A plangent vibration adrift in the air, a song as gracile as the swarm itself, our buoyant undulant throng. Why do we sing? For love, naturally.

Time, that ancient and endless meander, stretches out and into the distance, but along the way, a cumulative stray swerves it into a lazy, loose curve. Imagine the equation, or picture the graph, of the Archimedean spiral. This is the turning that unrolls the day, that turns the turns that the seasons obey, and the cycle of years, and the decades. But outer space too, that celestial gyre, the great Milky Way, turns inward and outward at once. And so we roil in the oldest of drifts – a slow, slant spin at the pit of the void, the darkest heart of them all.

“What is it you want from me?” I ask out loud, and like a match striking its strip, I think I have an answer. The recordings and the transcripts I hav

“What is it you want from me?” I ask out loud, and like a match striking its strip, I think I have an answer. The recordings and the transcripts I have made of Pó are an intimate invitation to experience this world through her recollections. Unencumbered. Raw. The question What for? comes back at me. I flick my cigarette over the balcony, orange ember spinning. I don't know how this story will end. But I know how it began. I press my pencil to paper, write They are called children of the moon.

My mother pushed me out into a warm evening, where I took my first breath. I was told this story countless times by Simu. I never tired of it. The moment I slipped out from my mother I was greeted by the moonlight that crept into the mouth of our mud hut. My pale body dragged across my mother's belly and to her breast. My skin, white as bone. A curse. A moon child, the men muttered, before running away. Simu remained to soothe the concern in her sister's eyes.

Shortly after I checked into the Hotel Tivoli, I dragged a chair and table out onto the fourth-floor balcony of my corner room, arranging them so that I could see bits of the ocean to my left and the fragile buildings of this poor city to my right. The shouts from shop vendors and street brawls that spilled from bars onto dirt roads, the smell of smoke from outdoor kitchen fires, all reminded me of the favela where I was raised. Like Serrinha and surrounding Florianópolis, there's nothing beautiful about this city; nothing about its architecture inspires me, except at dusk when lights twinkle from apartments or the glow from open storefronts floods the streets, and I think of quieter times.

I don't deserve to participate in life, not after what I saw and what I did. I used to catch myself smiling – children playing, piri piri shrimp, All in the Family – and I would feel guilty for letting joy creep inside me. They give me risperidone, which dulls the noises in my head and lets me drift off to a time and place where everything seems real. I keep telling myself that it's better not to look back. Nothing good comes from going back. Now, I spend part of my day or what is left of the night in my bed or in my chair staring into the dark until my eyes can pierce the thickness to see clearly through it. I see people, animals, and objects all around me, though they try to hide in the carpet pattern or in the paintings on the wall. I never switch lights on in the basement. I like it this way. “I used to have a dream as a boy – not a nightmare,” I say. Then I realize I am alone. Still, I'm careful not to speak too loudly or to give too much away. You never know who is listening.

“Oh God! Nonso, they are! It is like a coordinated song, the kind they sing during burial ceremonies. Like a choir. And what they are singing is a

“Oh God! Nonso, they are! It is like a coordinated song, the kind they sing during burial ceremonies. Like a choir. And what they are singing is a song of sorrow. Just listen, Nonso.” She stood silent for a moment, then she stepped back a bit and snapped her fingers. “It is true what your father said. It is an orchestra of minorities.”

He hadn't considered that he had been broken by the world. The birds were the hearth on which his heart had been burned, and – at the same time – they were the ashes that gathered after the wood was burnt. He loved them, even if they were varied while he was one and simple. Yet, like everyone who loves, he wished that it be requited. And because he could not tell even if his singular gosling once loved him or not, in time his love became a deformed thing – a thing neither he nor I, his chi, could understand.

All who have been chained and beaten, whose lands have been plundered, whose civilizations have been destroyed, who have been silenced, beaten, raped, plundered, shamed, and killed. With all these people, he'd come to share a common fate. They were the minorities of this world whose recourse was to join the universal orchestra in which all there is to do is cry and wail.

“You have,” she said. “I gbu o le onwe gi.”
Surprised by her switch to Igbo, he did not speak.

Oh, boy, you no sabi wetin you dey talk...Nothing wey person eye no go see these days oh. Im see nyash wey tripam – na im be say im love me.

Ijango-Ijango, the ndiichie say that if a wall does not bear a hole in it, lizards cannot enter a house...Egbunu, the old fathers say that a mouse cannot run into an empty mousetrap in broad daylight unless it has been drawn to the trap by something it cannot refuse...Agbaradike, the great fathers in their discreet wisdom say that seeds sown in secret always yield the most vibrant fruit.