By Sefi Atta
Junior Wife came to me. "I'm pregnant."
"That's very good," I said.
"I vomited all morning."
"It's a girl then."
"Why?" she asked.
"If it's a boy you will vomit all day."
She rolled her eyes. "I don't believe in that."
"Ask your mother. Didn't she teach you anything before you left?"
"It's not a girl, I know."
I had not thought of that. I was so happy Our Husband left me alone at night I was lulled into a stupid state. I was even singing while I cooked. A boy? What would happen to the rest of Fatima's secondary education? I was staring at Junior Wife's face. She had such a haughty expression. Pregnancy had made her stronger, as if she'd found a new companion I could not separate her from.
She actually refused to bed Our Husband. "I have my limits," she said. "You were naive when this happened to you. You didn't know how to trick him. I've told him that if he touches me, his son will be miscarried instantly."
He was dumb enough to swallow that fib? Ah yes, of course, he knew how to find a young girl's passage, but he didn't care what was going on in her passage.
"I should cook you a meal," I said. "To celebrate."
I wanted my hands to be busy. I did not want to hear about the possibility of a son.
"Many thanks," Junior Wife. "But I only eat what I myself have cooked from now on. My mother taught me that, at least."
What a cheek for her to assume I would be so malicious as to poison her.
As she grew bigger, the changes began in Zamfara. The state government was building Sharia courts, appointing Alkalis to preside over them. A contractor laid the foundation for a court in our town center. The earth cracked during the dry season, sandstorms came and went, hailstones followed and dented the finished aluminum roof of the court. I thought it was a divine sign. That was the first time I heard that the Koran forbade women and men from traveling in the same busses, girls and boys from attending the same schools. Fatima and other final year girls were transferred to an afternoon session. The boys had the morning sessions. By the afternoons, most teachers were tired and went home anyway, because the girl students were not many. Fatima's school marks remained high throughout. She even won a trip to a television station, after writing an essay about Heaven. She came back with her eyes so big: "Mama, I met Miriam Maliki. She reads the news on television. She says I could train with the station after I leave school."
I looked at my beautiful daughter, jumping up and down. Would anyone care what knowledge she had in her head? And if she ever were on television how would I see her? "We don't own a television," I said, to be the first to disappoint her.
But she would not stop talking about her Miriam Maliki. Oh, Miriam Maliki had such a pretty smile. Oh, Miriam Maliki wore gold bangles and covered her hair to read the news, because her husband's family disapproved of her exposing herself. And oh, Miriam Maliki had been on Hajj to Mecca.
I thought, what a dimwit for a woman. To care about work when she came from a home with money. She could afford a trip to Mecca? And back? That was typical of the rich; nothing better to worry about. I thought I would tell her off, this Miriam Maliki, if ever I saw her. She had let women like me down.
Then before the end of school term Fatima's favorite teacher, her English teacher was fined for braiding her hair with extensions. Allah--I don't tell a lie. The Alkali presiding over the poor woman's case warned her that she would spend time in jail if she didn't stop being fashionable. Hair perms were not allowed anymore. Hair dye was not allowed, except dark brown and black. We heard of a thief in another town who had his hand cut off by a surgeon at the general hospital. The nurses there buried the hand instead of throwing it away. Our Husband came home complaining that people who drank burukutu were being flogged publicly. We got word of the student in another school far from Fatima's. She too was to be flogged, because she was pregnant. Thirteen years old, and she said a mad man had raped her. Unfortunately, the Alkali told her, as she was a woman, her testimony was not so important.
I can't go on, says Beckett's Unnamable. I will go on. A writer's injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.
And Proust, too, killing himself to write his book comes close to the concept of dharma when, echoing Balzac, he says that in the end it's less the desire for fame than 'the habit of laboriousness' that takes a writer to the end of a work. But dharma, as this ideal of truth to oneself, or living out the truth in oneself, can also be used to reconcile men to servitude and make them find in paralyzing obedience the highest spiritual good. 'And do thy duty, even if it be humble,' says the Aryan Gita,
'rather than another's, even it be great. To die on one's duty is life: to live in another' death.
My discovery over the years is that the mother tongues have so much in them, so much that is alive, and are much more pervasive, in all strata of society, in all ages from children to the very old, men and women, literate and non-literate. What holds them together? It's not Sanskrit. It's these mother tongues. I think I went into linguistics because of that. That spoken languages had to be very, very important. It was important in my youth to have discovered this.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We are talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled expression in economical ways. Let's not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by daemons. He doesn’t know why they chose him and he is usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
I am trembling with cold