By Sefi Atta
I was pregnant by the end of that month. I had not been as sick as I normally was. I was sicker; sick all day. It made me thin. I was worrying about Fatima's schooling. I was running around for Junior Wife's new born, Abu. She was refusing to touch him. She said he might as well have been born a stone. She cursed her parents who gave her to Our Husband in exchange for a dowry. She said marriage was like slavery.
"But you're a miserable one." I told her. Everyone was quick to compare themselves to slaves. What slave had the power to tell Our Husband to let her sleep separately? I had to fake typhoid so that he would not come to me at night. My temperatures were easy; I was making his morning teas again. My nausea was convenient.
Junior Wife told me one evening. "You're hiding something from me. You seem one way while you are the other. You say one thing and mean the other. Our husband says you do this to drive people to madness."
Her eyes were red, not from crying but from lack of sleep.
"Have you fed your son?" I asked.
"See?" she said. "You're doing it again."
"Your son needs to be fed," I said, sharply. Doing what?
"My son is like you," she said. "A snake hidden in the grass. He does not cry so that I will worry about him. That is why I no longer sleep at night."
"He's an innocent child."
"No, he isn't. His big head almost killed me."
She turned her face away from me. I moved to check her head for fever. She slapped it. "Don't touch!"
By the end of the week she was rocking herself. Her hair was falling out, her breath stank, she'd stopped douching. Her baby was shrieking now, and it was I who was acting like his mother. I, who was carrying him and attending to his mess. Our husband was furious. "This household is cursed from top to bottom. One really has to be sure where one picks his brides. Everything is falling apart since she arrived. If she doesn't take heed, I will send her back to that father of hers, so that he can do as Mallam Sanusi did and cut off her foot."
Threats. He was trying to outshriek his own son.
"What will happen to the baby?"
"He will stay here. My son will not be deserted. If his own mother won't care for him, I will accept the next best mother."
"Who?"
"Who else? You, of course. And he will attend university. And he will become a doctor. And he will be rich. Then he can be president of Nigeria..."
"Bismillah," I said. "I'm sure he will, since he resembles you."
"Oh, shut up."
To him that was an invitation to come to my bed again. Not because we'd exchanged pleasantries, mind you. He said that since I was up to my usual tricky ways my typhoid must have cleared. This time I was prepared for his entry.
"I'm pregnant," I said.
"How?"
"By the grace of Allah as usual, and it is a boy, and if you lie with me, your son will instantly be miscarried."
"Spread your legs," he said.
He was rubbing spit inside me. I was writhing not from pain, but from the thought of burukutu in my passage.
"I'm..." I said.
He collapsed on top of me.
"Will you shut up! Now see what you've done. Only you is capable of doing this to me. Never, ever, has this happened..."
His manhood was like water on my belly. His chest hairs were in my nostrils.
"I can't breathe," I said.
Junior Wife had strayed into the room without a knock. She stood there with her hair looking like a mongrel's, her eyes were redder than ever.
"Something terrible has come to pass," she said in a soft voice.
"What?"
It was I who asked. A mother knows. She senses danger. She senses it in silence, a silence that is connected to her womb.
"Have I married a couple of witches or what?" Our Husband asked, staggering out of my bed. "Why do you barge in like this?"
"Unfortunately he is dead," Junior Wife said.
"Who?"
"Abu."
I heard the ceiling collapse. You know how coincidences happen? A whole section of the ceiling just caved in behind me. It made such a noise I was sure it had pounded the floor to pieces. I turned to check. The ceiling was intact. It was Our Husband lying on the floor. He had fallen down in grief.
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