By Sefi Atta
I could have pitied him the way he mourned. He embalmed the body. He wrapped the body in white cloth. He dug a hole and place it gently in. He covered the hole up. He even ordered a tombstone. One morning I heard him weeping like a woman, "Abu, Abu." I asked, "Would you like some tea?" His eyes widened as if he'd seen a witch. He ran away from me.
That same week he sent Junior Wife packing, back to her parents. He said she should be prepared for her foot to be cut off, after the way she neglected his son. Neglected? But he was always dumb for her sad face. I was happy to see that murderer out of the house. To kill her own child, there was no excuse, not even motherly madness. I told Fatima when she started lamenting how two losses in one week were impossible to bear. "Save your upsets. Save them for times that are worth it. They will come."
Our Husband was drinking burukutu like water now. He'd stopped going to work at his shop. He would leave home early in the mornings to do the work of drunkards. Meanwhile, his mechanics were pilfering from him. I was thinking, how did they dare in this new climate? The situation was so tense that Christians and Moslems were coming to blows on the streets, burning each other's houses, taking daggers to each other's throats. One Christian in the marketplace, a Moslem ripped a cross pendant from his neck. It wasn't even real gold. They fought until the Moslem died, and then a group of Moslems retaliated with bows and arrows on a Christian settlement. These were the stories we were hearing, and Our Husband's mechanics were pilfering? That was some poverty. I would rather beg knowing I had two hands to show for myself.
We did not hear a word from Junior Wife who had returned to her father's house. We never even asked, so we did not know her father finally begged her forgiveness for abandoning her. He said he did it to make her strong, so that she would not be homesick and run away. She told him of the threat Our Husband made. Her father said, "Come on, I'm not as wicked as Mallam Sanusi." She told him also of Our Husband's drinking, and her father exclaimed, "He drinks! You never said!"
That was it. They came for Our Husband while he was doing the work of drunkards. They dragged him out of the shack. They took him to court. The Alkali presiding over his case ordered fifty strokes. I did not know any of this until his friends brought him home, whimpering like a baby. They could find no trousers soft enough to cover his buttocks, so he was naked except for a dirty shirt. Fatima cried the most, of my daughters, as we lay him face down on his bed.
"There must be a reasonable explanation for this," I said.
He cursed Junior Wife and her father, told me what happened.
"I am so forlorn!" he wailed, louder than a muezzin. "Heaven awaits me! I've always been humble. Leave me to die. Let my sores fester..."
"I've heard alcohol helps," I said.
He wept silently now, into his mattress, gibbering something about me never changing my tricky ways and his friends coming back to save him. I used warm water and a boiled towel to cleanse his skin. The job took a long time. His buttocks looked like shredded cloth and he had urinated on himself. Shit was hanging out of him. I took Vaseline and slid it over each of the fifty welts while he sobbed on. He cursed the day this and that. He really was like a baby with all that complaining, and as I reached his anus with the Vaseline he farted.
"Hm," I said, holding my nose. "Men really should douche."
"You can't even say sorry!" he shrieked.
I was laughing. Not because of what he said, or what I saw, but because of what I'd said, men really should douche. It came out of my mouth like a bullet, without me thinking. I laughed so hard tears poured from my eyes and burned them. This house of ours, what else could go wrong?
"You evil woman," Our Husband said. "You will pay for this. You think it's funny? You will pay. Just wait. I will get better, and I will do something that will make you want to die."
I stopped immediately and held my chest. "Fatima?"
His voice became shaky. He'd reached the stage of uncontrollable lips with his crying. "W-what did Fatima ever do to me? It was you. Y-you and this horrible behavior of yours since you lost your hearing. P-punishing me, punishing me, for what was m-merely an accident. Did you think I made you h-half deaf on purpose? C-curse you..."
I nodded. So long as it was me.
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