By Sefi Atta
"Are you being sarcastic most times?" Miriam asked, after Fatima left.
"Me?" I answered.
"I notice," she said. "The way you talk. You say one thing and mean the other. I don't mean to be rude, but it's like I hardly know you."
She hardly didn't.
"Sometimes, I wonder if, forgive me, you are crazy."
I was thinking of Junior Wife. Could I be if I saw madness in others?
She rubbed her pretty lips. "You and I, I feel for you so strong, as though you matter more than my mother. Can I be bold? There is nothing to lose. I want to show you something."
She unwrapped her scarf from her head. Underneath was a rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, strips all over. Her hidden hair.
"It's prettier in the sky," I said.
"My husband says it's ugly. He says I've lost my head. He calls it my lost head, but he says it as a joke, mind you. I have two girls by him, you know. He loves them as boys. You will call me lucky to have such a man, but really, he should love them as girls. He also thinks he was my first. I married him when I was twenty-three, after I graduated from university. He was not my first. I lied that I was stretched by riding horses. I hope I'm not overwhelming you."
"A little." The rich again. Why would she tell me now I was about to die? Would she tell me if I were not about to die?
"What are you thinking?" she asked.
I was looking at her gold bangles.
"Does your husband have a lot of money?" I asked.
"No. We are what you call comfortable. A lot? Not at all. Do you consider me spoiled?"
I thought hard about that. In our country, Sharia was a poor person's law.
"Yes," I said.
"Are you scared to die?"
"Yes."
She drew closer. "You're carrying a child. That will give you time. They will not stone you until your child is born."
"It's a nothing," I said. "It is nothingness within me."
"Why didn't you answer the questions you were asked in court?"
"I just didn't."
"What really happened to make you pregnant?"
"What difference will it have made?"
I didn't have to think a moment about this. Sometimes I was confused, often afraid. To answer correctly was to give in most days. But so what if my reason was one or the other? I had a lover; a man who became invisible in court. There was no evidence against him, the Alkali said. I needed three independent witnesses to prove his guilt. Our Husband's testimony anyway, was greater than mine.
Miriam was crying. "You shall not be forsaken."
When stones were hurled at me, they would be hailstones on my head; hailstones over Zamfara.
"In the name of Allah," I said. "The Beneficent, the Merciful."
-- END --
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