Possessing the Secret of Joy

  EVERY DAY NOW, down below my window in the street, there are demonstrations. I can not see them, but the babble of voices rises up the wall of the prison and pours right through the iron bars.

  What I am really hearing, says Olivia, is the cultural fundamentalists and Muslim fanatics attacking women who've traveled from all parts of the country to place offerings beneath the shrubbery that is just below and around the corner from my view. The women bring wildflowers, herbs, seeds, beads, ears of corn, anything they can claim as their own and that they can spare. They are mostly quiet. Sometimes they sing. It is when they sing that the men attack, even though the only song they all know and can sing together is the national anthem. They hit the women with their fists. They kick them. They swing at them with clubs, bruising the women's skins and breaking bones. The women do not fight back but scatter like hens; huddling in the doorways of shops up and down the street, until the shopkeepers sweep them back into the street with their brooms.

  On the day I was sentenced to death the men did not bother the women, who, according to Olivia, simply sat, spent, hidden as much as they could be, at the base of the dusty shrubbery. They did not talk. They did not eat. They did not sing. I had not realized, before she told me of their dejection, how used I had become to their clamor. Even with my family beside me, cushioning the blow of the death sentence, without the noise of the battle from the street I felt alone.

  But then, the next day, the singing began again, low and mournful, and the sound of sticks against flesh.

  BENNY

  I CAN NOT BELIEVE my mother is going to die--and that dying means I will never see her again. When people die, where do they go? This is the question with which I pester Pierre. He says when people die they go back where they came from. Where is that? I ask him. Nothing, he says. They go back into Nothing. He wrote in huge letters in my notepad: NOTHING = NOT BEING = DEATH. But then he shrugged, that curious movement of his shoulders that caused my mother finally to like him, and wrote: BUT EVERYTHING THAT DIES COMES AROUND AGAIN.

  I ask him if this means my mother will come back. He says, Yes, of course. Only not as your mother.

  He said, Look at it this way. In the year nine hundred and twelve the people of Olinka had a stupid leader who put people to death by hanging. Now their stupid leader puts them to death by shooting. Now he is driven everywhere in a Mercedes. In nine hundred and twelve he was carried on the shoulders of four strong slaves everywhere he went. You see?

  I did not.

  ADAM

  WHEN SOMEONE INFORMS YOU your wife is to be assassinated publicly, it is a very bitter thing. I am always thinking of it, worrying it like a pip at the tip of my tongue. Olivia tells me not to read the papers, that they are filled with lies. I can not help it. I have become morbidly interested in this country's problems as they are revealed by inept and corrupt journalists. All the credible journalists have by now been beaten into silence, bought off, murdered, or chased into exile. The ones that are left have but one function: tell the people lies that flatter the president. In every edition of the two remaining papers there is a huge photograph of him: roundfaced, chuckleheaded, beaming like an evil moon. He is president for life, and that is that. The people are reminded over and over of his exploits as a youth against the white colonialists. They are told how, daily, he fights the neo-imperialists, who are still intent on stealing their country from them. They are told how frugally he husbands their dwindling resources and of how, during the latest interminable drought, he permits the lawn of his palace to be watered but once a week. Of course it is practically the only lawn in Olinka--lawns not being an African tradition--but no matter.

  He has been rabid in his insistence on the death penalty for Tashi. It is said all of his wives, except for the one from Romania, were circumcised by M'Lissa. The few professional women who sought a meeting with him to beg for Tashi's life were turned away by his secretary and warned they would lose their jobs if they pressed their interest in the case further. There was a photograph of the women as they were dismissed. They looked ashamed, and their eyes did not meet the camera. One easily imagined their sliding feet.

  At night I dream of Tashi as she was when she was a girl. In one of my dreams I recovered what was at one time a favorite expression of hers: But what is it? she would say, as my father or mother brought out some odd item they'd brought over or had sent to them from America. She'd never seen a kaleidoscope, for instance, and even while turning it round and round before her startled eye, and oohing and aahing at the fantastic colors and shapes it made, she would say, in a voice so filled with wonder it made us laugh: But what is it?

  In my dream I see this child, scrawny, dusty, blood trailing her heels, approach the gallows. The noose dangles before her face, rapt and curious. It is placed round her neck by the president of the republic. Still she marvels, fingers it with reverence. But what is it? she cries, as the noose is tightened and she is dropped into oblivion.

  TASHI-EVELYN

  NOW THAT JUSTICE is to be served and I am to be put to death, I am permitted visitors other than my family. One morning Olivia brings in the potters who are replicating the ancient fertility dolls.

  But they are not fertility dolls, apparently. One of the women, as stout as I am now from my sedentary life and the starchy prison food, and as solid as a tree trunk, informs me that the word "doll" is derived from the word "idol." The figures that have come down to us as mere dolls were once revered as symbols of the Creator, Goddess, the Life Force Itself. She proffers a stack of photographs of paintings she has discovered among caves and rocks in the driest parts of the country. Where, when we were children, we were told witches and hobgoblins lived. The people who actually lived there, I discovered later on as an adult, were impoverished nomads who resisted being settled, and of whose filth and flies the government, which desperately imitated its British predecessors, was ashamed. In ancient times, says the potter, pursing her lips as if sucking on a seed, the people repainted the paintings year after year. She chuckled. They lived in a vast art gallery, one could say. Now--she grimaces--they are so faded as to be barely visible. Still, with effort, as I take one of the photographs from her hands, it is possible to recognize the little figure from M'Lissa's hut, smiling broadly, eyes closed, and touching her genitals. If the word "MINE" were engraved on her finger, her meaning could not be more clear. She is remarkably alive. Nor is she alone. Another photograph shows a figure with her hand around the penis of the figure next to her. She is also smiling. Another shows a figure with her finger in another woman's vagina. She too is smiling. So is the other woman. So, indeed, are they all. Other photographs show women figures dancing, interacting with animals, nestled cozily underneath sheltering trees, and giving birth.

  We think children were given these "idols" to play with, as a teaching tool, says the other potter, in some age--she laughs--quite beyond the scope of the present imagination. And that when women were subjugated, these images were sent literally underground, painted on the walls of caves and sheltered enclosures of rock. Some of the stone and clay figures are of course in museums and private collections. The most famous one is of a man and a woman copulating, and his penis is huge; the woman appears to be impaled on it. This is an ancient image, and perhaps the reason all black penises were assumed by white people to be huge. She pauses. Many of the figures were destroyed. Especially those that show both a woman's vagina and her contented face. She shrugs. Now of course every little girl is given a doll to drag around. A little figure of a woman as toy, with the most vacuous face imaginable, and no vagina at all.

  We are not supposed to have vaginas under this scheme, says Olivia, with a smartness of speech that sometimes characterizes her, because it is through that portal that man confronted the greatest undeserved mystery known to him. Himself reproduced.

  The potters laugh.

  I have a favorite, says the stout woman briskly, and takes from the bottom of the stack of photographs one in which three figures a
re joined, much like the three-monkey sculpture See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil that Adam's parents brought from America and kept on top of a cabinet in their kitchen. Except these figures--two women and a man--have their hands on their own sexual organs and on those of the others, their arms overlapping to form a kind of wedding band.

  Thinking of it this way, as a marriage, and seeing the happy smiles on the fading visages of the fortunate three, I laugh. I can't help it. It is as if this sight strikes something awake that had been asleep, or dead, in my own body; though my body, alas, is now too damaged to respond to it in an uncorrupted way. I begin to sneeze.

  But what is it? I hear myself finally, sneezing and laughing, say. And for me, the possibility of delight is once more dimly glimpsed in the world.

  OLIVIA

  TASHI SAYS she wants to wear a red dress to face the firing squad. I remind her that her sentence is being appealed. There is also hope that the United States will honor her North American citizenship. I want to wear red anyway, she says, regardless of what happens. I am sick to death of black and white. Neither of those is first. Red, the color of woman's blood, comes before them both.

  And so, we sew.

  PART FIFTEEN

  TASHI-EVELYN

  YOU DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING, said M'Lissa, as I brushed her hair. You keep asking, as only a fool does, about the people and events of your own time. I could tell you that red fingernail polish is all that remains of woman's recognition of her own blood power and you would not understand me. Or that red on a woman's mouth signals something other than a taste for meat. Here M'Lissa grunted suggestively.

  In the old days before the people of Olinka were born as a people it is said that the blood of woman was sacred. And when women and men became priests blood was smeared on their faces until they looked as they had at birth. And that symbolized rebirth: the birth of the spirit. Myself, I was baptized by your husband's father, the missionary, and I bowed my head and held my tongue, for I knew their church's water was a substitute for woman's blood. And that they, who considered me ignorant, did not know this.

  What, other than her lying life, did I want from M'Lissa? I worried this question incessantly, as only the insane can. Each night I fingered the razors I kept concealed in the stuffing of my pillow, fantasizing her bloody demise. I swore I would mutilate her wrinkled body so much her own God wouldn't recognize her. I smiled to think of her nose lying bloody on the bed. But each morning, like the storyteller Scheherazade, M'Lissa told me another version of reality of which I had not heard.

  One day, as I was washing carefully between her clawlike toes, she informed me blandly that it was only the murder of the tsunga, the circumciser, by one of those whom she has circumcised that proves her (the circumciser's) value to her tribe. Her own death, she declared, had been ordained. It would elevate her to the position of saint.

  This confession, or lie, stayed my hand for many a day.

  M'LISSA

  I KNOW WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE can't even imagine or guess. That when one has seen too much of life, one understands it is a good thing to die.

  The very first day she came I could see my death in Tashi's eyes, as clearly as if I were looking into a mirror. Those eyes that are the eyes of a madwoman. Can she really think I have not seen madness and murderers before?

  In the village when I was a girl the mad were kept out in the bush. They lived alone in smelly, ramshackle huts, their filthy clothes in tatters. Their matted hair covering their backs like moss. I learned not to fear them, for I discovered, as all the villagers knew, that mad people, though murderous at heart, could, nonetheless, be easily distracted. If one lunged, you offered him or her--for there were always mad women and men; who never, incidentally, chose to live together--a yam. Or a song. Or a story that only a mad person could grasp the sense of. Stories we laughed at, nonsensical rhymes, made them weep. Stories sorrowful to us, about our own sufferings or those of the village, made them laugh like the fiends they were. While they laughed or cried, ate their yam or tried, usually without success, to locate the stinkweed we'd stuck in their mossy locks, off we ran.

  To Tashi I have posed the following question and, she has failed so far to properly answer it: Tashi, I have said to her, it is clear you love your adopted country so much; I want you to tell me, What does an American look like?

  EVELYN-TASHI

  WHAT DOES AN AMERICAN look like? the old witch has asked me. I started right in describing Raye. She is of a color not seen in Africa, I say. Except in certain seed pods or lightish brown kinds of wood. She has curly hair that is at the same time a bit nappy. Also never seen in Africa. And she has freckles. Also not seen in Africa. M'Lissa listens carefully and then questions shrewdly. Really? she asks. But is not America the land of the ghostly whites?

  I hasten to describe Amy Maxwell. Her wired smile and powdery skin that is tinged with yellow and pink. Her bony shoulders and marble eyes. Her teased white hair. Her sorrow and hurt.

  But M'Lissa is not satisfied.

  I begin to describe people with yellow skin and slanted eyes. These, she scoffs, must be Eskimos, of whom she has heard. Everyone knows they live far in the frozen north. Am I sure I can describe a real American?

  I describe white men from television, with hearty voices and fake warmth in their eyes. I describe Indians from India and Native Americans from Minnesota. Red women with black hair. Yellow people with blue eyes. Brown people with black eyes who speak a language from another country.

  M'lissa waits.

  It seems there is no answer to her question. Americans, after all, have come from so many places. This thought alone, I think, must boggle the mind of M'Lissa, who's never been anywhere.

  If you say to someone in Africa: What does an Olinkan or a Maasai look like, there is an easy answer. They are brown or very brown. They are notably short (Olinkans) or tall (Maasai). But no, shortness or tallness, brownness or redness, is not what makes an American.

  Finally, outdone, but also sensing an ancient trick, I stopped this little game of hers, and brought us closer to the day of her death.

  What does an American look like? she teased me complacently after several weeks had passed and I'd offered her hundreds of descriptions of Americans who rarely resembled each other physically and yet resembled each other deeply in their hidden histories of fled-from pain.

  What does an American look like? I asked the question softly to myself, and looked M'Lissa in the eye. The answer surprised us both.

  An American, I said, sighing, but understanding my love of my adopted country perhaps for the first time: an American looks like a wounded person whose wound is hidden from others, and sometimes from herself. An American looks like me.

  PART SIXTEEN

  TASHI-EVELYN

  THE VERY FIRST DAY after Mbati left, and I was required to wash M'Lissa, I saw why she was lame. Not only had her clitoris, outer and inner labia, and every other scrap of flesh been removed, but a deep gash traveled right through the tendon of her inner thigh. That was why, when walking, she had to drag her left leg. It was supported by the back tendon and the buttock muscles alone. Indeed, the left buttock was far more developed than the right, and even though she hadn't really walked with vigor in many years, there was a firm resilience in her flesh on that side.

  Yes, touch it, my daughter, she exclaimed, as she felt my fingers exploring the keloidal tissue of the old wound, as hard as a leather shoe sole. It is the mark, on my body, of my own mother's disobedience.

  Since this was the day on which I had earlier resolved to kill M'Lissa, I was unsure whether to appear interested in her life. That is, her life before she murdered Dura. But she was remembering, and I had not completed her bath. Trapped, I listened.

  M'LISSA

  SINCE THE PEOPLE of Olinka became a people there has always been a tsunga. It was hereditary, like the priests. Before the people became a tribe they lived too. But that was considered an evil time, because although everyone knew they had a mot
her, because she had given birth to them, a father was not to be had in the same way. You could not be sure. And so, your mother's brother was your father. The house always belonged, in those days, to the woman, and there were never children without parents or a home. But somehow this was seen as evil. Anyway, from the time of memory, always, in my family, the women were tsungas.

  But why is that? I asked my mother.

  Because it is such an honor, she replied. And also because it is the way we fill our bellies.

  She was a sad woman, my mother. I never saw her smile.

  She often prayed.

  When I became old enough to be aware of her suffering, I began to notice that when she prayed, she faced a certain direction, and that she often went off, walking slowly, looking back over her shoulder as if she thought someone followed her, in the direction of her prayers.

  Once, following her, I saw her enter a blighted forest where no one ever went, walk up to a hole in a rotting tree, and take something out of it. She unwrapped it, looked upon it, kissed it, and replaced it, all in a single motion. This forest was a kind of no-man's-land. Barren. Everything dry and dying. It was said this blight was caused long ago by a man and a woman fornicating there, when the area was planted in cereal grains. But this had happened so long ago no one remembered their fate, or even who they were.

  After my mother had left, I crept up to the tree in which the small wrapped object lay, and took it carefully down into my lap, where I unwrapped it. It was a small smiling figure with one hand on her genitals, every part of which appeared intact. This was before I was circumcised, and so, with the ready curiosity of a child, I lay right down to compare my vulva to the little statuette's. Hidden behind a boulder, I very cautiously touched myself. The blissful, open look of the little figure had aroused me, and I felt an immediate response to my own touch. It was so sudden, so shocking and unexpected, it frightened me. I hastily re-wrapped the little figure, placed it back in its niche, and ran.