You both knew when the baby was due to come and you knew what you would name her. You’d name her Ikuku, the term for the sacred winds which were believed to hold everything together. By then, you had made your decision.
“Today,” you told him, one night. “Because the baby will come tonight.”
Neither of you wanted to do it, really. But it was the only way to put things back in balance. No longer would your hair hold you together. Ikuku would. You walked to your parent’s home where you knew you would find your mother and father working in their garden.
“Papa,” you said, your voice slightly shaking, your hands pressed into the small of your back. “Osaze and I need you.”
“You and Osaze?” her mother said, releasing the rope of vine she was pruning. She looked at your father and you noticed that there was a slight smile on her face. You see, you were her child and when you met Osaze, she knew she had lost you to him for good. Or so she thought. She always dreamed that one day, you’d at last come back to her as Nourbese, her daughter. Today was that day.
“Yes, mama,” you said. “Your granddaughter arrives tonight.” You paused, knowing that once the words were spoken then they would come true. You felt Osaze’s arm come around your waist and rest on your belly.
“We need you . . . to separate us,” he said, looking her father in the eyes. Then he looked at the machete her father had in his hand.
Osaze’s parents were also called to bear witness to the event and by the time they arrived an hour later, a crowd of siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, and villagers had gathered.
“Please, papa,” you desperately said. “Do this quickly before more people come.”
By this time, your eyes were like a rare rain cloud and Osaze clung to you as if to let go would cause him to fall. Osaze’s parents huddled with your mother as your father sharpened his machete with a stone. You were very aware of the whispers. Several people had even come up and pleaded with you and Osaze not to separate.
“Please,” one man said, placing his hand on Osaze’s shoulder. “Our crops will fail, o.”
“Why are you doing this?” a woman said, taking your hand and squeezing. “Why not wait until after the baby?”
“You have made this place flourish,” an old man said, his wrinkled light brown hands clasped tightly together. “Now you want to make it die?”
“You will die if you do this,” an old woman said with tears in her eyes. “And then your baby will.”
At this, Osaze had looked at you and you looked away. And again, you had mumbled the response that you had mumbled to the others, “It must be done.” It was a sacrifice that needed to be made. But this time, you shivered. You weren’t sure if the process would kill you. You weren’t sure if the hair had become more than what it was. When cut, would it bleed? What a tragedy it would all be if all three of you died.
And if we don’t die, well, what if it hurts? you thought. If the pain was too great, the child would suffer trauma, too. But if you died . . . your father would cut the baby out of you. Your mother had told you about such a thing that had been done when a pregnant woman’s heart had stopped. The child that had been cut from the woman’s body was one of the children you’d grown up and played with before you met Osaze.
Doubts filled your head and maybe they made your head too heavy, for you still laid yourself on the sandy ground when the time came. You and Osaze had purposely lain three feet apart to give enough space to cleanly expose the thick cord of golden-brown twisted hair. You were face to face but when you looked at Osaze he would not meet your eyes.
You wanted to reach for Osaze’s hand as you lay there but you didn’t. Osaze didn’t try to reach your mind, either. You patted your belly as the child gave a soft kick.
“I will do it now!” your father loudly announced. He was sweating freely, large drops tumbling down his forehead and from his thick white black afro. But his hands held the machete tightly, firmly.
You glanced at the rising machete, which glinted in the desert sunshine. And then you shut your eyes just as the machete came down. But Osaze kept his open, so you were able to see it happen anyway. You’d never forget how the first chop left a deep gash in the hair. It made a meaty sound and reminded you of the first gash made in the neck of a bull when it was slaughtered. A perfect deep, mortal slice. You were certain that you smelled the copper smell of blood.
Now it would have to be finished. You saw stars before your eyes and you felt Osaze’s closeness retreat. It was like letting out your breath after you’d been holding it for nine months. It felt . . . good.
Your father chopped and chopped. And you could hear the gasps of the crowd with each chop. You could feel your head able to move back a bit more with each chop. Until the last chunk of hair gave and you both came loose. Osaze slowly sat up, his rope of hair flopping on his shoulder, but he was looking at you. You were farther away from him than you’d been in a decade.
“Osaze,” you whispered as your mother helped you up. Osaze’s mother came and helped, too, for you were quite heavy with your pregnancy. Your father just stood there staring. He’d later bury the machete he’d used in the sand.
The rope of hair on your head felt heavy and light at the same time. You leaned on your mother and straightened out your long green dress to hide the anxiety you felt from being so far from your true love. You took a step toward him but before you could get closer something in your belly gave, and liquid splashed down your legs into the sand.
“Osaze!” you screamed. He was running to you before you even spoke and had you in his arms before you could take another breath. You were not too heavy for him to hold up. “Take me home,” you said. You looked behind you. “Mama!”
“I’m coming,” your mother said. And so did your father, Osaze’s parents, your aunt, and the rest of those standing around.
Osaze didn’t leave your side the entire time. He placed his warm hands on your cheeks and absorbed as much of your pain as he could. Afterwards, he’d have burst blood vessels dotting the whites of his eyes and speckling his neck. As dawn approached and the birds of the desert began to sing, the voice of your first child sang to the air. She was a fine and healthy girl.
After that day you and your husband were called by your respective names and, as two individuals with a profound connection, you raised your baby. Your daughter took much pleasure in running from you to Osaze and back to you, her strong legs relishing in the exercise. And when she was two, she learned to climb the tough stems of the flowers in the flourishing croplands.
So you see, once again, you learned that sometimes love is best when two are separate.
Tumaki
Dikéogu Audio File Series
begun April 8, 2074
Current Location: Unknown Region, Niger
Weather: 36º C (98º F), N.I.U.F.
(Not Including Unpredictable Factors)
This audio file has been automatically
translated from the Igbo language . . .
Tumaki
I found the electronics shop two blocks from my hotel. All I needed to do was go in the opposite direction of the market.
The small store was packed with all sorts of appliances and devices. A few were from Ginen, like the solar powered e-legba that was part machine and part plant and the very small unhealthy-looking glow lily. Most everything else was very much from earth. Thin laptops, standard e-legbas, all kinds of coin drives, batteries, and hardware like bundles of wiring, piles of microprocessors, digicards, and every kind of tool imaginable. It was a tinker’s dream. It was my nightmare. Way too cramped. I planned to be quick.
To make things worse, the place was air-conditioned. The minute I walked in, my skin instantly started to protest. I wrapped my hands around my arms as I stepped up to the counter. A woman stood behind it. At least I thought it was a woman. I’ll never get used to burkas. Maybe it’s the southeastern Nigerian in me but those things are creepy.
About fifty percent of the
women in Niger wore them. Most are made out of stiff cotton and a cotton screen covers the women’s faces. You can barely see their eyes. These women, especially when you see them walking down the street at dusk or dawn, scare the hell out of me. They look like ghosts, all silent and mysterious. No, I’ve never liked burkas.
“Yes?” she asked. Okay, so I had been standing there staring. I never knew whether I was supposed to speak to these women or not. And since I couldn’t see their faces, I was even less sure.
“I . . . ”
She sighed loudly, rolled her eyes, and held out a hand. It was a careful hand. My mother would have described it as the hand of a surgeon. Her nails were cut very short, the palm of her hand slightly calloused. Her fingers were long and they moved with a precise care that reminded me of a snail’s antenna.
“Hand it here,” she said.
I gave her my broken e-legba.
She turned it over, tapping the “on” button. The damn thing only whimpered. Never have I been so embarrassed. All e-legbas do that when they’re broken. There are different whimpers, weeps, moans, or groans depending on the type of breakage. What kind of obnoxious engineer programmed them to do that? It’s bad enough that the thing is broken. Why should a machine act like a whiny child?
“What’d you do to it?” she asked. As if my e-legba was some living creature.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
She turned it over some more between her antenna-like fingers and laughed. “This is practically a toy,” she said. “This is your only personal device?”
“It’s a prime e-legba,” I insisted, indignant. “An electrical god of the best kind.”
She laughed her condescending laugh again. “A lesser god, if a god at all. With a weak solar sucker, sand grains in the fingerboard, a faulty and cracked screen and probably a smashed-up microprocessor.”
It gave a sad pained groan as if to stress her points. I wanted to grab and hurl it across the room. What do I need it for anyway? I thought. But in the back of my head, I knew I wanted to watch my mother’s news program. And I had a copy of My Cyborg Manifesto on it, a much needed Hausa/Arabic dictionary, and it picked up a fairly decent hip-hop station whose signal seemed to remain strong wherever I went.
“I can fix it, though,” she said after a while.
“You?”
She looked up, her dark brown eyes full of pure irritation.
I stepped back, holding my hands up. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I . . . my mouth is what it is.”
“It’s not your mouth that bothers me,” she said. “It’s your brain. My mother owns this shop. Not my father. Does that surprise you, too?”
I didn’t respond. It did surprise me.
She nodded. “At least you’re honest.” She paused, cocking her head as she looked at me. Then she brought my e-legba to her face for a closer look. As she inspected it, she talked to me. “My mother’s an electrician. She taught me everything I know. My father’s an imam. He tries to teach me all he knows, but there are some things that I cannot digest.” She laughed to herself and looked up at me. “You’re not Muslim, are you?”
“No.”
She grunted something that sounded like, “Good.”
“But you are, right?” I asked.
“Sort of,” she said. “But not really.”
“Then why do you wear that damn sheet?” I asked.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because you don’t want to,” I said.
“You don’t even know me.”
“Do I need to? A sheet is a sheet.” I saw her eyes flash with anger. I kept talking anyway. “Doesn’t matter if you look like a giant toad with sores oozing puss. You shouldn’t . . . ”
She pointed a long finger in my face like a knife. “You have got to be . . . ” She stopped. I saw where her eyes flicked to. The black tattoos on the bridge of my nose from my time as a slave on the coca farms. I could tell she got it. She understood my obsession with free will.
“My mother and I are electricians and this town is dominated by patriarchal New Tuareg ways and even stronger patriarchal Hausa, Old Tuareg, and Fulani ways. People here still . . . expect things. My mother and I play along. My father, well, he prefers us to play along, too. Everyone’s happy.”
“Except you have to live under a sheet.”
“Business is business,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not so bad. I get to be an electrician who is female.” She looked me in the eye. “Plus, sometimes I don’t want people looking at me.”
That was the excuse my close friend Ejii often gave whenever she wore her burka. I didn’t buy it from Ejii and I didn’t buy it from this girl.
“Well, other people’s problems should be their business, not yours.”
“In an ideal world, certainly,” she said. “So, can you pay?”
“Yes.”
“In full?”
“Yes.”
She paused, obviously deciding whether she could trust me. She brought out a black case and opened it. Her tools were shiny like they were made for surgery on humans not machines. She started to repair my e-legba right there. It was a simple gesture, but it meant a lot to me. She’d noticed my tattoos, considered them, yet she trusted me. She trusted me.
Minutes later, a woman came in, also draped in a black burka. Her mother. I was about two feet away from her daughter. It was too late to step back from the counter.
“As-salaamu Alaikum,” the woman said to me, after a moment’s pause.
“Wa ’Alaykum As-Salām,” I responded, surprised. She glanced at my tattoos but that was all.
People came in and out of the store. Her mother helped customers, sold items, chatted with them. But I was focused on the electrician fixing my e-legba. I ignored my claustrophobia and the freeze of the air-conditioning. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to move.
She had my e-legba in pieces within three minutes. She tinkered, fiddled, replaced, and tinkered some more. After about a half hour, she looked up at me and said, “Give me a day with this. I need to buy two new parts.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
From that day on, that store became my second home. Her name was Tumaki.
Poetry
My e-legba was nothing to Tumaki. She could take apart and rebuild the engine of a truck, a capture station, a computer! She could even fix some of the Ginen technology. You should have seen what she did to that pathetic glow lily that I saw the first day I was in the shop. She got that plant to do the opposite of die. Once, she tried to explain to me her theory of why nuclear weapons and bullets no longer worked on earth. She started talking physics and chemistry. I remember nothing but the intense look on her face.
She was a year older than me and planned to eventually attend university. I wasn’t sure if she liked or just tolerated me. When I was around her, I couldn’t stop talking.
“We just use pumpkin seeds,” she told me one day while she worked on an e-legba. We were talking about how to make egusi soup.
“See. That’s where you people go wrong when you make the soup,” I said.
“Us people?” she said, as she unscrewed some tiny screw.
“You people. Yeah. You know, those of you who live here in Timia,” I said. I shrugged. “Anyway, Nigerians call it egusi soup for a reason. Because we use egusi seeds. Goat meat, chicken, stock fish, fresh greens, peppers, spices, and ground egusi seeds. What they serve in the restaurants here is a disgrace.”
“Fine, we’ll call it pumpkin soup, then,” she mumbled, as she placed another screw. “Makes no difference to me.”
“Ah ah, I miss the real thing, o,” I said, thinking of home. “With pounded yam and a nice glass of Sprite. Goddamn. You people don’t know what you’re missing.” I wished I could shut up. I didn’t want her asking me any new questions about home. All I’d told her was that I was from Nigeria.
She only glared at me and loudly sucked her teeth. I grinned sheepishly. I was
just talking, totally drunk on her presence. No matter how much rubbish I talked, though, she never got distracted enough to lose track of what she was doing. She could listen to me and work on a computer like she had two brains. Tumaki was genius smart. But she was also very lonely, I think. I figured this might have been why she didn’t tell me to get lost. Maybe it was also why only two weeks after I met her, she did something very unlike her.
I was half asleep when I heard the banging at my hotel room door. It was around two a.m. I don’t know how I heard it, as I was outside in deep REM sleep on the balcony. It was rare for me to sleep this well.
When the banging on the door didn’t stop, I got up, stumbled across the room, no shirt on, mouth all gummy, crust in my eyes, smelling of outside and my own night sweat, barely coherent. I opened the door and came face to face with a black ghost. Death had come to finally take me. That thing from the fields outside the cocoa farms I’d escaped was back.
My eyes widened, my heart slammed in my chest. If my mind hadn’t finally kicked in and my eyes hadn’t adjusted, I’d have brought an entire storm into the hotel room to fight for my life. Then Tumaki would have learned the secret I’d kept from her just before that secret killed her.
“Tumaki?” I whispered, stepping back. I ran my hand over my dreadlocks. They were probably smashed to the side. I must have looked like a madman.
She laughed. “How’d you guess?”
A thousand emotions went through me. Delight, pleasure, excitement, horror, fear, confusion, worry, irritation, fatigue. I slammed the door in her face.
“Shit!” I hissed, staring at the closed door, instantly knowing it was the wrong reaction.
She banged on the door. She was going to wake my neighbors. I quickly opened it. “What the hell are you doing?” she snapped.
“Trying to save my neck,” I said.
She sucked her teeth loudly. “Let me in,” she demanded.
Oh my God, I have no shirt on, I realized. My heart pounded faster. I looked down both ends of the hallway. I saw no one. But who knew who might have been listening or peeking out? I grabbed her arm and pulled her in. “You could get me killed by coming here,” I whispered. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Tumaki’s family was highly respected. She was the imam’s daughter! No girl went to a guy’s hotel room in the middle of the night! Period. Especially not to meet a guy like me. Especially if anyone suspected that I was a meta-human.