Not all of the women evaporated when they climbed a palm tree, but the parents of the offender were cautioned and cleansing rituals were performed to appease the gods for her misdeed. A she-goat and a hen had to be sacrificed, and kola nut, yams, and alligator pepper were placed on shrines. The people of this village did not eat meat, and to sacrifice an animal, one had to find a goat willing to offer itself for sacrifice. You can imagine how hard that must be.
Well, there was a young woman named Yaya, your great-grandmother. Most people dismissed her as an eccentric. She was married to a young conservative man whose job was to talk sense into families who were having internal disputes. He had a respectable reputation. Everyone loved him, since he had saved marriages, friendships, and family relationships. But his woman, well, she was a different story. She wrote for the town newspaper but that wasn’t the problem. Her problem was her mouth.
She’d argue with anyone who was game. And as she was smart, and she was beautiful, so all the men in the village liked to engage her in discussion. The problem was she’d mastered the art of arguing and the men would either grow infuriated or stalk away exasperated. Rumor had it that the only argument she lost was with the man she married.
Yaya was a free spirit and when she wasn’t arguing, she was laughing loudly and joking with her husband. But one day Yaya was arguing with Old Man Rum Cake, the village chief elder. Cake was over a hundred years old and he liked to watch Yaya flit about the village. She both annoyed and intrigued him.
This was the reason for his comment about the glass of palm wine she was sipping: “You know women aren’t even supposed to climb palm trees, let alone drink it when it is sweet,” he said.
At the time, Yaya only humphed at his comment, and went on with their argument about whether garri was better than Farina with stew. Nevertheless, Yaya’s mind filed the comment away, to chew on later. It didn’t take much to get Yaya’s gears going.
That very evening, she ravished her husband into exhaustion, and while he slept his deepest sleep, she dressed and snuck out of the house. Under the mask of night, she crept toward the three palm trees that grew in the center of town, wrapped a rope around her waist and shimmied up the trunk of one of the trees. She took her knife out of her pocket and carved a circle about a foot in diameter, her people’s sign for female: a moon. Then she cut three huge leaves and brought them down with her, setting them at the trunk of the tree.
The next morning was chaos. Men looked confused. Some women wailed. What was to become of their desecrated village? The chief called a town meeting—the culprit had to be located and punished. But who would do such a thing? What woman could survive such an encounter? Yaya almost died with laughter, pinching her nose and feigning several sneezes and coughs. Cake proposed that the woman who did it had most likely evaporated. “And good riddance to bad rubbish,” he said.
The next week she struck again, this time tapping palm wine from one of the trees and leaving the jug at the trunk of the tree. Next to the moon she carved a heart, the sign for Erzulie, the village’s Mother symbol. This time, it was mostly the men who were in an uproar. The women were quiet, some of them even smiling to themselves. A month later, Yaya struck a third time. However this time, she almost got caught. Three men had been assigned to walk the village streets at night. For the entire month Yaya had watched them, pretending to enjoy sitting near the window reading. She thought she had adequately memorized their night watch patterns. Still, there she was in the palm tree just as one of the men came strolling up. Yaya froze, her cloak fluttering in the breeze, her hands dripping with tapped wine. Her heart was doing acrobatics. The young man looked up directly at Yaya. Then he looked away and turned around, heading back up the street, reaching into his pocket for a piece of gum. Yaya just sat there, leaning against her rope. He hadn’t seen her. He’d looked right through her. She glanced at the heart she had carved in the tree next to the moon. She gasped and then giggled, a mixture of relief and awe. The carving pulsed and Yaya knew if she touched it, it would be pleasantly warm.
When she got home, there was a green jug in front of her bed. She glanced at her snoozing husband and quietly picked it up and brought it to her lips. It was the sweetest palm wine she’d ever tasted, as if only a split second ago it had dripped from the tree. She plopped into bed next to her husband, more inebriated than she’d ever been in her life.
In the morning, her husband smelled the sweetness on her and was reluctant to go to work. Later on people smelled her in the newsroom, too. Many of her coworkers bought chocolates and cakes that day to soothe a mysterious craving. They began calling the mysterious woman who could survived climbing palm trees the Palm Tree Bandit and eventually, as it always happened in villages, a story began to gel around her.
The Palm Tree Bandit was not human. She was a polluting spirit whose only reason for existing was to cause trouble. If there was a night without moon—such nights were thought to be the time of evil—she would strike. The chief, who was also the village priest, burned sacrificial leaves, hoping to appease whatever god was punishing the village with such an evil presence.
However, the women developed another story amongst themselves. The Palm Tree Bandit was a nameless wandering woman with no man or children. And she had powers. And if a woman prayed hard enough to her, she’d answer their call because she understood their problems. Legend had it that she had legs roped with muscle that could walk up a palm tree without using her hands, and her hair grew in the shape of palm leaves. Her skin was shiny from the palm oil she rubbed into it and her clothes were made of palm fibers.
Soon, Yaya realized she didn’t have to keep shimmying up palm trees. One moonless night she had contemplated going out to cause some mischief but decided to snuggle against her husband instead. Nevertheless, when she woke up, she found another jug of palm wine wrapped in green fresh palm tree leaves inside her basket full of underwear. There were oily red footprints leading from the basket to the window next to it. Yaya grinned as she quickly ran to get a soapy washcloth to scrub the oil from the floor before her husband saw it. That day, the village was alive with chatter again. And the Palm Tree Bandit’s mischievousness spread to other villages, kingdoms away. Instead of an uproar, it became a typical occurrence. And the palm wine tapped was as sweet as ever and the leaves grew wide and tough. Only the chief and his ensemble were upset by it any more. Otherwise, it was just something more to argue and giggle about.
Eventually, women were allowed to climb palm trees for whatever reason. But they had to offer sacrifices to the Palm Tree Bandit first. Shrines were built honoring her and women often left her bottles of sweet fresh palm wine and coconut meat. No matter where the shrine was, when morning came, these items were always gone. So your great-grandmother was a powerful woman, yes, she was. Just as squirmy as you, girl.
My story is done, and so is your hair. Here you are, Yaya number four. Of this story, there’s no more. Run along now.
Author’s Notes
The Magical Negro
“The Magical Negro” was inspired by an incident that happened while I was at the Clarion East Writer’s Workshop at Michigan State University. One of the writers wrote a story with a magical Negro in it. That week, the instructor just happened to be African-American bestselling speculative fiction writer Steve Barnes. He did a lecture about Magical Negroes. Still, I was pretty pissed off so to illustrate my annoyance, I fired back by submitting this story to the workshop. It went on to be published in Dark Matter: Reading of the Bones and was named a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.
Kabu Kabu
This is one of those stories where I have no memory of the story’s origin. All I know is that I wrote it and then gave it to Alan and he worked it over and we went back and forth like that until it was done. I can say that I have always been fascinated by kabu kabus (illegal/independent cabs), danfos (commercial buses in Lagos), and okadas (motorbikes) in Nigeria. Also, well, my middle sister is named Ngozi, she’s
a lawyer who lives in a townhouse in Chicago and Vee-Vee’s, the African restaurant on the north side of Chicago, is very good.
The House of Deformities
This is the first short story that I ever wrote, so please be kind with it. The year was 1993 and I was in my very first creative writing class. I was sporting a medium length afro, liked to wear knee-high black Doc Martins and my experience with being paralyzed due to spinal surgery complications was very very fresh. I was still using a cane to walk. I wrote this on a word processor and I haven’t stopped writing since. Oh, and this is based on a true story and my sisters and I really do call it “The House of Deformities.”
The Black Stain
My novel Who Fears Death is a post-apocalyptic novel set in a future Sudan. The main character is the product of weaponized rape: rape used as a weapon during war and genocide against women and their cultures and families. A year after its publication, it was optioned by Completion Films with Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu attached to the project. Immediately Wanuri began asking me for more details about Who Fears Death. In particular, she asked me about the origin of the Ewu Mythology. (In the novel, the children of wepaonized rape are called Ewu, a derogatory term). Wanuri’s question inspired this story.
How Inyang Got Her Wings
Arro-yo is a character who has haunted me for many years now. She is the first windseeker to tell me her story, flying around me long before Zahrah came along. Over a decade ago, I wrote a novel called The Legend of Arro-yo. It was never published but one of the stories won an award for best magical realism, two stories from the book earned me finalist accolades, and three Arro-yo stories went on to be published. On top of this, just about every book I went on to write blossomed from writing and exploring of this unpublished novel. This is Arro-yo’s origin story.
On the Road
This is the first and only horror story I have ever written (so far). Writing it left me afraid of roads at night for weeks. It was inspired by a story the dean of my university told me about a friend of hers who’d visited Nigeria. Yeah, so, that creepy little boy, he’s real and he’s out there.
Spider the Artist
This is the first science fiction story that I wrote that I can clearly call science fiction. It first appeared in the Seeds of Change anthology and I thank editor John Joseph Adams for challenging me to write a science fiction narrative. After creating this story, the type of stories I wrote changed.
The Ghastly Bird
This story was the result of my disgust and sadness upon learning the true nature of the dodo bird’s fate.
The Winds of Harmattan
Originally titled “Asuquo,” “The Winds of Harmattan” is another story that I mined from one of the earliest versions of my unpublished novel, The Legend of Arro-yo. The Winds of Harmattan was about Arro-yo’s aunt and meant to be a cautionary tale for Arro-yo. Of course, Arro-yo didn’t listen and still managed to get herself kicked out of her village, as demonstrated in the story (also mined from The Legend of Arro-yo) “How Inyang Got Her Wings.”
Long Juju Man
I eventually expanded this into a children’s book that went on to win the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa. The short story and subsequent book were named after the infamous Long Juju Shrine of pre-colonial Arochukwu, Nigeria. This shrine was said to have divine knowledge, when in reality it was merely a tool used to trick and sell people into slavery. The name “long juju” was said to come from the idea that the shrine’s juju went a long way . . . at least that’s what my uncle said. This short story has nothing to do with slavery and plenty to do with trickery. I credit my Uncle Moses Okorafor for telling me all about the Long Juju Shrine one day when I visited him in Maryland (the American state, not the Maryland in Lagos).
The Carpet
When my oldest sister and I were in our early 20s, our parents sent us to Nigeria to visit my father’s village. They wanted us to check on the house they’d had built in my father’s village. When building a house in the village, you never truly knew the progress until you saw it with your own eyes. We were to stay in the freshly built fully furnished humongous beautiful white house with the red roof. Before we left, my sister bought a welcome mat that was shaped like a very happy cartoon frog. When we arrived, we learned that indeed the house was gorgeous and finished. However, there was no running water, no electricity, and every piece of furniture had been stripped from its interior . . . by relatives. My sister and I were angry as hell and determined to stay in the house, regardless, to show respect to our parents. We managed to stay for three days. We slept on a bare bed. Those nights were full of mosquitoes and heat and there was a turkey right outside our window who would screech and cluck until the sun came up because it was being attacked by rats. And we were terrified because every night, something downstairs slithered around. Maybe it was a snake, maybe it was something else.
Icon
This is a story that is an even mix of the fictional and the real. Some of the words in this story come from individuals in Nigeria’s conflicted Niger Delta whom I had no business speaking to.
The Popular Mechanic
The origins of this story is complicated and very personal. I wrote it when my father was very very sick. He suffered from Parkinson’s Disease and Diabetes. Several moments in this story draw from some of the darkest times of his illness. At the same time, the conflict in the Niger Delta was raging and I was fascinated by the many instances of oil bunking.
Windseekers
This was the first Arro-yo story to be published. It was a finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest and published and illustrated in the resulting anthology. It’s a story mined from one of the earliest versions of my unpublished novel, The Legend of Arro-yo. I must admit, looking back, I don’t like this story very much. The ending really bothered me and I eventually changed it in the novel.
Bakasi Man
How do I explain this one? Well, it all started when my sister’s superstitious ex-husband (who happened to be Igbo) said, “Hunchbacks are very expensive.” It was all downhill from there.
The Baboon Wars
I hate to totally validate a cliché about black people but . . . when my mother was a kid, she used to fight baboons. She was born and raised in Jos, Nigeria, a city in the predominantly Islamic and arid North. She talked about the soothing call to prayer of the muezzin from the minaret and the dust devils she’d play in. One day, she told me about how she and her friends used to have to fight baboons on their way to school. The baboons wanted their lunches. I imagined the rest.
Asunder
I can’t believe I wrote a love story (I don’t like love stories that are love stories only for love’s sake), but that’s exactly what this story is. This story was part of the only novel I’ve ever begun and not finished. The novel was called Nsibidi’s Script. I stopped writing it in order to write my second novel The Shadow Speaker. This story is told to Nsibidi (who was also a character in my first novel Zahrah the Windseeker) in sign language by an idiot baboon. She’s being told about her past life and why it’s important that she leave home.
Tumaki
The short story “Tumaki” is mined from my novel Stormbringer, a sequel to The Shadow Speaker. I like for readers to read it without context. But if you must have some, all you really need to know are the following: The narrator is sixteen-year-old Dikéogu. He is Nigerian and a fledging rainmaker (one who can control the weather; this includes producing lighting from within and calling up the wind) who is avoiding his destiny. The story is set in a Post-Apocalyptic near-future Niger (the country directly north of Nigeria which is dominated by the Sahara Desert) where many of the laws of physics no longer apply, the barriers between worlds have disintegrated, and children (called meta-humans) are born with strange abilities. Dikéogu’s e-legba (a sort of blackberry-ipod-laptop-esque portable device) is broken and he needs to fix it.
Biafra
This short story went on to win The Margin: Exploring Modern M
agical Realism Short Story Contest. It is yet another story from my unpublished novel, The Legend of Arro-yo. The detail about the vultures came from an actually account from one of my father’s best friends who also happened to be a Biafran War veteran. The ghost of the Biafran War (also known as the Nigerian Civil War) haunts every Nigerian family, no matter what side they were on or what tribe they belong to.
Moom!
“Moom!” is the first prologue (there are three for each “act”) in my novel Lagoon. I’d read a news story about a swordfish in Angola that “attacked” an oil pipeline. Talk about a story that landed right in my lap. Another point of realism in the story was that the FPSO Mystras is a real ship.
The Palm Tree Bandit
“The Palm Tree Bandit” was the third story I had published. It was the second speculative fiction story I had published. I’ve always had very strong arms and for this reason, I’ve always been good at climbing trees. While in Nigeria, one of my granduncles saw me admiring a palm wine tapper collecting his bucket of sap at the top of a palm tree. He smiled and told me that women weren’t allowed to climb palm trees. I think the reasoning behind this was that men could see a woman’s underwear when she climbed the tree (as if a man can’t just avert his eyes. Why must a woman always change her behavior in such situations?). This irritated me, of course. So I did something about it. I wrote a story in which the culture was changed and a super heroine who did the unthinkable was created.
Publication History
“The Magical Negro” first appeared in Dark Matter II: Reading the Bones, 2004.
“Kabu Kabu” (with Alan Dean Foster) is original to this collection.