I do not like the taste of this place—from tangy to sour.
Mama is saying, “Sorry, sorry, you have to manage your life here. There’s no place for us at Umudunu anymore. Look, your father’s people have returned my bride price; they say I am the worst thing to happen to their son. It is not my fault the gods decided to make away with your voice. I am just a woman, and my job is to give back what is given to me. Look at my palms. If I ever practised witchcraft or opened my legs to shady business, let my mother’s spirit land me a sounding knock on my head!”
She bares her palms to your leaking face; you have just woken, and you could not find your door. Your skin has been scratched by the gritty paint on the wall in your attempt to find your way out. Echezonachụkwụ, everything about this place is telling you to run. It is an abomination for a Dị ọkpara like you to grow far away from his father’s land. Your pillows will turn to rocks, your tears will eat at your eyes, and your anger will scratch your throat, but does one force a home upon himself? Mba. This home is not a ball of fufu you swallow to keep your belly warm; it is a goat’s bone lodged in your throat, saying, Let me go, or I’ll kill you. But how do you let go without coughing up your spirit altogether?
Echezonachụkwụ, tomorrow you will wake up and you will still be unable to find your door. Your mother’s voice, heavy with sadness, will bounce on the walls and kiss your skin so intimately that you will no longer know if you are made of clay or sadness. Her prayers are a series of whys: Why did my husband die? Why is my son unable to speak? Why am I alive to see my own ruin? And when she is done, a solid silence fills the room. The gods do not know this land; they are watching from miles away, swaying their heads like banana leaves, and telling you that even gods have boundaries they do not cross. Onye g’awara ha ọjị? Onye ga wụpụrụ ha ọbara?
Outside your window, the Port Harcourt boys are playing and cursing their fathers with their full chests. Your papa do this! Your papa do that! Your papa rejected you, and you have no voice to either plead or reject him back. Curled up in a numb ball, in a spiritless body, you wish you could curse your father with the same fervor that says I am my father’s son no matter what happens. The privilege is not yours; your father is a tourist in the soft insides of a woman who is not your mother, trying to pleasure the gods into replacing a dumb son. Maka chukwu, his blood will not be tainted by your futility.
Echezonachụkwụ, this is a story where nothing happens—nothing can move unless you move it. You will sit in your tears and recall the slapping sweetness of the udara on your tongue; the soft roasted skin of the ube that followed your teeth wherever it went; the chilled coconut water that filled your infant brain with illusions of intoxication; the warmth of your mother’s breast when the world still tolerated you; the juicy pieces of boiled stockfish stuffed into your mouth away from your father’s criminating eyes.
Mama will send you to school, and you will return to your room each day and hide because the other boys threaten to stick their hands down your throat and release the poor toad you swallowed. She will say, Touch this world a little bit; it might answer us. You cannot sit beneath your window and cry forever. You will try to obey your mother, but you cannot recognize your hands or this place.
God has soaked his long coat in dye again. He fixes a bright brooch that is the moon. Careful not to touch too boldly a world that is not yours, you scale your open window and walk towards the soursop tree, underneath which the boys play at noon. You pick a fallen fruit and caress its pimpled skin with your front teeth. You have never seen a soursop before, but you decide that it is just a mango with a skin disease. Sinking into the flesh of this mutated mango thing, your teeth acknowledge foreign, the confused taste on your tongue makes you sob; your shoulders shake as mangled cries peel out of your throat. The fruit falls onto the floor as you tiptoe into the house your mother sleeps in. Her fitful snores and her occasional laments are crawling on the walls—you nod your head and wish there was a way you could touch this world for her. Even the fruit here is not sure if it should hold you or push you away.
James-Ibe Chinaza is undefined, but most of the time she is just a girl who loves food, books, music, and viewing the sunset from different angles. She is Instagram’s yellowin_teeth and Facebook’s James-Ibe Chinaza.
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