Читать книгу Against the Odds - Ben Igwe - Страница 9

One

The mist that settled overnight on the village in dry season cleared quickly in the morning. A big bowl of sun appearing on the horizon could be sighted through tree branches and drooping palm fronds. Some villagers had emerged from their compounds to start the day. Women with long baskets on their heads were on the way to farms to dump trash or start work, while others returning from the stream balanced clay pots of spring water on their heads. Men who had gone into the bushes earlier on were returning with fodder for goats, machetes in hand, before setting out for other daily activities. A wine tapper with a ladder and oblong safety harness slung across his shoulder was on his way to tap palm for morning wine. Fowls that sauntered across the road into neighborhood farms had begun scratching through debris and soil for food. Occasionally a rooster stretched its neck, head, and combs high to crow, embracing a new day.

Uridiya walked briskly along the dirt road in the direction of the half-walled village hall with its roof of rusty corrugated iron sheets. She looked pitiful in the black mourning outfit that consisted of a loose blouse, a single wraparound loincloth, and a head-cloth of the same fabric knotted loosely at the back of her neck. Her temper was short. Quite easily she would call out all the evil spirits of the land if provoked, especially by relatives of her deceased husband who took advantage of her. She would put a curse on everyone who abused her or planned to do so:

“Chi-ne-eke, any man or woman who does not wish a widow well, or who wants to see her head buried in the ground will not meet good fortune. Anyone who wants to stress me to death from talking will follow Nnorom to the land of the dead. May all the dead of this village and the great Imo River take them? The evil spirits will not allow anyone to rest who has sworn that Uridiya will have no rest. May all the evil things you wish for me follow you, your children, and your children’s children, both born and unborn. May evil visit you―reincarnation after reincarnation. May you be cursed, not me. You say I am a lunatic, wait till you see what a lunatic can do.”

Uridiya would conclude by saying that she was certain that those who maltreated her would never leave her alone. She likened herself to the chick picked up and lodged irretrievably in the sharp talons of a fleeing hawk, shrieking hard not because the predator would let go. Alas, no, she is crying out so the world would hear her voice.

Village youngsters and siblings who gathered in cool sandy shade looked forward to hearing Uridiya at some point during the day because they expected someone to upset her. Her curses had almost turned into a song and ritual for them. If children saw her standing with two hands clasped across her head staring intently into space, they knew she was about to invoke evil spirits on persons who might have wronged her. They would giggle and provoke her by throwing out some words so she would say something funny for their amusement. One very windy afternoon, after she was done cursing and breathing heavily, a townsman, Nzeadi, coming down the narrow road on a bicycle, greeted her as he approached.

“Uridiya, I greet you. How are you doing?”

“Are you asking how Uridiya is doing? Can’t you see how I am doing?” She spread both hands and projected her chest. The cyclist stopped. Still on his bicycle with the right foot on the pedal and the left foot on the ground, he looked at her.

“To tell the truth, you look well.” Uridiya laughed mischievously.

“Do you say I look well the way I am or are you mocking me?”

“How can I mock you, Uridiya? To mock you is to mock myself. Your late husband and I were age-mates and friends too.”

“Is that true? I did not know that.” Uridiya’s voice rose. “Then you are in the group of those who want me dead. They are the people who call themselves Nnorom’s friends and relatives.”

“What would they do with your corpse, Uridiya? They can’t eat it.” The cyclist dismounted and with his right foot pressed down the bicycle stand and turned fully to Uridiya.

“The meat from Uridiya’s body will be tasteful. You didn’t know that?” she said.

“I did not know anybody who wants you dead. Please don’t count me in that group. I am hearing it for the first time from your mouth.” The man held on to his hat and beat back the wind that attempted to take it off his head.

“If you have not heard it, then you do not live in this village. You must be a visitor. What town are you from?”

“Uridiya, please don’t worry about it. I did not say anything bad. All I said is that you look well.” A woman who turned to look at them after she passed almost walked off the road. The cyclist let go of his hat, having pressed it firmly down on his gray-haired head.

“Come on, man, you said it again. Are you looking at Uridiya, or are you looking at someone else?” She pointed at herself.

“I am looking at you, and I see you do not look sick.” Nzeadi moved closer.

“Oh, is that true? It is only when I look sick that you will know that my death is near?”

“At least everyone will know that Uridiya has been sick.”

“So, you have not seen anyone who died without being sick?”

“Uridiya, please don’t die. To whom will you leave this one child of yours? Stay alive and raise your child. Nobody takes care of a child like a mother does.”

“Did you say that? Did you say that?” The cyclist struck a co rd in Uridiya, who wheeled herself around and even came closer to him. “Did that come out of your mouth? I hope all the creatures of God and man heard you. May you live long, you who have seen the truth and voiced it! Nobody raises another person’s child. All those who plan my death should hear you. Your statement is that of a prophet. Anyone that it pleased God to give a child should stay alive to see the child become somebody, be the child male or female. God made it so.”

“Uridiya, I must continue on my journey now. May life be good to you.”

“Go well, may you be blessed.” The cyclist, still talking to her, pushed his bicycle for a while, then mounted and rode away.

Villagers who took advantage of Uridiya would attempt to rob her of farmlands as well as the fruit trees that sustained her. They harvested her oil bean tree in the early hours of the morning before she woke up, carried away her breadfruits when they fell and no one was watching. They would not leave a widow alone to have breathing space until she started to behave like a lunatic with a sharp abusive tongue, spitting out curses on them and their children.

The black two-piece mourning outfit with matching head-cloth was Uridiya’s attire for one year during the period tradition required that she mourn her husband. A merciless haircut compounded her miserable condition. Her head was shaved to the bare shining skull. This duty was dexterously performed by widows from the kindred who themselves had been through the same rite. They shaved off her hair with a piece of broken bottle or sometimes with a locally made razor. It was done to perfection and, her head polished with palm kernel oil, shone reflectively.

Uridiya Nnorom, a widow in the village of Aludo in Igboland in Eastern Nigeria, suffered the fate of a widow. The condition of the widow in the village in the 1950s evoked sympathy and pity. Her life was a struggle. Suffering was her lot and endurance her virtue. Because most people did not care about her, she went about her harsh living saying as little as possible. Widowhood leaves little for words. Resignation to the will of the gods and protection by the spirits of her ancestors bespoke her condition.

Widows in the village most often were helpless. This is the reason malevolent persons would pounce on a widow’s farmlands, fruit trees, or domestic animals such as dogs, goats, sheep or her fowls, attempting to dispossess her. Ironically, it was the close relatives of the widow’s deceased husband who were the first to try to disinherit her, especially if her children were minors.

Uridiya was forty-five years old, tall and brown skinned. She looked far older than her age due to hardship. Her cheekbones, set on a slightly square face, highlighted the wrinkle on either side of her drawn cheeks. Before her mourning outfit became regular wear, she used to sometimes walk around bare-bodied to the waist, her flat breasts pendulous and her one-piece loincloth knotted firmly with a cloth string around her waist. Above the cloth and below an exposed navel were many rope-like rings of red and black beads that adorned her hips and swung with the undulating movement of her buttocks when she walked.

Everyone in the village knew Uridiya well. Wherever she appeared, persons around would be aware of her presence because she would be complaining beyond conversational tone about what someone had done to her. Sometimes she walked briskly barefooted along the village dirt road wringing her hands at man’s inhumanity, cursing, and invoking the god of thunder and other evil spirits to visit quickly and snatch away all those oppressing her. When rain threatened, thunder roared, and lightning flashed in the sky, Uridiya would raise her hands to the sky and entreat,

“The strong one! No living person doubts your work. Anyone who crosses your path does not stand again. Whoever doubts you does so to his or her peril. You know those who are after Uridiya, I don’t know them.” She takes a pause and then continues. “What am I saying? I know some of them. I beg that you come down and do your work on them. Strike them so all will see and know that you do not want mistreatment of anyone. We know that nothing will happen to anyone who does nothing wrong. Follow the evil ones; follow them even if they run into a rat hole. They are the reason why the world is not good.”

Jamike was Uridiya’s only child, born to her late in life. She became pregnant just as her husband, Nnorom, was seriously thinking about taking another wife, after years of barrenness and the concern and pressure of his relatives to take another wife. In their imprecise counting, the villagers said that it was nearly two decades after her marriage that Uridiya gave birth to the boy, Jamike. Fate, however, was cruel to Uridiya and the baby, for her husband, Nnorom, died just two years after her son was born. He fell to his death off a palm tree. Villagers considered this an abominable way to die. Such deaths were believed to be the handiwork of Amadioha, the god of thunder, showing his wrath over an offense against the god.

When Jamike was young, Uridiya always carried him on her back with such a narrow piece of cloth one would think the boy could fall off, but he clung hard on her shoulders. When he was older and able to walk, she would hold him by the hand along the uneven road, she walking briskly, he holding, crying and running to keep up and sometimes stumbling. Uridiya cursed along the village road whenever she was aggravated. Because of that, the villagers said she was on the verge of becoming a lunatic.

“No,” she would protest, “I am not a lunatic. I am never one to talk too much. You turned me talkative after my husband died.” Then she thought for a moment, “No, after you killed him.”

After Nnorom died, villagers did not believe Uridiya would survive his death. Her grief could not be controlled. Passers-by would look at her and shake their heads in pity as she flung a sick and tired child, Jamike, on her shoulder from one native doctor to another. If she tied him to her back, the boy’s neck and head would feebly tilt to one side or another. People close by would ask Uridiya to situate the child right before he would break his neck. She carried eggs, lizards, white-feathered fowls, and tortoises to divining priests for ritual offerings to propitiate Jamike’s chi so he might live.

Uridiya and Jamike eked out a harsh existence. Living for them was based on small quantities of farm products. Cassava, cocoyam, and green plantain were staples. Uridiya sold some of these, including pepper, small quantities of palm oil and palm kernel, vegetables, and ripe banana, to buy other things like crayfish, kerosene, onions, matches for the hurricane lamp, salt, soap, and other commodities. Whatever she could not afford they did without.

When Jamike started elementary school, he would come back from school and there would be no real food available. Dropping his raffia school bag, Jamike would look into every pot in Uridiya’s dingy kitchen in search of food.

“Is there nothing to eat in this house today?” Uridiya would keep silent. She heard him.

“Mama, I am asking you.”

“Jamike, find something to eat and leave me alone to think about my life and my world. Crack some nuts. Palm kernel is food. It is not always that one has to have a full stomach.”

Jamike would gather and crack palm nuts for kernels to chew. If there were dried slices of cassava, he would either eat them so or soak them in water to soften before he ate them. During harvest time Uridiya would bring out cocoyam for him to eat before she would leave for the market. Without taking off his school uniform Jamike would put the cocoyam in the fire to roast. Once it was ready he dipped it in peppered palm oil and ate zestfully. Soon a bulge would appear on either side of his stomach like a well-fed lizard. Jamike was full and ready to do his errand. Uridiya would always attach a chore to after-school meals. She educated Jamike on her philosophical belief that wherever there is something to eat, there is also something to do. Jamike would speed off to get palm fronds and twigs for their two goats or go to the stream to fetch water. He could do his little homework or prepare materials for his school handiwork for the next day. Sometimes he went into the forest to cut sticks for building or mending school fences.

Despite their condition of poverty, Uridiya had a strong faith in her god and an indomitable will to survive with the only seed, as she called Jamike, which God gave to her. She believed the god of Nnorom would not allow this one seed of his to be taken away. Nnorom, she said, never harmed anybody while he lived, nor did he commit an abomination or anything forbidden by custom or tradition. She could not understand why the god of thunder chose to take him. The divination priest told those who went to the oracle to seek the reason for his death that it was on account of some oath he took but did not fulfill in his previous life before he reincarnated. The Priest said Nnorom would have reincarnated as a stump of a tree but for the intervention of benign fate. If his parents had appeased the god when he was born he would still be living.

To make sure that Jamike would not suffer the same fate as his father, Uridiya sold off many of their farmlands to appease Amadioha. The chief priests of the god carted away most of Nnorom’s property, as is the custom when the god of thunder is responsible for someone’s death.

Most mornings when Uridiya visited her farms there was an unwelcome activity in one or two of them. It might be that a villager who farmed the portion of land adjoining hers had encroached beyond the boundary with one or two tongues of hoe strikes. It might well be unintentional or even intentional just to see if they could get away with a little piece of her farmland. Sometimes youngsters in search of firewood had removed dried palm fronds that covered germinating seeds. If she found out, then it was time to call up the neighborhood to witness the hatred visited on her. Villagers farming in the vicinity would stop work for a moment to listen to what problem the widow had to warrant her yelling. They knew immediately that someone had wronged her.

In the evening when she returned from the farm, there was always something that would cause her voice to be heard beyond the rampart that surrounded their family com pound. It could be that someone had made use of a little bit of her meager pile of firewood or taken water from her clay storage pot, or that someone had left the barn open for goats to eat her little quantity of cocoyam. Each day, at some point, she would scream and curse the machinations of evil people against her. Some days, though, Uridiya would walk along the road silently, saying nothing to people she passed on the way. If Uridiya were greeted while in this mood, she would mutter a response to herself, saying, “How can you greet me when you too are in the plan to have me dead?” She was suspicious of everyone. When she walked along the village dirt road in silence, Uridiya was in her own world.

“What am I going to do so people will leave me alone?” she would reflect. “In fact, if they ever cause my death, they would be the worse for it because I will promptly return as a witch and snatch away all who destroyed me. They cannot run me to death and stay alive here. They must join me in the land of the spirits. But what I cannot do now is to take my own life. If I do, what will I tell this seed that the gods gave to me? Those who caused my death would make sure he died too so they could take over Nnorom’s household.”