Читать книгу Stars of the Long Night - Tanure Ojaide - Страница 17

7

Kena had kept warm memories of Titi and continued to be haunted by her face and words long after the Okpara woman had returned to her home of bondage or, rather, her home of self-actualization, freedom, and prosperity. Titi had returned to her refuge from Agbon's tyranny. Like the cat seeking freedom, she had gone into the forest, where she could live a life of abandon without Okpara's containment of her potentials. How things had turned upside down that her nativity had become a bondage she had to flee to regain freedom in a foreign land!

Kena pictured in her mind how Titi's words had come through tears before her own people. The woman who had been sold out of Agbon and had returned to show off her wealth to embarrass her family and the entire Agbon was calm, soft-spoken, firm and dignified. Like the matriarch of Agbon, she sat in a cane chair; her feet stretched forward, her right and left palms placed on her lap; her head raised upright. She was the idol of the crowd gathered to listen to her. One could tell how intense Kena had been, as she and others watched and listened to the woman who had redeemed her image.

Nobody wanted to be told about what Titi said about herself. All the concerned and inquisitive people in Okpara wanted to hear from the oracle's mouth. Who would not avail himself or herself at the oracle's presence if allowed to hear the words firsthand? Those would be words to treasure in a lifetime and nobody wanted to miss them. Many came to listen to her because they just wanted to show their solidarity with her; they wanted to make up for the evil past that had falsely condemned her. These people felt it was better to confront the past through Titi's presence and liberate their minds from the haunting guilt. Those who had no part to play in her being sold away still felt guilty. It was Agbon's guilt and everybody shared in this evil, which needed to be expiated. There were no innocent ones in the matter; all had become victims by complicity of birthright in Agbon. The guilt weighed heavily on them as the experience did on the initial victim.

As Titi spoke, she used her right palm to wipe out tears from her eyebrows.

“They lied against me!” she cried out in a clear bell-like voice that rang through the crowd.

But she spoke now not as a bitter and enraged person who sought revenge. She sought no restitution from anybody. She had even forgiven her deceased father for his ignorance. She said these things, according to her, for the future to be fair and just for all people, men and women as well as children and adults.

Kena had sat close on the ground in the big compound and could see something indescribable glowing in Titi's face. In the face shone a determination to set malice aside and live the life ahead of her. In it shone a fierce determination for justice and fairness that every community should practice as a cardinal rule. Titi had grown robust and taller than the average woman around. She looked fresh and prosperous. Everybody looked to her as to an oracle to divine the future, not a personal future but the future of all Agbon people.

The women looked up to her as if they were looking at a mirror that showed their own faces. They saw themselves in her. After all, no man had been sold away to Izonland, or anywhere else for that matter, because of being suspected of being a wizard. Men actually committed many abominations, killed, and robbed and got away with real atrocities. A man suspected of being a wizard would be described as a strong man. A strong man indeed! A fine face put over an evil name. Women, especially the young and old, only needed to be suspected, and they would be condemned as guilty by public opinion. Those women neither young nor old suffered a different fate; they were preyed upon by men. They were wives. Wives were men's servants to cater for the man's needs and comfort. The women stared at Titi as she stared back at them. An invisible thread bound them helpless in the male dom of Agbon.

Titi had held back to the eve of her departure her most moving testimony. The whole month she had come, she did not go into details about how she had been taken away. She was surely bidding her time before lifting the veil from the monster that was Agbon's practice of selling so-called witches into servitude. She waited for the time when she could etch the story on the people's minds for them to carry the ugly mark for the rest of their lives. Now she told it in detail to set the record straight. She believed only she could tell her own story right. Only she had experienced the longest nights of Agbon's injustice to women and the eternal dawn of Izonland. Only she had found freedom in bondage. Only she could throw off the incubus meant to stifle her life. She was sole witness to her suffering and now was the storyteller of her past ordeal.

“There I was in the middle of the vast waters alone with a stranger, hostage and wife in a big boat. I was paralyzed by the shock of the action; lured into the boat and taken unawares into bondage. I did not have the frame of mind to fight back the lone man who took me. I surrendered to my fate that I knew could not be destroyed with lies. I could swim but would not dive into waters I knew were infested with crocodiles and all sorts of dangerous water creatures. I would not kill myself to be forever maligned. I chose to go through the entire course of what I knew would be a story with a happy ending despite its sadness.

We travelled all night, another day, and arrived there at night. Who knew there was land beyond the great rivers? Who knew that the sea held some islands peopled by men and women so removed from land settlements? The man to whom I had been bequeathed or sold knew the waterways as we know the footpaths in our afforested land. Despite the night, he manoeuvred the canoe through narrow and wide rivers and creeks towards his destination. By daybreak I was in a very strange part of the world, following the current and on both sides of the creeks mangrove trees appeared to have lined the long winding route to welcome me into the heart of their country. The movement was faster till about mid-day when the current went our way; once we were going against the currents it was a more arduous journey. The currents turned to tides as we moved farther towards the great waters. But, from all indications, my man, Pere, was a very capable boatman and there was no fear even when we were crossing troubled waters.

I followed the stars above me with my eyes and knew where I came from despite the long nights and the labyrinthine routes. I would know later from merely looking at the moon and stars where my people lived. I did not cry; not a teardrop fell from my eyes. There are times when you have no fear of the unknown. Let the night and open sea bring out monsters; I was never afraid. I could not drown below the river's bed. I had had the initial shock and instantly recovered. My heart did not miss a beat. I knew I had been sold away unjustly, but I had never been the sort of person who wept for the injustice done to me. I knew I would exonerate myself someday one way or another.

The very day following our arrival at Alagbabri, I was introduced to two Agbon women who had been expecting me! They told me there were many of us Agbon women married there. They had many children for their men. I shook my head because I knew they must have come there the same way I found myself in Alagbabri. I had never heard of that name before I arrived there. The Agbon women there were all doing fine, according to them.”

It was at this stage of Titi's testimony that Kena could no longer control her emotions and burst out wailing loudly. Other women followed; wails rose and fell as if an important person had just died. Titi, for whom these wails were raised, asked them to stop crying since she was living and not dead.

“You need a big heart to overcome your enemies,” she told the wailing women. “Have a big heart!” she counselled.

Kena could still recollect clearly that long evening when many of them, Okpara daughters and many wives, clustered round Titi. Among the Okpara daughters there was Oyeghe, her playground “daughter,” who had come to visit her parents. A few men, friends of the women, as they were called, were there. Among them Iniovo that some men often ridiculed for insisting that women were senior to men; Tefe, the storyteller, who had railed against Titi's betrayal whenever he had the opportunity to do so; and Obie, the young carver, who, unlike men in the same circumstances, never contested seniority with women who were his seniors. Kena remembered Obie's anguished exclamation: “How can we not know our greatest blessing!” Okpara and Agbon men had not yet realized their blessing. According to him, women were a blessing to men just as men were a blessing to women. When this realization would take place, nobody could tell, Kena wondered.

Kena also recollected Tefe's statement: “We must learn from every experience, pleasant or unpleasant. This was a very bad one and never again should we go back to the horrible days of selling our own because in selling our own we sell ourselves. We must learn from the mistakes of ignorance.” Everybody there listened and nodded to the storyteller's words of wisdom.

Titi carried within her some inner strength that intensified over the years. She had likened herself to an orphan who only had to seize her birthright, if not willingly accorded to her. She was not quite an orphan at the time of the shameful act because, though her mother was dead, her father had carried out the act. Somehow, her stepmother died about the same time as her father after a mere fever. She had come, not knowing that both had been long dead. But she had been well received by her relatives, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces. Even the children of her stepmother had asked for forgiveness, and she had embraced them as her own brothers and sisters.

For more than forty years Titi had been away from her home and she had come back to show Okpara how she had fared. Nobody needed to be told that she had done better than marriage in Agbon would have made her. “If you want to show off your ivory bangles, stretch your hands,” the saying went. In Titi's figure you could see prosperity and joy. Imagine her talk of her husband's fondness for her. When other men teased her husband that she might not return to him as she left for the publicized trip, he had only laughed and said that both of them were inseparable—he could not imagine Titi living a happy life without him, nor he living a meaningful life without Titi. In Agbon, the wife was seen as another person's daughter, another entity from the man. It was not so in Alagbabri. Pere and Titi had become an inseparable couple.

Titi was back to her husband in Izonland, but the lesson of her fate was something Kena would not forget. Women, when treated unjustly, could reverse their negative perception with their own hands. When denied their rights, women could seize them back. In Agbon the women were still folding their arms, and only they could use their hands as tools or weapons to wrest for themselves the rights they deserved to enjoy. But she knew this was easier to say than to implement. How many Titis were in Agbon to make a change? But she felt that since Agbon produced Titi, there were others there among them who needed to be discovered.

Already members of the women-only Elohor cult were talking surprising things. They were not satisfied with cultivating plantains to induce fertility; they were already planting yams that had been a male crop. That was just one of the signs of the changing attitude of women. But what could they achieve in their chameleon steps? Kena asked herself.

Kena had been so carried away in her recollection of what had happened to Titi and how the victimized woman had bounced back to a robust life that she, at least for that moment, had forgotten the painful reality of her son beside her.