An Orchestra of Minorities Read online

  Ezeuwa, when my host sought an answer to something beyond his understanding, I often ventured to supply it. So before he slept that night, I impressed on his mind that he should return to the river in the morning; perhaps he would still be able to find the fowls. But he paid no heed to my counsel. He thought it an idea that originated from within his own mind, for man has no way to distinguish between what has been put into his thoughts by a spirit—even if it is his own chi—from what has been suggested to him by the voice of his head.

  I continued to flash the thought in his mind many times that day, but the voice of his head would counter each time and tell him that it was too late, that the chickens must have drowned. To which I responded that he could not know this. Then the voice of his head said, It is gone; there is nothing I can do. So when it was evening, and I could see that he would not go, I did that which you, Oseburuwa, caution guardian spirits to avoid doing except in extraordinary situations. I stepped out of the body of my host while he was conscious. I did this because I knew that my place as his guardian spirit was not only as a guide but also as a helper and witness to the things which may be beyond his reach. This is because I see myself as his representative in the realm of the spirits. I stand within my host and gaze at every movement of his hands, every step of his feet, every motion of his body. To me, the body of my host is a screen on which the entirety of his life is displayed. For while in a host I’m nothing but an empty vessel filled by the life of a man, rendered concrete by that life. It is thus from the place of a witness that I observe him live, and his life becomes my testimony. Yet a chi is constrained while in the body of its host. While there, it becomes nearly impossible to see or hear what is present or spoken in the supernatural realm. But when one exits one’s host, one becomes privy to things beyond the realm of man.

  Once out of my host, I was hit by the great clamor of the spirit world, a deafening symphony of sounds that would have frightened even the bravest of men. It was a multitude of voices—cries, howls, shouts, noises, sounds of every kind. It is uncanny that even though the separation between the world of mankind and the spirits is only leaf-thin, one does not hear even a faint whisper of this sound until one leaves the body of one’s host. A freshly created chi on earth for the first time is immediately overwhelmed by this din and may become so frightened that it might run back into the fortress of silence that is its host. This happened to me during my first sojourn on earth as well as to many guardian spirits I have met at the resting caves of Ogbunike, Ngodo, Ezi-ofi, and even the pyramidal mounds of Abaja. It is especially worse at nighttime, the time of the spirits.

  Whenever I leave my host while he is in a state of consciousness, I make my visits rapid and brief, so that nothing will happen to him in my absence and he will not do anything I would not be able to account for. But because the road to anywhere in a disembodied form isn’t the same as when one is borne by a human vessel, I had to slowly make my way through the crowded concourse of Benmuo, in which spirits of all kinds writhed like a can of invisible worms. My haste yielded fruit, and I got to the river within a period of seven battings of the eyelids, but I saw nothing there. I returned the following day, and by the third visit, I saw the brown rooster he had thrown over the bridge. It had bloated and now lay on the surface of the river with its legs facing up, taut and dead. The water had added a shade of imperceptible gray to the rooster’s barring, and its belly was naked of all plumage, as if something in the water had eaten it. Its neck seemed to have elongated, and its wrinkling was deeper and its body was swollen. A vulture sat on one of the wings of the chicken, which had flattened out over the surface of the water, peering down and about at the bird. I saw no sign of the wool-white fowl.

  Ebubedike, in my many cycles of existence, I have come to understand that the things that happen to a man have already occurred long before in some subterranean realm, and that nothing in the universe is without precedent. The world spins on the noiseless wheel of an ancient patience by which all things wait and are made alive by this waiting. The ill luck that has befallen a man has long been waiting for him—in the middle of some road, on a highway, or on some field of battle, biding its time. It is the individual who reaches this point and is struck down who may be fooled into sullen bewilderment, along with all who may sympathize with him, even his chi. But in truth the man had died long ago, the reality of his death merely concealed by a silken veil of time, which would eventually be parted to reveal it. I have seen it many times.

  While he slept that night, I stepped out of him, as I often did, so I could watch over him, because the inhabitants of Benmuo often become more active in the earth at night, while mankind sleeps. And from this position, I flashed the image of the chicken and the vulture into his subconscious mind, for the easiest way to communicate such a mysterious event to one’s host is through the dream sphere—a fragile realm a chi must always enter with caution and great care because it is an open theater accessible to any spirit. A chi must first eject itself from the host before stepping into its host’s dream world. This also prevents the chi from being identified by the foreign spirits as a chi hovering in untenanted space.

  Once I’d flashed the images before him, he twitched in his sleep, lifted one hand, and curved it into a weak fist. I sighed, relieved, knowing that he now knew what happened to his white rooster.

  GAGANAOGWU, his sadness for drowning the fowls had suppressed every thought of the woman at the bridge. But slowly, as his sadness abated, thoughts of her began to line the boundaries of his mind and then gradually crowd in. He started to dwell on thoughts of her, what he had seen of her. All he’d been able to gather from the night vision was that she was mid-sized, not as fleshy as Miss J, the prostitute. She had worn a light blouse and skirt. And he remembered that her car was a blue Toyota Camry, similar to his uncle’s. Then often, like a grasshopper, his thoughts would leap from her appearance to his curiosity about what she did after he left the bridge. He would blame himself for having left the bridge in haste.

  In the days following, he tended to his poultry and the garden with light hands, consumed by thoughts of her. And when he drove about the city, he searched for the blue car. As weeks passed, he began to yearn for the prostitute again. Desire swelled like a storm and washed over the parched landscape of his soul. It drove him to the brothel one evening, but Miss J was busy. The other ladies mobbed him, and one of them dragged him into a room. This woman had a lean waist and a scar on her belly. With her he felt himself certain and sure, as if at the place of his last encounter his apprehensions and naïveté had been clobbered to a bloody death. He yielded to her without scruples, and even though I often avoid witnessing my hosts having sex because of its fearful imitation of death, I stayed put because it was to be his first. When he was done, she slapped him on the back, saying how good he was.

  Yet, despite this experience, he was still drawn to Miss J, to her body, to the familiar sound of her sigh. It surprised him that even though he had done something more profound with the other woman, he’d found greater pleasure in the hands of Miss J. He returned to the brothel three days later and avoided the other woman, who ran heartily to him. Miss J, this time, was free. She regarded him only with faint recognition and set about undressing him in silence. Before they could begin, she answered her phone and told the caller to come in two hours, and when it seemed the male voice refused the bargain, she settled for an hour and a half.

  They had begun when she spoke about the last time and laughed. “You don open your eye now after I suck you that time, ba?”

  He made love to her with an exuberance that fevered his soul and poured himself into the act. But once he slumped beside her, she pushed away his arm and rose.

  “Miss J,” he called, almost in tears.

  “Yes, na wetin?” the woman said. She started to strap her brassiere over her breasts.

  “I love you.”

  Egbunu, the woman stopped, clapped her hands, and laughed. She turned on the light and crep
t back into the bed. She scooped his face in her hand, mimicked the calculated somberness with which he’d uttered the words, and laughed even harder.

  “Oh, boy, you no sabi wetin you dey talk.” She clapped her hands again. “Look at this one, him say him love me. Nothing wey person eye no go see these days oh. Im see nyash wey tripam—na im be say im love me. Say you love your mama.”

  She snapped her fingers as she burst again into renewed mirth. And for days, her laughter echoed through his being in many hollow places, as if it were the world itself that had laughed at him, a small, lonely man whose only sin had been that he was hungry for companionship. It was here that he first felt that befuddling emotion of romantic love, a kind of crossroad that was distinct from what he felt for his birds and for his family. It was a painful feeling, for jealousy is the spirit that stands at the threshold of love and madness. He wanted her to belong to him and begrudged all the other men who would have her after him. But he did not know that nothing truly belongs to anyone. Naked he was born, naked he will return. A man may own something for as long as it remains with him. Once he leaves it, he may lose it. He did not know at the time that a man may give up all he has for the sake of the woman he loves, and when he returns, she may no longer desire him. I had seen it many times.

  So, broken by the things he did not yet know, he left the place and resolved never to return.

  3

  Awakening

  IJANGO-IJANGO, over many sojourns in the human world, I have heard the venerable fathers, in their kaleidoscopic profundity, say that no matter the weight of grief, nothing can compel the eyes to shed tears of blood. No matter how long a person weeps, only tears continue to fall. A man may remain in the state of grief for a long time, but he will eventually grow out of it. In time, a man’s mind will acquire strong limbs, strike down the wall, and be redeemed. For no matter how dark the night, it soon passes, and Kamanu, the sun god, erects his grandiose emblem the following day. I have seen it many times.

  By the fourth month after the encounter with the woman on the bridge, my host almost ceased grieving. It was not that he was happy now, for even the hems of the garments of his brightest days were fringed with threads of sorrowful darkness. It was that he was alive again, open to the possibilities of happiness. He turned to his friend Elochukwu, who began visiting regularly and persuaded him to join MASSOB, the group that was sweeping young Igbo men with an old broom into a pile of dust. Elochukwu, who had been his friend and confidant in secondary school and who was always slender, had become brawny with biceps he displayed at every turn by wearing armless shirts or singlets. “Nigeria has failed,” he would tell my host in the White Man’s language, and then trail into the language of the fathers with which he mostly conversed with my host. “Ihe eme bi go. Anyi choro nzoputa!” At Elochukwu’s insistence, my host joined him. In the evenings, at the big shop of a car dealer, they gathered wearing black berets and red shirts, surrounded by flags of a half-drawn sun, maps, and images of soldiers who had fought for Biafra. My host would amble about with this group, shouting slogans at the top of his lungs. He would yell “Biafra must rise again” with them, stamp his feet on the unfinished floor, and chant “MASSOB! MASSOB!” He’d sit among these men and listen to the dealer and the head of the movement, Ralph Uwazuruike. Here my host spoke, he made merry again, and many noted his broad smile and his quickness to laugh. These men, without knowing where he had been or where he was coming from, glimpsed the first marks of his healing.

  Chukwu, because I had been present in a host during the Biafran War, I feared his dalliance with this group would lead him to harm. I put thoughts in his head that there may be violence in these engagements. But the voice of his head replied with certainty that he was not afraid. And indeed, for a long time he went with this group, moved only by an anger he could not define. For he had not himself experienced the grievances the men articulated. He did not know anyone who had been killed by people from northern Nigeria. Although many of the dark sayings of this group felt true to him—he could see, for instance, that indeed no Igbo had been president of Nigeria and perhaps none would ever be—none of it affected him personally. He did not know anything about the war except that his father had fought and had told him many stories about it. And while these men spoke, the vivid accounts of the war his father had given him would thrash about in the mud of his remembrance like wounded insects.

  But he attended the meetings mostly because Elochukwu was the only friend he had. A neighbor’s hand in the death of his gosling had shut his heart to friendships. After the incident, he had hovered over the gray field of humanity and determined that the world of man was too violent for his liking. He found solace instead among feathery creatures. He also went because it gave him something to do besides tending to the poultry and the small farm and because he’d hoped that while going from one point to another in the city, advocating for the actualization of the sovereign state of Biafra, he might come across the woman he’d met at the bridge. Akataka, it was this last reason that was principal in his mind, the main reason why, even as the marches became increasingly dangerous, he persisted. But after a month of protests, clashes with police, riots, and violence, and my intense persuasion through endless flashes of thoughts in his mind that he desist, he broke off from the group like a wheel unhooked from a fast-moving car and rolled into the void.

  He returned to his normal life, rising at daybreak to the beautiful but mystifying music of the poultry—a symphony of crows, cackles, and tweets that often melded into what his father had once described as a coordinated song. He harvested eggs, recorded the birth of new chicks in his foolscap record book, fed the flock, watched them graze about in the yard with his catapult at the ready to protect them, and tended to the ill and feeble ones. One day in that month, one of the days he worked the most without distractions, he planted tomatoes on the shorn part of the land. He had not tended to this part of the land in a long time, and the change he saw on it shocked him. While weeding the area, he had found that red ants had not just encroached but also completely infested the land. They lay deep in the nerve of the soil, nestled in every clump. It seemed they’d fed on an old dead cassava head which, perhaps owing to their attack, had been unable to grow. He boiled hot water in a kettle and poured it on the loam, killing all the ants. Then he swept the mass of dead ants away and planted the seeds.

  He returned to the yard afterwards and washed the tomato seeds that clung to his fingernails and blackened his thumbs. He then scooped bowlfuls of millet from a silo stacked in an unused room in the house and spread the grains on a mat. He unlatched the two large coops in which a dozen chickens grazed about, and they flocked out towards the mats of feed. Within the coops were two cages each of hens with their chicks and one of three large broilers surrounded by their eggs. He felt each one of the birds to try to see if they were all in sound health. There were about forty of the brown ones and about a dozen of the white ones. After he’d fed them, he stood in the yard watching to see which of them had shat so he could poke their excreta with sticks in search of worms. He was searching a gray glob of feces dropped by the well by one of the broilers when he heard the voice of a woman hawking groundnuts.

  Egbunu, I must say that it wasn’t that he responded this way to every woman’s voice, but her voice sounded strangely familiar to him. Although he did not know it, I knew that it reminded him of his mother. At once he saw a plump, swarthy woman who looked his age. She was sweating in the hot sun, and the sweat shimmered along her legs. She carried a tray filled with groundnuts on her head. She was one of the poor—the class of people who had been created by the new civilization. In the time of the old fathers only the lazy, indolent, infirm, or accursed lacked, but now most people did. Go into the streets, into the heart of any market in Alaigbo, and you’ll find toiling men, men whose hands are as hard as stones and whose clothes are drenched in sweat, living in abject poverty. When the White Man came, he brought good things. When they saw the car, the chi
ldren of the fathers cried out in amusement. The bridges? “Oh, how wonderful!” they said. “Isn’t this one of the wonders of the world?” they said of the radio. Instead of simply neglecting the civilization of their blessed fathers, they destroyed it. They rushed to the cities—Lagos, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Kano—only to find that the good things were in short supply. “Where are the cars for us?” they asked at the gates of these cities. “Only a few have them!” “What about the good jobs, the ones whose workers sit under air conditioners and wear long ties?” “Ah, they are only for those who have studied for years in a university, and even then, you’d still have to compete with the multitude of others with the same qualifications.” So, dejected, the children of the fathers turned back and returned. But to where? To the ruins of the structure they had destroyed. So they live on the bare minimum, and this is why you see people like this woman who walk the length and breadth of the city hawking groundnuts.

  He shouted for her to come up.

  The woman turned in his direction and lifted a hand to hold the tray on her head in place. She pointed to herself and said something he could not hear.

  “I want to buy groundnut,” he called to her.