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If everyone in your culture does it, you should do it too. Kids hate being different.
“Daddy,” she said happily. To see him, in all his good-humored mischief, was to remember her life as it once was, when she was only a daughter, not a mother.
Zikora looked now at her mother, standing by the hospital-room window. How had she never really seen her?
The tinkly music from her son’s crib mobile. The frequent flare of sad longing. She missed Kwame. She looked ahead and saw a future dead with the weight of his absence.
But she was wearying of his rejection, his ignoring her texts, his blocking her number, and she felt translucent, so fragile that one more rejection would make her come fully undone.
“Men say all kinds of things. It is what they do that matters.”
she quivered with the restlessness of unhatched dreams.
Kadiatou loved her as one loves sunlight.
At the mention of the village, Binta tightened into a knot of refusal.
Kadiatou knew Mama loved her, for being dutiful and dependable, but sometimes, secretly, she wished Mama loved her as she loved Binta, for being free.
Kadiatou felt the urge to cry and plead with Binta, to say please, please, please, but for what she was not sure. Please let us be as we used to be. Please don’t avoid my eyes. A memory came to her then in vivid light, of herself sitting on the floor as Papa ate his supper of ndappa, alert, watching him, eager to refill his enamel cup of water, but just as he took the last sip, Binta sprang up and took the cup.
she couldn’t live in this place that was never at rest, breathing in the exhaled breaths of too many people. Smaller, quieter things appealed to her; she did not see the point of reaching to touch or feel what might bring discord.
He kissed her, her life’s first kiss, his tongue like a warm slippery fish in her mouth.
A feeling of being empty-handed, which was different from being empty.
From deep in her throat came a guttural keening as ancient as unformed earth, the ugliest, most spine-chilling sound Kadiatou had ever heard. It shattered the shock-strangled air. In that moment Kadiatou understood that her sister was dead. She felt an implosion in her heart, the beginning of a deathless sorrow, the moment that love forever turned to loss.
Binta was her sunlight child and Mama’s heart had died with her.
She thought of Amadou in America driving a big white car and she saw a glimpse of her own future, cleaning dust day after day, her knees scabbed from kneeling, her loneliness aching in her bones.
Her son looked like Papa, the lean face and the forehead, and she felt acutely aware of how close and how large life’s mysteries were.
Death was too final; she had wished for him a punishment with an ending.
walking with the donkey-like gait of people born abroad,
“No sir, no sir,” she said. Not like this, she wanted to add. Not like this. The shock of his heavy alien weight. He was so heavy, like a giant bag of cassava pressing and deflating the breath from her. Why did he not ask her, why treat her as though she was not worth asking? It could have been different, he could have asked her, she could have gently touched that soft foreign hair.
An ambulance noisily racing through crowded streets to save a single life. Just one life. What a country.
American English was spoken at a higher pitch than normal, and she wondered if she would ever perfect that pitch, even if she managed to get the words right.
Kadiatou didn’t understand what he was talking about, but she understood his nostalgia, his need to talk about home with a person recently from home.
She wanted only to have their plans made molten, blending each in the other.
It seemed to Kadiatou too much information, but Americans did that all the time, they gave details that nobody had asked them for, and Chiamaka must have lived a long time in America.
Kadiatou had never felt so flattered, to be thought of as a person who could read.
Rich people, the good ones, could be so impressed by the normal things they never did, and it made them overpay for those things.
She had come to understand that dishonesty had its shades, its layers, its twists and knots. Sometimes we lie because we love, and sometimes we lie to serve or save those we love.
She understood then the true debasement of prison, that you no longer owned yourself.
She paused often, while cooking for Chia, or cleaning a hotel room, or talking to Binta, to think this was her life, it really was her life, a life of stable things, trimmed with small pleasures.
“My sister, Binta. She’s not afraid, like you.” Omelogor was silent. “Like you, too,” Omelogor finally said. “Me?” “Yes, you.” Omelogor said and turned back to her laptop. Kadiatou felt a sudden flush of pleasure, the small, surprising awareness that Omelogor respected her.
The popcorn always disturbed her stomach, but the pleasure was in sitting next to her daughter, the warmth of her daughter, so known and yet so new.
“Oh great,” she said. The kind of thing she said to sound American. Oh great. Oh my God. Words that felt foreign in her mouth, more foreign than other English words.
The detective talks to her as if she is somebody. This is the best kind of American, a simple, wise, and hardworking man; she can tell that he sees people as people. In her heart, she wishes blessings upon him and his family.
Chia and Miss Zikora were complaining that she was being called a “maid” in the press and she didn’t understand that. So what if she was called a maid? She was a maid, after all, and she loved her job, and she wanted nothing more than to rewind time and go back to being a maid with a perfect daughter and a man finally about to come home.
His tears repulsed her. He was supposed to be stoic, like a proper Fula man.
Her longing for her apartment was a subterranean ache, that small square of the world that was hers alone. The solace of her kitchen. She thought of the day, not long ago, when she was in her kitchen, on her day off, and felt contentment wash over her, calming, refreshing waves of contentment, as she stood by the sink, sieving cornmeal, breaking apart dried fish, and pausing to watch a whole pepper float in her pot, yielding its spice and heat.
He said “it will be okay” so often that Kadiatou knew it would not be.
The diesel truck is gone, a misty silence falls, and I am moved to be standing out in my balcony on a new morning in this new year. I am mistress of all I survey. Actually, Aunty Jane, I do like my life. I flail for meaning sometimes, maybe too often, but it is a full life, and a life I own. I have learned this of myself, that I cannot do without people and I cannot do without stretches of sustained isolation. To be alone is not always to be lonely. Sometimes I withdraw for weeks merely to be with myself, and I sink into reading, my life’s great pleasure, and I think, and I enjoy the silence
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She had the calibrated charm of a person who can turn fully nasty in a heartbeat.
you can have a surfeit of things, and still have an empty life, so there really is no way to prove to someone else the fullness of your own life. Your true experience is the only proof.
She can’t accept that I actually like the Africanness of unclear boundaries with staff. If I didn’t, I would not pay Paul’s children’s school fees or Mohammed’s mother’s hospital bills or rent for the tailoring shop where Mary spends the rest of each day after her cleaning is done.
Affection is softly rising in me, and softly spreading out first to my friends seated around my table bathed in light and then to the whole phosphorescent world. I do like my life.
She seemed like a person who asked questions of life.
You don’t stop at longing; you use the force of your longing to bring into being the life that you want, or you try to, at least.
And the striving, the striving, everybody wanting to start a small business, everybody with big trading dreams.
They tell these stories because it is men who built the secret caves where fortunes are made, and a woman seen inside them must somehow be explained.
A feeling came over me, of self-disgust, to be in this tawdry place watching this scene and to be spoken to by this man whose voice was edged with mocking disrespect.
That American word “concerns,” another slimy slippery word, easy to shift and shape into meanings to free yourself, like “exploring” difficult topics in graduate school.
