Zikora

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“When they say something tastes nutty, do we know which nut they mean? Because a walnut tastes nothing like a cashew nut.”

but I knew, too, that their approval would have come slower had I not had the right bona fides, my Georgetown degree, my wealthy Nigerian family.

“I think I should leave. Is that okay?” he asked as though he needed my permission to abandon me. He would kill you, but he would do it courteously.

“It’s funny how pregnancy is like body hair. We scrub and scrape our armpits and upper lip and legs because we hate to have hair there. Then we pamper and treat the hair on our heads because we love hair there. But it’s all hair. It’s the wanting that makes the difference.”

in creating a child, Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man.

We mostly spoke English; Igbo was for mimicking relatives and for saying painful things.

Nature must not want humans to reproduce, otherwise birthing would be easy, even enjoyable: babies would easily slip out, and mothers would remain unmarked and whole, merely blessed by having bestowed life.

I thought I was having a girl, I sensed it, and all the mythical girl signs were there: I carried the pregnancy high, I had bad morning sickness, my skin turned greasy.

I believed then that love had to feel like hunger to be true.

Something was growing inside me, alien, uninvited, and it felt like an infestation.

It was done. On the bus home, I cried, looking out the window at the cars and lights of a city that knew my loneliness.

Respect: a starched deference, a string of ashen rituals.

Respect was her reward for acquiescing.

My aunty Uzo, my father’s sister, said “senior wife” like a title, a thing that came with a crown.

I looked at my mother, standing by the window. How had I never really seen her? It was my father who destroyed, and it was my mother I blamed for the ruins left behind.