Zikora

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I’d read somewhere that maternal mortality was higher in America than anywhere else in the Western world—or was it just higher for Black women?

I was disgracing her now; I was not facing labor with laced-up dignity. She wanted me to meet each rush of pain with a mute grinding of teeth, to endure pain with pride, to embrace pain, even. When I had severe cramps as a teenager, she would say, “Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,” and it was years before I knew that girls took Buscopan for period pain.

He was the kind of man you married, the kind people called, minutes into meeting him, “a good man.” We didn’t talk about marriage itself, but we talked often of the future, what we would do and wouldn’t do in five years, in ten years, as though we both knew it was inevitable that we would be together.

I read somewhere that love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold.

“I just want them to know I can handle it, I can do it alone,” I said. “Some of us have men and are still doing it alone,” Mmiliaku said.

If he was going to have a child, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say, since the body was mine, since in creating a child, Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man.

Somewhere in my consciousness, a mild triumph hovered, because it was over, finally it was over, and I had pushed out the baby. So animalistic, so violent—the push and pressure, the blood, the doctor urging me, the cranking and stretching of flesh and organ and bone. At the final push, I thought that here in this delivery room we are reduced, briefly and brutishly, to the animals we truly are.

Did it never end? 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 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.