Zikora

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I began to laugh. From somewhere outside myself I heard the hysteria in my laughter.

I caught my mother’s glance, that icy expression she had when I was a child and did something in public where she couldn’t slap me right away as she would have liked.

I felt angry and I felt ugly and I welcomed both like a bitter refuge.

Tears filled my eyes; my anger began to curdle into a darkness close to grief.

“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.”

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.

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

I knew how I was supposed to feel, but I did not know how I felt.

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.

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

A recurring image: my mother turning away, retreating, closing windows on herself.