Butter Honey Pig Bread

by Francesca Ekwuyasi

AS IF ON REQUEST, dazzling sunshine is coupled with a cool breeze on the day of Kehinde and Farouq’s wedding party. The guests are few: Isabella and Toki (seemingly reconciled), Star and a blindingly handsome friend he introduces as Mukhtar, Dr Savage and her nieces, and a handful of Kambirinachi’s friends from the church bookstore. The guests join the twins, their mother, Farouq, and Timi under the tree-dappled late-afternoon sunlight in the backyard to eat and shower the couple with good wishes. Kehinde is a vision in a pale coral tiered eyelet lace dress that lifts at her belly. Her thick hair muscled into a coronet braid and adorned with tiny Ixora flowers that match her lipstick. Farouq is in a white kaftan embroidered at the edges in gold thread, he is clean-shaven, and beaming with his eyes fixed on his wife.

The Africville Museum is a museum in the shape of a church. It’s a replica of a church that the city of Halifax destroyed in the ’60s. The whole town of Africville was destroyed because white people love destroying things, it’s their favourite thing. I’m kidding! Not really. Maybe. Yes,

Let me tell you about Africville: In the 1800s, hundreds of Black folk settled here, and a majority of them owned their land (significant to note). Despite racist fuckery, the community was self-sustaining and thriving. It was poor, and the city refused to offer basic services like clean water and sewage removal. Instead, the city built a dump, a prison, and an infectious disease hospital right by the community. Lovely abi? The city eventually decided to relocate the residents without properly consulting them! Basically, the residents were moved, some forcefully, and their homes destroyed. The church was the heart of the town; this replica stands to commemorate what happened.

My apparition buddy tells me I’m not as worthless as I think I am. I don’t even know why I fucked Salomé’s TA. I know why I keep doing it, though, and it’s pretty perverse. I’m pretty perverse. There’s this poem by Nayyirah Waheed that I keep thinking about. It’s something about being in love looking like all the things you’ve lost finding you once more.

But don’t they say wanty wanty no get?

“I started writing them the year I went to live with Aunty Yemisi, after you refused to come with me. You refused to answer my calls, my texts, my emails, remember?” Her voice is low and hard, it comes out of her mouth with thick plumes of smoke that she blows away from me.

My sweet Taiye looks at me when I come through the door, but my Kehinde’s face is stone. I look at my daughters, this split ball of light. It’s painful what I’ve done to them, what I’ve allowed to be done to them. If I could undo it, if I must be honest—

She kisses him softly on the lips and says, “Thank you, I love you, let’s see each other more often.” He replies, “Bitch, I love you too.” Then he adds, “Think about the food truck idea.”

Taiye slices the yam in small rectangular chunks and fries them in fragrant coconut oil. She rips apart lettuce leaves and quarters ripe tomatoes to make a salad with soft-boiled eggs and ribbons of carrot and radishes. For dessert, she mashes overripe plantains with eggs, flour, and yeast for mosa to serve alongside fresh juicy mangoes. Then she searches for Kehinde.

I follow Taiye slowly, past Coca-Cola cat curled up smack in the middle of the staircase, to the kitchen, where the delicious smell of yaji and chicken greets us. And then I see the small feast that Taiye has prepared for us.

SENEGALESE BREAD, PITA, NAAN, Agege bread, baguette, brioche, soda bread, sourdough, molasses seed bread, sprouted grains, gluten-free, and many other variations of bread.

Her Agege bread, for example, failed to match the particularly dense and stretchy texture of the loaves she buys from the hawkers in Obalende. And her naan was just fine, nothing worth sharing, really. She has immersed herself in this task of perfecting her breadmaking skills in the three weeks following a tearful goodbye to Kehinde. Their relationship did not transform drastically after that meal of roast chicken and fried yams, but it unlocked a door in both of them.

Taiye is shaping a large loaf of sourdough, her most consistently successful recipe, when her phone rings with a call from Kehinde.

AFTER MUCH TRIAL AND ERROR, Taiye thinks she’s discovered a trick to give her Agege bread that desired chewy texture: scalded flour. A simple combination of bread flour and boiling water creates a gelatinous dough that gives the bread that signature stretch without the need for potassium bromate, or any other dodgy preservatives. She sifts 350 grams of bread flour, seven grams of instant dry yeast, and a teaspoon of salt.

She returns to her bread dough, which has doubled in size. She pounds it down, divides and shapes it into four small loaves, and then leaves them for a second rise.

She prays for the baby on its way through her. She prays for her mother asleep upstairs in her room, for her father on the other side, for Timi in Amsterdam, for Aiden wherever she is, for Bobby in New York, and finally, for Salomé in Halifax. She prays for their safe passage, whenever the time arises. And for each of them to know, however they must learn it, just how beloved they are. By the time she glazes the twice-risen loaves with melted butter and sets them in the oven to bake, it is almost three a.m.

Taiye boils three eggs until their yolks are the consistency of custard. She cuts thick slices of the bread and smears them with butter and shito. As she serves her mother, she says, “I think I’ve come as close to making Agege bread as I can get.”

TANGIER IS AN ANCIENT AND FASCINATING CITY, as beautiful as it is old. Those first few weeks, while Farouq spent his days interviewing scholars and activists, I happily explored the Kasbah, the Grande Mosquée, St. Andrew’s Church. I saw as many films as I could at Cinéma Rif, I visited the American Legation, I walked along the stunning beach.

I even started a glass bead collage of Farouq floating in a pool of orange juice—Morocco might very well have the best oranges in the world.

IF YOU ASK KAMBIRINACHI, THIS IS HOW SHE’LL TELL It: Oke oshimmiri anokataghi rie onye obula nke o na-ahughi ukwu ya anya. The ocean never swallows a person whose leg it does not touch.

ON HER TRIP TO ABEOKUTA, She takes a cabu cabu to her childhood home. There she finds nothing but wild greenness covering the foundation where the house once stood. She walks through the green, paces through where she remembers each room used to be. Here the tiny living room, here the even tinier kitchen, here her parents’ bedroom, her room, the bush of a backyard with the borehole. She thinks of her mother. She is sad to have driven the woman away with her very nature. She doesn’t regret this life, but it hurts, nonetheless.

I AM IMMENSELY GRATEFUL TO MY FAMILY—blood and chosen—for their unwavering love and support.

Big love, and thank you, to my grandmother, who often seems to be writing something—letters, queries, etc., and always thought I would write a book one day.

Big love to my brother Ike, a fellow storyteller who has always supported my weirdness and challe...

Big love to my aunties and uncles, and my cousins Chinedu, Ene...

Big love to my dear friends Hannah, Biyi, Monika, Carmel, Alanna, Frank, Wren, Marshall, Christine, Neil, Portia, Patricia, Arielle, Leanne, Adanna, and Seyi—thank you for witnessing, listening to, and enc...

Immense gratitude to the incredibly generous folks who read and blurbed this novel: Kai Cheng Thom, Zeba Blay, Canisia Lubrin, Tanaïs, and Catherine Hernandez. Thank you, Enrique Ferreol and Arts Nova Scotia, for the generous Arts Equity Funding Initiative Grant that allowed me to do some research required to make this book what it is.

Thank you to GUTS magazine, the Malahat Review, Winter Tangerine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Transition Magazine for publishing my short fiction over the last few years, thus giving me the confidence to carry on writing.

And thank you to the baristas and bartenders at the many cafés and bars where I wro...