The Attic Child

by Lola Jaye

And yet it was I, Dikembe, who had stood before the mirror that morning and not recognized myself; it was I, Dikembe, who was sitting in the grand room full of people, all eyes on me, yet feeling as if I were actually invisible.

“In my work, it’s always been clear to me that history is on the side of the powerful and not the weak.”

“Do you learn Latin?” I asked. “Oh no, the boys do that.” “Then what do you do?” “Needlework. We also learn how to be a wife . . . a good wife.” “Do they teach you how to be a good person?” “What a strange question, Celestine. Isn’t everyone good?”

An idleness that sometimes led to thoughts of anger and regret; pointless emotions that could only lead one way.

held no malice for my people. We were all just trying to survive in this country. That much I now understood.

I may not even be a sailor—supposedly the intended target—but a man enraged with his own insecurities, inadequacies and misinformation would never see beyond that.

I know what I wanted: to end that miserable existence he called a life, one that was filled with hatred for people he’d never even met, based on a view so irrational it beggared belief.

Having been so tied up with reading about great men from the past I was never actually going to meet, I’d failed to seek out the greatness happening around me.

“I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

“Like humans, trees tell a story. In nine months they can go from nakedness to half dressed, to fully flourishing bloom. Then they repeat the process all over again. I think they communicate a metaphor for life quite clearly.”

“Nothing stays the same. We’re in constant transition even when we are stagnant. So either you go with that or you get left behind. I just went with it.”

Dikembe at times embodied strength yet wasn’t untouched by a lifetime of pain, some of which I knew he would never speak about.

Chinua Achebe’s quote, “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter,”