Possessing the Secret of Joy (15 page)

In the village when I was a girl the mad were kept out in the bush. They lived alone in smelly, ramshackle huts, their filthy clothes in tatters. Their matted hair covering their backs like moss. I learned not to fear them, for I discovered, as all the villagers knew, that mad people, though murderous at heart, could, nonetheless, be easily distracted. If one lunged, you offered him or her—for there were always mad women and men; who never, incidentally, chose to live together—a yam. Or a song. Or a story that only a mad person could grasp the sense of. Stories we laughed at, nonsensical rhymes, made them weep. Stories sorrowful to us, about our own sufferings or those of the village, made them laugh like the fiends they were. While they laughed or cried, ate their yam or tried, usually without success, to locate the stinkweed we’d stuck in their mossy locks, off we ran.

To Tashi I have posed the following question and, she has failed so far to properly answer it: Tashi, I have said to her, it is clear you love your adopted country
so
much; I want you to tell me, What does an American look like?

W
HAT DOES AN
A
MERICAN
look like? the old witch has asked me. I started right in describing Raye. She is of a color not seen in Africa, I say. Except in certain seed pods or lightish brown kinds of wood. She has curly hair that is at the same time a bit nappy. Also never seen in Africa. And she has freckles. Also not seen in Africa. M’Lissa listens carefully and then questions shrewdly. Really? she asks. But is not America the land of the ghostly whites?

I hasten to describe Amy Maxwell. Her wired smile and powdery skin that is tinged with yellow and pink. Her bony shoulders and marble eyes. Her teased white hair. Her sorrow and hurt.

But M’Lissa is not satisfied.

I begin to describe people with yellow skin and slanted eyes. These, she scoffs, must be Eskimos, of whom she has heard. Everyone knows they live far in the frozen north. Am I sure I can describe a real American?

I describe white men from television, with hearty voices and fake warmth in their eyes. I describe Indians from India and Native Americans from Minnesota. Red women with black hair. Yellow people with blue eyes. Brown people with black eyes who speak a language from another country.

M’lissa waits.

It seems there is no answer to her question. Americans, after all, have come from so many places. This thought alone, I think, must boggle the mind of M’Lissa, who’s never been anywhere.

If you say to someone in Africa: What does an Olinkan or a Maasai look like, there is an easy answer. They are brown or very brown. They are notably short (Olinkans) or tall (Maasai). But no, shortness or tallness, brownness or redness, is not what makes an American.

Finally, outdone, but also sensing an ancient trick, I stopped this little game of hers, and brought us closer to the day of her death.

What does an American look like? she teased me complacently after several weeks had passed and I’d offered her hundreds of descriptions of Americans who rarely resembled each other physically and yet resembled each other deeply in their hidden histories of fled-from pain.

What does an American look like? I asked the question softly to myself, and looked M’Lissa in the eye. The answer surprised us both.

An American, I said, sighing, but understanding my love of my adopted country perhaps for the first time: an American looks like a wounded person whose wound is hidden from others, and sometimes from herself. An American looks like me.

T
HE VERY FIRST DAY
after Mbati left, and I was required to wash M’Lissa, I saw why she was lame. Not only had her clitoris, outer and inner labia, and every other scrap of flesh been removed, but a deep gash traveled right through the tendon of her inner thigh. That was why, when walking, she had to drag her left leg. It was supported by the back tendon and the buttock muscles alone. Indeed, the left buttock was far more developed than the right, and even though she hadn’t really walked with vigor in many years, there was a firm resilience in her flesh on that side.

Yes, touch it, my daughter, she exclaimed, as she felt my fingers exploring the keloidal tissue of the old wound, as hard as a leather shoe sole. It is the mark, on my body, of my own mother’s disobedience.

Since this was the day on which I had earlier resolved to kill M’Lissa, I was unsure whether to appear interested in her life. That is, her life before she murdered Dura. But she was remembering, and I had not completed her bath. Trapped, I listened.

S
INCE THE PEOPLE
of Olinka became a people there has always been a
tsunga.
It was hereditary, like the priests. Before the people became a tribe they lived too. But that was considered an evil time, because although everyone knew they had a mother, because she had given birth to them, a father was not to be had in the same way. You could not be sure. And so, your mother’s brother was your father. The house always belonged, in those days, to the woman, and there were never children without parents or a home. But somehow this was seen as evil. Anyway, from the time of memory, always, in my family, the women were
tsungas.

But why is that? I asked my mother.

Because it is such an honor, she replied. And also because it is the way we fill our bellies.

She was a sad woman, my mother. I never saw her smile.

She often prayed.

When I became old enough to be aware of her suffering, I began to notice that when she prayed, she faced a certain direction, and that she often went off, walking slowly, looking back over her shoulder as if she thought someone followed her, in the direction of her prayers.

Once, following her, I saw her enter a blighted forest where no one ever went, walk up to a hole in a rotting tree, and take something out of it. She unwrapped it, looked upon it, kissed it, and replaced it, all in a single motion. This forest was a kind of no-man’s-land. Barren. Everything dry and dying. It was said this blight was caused long ago by a man and a woman fornicating there, when the area was planted in cereal grains. But this had happened so long ago no one remembered their fate, or even who they were.

After my mother had left, I crept up to the tree in which the small wrapped object lay, and took it carefully down into my lap, where I unwrapped it. It was a small smiling figure with one hand on her genitals, every part of which appeared intact. This was before I was circumcised, and so, with the ready curiosity of a child, I lay right down to compare my vulva to the little statuette’s. Hidden behind a boulder, I very cautiously touched myself. The blissful, open look of the little figure had aroused me, and I felt an immediate response to my own touch. It was so sudden, so shocking and unexpected, it frightened me. I hastily re-wrapped the little figure, placed it back in its niche, and ran.

I would often go back to the blighted place and take the little figure down from the tree and play with it. But it seemed too powerful for me to ever again compare to myself. And so, I never again touched myself. If I had, then at least I would have known the experience that the work of the
tsunga
was trying to prevent.

Can you imagine the life of the
tsunga
who feels? I learned not to feel. You can learn not to. In this I was like my grandmother, who became so callous people called her “I Am a Belly.” She would circumcise the children and demand food immediately after; even if the child still screamed. For my mother it was a torture.

Then, one day, my mother had to circumcise the girls in my age group.

Prior to that day, for weeks, she prayed to the little idol constantly. And when my turn came she tried to get away with cutting lightly. Of course she took the outer lips, because four strong eagle-eyed women held me down; and of course the inner lips too. But she tried to leave me a nub, down there where the charge I had felt with the little statuette had seemed to be heading. She barely nicked me there. But the other women saw.

What my mother started, the witchdoctor finished. He had learned all the healing and cures that he knew from women, which was why he was called a witchdoctor, and he wore the witch’s grass skirt, but the witches who taught him had been put to death, because they refused circumcision and were too powerful among the women to be left free, uncircumcised. He showed no mercy. In fright and unbearable pain my body bucked under the razor-sharp stone he was cutting me with…

I could never again see myself, for the child that finally rose from the mat three months later, and dragged herself out of the initiation hut and finally home, was not the child who had been taken there. I was never to see that child again.

A
ND YET,
I
SAID,
hardening myself against the sight of M’Lissa’s heaving chest, expecting tears, you saw her over and over again, hundreds, thousands of times. It was she who screamed before
your
knife.

M’Lissa sniffled. I have never cried after that, she said. I knew in the moment when the pain was greatest, when it reached a crescendo, as when a loud metal drum is struck with a corresponding metal stick, that there is no God known to man who cares about children or about women. And that the God of woman is autonomy.

Cry, I said. Perhaps it will ease you.

But I could see that, even now, she could not feel her pain enough to cry. She was like someone beaten into insensibility. Bitter, but otherwise emotionally inert.

Why did they make us do it? she asked. I never really knew. And the women, even today, after giving birth, they come back to the
tsunga
to be resewn, tighter than before. Because if it is loose he won’t receive enough pleasure.

But you taught them this, I said. It is what you told me. Remember? The uncircumcised woman is loose, you said, like a shoe that all, no matter what their size, might wear. This is unseemly, you said. Unclean. A proper woman must be cut and sewn to fit only her husband, whose pleasure depends on an opening it might take months, even years, to enlarge. Men love and enjoy the struggle, you said. For the woman…But you never said anything about the woman, did you, M’Lissa? About the pleasure she might have. Or the suffering.

I am weeping now, myself. For myself. For Adam. For our son. For the daughter I was forced to abort.

There is caesarean section, you know, the aborting doctor had said. But I knew I could not bear being held down and cut open. The thought of it had sent me reeling off into the shadows of my mind; where I’d hidden out for months. I watched from a lofty distance as Adam packed for his twice-yearly visits to Paris, to be with Lisette and his other son; I watched Benny struggle with all his might to be close to me, to melt into my body, to inhale my scent; and I was like a crow, flapping my wings unceasingly in my own head, cawing mutely across an empty sky. And I wore black, and black and black.

If I look at M’Lissa I know I will leap up and strangle her. Fortunately I am unable to move. I look down at my feet. Feet that hesitate before any nonflat surface: stairs, hills. Feet that do not automatically or nimbly leap over puddles or step gracefully onto curbs.

Perhaps an hour passes. I think M’Lissa has fallen asleep. I glance at the bed and am startled by how small she looks. She seems to have shrunk. I glance at her face. It is alert, watchful. But not because of me. She seems to have forgotten me.

I finally see her, she says, astonished. Self-absorbed.

Who? I ask. You finally see who?

She makes a slight dismissive motion with her hand, warning me not to interrupt.

The child who went into the initiation hut, she says. You know I left her there bleeding on the floor, and I came out. She was crying. She felt so betrayed. By everyone. They’d severely beaten her mother as well, and she blamed herself for this. M’Lissa sighed. I couldn’t think about her anymore. I would have died. So I walked away, limped away, and just left her there. M’Lissa paused. Her voice when she continues is a whisper, amazed. She is still crying. She’s been crying since I left. No wonder I haven’t been able to. She has been crying all our tears.

I
HAVE BEEN STRONG.
This is what I tell the tourists who come to see me, and the young mothers and the old mothers and everybody who comes. It is what they tell me back: the president and the politicians and the visitors from the churches and the schools. Strong and brave. Dragging my half-body wherever half a body was needed. In service to tradition, to what makes us a people. In service to the country and what makes us who we are. But who are we but torturers of children?

C
ROWDED INTO
the small white chapel on the top floor of the prison are Adam, Olivia, Benny, Pierre, Raye and Mbati. Raye has flown in for the execution, though she denies it. It is not your death that is so fascinating, she says bluntly. It is still your life with which I am concerned. Besides, she says saucily, hands on her hips, You’re not dead yet!

Indeed, I think, I am not. But neither would I say I am fully alive.

Considering the deterioration of the rest of the prison, says Mbati, it is odd that the chapel is still intact.

That’s because no one uses it, says Adam, fingering the dusty unopened Bible, whose gilt-edged pages have been gnawed by moths.

It is even cool here, in the evenings; the windows are large and nothing, not even shutters, blocks the breeze. There are no bars, presumably because it is too high to jump.

Since the trial, Olivia has volunteered to work mornings downstairs on the AIDS floor. Adam, Benny and Pierre have rented a jeep and explored the countryside. We’ve filmed everything, says Benny, and now we want you to see it.

Adam starts the projector; at first there are slides. Pictures of the northern territory and its petroglyphs and faded paintings of celebrations and hunts. But then there is a film. I know they are trying to prepare me for it because Olivia is suddenly handing me a glass of water and Adam is holding my hand.