Olive Witch: A Memoir

Green White Green

The limits of my body

Become the limits of my world.

—Kaiser Haq

eventide, 77°F

unu nwere kom-kom

kom-kom

unu nwere kom-kom

kom-kom

– the cry of the tin can hawkers

Drums

School starts tomorrow. Real school. Not the nursery school just behind our house. I’m four years old, and at the University of Nigeria Nsukka Primary School, I’ll have my own satchel and wear a uniform and carry a water bottle. Amma made my kindergarten uniform on her sewing machine. It’s a dress with blue and white checkers and pointed collars. My water bottle has a long red rubber cord and ridges across its blue-moon body. It’s hanging in the kitchen on a nail.

Today we made necklaces out of frangipani flowers. We have the only peach frangipani tree in town. Everyone else has white or yellow. The flowers come off the branches easily, but first we have to use the ones that have fallen on the ground. My necklace had ten flowers on lavender thread. My little sister, Simi, used yellow thread but she’s only three so Amma had to help her with the needle. When I put the necklace on, the fragrance was so strong, it made me dizzy.

It’s dark now and the crickets are calling. Amma has finished reading to us and she’s tucking Simi in. Our twin beds are next to each other and there’s a wooden nightstand in between. The nightstand used to hold the Grundig tape player, the one that played classical music on big round reels while we slept, the tape flying wild at the end of the collection. Now, the Grundig is in the living room, next to the radio that plays the BBC and Voice of America in the mornings.

‘Ghumai jao,’ Amma whispers in Bangla, as she switches off the light and closes the door. ‘Go to sleep.’

Her shadow darkens the space in the doorway and then goes away. My body is flat between the cool sheet and the springy mattress, safe and snug. But I won’t sleep yet. I’m waiting for the drums. I know they’re coming. They always do. The drums are for the dancers, at night, fire in the centre, in the villages that seem so far away in the day, but move closer at night.

Sometimes, the drums come into town, carried in by the juju men, the witch people. They go from compound to compound and they sing and they dance, wearing huge painted masks. I don’t know if they have real faces underneath. We give them money because if we don’t, it’s bad luck.

The drums are so faint at first I don’t even hear them. And then, just before I fall asleep, from somewhere inside the jungle, they come.

harmattan, 78°F

Pi, Pi, Pi, Pi,

Pitakwa na a kpo gi

Elu uwa si gi bia

Selense si na bugibu

Lagos emeri go Ibadan

One senseya emeri go Ibaadan

Two senseya emeri go Ibadan …

– Igbo clapping game

Red and Orange

Nsukka is a small town in a valley in southeastern Nigeria. The mornings and evenings are cool enough to wear blazers, but the afternoons are roasting. During the rainy season, there is a thunderstorm every afternoon. The sky turns black and roars. Then the rain comes.

We’re in the dry season now. It’s called harmattan, after the desert winds that travel thousands of miles from northern Africa all the way to the West African coast. It’s not going to rain for months. The ground thins, losing its red skin to the incessant wind. Dust blows everywhere. We have to sweep twice a day or our feet leave footprints on the floor. Our lips crack and our limbs turn grey in the dry heat.

Every Sunday, my mother sits Simi and me down to write letters. We have our own little table, tucked into a corner with two chairs, one for Simi and one for me. We keep our notebooks and pencils there. Our reading books are on the other side of the room, in a bookcase as tall as me, with three shelves. It’s full of Ladybird books, small and hard and easy to stack. My favourite book though isn’t a Ladybird book. It’s bigger, and has folktales from different countries. I like the Russian story best, about a little girl called Vasilissa and her magic doll and the witch, Baba Yaga.

Once a week, we write to our grandparents in Bangladesh on lined paper, every other line.

Dear Nana and Nanu, how are you? I am fine.

Dear Dada and Dadi, how are you? I am fine.

We draw large careful letters that hover between the lines. The letters to Nana and Nanu go to the capital city of Dhaka, to a bungalow with an overgrown garden buzzing with crows and a pond so big you can hardly see the other side. The letters to my paternal grandparents go further, to a village called Barahipur in southeastern Bangladesh.

Nanu came to visit us once. She brought bangles and toys from Bangladesh. They smelled like her, like fennel and ironed cotton. In the evenings, Simi and I played oga and other clapping games as she walked with Amma in the garden, between the allamanda bushes and the cactus plants with their thorny sprawling leaves. I could hear her saying how peaceful it was, how quiet.

It’s always quiet in Nsukka. Even when the president changes and no one likes it. After two military coups, the last leader, General Obasanjo, has handed over power to a civilian. The new president’s name, Shehu Shagari, sounds funny because he’s from the north. All smooth rolling sounds, not the staccato rhythms of Igbo. But in our university town, nothing seems different. Only the war, the one the Igbos fought and lost, before I was born, before my parents arrived in Nigeria, hangs like a backdrop behind everything. I don’t know what it means, but it’s there, the word, Biafra, as familiar as my own name.

This harmattan, Jamie Mama, my mother’s younger brother, has come to visit from Ankara, Turkey where he is studying architecture. He presents Simi and me with red and orange cotton dresses, and there’s a tiny button-up shirt for my brand new baby brother, Maher. Simi and I interrupt our hopscotch game straight away and run into our parents’ bedroom to try on the dresses.

‘Brush your hair,’ my mother tells me, as she does every few hours. My hair is curly and refuses to sit neatly if it isn’t tied back. I ignore her as I preen in her mirror, holding my hopscotch stone in my hand. The stone is flat on one side, so it doesn’t roll around too much after it lands. The hem of my new dress barely settles around my knees before I run back outside.

After Jamie Mama leaves, Simi and I have a fight about which dress is hers and which mine. We are only a year-and-half apart, so the dress sizes are the same.

‘The orange dress is mine!’ I shout. ‘I remember wearing it when we got them!’

Simi’s face is streaked with tears. ‘No, the red one is yours! The orange one is mine!’

‘You’re wrong! You don’t remember anything. I was wearing the orange one! It is mine.’

We go on like this until I bully Simi into agreeing with me. This is nothing new. As the oldest, I have been getting my way for seven years now. My ‘evil eye’ is legendary in my family. But this time I’m right. I can see my reflection in the mirror wearing the orange dress.

Months later, while leafing through our photo albums, I come across a polaroid photograph of our family from when Jamie Mama came to visit. We’re in our front compound in front of my mother’s white rose bushes. In the picture, my uncle is holding my naked baby brother high in the air and I know with hindsight that Maher is about to pee on him. My mother is sitting on the veranda steps, laughing. She has curly hair like mine, only longer, and pulled tightly into a ponytail. Her face though is like Simi’s, round and open and fair.

My father is wearing that faint air of amusement he wears only in photographs. He stands head and shoulders above us all. At six feet, he is tall for a Bangladeshi; Amma almost a foot shorter than him. My uncle is only a little taller than my mother.

The ground beneath us is red and dusty, and I’m looking sullen because I hate taking pictures. My sister is standing to Jamie Mama’s left, smiling her brilliant smile. She’s wearing the orange dress.

In that moment, I realize memory is a treacherous thing. And I’m extra nice to Simi for a while.

first gust, 80°F

in the land of Mars

where the ladies smoke cigars

each puff they take

is enough to kill a snake

when the snake is dead

they put flowers on its head

when the flowers die

they put diamonds in its eyes

when the diamonds break, it is 1988.

– author unknown

Black Keys

Tanu is a skinny Indian girl who lives two streets away from us. She’s in grade three, one above me, and her words are as sharp as her chin. I like going to her house because she has comic books about gods and goddesses and other religious stories. The comic I read and reread is about a prince called Siddhartha who gives away everything he owns, even the clothes on his back. He tears out all his hair in four handfuls, and he leaves his palace, his family, everything he knows.

Everywhere he goes, he is met with disdain or anger. People yell at him, throw things at him, drive him away from their homes. In each frame, his nakedness is obscured by something – a tree, a house, a weapon raised in rage. Still, he keeps searching, and it is long years later that he finds what he’s looking for, while sitting serene under a tree, and a light spreads out like a fan all around him.

Sometimes Tanu and I watch TV with her mother. Her mother loves watching Hindi films. The films have a lot of singing and dancing so you don’t have to understand Hindi. Today the film we’re watching stops halfway through. I look at Tanu’s mother, but she’s already on her way to the kitchen.

‘Intermission!’ she calls over her shoulder, as the word appears on the TV screen.

I’m sorry because Tanu wants to leave and I think I was even starting to understand the plot. Maybe it was the obvious gestures and expressions of the actors, or knowing Bangla helped me more than I realized. I suppose it doesn’t matter how I understand, only if I do. There’s no in-between to understanding.

The only time I see Tanu is when we play in the evenings, because there isn’t any inter-grade interaction at our school. Her father, like mine, is a professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Practically everyone in my school has a parent who teaches at the university or practices medicine at the university hospital. I have many classmates, Nigerian and foreign both, who holiday abroad, whose parents I address as Dr so-and-so, who’s hoping to go to England or America for university.

‘I know a good song,’ Tanu tells me one day when we are playing Monopoly at my house.

‘What is it called?’ I ask, moving my metal iron token down the board. I love the iron. I always make sure I choose it. Simi prefers the shoe. Tanu has the horse. I don’t know why she chose it, because it’s too tall and falls over easily.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who sings it?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says again, impatiently. ‘Do you want to learn it or not?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

My mother enters the room. ‘Girls, clean up the living room. Your fathers are coming to play bridge soon.’

‘Amma! We’re in the middle of a game,’ I protest.

‘I didn’t say you had to stop playing. You can take the board to your room,’ she says mildly.

‘Let’s stop,’ Tanu says. ‘I can teach you the song. And it’s not because I’m losing because I’m not. I have Park Lane and Mayfair.’

She’s lying but I want to learn the song, so I start stacking up the Chance and Community Chest cards. The last song we were obsessed with was a nonsense rhyme with a hypnotic rhythm about a land called Mars. Tanu’s song sounds similar, but it has no words. You’re supposed to play it on a harmonium or piano, but we don’t have either. She says it’s a snake charmer’s song. Whatever it is, we both love the sound of it. The melody is constantly in our heads, on the tips of our tongues. Even Simi knows it, though she doesn’t often play with us.

Some evenings, Tanu and I play tennis at the courts past the stadium. We have wooden rackets, which we have to keep screwed onto racks when we’re not using them or they’ll warp from the weather. One day, walking up Ako Okweli Street with our rackets, we hear the clinking sounds of a piano. It’s an unusual sound in our quiet little town. There’s only the roar of the occasional car and the birds and crickets and children. Once, the wails of mourners at a funeral. Always the wind.

‘Where is it coming from?’ I ask Tanu.

‘I don’t know. Let’s find out.’

She scrambles over a dried-up ditch not waiting for me to follow. The winds converge as we scale a miniature hill, the weeds waving, higher than our heads. At the top of the hill, a hedge foils us, until I spy a space in it, low to the ground, between two thin trunks, with just enough room to crawl through.

We emerge behind a row of one-storey buildings. It’s the music department. Someone is playing a piano inside. Tanu and I look at each other with the same thought, but conflicting reactions.

‘They may have an empty practice room,’ she says.

‘What if we get caught?’ I ask.

She ignores me and walks on. Heart racing, I follow. One of the buildings consists of two long rows of practice rooms with a corridor down the centre. Some of the rooms are occupied with people playing piano, but either their doors are closed or they are too busy to notice us. We sneak into one of the practice rooms undetected.

We spend the next few weeks banging out the tune to the snake charmer’s song. It’s clear from the beginning that almost none of the white keys sounds right. In fact, it only sounds good when we use mostly black keys.

When Tanu is bored with our sessions, I return to the practice rooms alone, to try and play parts of other songs. There aren’t any local radio stations in Nsukka, only the BBC and the Voice of America, and we don’t have a TV. So my musical knowledge is limited to what I’ve heard on those two stations and my mother’s tapes.

I pound out parts of ‘Cecilia’ by Simon and Garfunkel, ‘Thriller’ by Michael Jackson, and ‘In the Ghetto’ by Elvis Presley. There’s another song I heard on the radio called ‘The Maneater’ by Hall and Oates, but it’s too fast for me to play. I know the Elvis songs by heart because my mother plays them when she comes back from teaching Economics at the girls’ secondary school. The Grundig spirals out his voice as we pace up and down the cool concrete veranda in front of our house. The veranda has three open sides covered with netting and it’s painted a blood-red colour that I love.

‘I first dreamt about you when I was in Libya,’ my mother tells me, ruffling my hair. ‘I flew there from Bangladesh to join your father after we got married. But it wasn’t even Bangladesh then. It was still East Pakistan and I was in West Pakistan, in university at Lahore, when your Nanu wrote to tell me to come home.’

‘Why did she want you to come home?’ I ask.

‘She said she had found a husband for me, that he was tall and good-looking and educated, that he lived abroad. But to me, it mattered only that she approved of him. So I left Lahore and went back to Dhaka to get married.’

I try to think of my father as a young man looking for a wife. The only context I have for this is in the Nigerian folk tales I’ve read, like the brave young farmer who has to be clever and kind in order to win the hand of his beloved and defeat the trickster gods. But to me, Abbu is ever the professor, with accented authority in his voice and stature. He is a scientist and a devout Muslim. He is my strict and articulate father.

My mother is still telling her story. ‘After the wedding in Bangladesh, I went to Tripoli. Such a beautiful city by the sea.’

‘Were you afraid?’ Simi asks. ‘Of the sea, I mean?’ I know she’s asking this because she’s afraid of waves.

‘No, but I do remember something scary. It was my first night in Tripoli and it was very late and we were already in bed. Suddenly, there was a loud crashing sound, like bombs bursting, and it woke us up. Your Abbu said it was nothing, that Libyans liked to set off firecrackers for weddings and other celebrations. So we went back to sleep, but in the morning, when we switched on the radio, the announcer said there had been a coup in Libya and General Gaddafihad taken over power!’

Elvis is singing, ‘And look the other way? Well, the world turns …’

‘You got the Elvis music in Tripoli, right?’ Simi adds.

‘Yes, I did. You remember! I got bored sitting at home all day while your Abbu was teaching at the university, so I got a job at the local radio station. It was just a few hours a day, but it was a lot of fun, playing whatever music was popular. I taped some of it before I left, like the Elvis songs.’

‘And then you came to Nigeria and had me,’ I say.

‘Well, first we went to Bangladesh, and it was finally Bangladesh then. It was the summer of 1972, just after the war. We were there for a few months, and then we came to Nigeria. By then, you were in my tummy,’ she gestures towards me. Her sari is a billowing brown-and-green Georgette fabric. ‘I carried you here. So you’re our Nigerian baby, because you were born in Nigeria.’

‘And I’m the Bangladeshi baby,’ Simi says. ‘Because you went back to Bangladesh to have me.’

This part is a familiar story. We’ve been telling it for as long as I can remember.

‘Yes. And this one is the American baby,’ Amma says, chucking Maher under the chin.

He laughs and swats the portent air with his chubby arms. Outside the veranda, the trade winds are hazing the heavy air with dust. Inside, the Elvis tape is done, the reel spinning in silence.

Amma says she went to America to have Maher because the hospitals in America are better than in Nigeria or Bangladesh. But I think it’s because she wanted us to have three different homes. Then we wouldn’t fight about where we were from. We could each have a place to call our own, or all three if we shared.

‘Sing, Amma!’ Simi says.

Amma knows many Bangla songs from growing up in Dhaka. Nursery rhymes and childhood verses, songs by Rabindranath Tagore and Nazrul, folk songs.