This Earth, My Brother

Prologue

So they said, this is it. I know them all. They are pretending not to be looking at me; casting furtive glances, and withdrawing their eyes like hawks that give not to their offspring, averting their eyes. As if I wanted something off their backs. They knew. I didn’t ask them for anything. When I say it, then they become gentle and they pretend. Show him sympathy. He is a well-educated man, they say. He comes from a great family. He went to England, read books, big fat books of wisdom. I planted the tree of wisdom. I hoed the field of thorns, collected and burned the thistles on the outskirts, and planted the tree. Yes. When I went to see her, she pretended not to recognize my knock on the door. My knock! She used to jump up. She read my steps from afar. She said she smelled me from far away.

Was it a busy day?

Yes.

Silence. Silence.

She would wear her pink nightie, underneath it the violence of her nipples, black thick and cruel. Then she would laugh. Because I touched her in the armpit. Yes, touched her. It wasn’t funny. She would laugh, a shrill little laugh revealing the gap where a tooth was extracted while I waited outside the dentist’s office.

Was it a busy day?

No.

Silence.

No?

No.

But you look tired. Take off your shoes. Sit down. Then she would sit down first, carelessly, revealing her ass. She would wear a blue skirt and a scarlet blouse.

Are you hungry?

No.

No?

No.

Silence.

When I planted the tree after hoeing the field of thorns, I burned the harvest of thistles. I went to the public tap and washed my hands and drank some water. Then she revealed her ass, the hair on it was black, thick, combed upwards. She sat down, holding and caressing her left thigh. Her eyes vacant. Staring.

Are you sure?

About what?

I am not sure about anything. I am not. How many times must I tell her that I am not sure!

She said she smelled me. She read my steps at all hours. In her sleep she knew it when I walked towards her room. Even if I didn’t knock, she would open the door. The other night I came, she said, her river was in flood. So I couldn’t ride in my canoe. I said I would. She said, It is a taboo. Taboo my ass. When she showed fright I said I would go away. She said, No, don’t go away. Stay with me. I am frightened. Of what? Of me of course. She thought I would do her some physical injury; twist her arms and legs or slap her face, and kill her in a fit of anger as in one of those deeds of passion.

She would walk towards her little bed. I bought it for her. And the mattress. She would lie down and say, Let me take off your shoes. Come and lie down awhile. You look tired. She would take off my shoes slowly. And I would go towards the bed, lie by her side. I would squeeze her hand gently as she caressed me. Gently. I would take her, hard and gentle, and she would complain of bruises in her woman. And I would say it was not my fault. After her eyes had turned into white, the brown pupils gone, and she had gasped, and cried, and scratched, she would quieten down. And sigh. Then I would hold her throat with my big hand. And squeeze it hard and gentle. She would moan, and cry, and not move. Slowly her eyes would run, the brown vanishing far away to the world’s end where graves are green and white with stones. Slowly, very slowly, I would let her die.

I came back the next noon, through the rain, mud on my brown shoes, stepping into puddles, into gutters of nights and days raining hard here in this land. The gentle drizzle I am not aware of forming a filmy halo of mist rising from my head, heat of a headache which no pills could cure. She would lie there breathing gently in a soft liquid sleep and wake up and look at me with those sad eyes misty with little tears. Like the one that freshened a long-ago cactus in a deserted garden far away, of my friend and brother Jesus. Then I would be sorry I had killed her. And I would go on my knees and beg her that I would never kill her again so long as I lived; that I would die in her place should they want to kill her, beat her and shame her in this land of ours. I would take all the indignities and the shames intended for her, I would cry hard like a man, and say, It is the death of a woman which is far away. Man’s is near, hiding behind his door.

Then I would rise from the floor on my knees marked by the patterns on the linoleum, and slowly I would return from where I came.

A mermaid was sitting on my lap. Dripping water. Her feet, tail were fins spread-eagled in fans. Sitting on my lap. Her eyes were rolling in circles of little fires, her breasts balls of flames; she was breathing pollen gold and cinnamon down my neck; her teeth rows of sapphires and corals. She was shedding tears of moondust.

My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death.

I would renew my oath, my promise that I would never kill her again; that it was my error. No, I shall let her live within me. Let her share my joy. My agony I shall keep away from her in the firm belief that she will never die.

Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.

I shall ask her deliverance from the terror and the burden of this joy. Her corals and sapphires shall be planted upon my neck, incisors stamping marks I shall wear in little crosses of the thunder initiates till my dying day.

Then she was no longer a mermaid. She became the overseer in our ward. A squat ugly man with the voice of a dog barking in my sleep every night. He was marching up and down with a long bamboo cane. He stamped his feet in military precision just to impress and frighten us. Pretending he didn’t know we were there.

She was her, my mermaid sitting on my lap, dripping wet with water now crying now laughing. I stretched forth my hand to squeeze her breasts. They felt like flames, black blue flames of the burning of the spirit, bursting in my hand in gold.

She was my mermaid come from the sea. She came one night when the moon was there, burning over the ocean. Her beams cast upon the spire of our wooden church built by the missionaries from Bremen in 1847. They died. They are all buried in the churchyard beside the chapel with shiny words in German on the gravestones made of marble.

That moon that night was singing in the season of mackerel when fishermen cast their nets in the night to prepare to haul in a good catch at dawn just when the women were leaving morning service. Mackerels screaming the gulls gone home to bird island and we lay in the sand waiting.

Then she came up. Head first. Upon the water at the spot where the steamers used to stop in those days, on the line of the biggest moonray she emerged. Head first. Her hair was long and black and shining like flames of jet streaming down her long thin body which has now become flabby with age and time and labour. Then she rose from the sea, casting about her a flaming mantle of beaten cloth, her breasts shiny and erect upon the water. I could not see any more.

She walked the sandy lanes of my home town with me. We skirted the shoreline that night and many more nights. She was my secret; no one else saw her by my side. They could not see her. The second day my father said, You look like a sleepwalker. You have neglected your daily chores; you no longer read your Reader Six. You disobey your elders.

She was with me. And I was not afraid. I told her my story of the nature and the bitterness of the birthwater that nurtured me. Of the womb that carried me. Of the pangs that delivered me. She listened. She never said a word. Only she would smile a knowing smile, revealing her teeth of coral and sapphires. We walked the edges of the big lagoon. I pointed out to her where the gulls return at night on bird island. We followed the tracks laid by infant fisher feet of the tegayi where a shiny shoal of fish in the mud and the long line of retrievers followed bringing home the harvest of fish of the following feet.

When I asked her, Are you tired? she shook her head and her long hair dropped millions of golden stars behind her. If I stopped to collect them she would rebuke me. Then we would walk on, through marsh. We would walk on. She wanted to know who owned what portion. What happened to the owners of this neglected compound? Who owned this house whose fences were falling and termites ate the shiny trees that held it together?

The third night I said I was tired. We had wandered again the whole night. We sat underneath the Indian almond tree on the beach, just about two hundred and ten yards from the spot where she came out that night long ago, I cannot remember how recently. My feet were tired from the long walks, my head ached violently from lack of rest. The boys and girls from our households had been looking for me for days. That night my mother had joined them, a hurricane lantern swinging in her hand as she led the chorus of querulous and talkative children to look for me. Always they would pass me by without seeing me. Sometimes as near as one yard, or sometimes one foot. They swept past like a band of choristers calling my names and looking behind every tin shack, and behind every tree. They came so close that day I could hear their talk.

Where could he have gone?

He hasn’t come home to eat his food!

They said he didn’t show up at the school.

She stood close to me breathing down my neck cinnamon.

The moon had arisen that night again, like the night she came. She shone in a violent fire of long line like the glinting knife. Carving the sea in two where that night she came. It was blazing in the silence of the long knife to the foot of the Indian almond; it blazed. She stood near me, her eyes reflecting the blaze of the fiery water in the savagery of the carving knife. Then it began to happen.

First the whale, the rolling stone tree trunk deity, is the worshipper of thunder, dalosu, the seer and the unseen, the rider of the white horse of the air in the sky above his children. He rolled up in his majesty without hindrance. Then he rested in the sand at the edge of the silver foam where they covet gold out of old coffins of dead buried on land, now covered by the waters of the sea long ago, my father said when he was a boy.

From the sea, the worshippers emerged. They were led by a tall man clad in white. Around his head a blue band in which flamed the tail feather of a parrot. He held the long spear rattler and a small group of gong boys followed him beating time to the fall of his rattler that shook with its bells. Then there came a host of women, bare-chested, their drooping breasts flapping about their chests, their skin shining with shea butter in the violet light of the single moonbeam that slashed the sea in two. They were not singing. From their lips rose an ululation long, echoing among the fallen walls behind the church bell. Then they would slap their hands over their mouths interrupting for split seconds the long cry. They were looking for the dead, in every corner, in every tin shack, in every fallen-down mud house. Behind them came a long line of teenagers. Boys. Long-limbed boys with small feet flat in the sand. Girls. Their breasts scarcely out, bubbling. Their bodies shining in shea butter. Each had around her waist, long aggry beads of several colours. Their rears singed in white chalk, studded with ground black incense of the sycamore. They were not singing. Their heads bent upon the earth, as their feet traced many footsteps in the sand following the tall man with the rattler.

At the end of the line, around the body of the whale a circle formed. The ululation stopped. The leader lifted his hand up into the skies. The followers bent their heads upon the earth.

Then they sang a song. A low moan, a mournful song of death, and loss. The moon blazed on. She sent a sword that divided the sea and cast itself upon the black shiny body of the whale.

After what seemed like a day, the ululation died down. The line was led again by the tall man. The boys and the girls followed. Then the whale in his majesty. She, as if in a dream, moved from my side under the Indian almond. Into the burning sword of the moonbeam which carved at the sea they all moved to the single jangle of the leader’s rattler. She was the last to go.

And I was alone. But not for long.

Chapter 1

Deme lies on the great northern road that cuts across the abdomen of Eweland heading towards Kete Krachi, towards the north. It lies thirty miles to the sea, from the market town of Keta. Its people are a wing of the Anlo sojourners from Notsie several years ago. Not even the very old can remember how long ago.

The lorry road is a narrow track of red earth beaten together by many feet, and the few trucks that careered along it on market days, on their way to the coast. It was mainly built, if it was built at all, of mud, and gravel collected by women from the gravel pits beneath the Aka River. When it rained, it was closed to traffic. There was a road overseer, a fat, drunken man who could be seen after the second day of rain in his army supply raincoat, carrying a large load of keys which he jingled with a great deal of the feeling of importance. Then he would move to the northern end of the town and close the creaking gate under the tall Ago palm, and return to his house in the sweaty expectation that the drivers of the plantain and yam trucks would come around and offer him gifts. He had been at his post for years, no one knew how long. He and the creaking gate under the Ago palm were indistinguishable. The gate was the symbol of his authority. The epiphany of his power as an agent of the government at Accra.

The lorries would form a long line on both sides of this gate. The drivers who didn’t have any gifts to give lurched out into the market square and sought out the palm wine stalls while their passengers sat on the wooden planks and dozed for days. The few that could offer a gift sauntered in and out of the road overseer’s house, and split with him never-ending bottles of akpeteshie, the homemade gin declared illegal by the colonial government. He himself sat in his easy chair in his parlour, a veritable picture of human lethargy translated into power at its most resigned and unconcerned pivot.

The only time that he came to life was when one of his many assistants ran up and reported the arrival of a touring car. A car signified a white man and the lowliest minion of the Empire must be about his duty. England expects every man to do his duty. Then Mr Attipoe would jump off his chair, his bulk and his state of drunkenness notwithstanding. His small red eyes would come to life. And, like a sleepwalker, he would dash off pursued by a group of excited drivers who fondly hoped their chance had come to continue their journeys. If it was a false alarm, Mr Attipoe would return cursing his assistants. The dogs, didn’t they know he was resting? Anyone who reported false fire next time would lose his job. Then it wasn’t he, Attipoe Esquire, road overseer, Deme, who held power over who came and went on the King’s road.

Most things came to a standstill when the rains came in Deme. For the rains would come down in great, white sheets beating a dissonant music on the few zinc roofings for days and nights. The intervals that arose were only changed quickly by flashes of thunder and the firing of heavenly muskets. Then the noise and the fury of the rain would rise loud and crashing for hours. Everyone would be indoors. If your house leaked, you gathered together pans and pots in which the drip, drip, drip of the rain beat at first singular tattoos, and then changed to the drop, drop, drop of collecting water. A fire would be lit. The children would gather round it and watch the blaze while their elders warmed their insides with local gin.

Then the rains would clear, and the sun would come out on an early morning. The earth would still be soggy and mud tracks would lead from hut to hut, from house to house, laid by the feet of those who went to drink. Children who had played in the early rains would still be sleeping in the fond hope that it would continue to rain forever.

The sun had just risen after such a rain over Deme. Kodzo Dzide, the town crier, had spent the night on Mr Attipoe’s compound. There had been a wake the previous night. Since that was his seventh wake in the last two days, he had passed out comfortably in a corner near the chicken coop. He opened his eyes, rubbed his face with his palm and looked around to make sure where he was. Women were bustling around bathing children or preparing the morning fires with which to boil water.

His head was sick. Very sick. He remembered just faintly the previous wake at Yenaye. How he came to be at Deme he couldn’t remember. His head was sick, he was sure, because he hadn’t eaten the previous night.

His wife had left him three markets ago. But man must bear all his troubles. Kodzo was not prepared to go after his wife in spite of the linguist stick sent to him by the chief of his wife’s village. He should have heeded his late uncle’s advice. He should not have married the woman. The woman had lived in the mining town of Akwatia up country. Any woman who had lived in Akwatia was a prostitute. His uncle said so. Kodzo agreed, nodded his head, as he sat on a log of wood