A friend of mine posted a video on
Facebook in which he sang the popular Christmas song wherein he, with lots of
nostalgia – the kind that finds perfect expression when you are fresh out of
bed on a not-so-cold winter morning in Salford – sang about his dream of a
white Christmas, the kind where treetops glisten and children listen…you know
that kind. You probably know the song. If Ojeaga rings a bell on Facebook, the
right Ojeaga that is, then you probably saw the video. Another posted a link to
me in Cyrillic, and when I followed the link, I was rudely reminded of all the
reasons why you should never follow links to websites you do not know if you
have a curious, wide-eyed eleven-year-old looking over your shoulder. I quickly
shut the window, but I could not as easily shut down the battery of questions that
followed. So I got him to go out with some other children to a movie, and finally
settled to begin Adichie’s Americanah. That iss my Christmas
gift to myself – a good book every Christmas always is, and so far, I am
enjoying it immensely. I thought I should share this passage from it.
One day, the year Ifemelu turned ten, her mother came home from work
looking different. Her clothes were the same, a brown dress belted at the
waist, but her face was flushed, her eyes unfocused. “Where is the big
scissors?” she asked, and when Ifemelu brought it to her, she raised it to her
head and, handful by handful, chopped off all her hair. Ifemelu stared,
stunned. The hair lay on the floor like dead grass. “Bring me a big bag,” her
mother said. Ifemelu obeyed, feeling herself in a trance, with things happening
that she did not understand. She watched her mother walk around their flat,
collecting all the Catholic objects, the crucifixes hung on walls, the rosaries
nested in drawers, the missals propped on shelves. Her mother put them all in
the polythene bag, which she carried to the backyard, her steps quick, her
faraway look unwavering. She made a fire near the rubbish dump, at the same
spot where she burned her used sanitary pads, and first she threw in her hair,
wrapped in old newspaper, and then, one after the other, the objects of faith.
Dark grey smoke curled up into the air. From the verandah, Ifemelu began to cry
because she sensed that something had happened, and the woman standing by the
fire, splashing in more kerosene as it dimmed and stepping back as it flared,
the woman who was bald and blank, was not her mother, could not be her mother.
When her mother came back inside, Ifemelu backed away, but her mother
hugged her close.
“I am saved,” she said. “Mrs Ojo ministered to me this afternoon during
the children's break and I received Christ. Old things have passed away and all
things have become new. Praise God. On Sunday we will start going to Revival
Saints. It is a Bible-believing church and a living church, not like St Dominic’s.”
Her mother’s words were not hers. She spoke them too rigidly, with a demeanor
that belonged to someone else. Even her voice, usually high-pitched and
feminine, had deepened and curdled. That afternoon, Ifemelu watched her mother’s
essence take flight. Before, her mother said the rosary once in a while,
crossed herself before she ate, wore pretty images of saints around her neck,
sang Latin songs and laughed when Ifemelu’s father teased her about her
terrible pronunciation. She laughed, too, whenever he said, “I am an agnostic
respecter of religion,” and she would tell him how lucky he was to be married
to her, because even though he went to church only for weddings and funerals,
he would get into heaven on the wings of her faith. But, after that afternoon,
her God changed. He became exacting. Relaxed hair offended Him. Dancing
offended Him. She bartered with Him, offering starvation in exchange for
prosperity, for a job promotion, for good health. She fasted herself bone-thin:
dry fasts on weekends, and on weekdays, only water until evening. Ifemelu’s
father followed her with anxious eyes, urging her to eat a little more, to fast
a little less, and he always spoke carefully, so that she would not call him the
devil’s agent and ignore him, as she had done with a cousin who was staying
with them. “I am fasting for your father’s conversion,” she told Ifemelu often.
For months, the air in their flat was like cracked glass. Everyone tiptoed
around her mother, who had become a stranger, thin and knuckly and severe.
Ifemelu worried that she would, one day, simply snap into two and die.
Then, on Easter Saturday, a dour day, the first quiet Easter Saturday in
Ifemelu’s life, her mother ran out of the kitchen and said, “I saw an angel!”
Before, there would have been cooking and bustling, many pots in the kitchen
and many relatives in the flat, and Ifemelu and her mother would have gone to
night mass, and held up lit candles, singing in a sea of flickering flames, and
then come home to continue cooking the big Easter lunch. But the flat was
silent. Their relatives had kept away and lunch would be the usual rice and
stew. Ifemelu was in the living room with her father, and when her mother said “I
saw an angel!” Ifemelu saw exasperation in his eyes, a brief glimpse before it disappeared.
“What happened?” he asked, in the placating tone used for a child, as if
humouring his wife’s madness would make it go away quickly.
Her mother told them of a vision she had just had, a blazing appearance
near the gas cooker of an angel holding a book trimmed in red thread, telling
her to leave Revival Saints because the pastor was a wizard who attended
nightly demonic meetings under the sea.
“You should listen to the angel,” her father said.
And so her mother left the church and began to let her hair grow again,
but stopped wearing necklaces and earrings because jewellery, according to the
pastor at Miracle Spring, was ungodly, unbefitting a woman of virtue. Shortly
afterwards, on the same day as the failed coup, while the traders who lived
downstairs were crying because the coup would have saved Nigeria and market
women would have been given cabinet positions, her mother saw another vision.
This time, the angel appeared in her bedroom, above the wardrobe, and told her
to leave Miracle Spring and join Guiding Assembly. Halfway through the first
service Ifemelu attended with her mother, in a marble-floored convention hall,
surrounded by perfumed people and the ricochet of rich voices, Ifemelu looked
at her mother and saw that she was crying and laughing at the same time. In
this church of surging hope, of thumping and clapping, where Ifemelu imagined a
swirl of affluent angels above, her mother’s spirit had found a home. It was a
church full of the newly wealthy; her mother’s small car, in the parking lot,
was the oldest, with its dull paint and many scratches. If she worshipped with
the prosperous, she said, then God would bless her as He had blessed them. She
began to wear jewellery again, to drink her Guinness stout; she fasted only
once a week and often said “My God tells me” and “My Bible says,” as though
other people’s were not just different but misguided. Her response to a “Good
morning” or a “Good afternoon” was a cheerful “God bless you!” Her God became
genial and did not mind being commanded. Every morning, she woke the household
up for prayers, and they would kneel on the scratchy carpet of the living room,
singing, clapping, covering the day ahead with the blood of Jesus, and her
mother’s words would pierce the stillness of dawn: “God, my heavenly father, I
command you to fill this day with blessings and prove to me that you are God!
Lord, I am waiting on you for my prosperity! Do not let the evil one win, do
not let my enemies triumph over me!” Ifemelu’s father once said the prayers
were delusional battles with imaginary traducers, yet he insisted that Ifemelu
always wake up early to pray. “It keeps your mother happy,” he told her.
From Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2013:41-44
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