“Ei! Is this how people are?
How can you just leave it like that?”
“Darling I thought I read
somewhere that these people respect their dead so much, but look at
this! Maybe they thought the person was a witch or some other
superstition…”
“Ewurade yesu! I won’t pass
here again!”
“This is a disgrace! What do we
have AMA for?”
Step right up! See the
incredible invisible girl appear and disappear before your very eyes!
It was such a shame, and yet very
appropriate, that after years of perfecting her disappearing act,
Mawukoenya would exit in the most public and humiliating of ways. If
invisibility was indeed a real talent that she possessed, why had it
not manifested itself at this crucial time? And so she lay there,
next to an open gutter that threatened to spew its contents onto the
street, her body stiff, strangely pristine in its surroundings.
Bushes were adorned with shreds of plastic bags, which clung to
thorns where flowers should have. Rats tugged at her clothes, where
an undertaker’s hands should have been busy cleansing and
arranging.
Step right up!
Since childhood, Mawukoenya had
harbored a curious obsession with the circus, but it never came to
her town, and she knew it never would. It was a treat reserved for
rosy-cheeked, pig-tailed little girls, for pudgy little boys with
heads full of curls the color of wheat or spun gold or something they
called “hay”, for milky white people who inhabited worlds she
read about in story-books handed down from her older sisters. And
yet, her fantasies took her to the big top repeatedly. She saw the
strongest man alive, his swollen muscles glistening obscenely under
the incessant heat of the spotlight. She saw twins striding through
thin air in tandem, the tightrope barely visible to an enthralled
audience who, aghast, held on so tightly to the edges of their seats
that the metal almost cut through the soft flesh of their palms. But
what arrested her attention was the freak show. Although the term
“freak” was not one blended with her lilting vernacular, or the
absurdly formal Ghanaian English she had been taught, she found this
category of castoffs oddly endearing, familiar in so many ways.
There was the bearded lady with a
full shrub of hair clinging resiliently to the lower half of her
face. She stood with hands planted firmly on her hips, and turned her
head slowly as if to survey the crowd, but really daring any one to
mock her. But was a bearded lady so strange? After all, Mrs. Boadu,
her Class Three teacher, had quite an impressive smattering of
stubborn black hairs sprouting on her chin, with a generous patch of
chest hair only slightly visible above her low-cut blouses; visible
enough to make you question whether your imagination was indulging in
its usual trickery or whether she was a man in disguise.
In any case Mawukoenya knew she
belonged there, in that basket of misfits which contained all the
God-given traits that other children begged not to be cursed with.
Nothing else explained why she was such an expert at making herself
invisible. It wasn’t even a talent she could call up on demand –
step right up and
witness the wonders – she
was a natural. She
started doing it before she was born. Unlike her sisters, she was
such a restful tenant of her mother’s womb that it had taken her
mother months to realize the nausea and dizziness were more than a
particularly persistent strain of malaria. With her first two
pregnancies, Mama Ashime (Mama Market as other traders in the
Ashaiman market affectionately called her for her fierce presence and
authority) had given birth to robust babies with the most piercing
cries that could be heard up and down their red sand cul-de-sac. And
yet, when Mawukoenya made her quiet entry into the world, her parents
had looked down at her unhealthy frame wrapped in a faded cot sheet.
Efo, her father, sniffed, shaking his head slowly at the runt of the
litter, with disgust evident in his wrinkled nose and furrowed brow.
“Hmmmm,”
he had said. “What is wrong with this one? Let us call her
Mawukoenya. Only God knows why he brought us this… Only God knows
why! Mawu! That face! So sad.”
“Kai daddy, what is wrong with
her head?” asked Aseye, Mawukoenya’s elder sister.
When she grew up, and her wrinkly
face had smoothed out to a less troubling plain brownness, and her
body had grown to match the size of her head to a certain extent, she
could never shake the feeling that it might be more convenient for
all parties involved if she could just evaporate from sight.
She became an expert at
disappearing, to save herself the obvious resentment, the drastic
shift in her mother’s voice when she would introduce her other two
daughters, “Here are my children, Seyra and Aseye! Babies come,
come, come and greet aunty! Oh ermmm, Mawuko! Mawukoenya, where are
you hiding? Ah. Here is the last one. Hmmm.” Only God knows. After
the first dozen times it was no longer painful to hear the church
bells and car horns blaring in her mother’s voice when she called
her sisters. In her mother’s voice, her name sounded more like an
elegy, drawn from vocal chords that had ceased to know joy a long
time ago. Mawukoenya learned how to skirt edges of conversations and
disappear into the periphery of the room. Where has this girl gone
again? Always hiding in corners like she’s up to no good!
She was the sole proprietor of no
man’s land, taking pleasure in the imaginary worlds she conjured
and held tightly in her sweaty palm, stuffing them hastily away in
the pocket of her brown pinafore before nosy classmates tried to
snatch them, or snatch her out of her pleasurable reverie. She was
not a playground favorite, and it intrigued her and made her laugh at
the same time. They thought she was crazy, their fervent whispers
brushed past the tips of her ears like the harmattan breeze, fleeting
and strangely refreshing. Their fear was apparent in the smooth way
their pupils slid away from hers when she walked past them on the
narrow verandas of the school. Maybe she should extend an invitation
into her secret spaces. But even in her imagination she occupied the
fringes, the person left out of the circle when playing “mosquito”,
the game with the sharp sound of youthful palms clapping and with the
shrill chants of “Ama, Ama, close the door -- because of what? --
mosqui-t-o”. But she wasn’t alone on the outside, her fellow
shadow dwellers stood beside her. They would form a second circle
around the “normal”, “happy”, “well-adjusted”, “socially
adept” children who knew how to “play well with others”, and
they would laugh, and lick their cracked lips, and inch closer to
those who had dared exclude them. And their wrinkled hands would
sprout claws, and their milk teeth would turn into vicious fangs, and
then…who knew enamel against young flesh felt so good?
“Mawuko! Wake up!”
Mawu! This child was laughing in
her sleep again. If you could even call that laughter. It was more
like a shriek, like tire rims screeching on tarmac, narrowly missing
the slender frame that thought it could outrun the machine.
Mawukoenya. Why can’t she just be normal? Walking back from the
market one evening, Mama Ashime was sure she had seen the other
children in the neighborhood running away from her. She was
surrounded by them, and was lunging clumsily towards them like the
neighborhood drunkard. The children would squeal and tear off in the
opposite direction. Maybe it was a new game they were playing. Maybe
her eyes were misleading her. After all, it had been a long day of
dismal sales, and she had a migraine threatening to shatter her skull
into a million fragments. Perhaps they were only playing?
But perhaps not. And Mawukoenya
folded herself into smaller and smaller pieces, learning how to erase
herself from sight. It really wasn’t difficult when everyone else
was wishing for her disappearance deep in the obscure corners of
their minds. Even those who had no choice but to love her did so very
grudgingly, the endless parade of relatives and neighbors who dropped
by their home in the hopes of leaving with a bag of provisions, or a
container packed with stringy Okro stew, or some coins concealed in a
tightly closed fist.
And with every condescending
squeeze of the shoulder – Don’t worry! One day you’ll grow
“fine-fine” like your sisters – it was as if they were erasing
just one more trace of her tangibility; boring holes into her flesh
which started off as pin pricks and transformed into gaping craters,
letting out the last vestiges of light and carefree childhood and
allowing insecurity and useless aspirations and
never-will-you-be-good-enough and depravity and insanity to seep in.
Eventually these dark infiltrators would mesh together, fibers of
thick black wool knitted together, obscuring vision, shoved so far
down her throat that her breath sputtered to a standstill – Don’t
mind that thing over there, it’s just rubbish, we keep forgetting
to throw it away. Ah! Where did this girl vanish to again?
Mawukoenya found enjoyment only
in her private fantasies of revenge, and milk teeth dripping with
warm blood, and clasped hands, and circles, and, and… the circus.
She had found the circus. One day
Aseye had set down the Enid Blyton story book she had been reading to
run an errand for Mama. Mawukoenya snatched it off the coffee table
and retreated immediately to her usual territory, that sliver of
space between the cupboard full of provisions and the wall, just big
enough for her body to fit. She was enthralled with these cherubic
children who tottered down garden paths and partook in strange
rituals like “tea time”. But it was the circus freaks that had
grabbed her by the neck and turned her head towards their display.
Step right up!
She recognized herself in their
otherness, in the combination of curiosity and disgust pasted plainly
on the faces of their spectators. She recognized too, that she could
erase herself into infamy, disappear into the lime light. The
incredible invisible girl.
Step right up! You’ve never
seen anything like this before!
Mawukoenya continued to lurk in
the shadows, meanwhile Aseye and Seyra laughed and bathed in the glow
of the sun’s rays, Mama and Efo looking on and applauding with
sickeningly indulgent smiles, and the flesh around their foolish
smiles melted and coagulated into several rolls of fat, multiple
chins folding over themselves and oozing over the collars of their
clothes; what would happen if she sank a sharpened fingernail or two
into them? Would they just ooze excess fats and oils, or would they
spill some of their reserves of affection so she could lap them up
before her sisters dried up the supply? She even tried to dance in
the light with them, but no spotlight was bright enough to fill the
ever-expanding darkness that blanketed her being. She tried, but the
light didn’t catch her dark brown eyes in the same way it glinted
in her sisters’ faces.
Sit down Mawukoenya! Aseye and
Seyra are playing with their friends and you’re in the way! Ahba!
Why is she so troublesome?
Even adolescence, with its naïve
optimism, wasn’t kind to Mawukoenya. This was the time when girls’
breasts began to perk up and out, and their hips started to roll
along rhythmically as they walked. Their minds began to fire
conflicting signals in all directions, neurotransmitters driven
haywire with lust and angst and exuberance and hope. This internal
upheaval revealed itself however it chose, buttery smooth skin one
day, infestation of pimples the next. Beyond the trauma of this
constant transformation lay the expectation that young girls would
emerge from this period refreshed and refreshing, exactly like Aseye
and Seyra. They entered into young adulthood with the grace of flame
of the forest flowers drifting in the breeze, before tumbling to a
perfect landing on earth. For Mawukoenya, her petals were more
shriveled than promising, nectar dried up before drought had even
contemplated descending on the unsuspecting populace.
“Mawu! Menyo kraaa kraaa kraa
ooh!”
“Mama Ashime take this cream
for your daughter’s face! Those pimples will be gone one touch!”
“Mmmm! Mawuko! Did you use the
lime today? Your armpit smells!”
Step right up!
Her audience was frozen in awed
revulsion. That scraggly hair, more like the tangled tufts of fluff
that lived in corners that were never swept, and less like cotton
wool slipping meekly between fingertips. That face, nearly no inch
left untouched by a blemish or at least the trace of one. But that
mind – the backdrop for all this external chaos, the scene where
the crime of puberty actually takes place – if only she could give
people a tour.
Prime seats. Step right up!
Two concentric circles, the inner
one tightly formed and emanating warmth from its core, hands lovingly
clasped, and the owners of these hands self-satisfied in their own
goodness and health. The outer one – gaping holes in some places
where life should have been, dirty claws grasping for each other and
holding on precariously, reluctantly. Closing in, the main event,
sawdust thrown on the floor of the big tent, here come the freaks!
Throw sawdust in their eyes, rip their smug flesh apart, rip it…
“Efo what are we going to do
with this your daughter? We can’t send her to boarding house with
this behavior! Shouting and kicking in her sleep like that? Ebei!”
Efo squeezed every last drop of
juice, ripping out every string of fibrous flesh clinging to the
thick orange rind. He spat out a few seeds onto the freshly mopped
veranda, a habit that reddened Mama Ashime’s eyes to an impressive
crimson.
“Chew the skin too! Tswwwww,
see village people!”
She was more easily irritated
these days, probably due to Aseye and Seyra’s absence. They had
been away at boarding school for almost a year. They spent vacations
with relatives to avoid the over-priced, over-crowded buses back into
the city. And now Ama was left with this disgrace. This she-devil.
Only God knows what she was always doing hiding in dark places,
mumbling to herself in her sleep, always, always clawing at the air
and grabbing fistfuls of nothing.
Efo dug a finger deep into his
ear and examined the product he had extracted. “Hmmm. What do you
want me to say? You’ve already made up your mind, or?”
“Efo, taflatse! I don’t know
what else to do with her. According to her teachers, she stares into
space all day long. When everyone goes outside for break, she
squeezes herself into corners like, like – I don’t even know!
She’s not normal! Asylum Down seems like the best place for her.
Maybe they’ll know what to do.”
Efo heaved an exhausted sigh,
exhaling what seemed like all the air stored in his lungs.
“She’s a handful, I know. But
are you very sure? Even my biggest enemy, I wouldn’t send him
there.”
“Efo, I’ve already spoken to
a nurse there. One lady who comes to my stall, the one that always
wants to buy on credit, she told me they can handle Mawuko. There’s
nothing they haven’t seen!”
The Accra Psychiatric Hospital,
or Asylum Down, was located at a busy intersection close to High
Street. Every day, an endless procession of civil servants, bank
employees, shoe shine boys, pickpockets, and students, would hurry
past the non-descript building without giving it a second glance. You
would have to pay very close attention to notice that some of its
patients, or “inmates” as they were unfortunately labeled,
spilled out of the grounds and mingled with the hawkers that crowded
between the lanes of cars, selling TV remotes, mouse traps and any
other item one might ever need.
Mama Ashime hustled Mawukoenya
out of the taxi onto the pavement, which was littered with a sticky
mess of neem fruits. A nurse met them at the gate. Mama eyed her
white uniform with its seams stretched to the absolute limit to
accommodate her rolls and curves. She had kept so much of Mama’s
money, and she couldn’t even use some of it to sew new uniforms.
Tswww. The empty look on Mama Ashime’s face did not betray her
disapproval. She would be waiting for her in the market next time.
But back to the matter at hand…
“Mama, I’ll take it from
here. Mawuko is in good hands.”
Step right up.
The show must go on. Mama Ashime
squeezed Mawukoenya’s arm briefly and turned on her heel back to
the organized insanity of the traffic jam outside.
Look! There were cages and chains
and a dusty courtyard! Sawdust? That must be where the lion tamer
kept his ferocious side-kick! Was this the bearded lady? She didn’t
have quite enough hair on her chin, a little disappointing to be
honest.
And rows and rows of metal cots,
and patients…inmates…performers. Rocking and moaning and crying
unholy cries, barking and singing and wrenching their coarse hair out
a few dozen follicles at a time. Perhaps the freak show was starting
early? But these characters were rowdier than the shadow dwellers she
had expected. Maybe they were rehearsing. She would rehearse too.
Folding and folding and curling and curling pieces of herself until
she wasn’t sure she really existed anymore. Maybe later when the
invisibility wore off she would take a walk to try and find the
lions’ cages.
Mawukoenya must have fallen
asleep. She opened her eyes to a few strangers clad in white standing
around her cot.
“What’s the problem with this
one here?”
Unsure of what to do, she clammed
her eyes shut hoping she would just melt into the closest available
corner like she always did. Admittedly her act needed some work. But
then a pain shot through her right arm all the way to her bone
marrow. She tumbled through the fabric of the big top, and she
swallowed a mouthful of sawdust, and she heard Mama Ashime screaming
as her nails scratched her plump face…
The days were shrouded in an
over-medicated haze, and Mawukoenya was sure she was actually
disappearing piece by piece. Syrups for pain where there should have
been blood and mucus, pills for sleep where there should have been
muscle and tissue, injections for peace – pinpricks into gaping
voids. The freak show was twisted and terrifying. She eventually
found the lion cage, and she stuck a short stick through the bars,
and a pair of large teeth clamped on to it. Success! If only the lion
tamer was here to complete the moment… except the teeth belonged to
a human head. Eyes embedded so far back in his skull they were barely
visible; collarbones jutting out through papery flesh. And the
smell... Mawukoenya yanked the stick out of this fake lion’s jaws
and ran as fast her sluggish, sedated body would carry her, which
meant she was really just dragging herself step by painful step
outside the grounds of the hospital.
Step right up! Don’t miss
the incredible invisible girl!
She might as well have been
invisible, because the dozing security man didn’t even blink in her
direction as she labored past. After all where would she go? Her
family was definitely not coming back for her! It had been weeks, or
maybe months, and not one relative had arrived with a basket of food.
She would be back.
Torture the freaks. Why can’t
you be normal? Where has this girl gone to? No milk teeth, just
fangs, and thick needles. And blood everywhere. Today, Mawukoenya was
choosing light over shadow, over invisibility. I’m right here! And
there were taxi drivers yelling, and a cacophony of car horns, and
blood and invisible forever, incredibly so…
Good evening Accra and welcome
to News24. The dead body of an unidentified young woman estimated to
be about 15 years of age has been discovered in the Asylum Down
neighborhood, adjacent to the Accra Psychiatric Hospital. The woman
is believed to have been a patient of the hospital. She allegedly
wandered out of the grounds during lunch and was struck by a speeding
taxi. The Accra Metropolitan Authority and some members of the police
force were brought to the scene when a few concerned residents drew
the authorities’ attention to the growing stench and presence of
rats and other vermin. The Deputy Minister of Health has launched a
probe into the administration of the hospital, after allegations of
inmates being subjected to severe neglect and abuse. There have been
reports of extreme solitary confinement, with some individuals being
kept in zoo-like conditions. The family of the young woman is yet to
come forward to identify her body.
“Ei! Is this Ghana?”
“Hmm my sister it’s not easy
ooh! Now people are leaving their dead on the road like that. Chai!”
“It’s because she was mad.”
“Don’t say that ooh! Are they
not people too?”
“Hmmm…but what of Mama
Ashime’s daughter? It’s been long since I’ve seen her!”
~~
Zoë
Gadegbeku
is
a very recent graduate of Georgetown University. She will be pursuing
an MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College starting in September.
All she wants to do with her life is to write until she runs out of
words, at which point she will probably begin to invent her own. Her
studies as a French major have been dedicated to the history and
cultures of Francophone Africa. She wrote her senior honors thesis
based on the writings of Awa Thiam, Mariam Bâ and Ken Bugul. Zoë
also draws inspiration from Ama Ata Aidoo, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Toni
Morrison, and many other women writers she enjoyed from her mother’s
book collection. She hopes to be half as great as these women some
day, but in her own unique way of course, because that’s what they
would want.
~~
~~
Also in this Issue
Short Stories
Poems