It is a Saturday, and the sweltering Nigerian sun seems to have a point to prove, or a vendetta. I walk toward the cavernous hall, following my mother’s uneven steps. She has had arthritis for several years now, and a host of other problems that have permanently altered the way she walks. Like Chinonso Nzeh lamented so heart wrenchingly in his award winning essay, my mother is “slipping away.”
I pause behind her while she climbs the steps, tracking her feet with my eyes and wondering at what age I will start experiencing the same afflictions. Hers had started in her late forties, after bearing four children and watching them grow up into joys and heartbreaks. But she’d gotten married at nineteen. I, twenty-nine, unmarried and childless, could not compare.
Even with the distance we have to cross, my mother insists on a seat near the happy couple. Yanda zamu gani da kyau, she says. So we can see properly. My mother loves weddings. I do not. I may be the photographer, but she’s the one who always has her phone out at events, letting the world know what joy looks like from behind a lens.
The bride is small. That is my first impression of her. Small. Maybe it’s because the groom dwarfs her from his position on her right, or maybe it’s because I’m quite tall myself—”model’s height” my former primary school principal used to murmur with a gentle smile, when she saw me hunching my squared shoulders in a bid to fit in among my tiny classmates—but all I can focus on is how you can barely make her out from beneath the voluminous folds of her dress and long veil. She has her head down, her hands clasped in her lap, fingers twisting and untwisting. I desperately want her to look up. To see if I can find joy on her face. This joy we are told all brides experience on their wedding day, and apparently the reason why they should all look so forward to it. I want to scream at her. I want to rush the gap between tables like an Olympic runner, leaping over hurdles of oblivious people toward my goal. I want to yank on her veil and beg her for assurances. I want her to look up, look up. Let me see, let me see.
I want to know. I want to be sure.
#
Marriage is inevitable in Hausa culture. It is simply expected of you, and the choice you get is only in the choice of spouse, not the marriage itself. Marriage is Thanos, its gait confident with the crushing weight if its inevitability. Marriage and then children, because one must never come before the other.
When I was twelve years old, my head was full of romance and feverish with the looming certainty of marriage. I wanted what I was consuming daily by way of the school library, nestled into quiet corners and cobwebbed shadows, my lanky frame folded up like a pretzel to avoid anyone tripping over my feet. Tales of dashing princes both dangerous and charming, their chiseled jaws sharp enough to cut through sorrow. And then I turned sixteen, suffered my first heartbreak, and realized—as made clear in 2014’s “Into the Woods”—that while the princes may be charming, they were not always sincere.
By the time I was twenty-five, I had become deathly afraid of marriage. I couldn’t imagine permanently tying myself to a complete stranger, no matter what “feelings” were involved. What if he snored? What if he was messy like my brothers, who I was constantly having to pick up after? What if he had chest hair, which I hated? What if he woke up one day and decided I was no longer enough? What if he had some horrid trait I only discovered after we’d tied the knot? What if he liked to hit things? What if he wanted children, when I still did not know if I did? What if, what if.
These unending questions always clouded my head and left me weary of all the people around me who had already decided my fate. Sai auren ki ya zo, za mu sha biki. When your wedding comes we’re going to have so much fun. A phrase my aunties would always say, and I would feel my reply clogging up my throat, its claws sunk deep to stop itself from coming out and staining their dreams for me black: but what if I don’t want to get married at all?
#
I don’t believe I am a nice person. I try to be, but I don’t always succeed. Niceness doesn’t come easy to me, except in relation to animals. I am nice to children but I don’t always like being around them. I wonder if this is a flaw. The average Nigerian woman—the average Hausa woman—is supposed to love children. It’s supposed to be wired through her veins, shadowing her blood to her lungs to choke her from the inside out. And children come after marriage. One, as always, must not come before the other.
Once, I sat next to a cousin as she changed her baby’s soiled diaper. Only three months from the horrors of the labor bed and complete inexperience, and yet her hands had moved with the dexterity of a champion violinist. She’d handed me the child when she was done, and in my panic I’d almost dropped him. I spent the ten minutes it took for her to return, awkwardly cradling his head and avoiding his bubbly smile, fearful with the possibility that someone would see my ineptitude and the terror in my eyes, and know that I was not meant for this life.
Marriage is tradition. One a Hausa woman is supposed to carry on her back until she reaches the age where she can set down the load for other women to pick right back up.
But some loads are heavy, and bring forth calloused feet and a bowed back, and sometimes, a broken spirit.
#
There is a portrait of my grandmother in my aunt’s living room, hanging like the ghost of sacrifices past. It is in black and white, its edges yellowed and folded in like broken elbows. My grandmother got married at thirteen to a man that had been chosen for her—as was the custom of her time—and every time I look at her picture, I envision how scared she must have been. How much she must have chafed at this thing laid upon her. I wonder if she’d cried when she was asked to put away her dolls and replace them with a living child.
Or did she walk in unafraid, head held high, accepting and unresentful of her duty? Did she bow herself to tradition, respectfully setting down her load, grateful for the opportunity to have carried it?
#
The chorus to John Mayer’s “Daughters” croons through my head sometimes. Girls become lovers who turn into mothers…
Yes, well, maybe not all of us, John. Maybe not yet. Maybe not ever.
#
By my twenty-eight birthday I’d learned to nurture resentment. It festered at the corners of my mouth and underneath my barbed tongue, yearning to lunge out with a sarcastic response to any mention of marriage and children. I’d also learned to ignore the part of me that desperately wanted what all the women in my life seemed to have, or smother it when I couldn’t.
On the days when I could neither ignore nor smother, I would wake up before dawn, in that quiet moment where everything was still and silent and full of shadows, and fold my body in sujood, asking my Creator for clarity and guidance, and if He would help me stop being so afraid.
My mother would say, “Pray to Allah, He knows your heart. He will make the best choice for you.” It sounded so black and white when she said it, like my grandmother’s portrait, with her thick eyelashes and unwavering stare.
But how could I explain to this woman, who had loved and cherished me throughout my life, and taught me what it meant to be a woman, who had spent several days and nights on her knees before the kibla, asking for Allah’s blessings on my future home—blessings that included the children I was not sure I would ever have? How could I tell her I was a failure?
#
I look at the bride again, this tiny, beautiful woman, ready to be shipped off like cargo to a new home, one she’s never seen before but may end up defining her life more than her previous one ever had. I look at her and see the sweat on her forehead that has evaded the attentions of her maid of honor with the doggedness of a prize bull fighter. I see the white veil that covers her form, almost like a funeral shroud. I see the glittering of the gold bangles and bracelets that cover her wrists all the way up her arms, like manacles. I prepare to turn my head away. Then she looks up.
Now, I look at her eyes, and the way they light up ever so minutely with every turn of her head to the right, where her groom sits relaxed, his own eyes drinking her in. He wiggles his eyebrows at her and she laughs, a sound that gets swallowed up amid other voices. He holds out his hand and she stops twisting her fingers to place them in his grasp. His hands dwarfs hers as he raises them to his lips, bestowing a lingering kiss on her knuckles that has her shyly ducking away.
She raises her head after a few seconds, gaze flitting around the hall like a restless butterfly, resting only a second or two on a person before taking flight once more.
Suddenly it’s my turn. Her luminous face flickers toward where I sit, strangely breathless. Our eyes meet. She looks at me, and smiles.
************
Are you a Black woman writer? We’re looking for short stories and personal essays to feature on our digital and print platforms. Click HERE to find out how to submit.
