Litany | Short Story | A Review

  

It was the same message Adichie’s “Arrangers of Marriage” was drumming out that afternoon. Men. Hot oaths. Cold hearts. By the time I swelled the third sigh, nosiness had gone. I kept my face to the windowsill, and for a full minute or so, I thought about things and then wished for more things—the capacity of being a woman and the throbbing heart of warmness—yet, I sounded fake to my own thoughts.

That afternoon, in my head, I was carousing there, on the brink of lavish manliness, thankful to be safe, glad to be tamper-proof. But I kept to it, the reading of those kinds of books that presented you the lies about the glazed things about being a man and the truth about a woman’s nakedness. The dynamism had not been broken since I started the short stories of Koyi, my first attempt to look at fiction through a lady’s lens. A fickler attempt, maybe. Writing, one has submitted, calls to a certain moral obligation, and provoked writing (that is, the strange sort imposed by the humanely impotent situation) rejoins to a certain personal need, the emotional bottleneck; which is awed or, somehow, equivalent to what adorable Donna Tartt understands of her novels—written by the alone for the alone. 

So, I think, sometimes, these words a caste of nurtured sensibilities, my mental slate about the callousness that befalls the woman used up like dry wood and the one that continues to befall. A suffragette rebirth, I’d have supposed (shrugs).

Pity was heavy in my hands that week, weighing them down, and I didn’t know where to place it. I would write a beautiful piece about the “blessedness of womankind”, stab a chauvinist with my pen, drag my mouse dart across the net and look for the ‘most contemporary’ Adichies. I had not grown the heart of a woman. And so, when I first sipped the delicious brazenness in Onwutuebe Ucheoma’s works; I was still a young man who knew he would marry a woman someday. There were times I suspected that some ‘bigger stories’ lied behind her incensed stories, her sentient fiction, the way she could raise two fangs of feminism and tickle you just the same, with an avant-garde bravura of words. Yet, I envied her ability to be sometimes… uncertain.

Many of Uche’s tales, I have noticed, try not to only preserve the spirit of liberal feminism—resembling Chimamanda, to whom the stance is considered a must—but also the didactic gleam. In “Litany”, a short story published on Africanwriter.com and the writer's blog, there is a rallying cry that presents itself in scattered scenes.        

“Litany” is like being lulled to bed with poetry, watching the most secretive agonies of a woman from your smallest window. In one story, it is a collection of bits, of discrete tales that she has so consummately bonded. Unlike many feminist works, Litany evades a deliberate address on the familiar singular ‘glorified-de-glorified’ heroine and the voluble one-way sequence she shall inevitably course. It refuses to mirror the anguishes from the story of one woman; instead, it tries to mirror the one common anguish, the only anguish from the stories of women, not necessarily of a mixed seraglio, but of a different woman in a different situation. The first one is the bride whose man weds a second bride. After twenty-five years, the kitchen-guru tries to no avail:

“…I am the worn wrapper smelling of yesterday’s cooking. The eyes that tear as you peel onions. Mine is the skin etched with stretch marks. 

But you know, in the eyes of your beloved, stretch marks are life’s beautiful etchings. But when one is unloved, the smell of the wrapper becomes his excuse.” (I)

But that comes after those twenty-five years ‘of her sweat, her love, her moans, her tears and her dreams’. Somewhere, somehow, in another scene, it’s another woman, red-dressed, a more romantic, more expectant woman. But the trial binds them both—the painful loss, of which no simpler reason can be indorsed except for the callousness of ingrate-men.

“I am the clock she is glancing at time and time again, soliciting sympathy, just like a child showing off bicycle wounds. I wish I could stop to console her but a clock’s destiny is to tick. I am the phone she rushes to; hope deflates, like a punctured tire when the caller isn’t you. Night falls. Crickets and toads begin their out of tune orchestra. Adam, where art thou?...” (II)

‘Adam’ is nowhere; he sees his other love tonight. For some unexplainable reason, Uche is not rebuking ‘the men’; instead, she continues to communicate the silent agony, the unheard litany, to focus on the effect than the cause, and with a poetic vigour to it. This particular quality of expression helps to rouse the pathos of the average reader; for how may the heart feel pity if it isn’t capable of supposing that some evil may happen to it itself? Aristotle, in Rhetoric, writes: ‘Pity is, therefore, not felt by those completely ruined, who suppose that no further evil can befall them…’. It becomes the case of the tormented housewife who wants to kill herself, or her distant neighbours who ‘watch as she heads for market, shopping basket slung over her shoulder like Christ’s cross on his way to Golgotha’ … and when this really becomes the case, the feeling is rather presumptuous insolence’. Aristotle’s words were spot-on, as are Uche’s:

“With you, it is a holy command we obey: regard prisoners as if you were in prison with them. Look on victims of abuse as if what happens to them happened to you.

But what does one do when the victim and prisoner is you? This is what we would say: detach yourself, your soul from your body, act like the blows and the kicks are raining on someone else and you are simply a voyeur to your own misery.” (III)

The beauty of this short story is that it is full of a range of vicarious themes, poignant, neatly-paced and has very few characters that are not even properly identified. In the next three rungs, the writer tells us of a more interesting set of women, ones who have not only lost their men so simply, but after passionate efforts: her newly-wed cousin’s sister, whose mother advises to perform the instructions of the ‘DOMESTIC GODDESS; HOW TO KEEP HIM COMING HOME’ book; she later becomes the muscular gym-wife and is ‘bundled back… with apologies’; the curious young city slicker who spends Christmas at her absent fiancé’s hometown and is disdained and sent away by his mother before and after, somewhere in the woods, a rabid dog bites her. She has just finished her MBA exams, but that never mattered; or the nostalgic single mother, whose hands reach for the other side of the bed more often than the bulging leather purse beneath the mattress.

“The sun still shines; the cock still crows; rain still falls to earth. The birds have not lost their songs; trees still sway to the sensuous music of the wind. Dogs still bark at phantoms at night. Foetus would become infant… the world has refused to come to an end, making child’s play of solipsism. No matter what happens, who has left has… she lays awake at night. She must move on…” (V)

Uche habitually attempts to portray the mess the cold-heartedness of a certain ‘man-nature’ can wreak, of not only tearing a woman’s heart apart, but also nullifying her best artifices. Her artfulness to conserve the grandeur of her matrimony always falls back at her face like hasty dust, and the more fervidly she strives the more paltry and strange the result. And just as love conquered all, callousness conquers too!

By the same token, it comes to dawn on the careless young belly that has grown bigger. Only that in this different story, the young girl can find the bricklayer that she shared passions with, but he has become alienated to her heart. Although Uche, for the first time, describes a definitive cause of her heroine’s agony: love at first sight; she depicts it as ‘a rather unhealthy release of pheromones… the type that flowed in one direction, not the equal mingling of the emotions of two people’. And when it does flow that way, the story finds itself at a crossroad, excusing the latest carnages of illogical accusations.

““Go to hell, get a plot, build a house on it and put a Not For Sale sign on it,” He turned his back and strode away.” (VI)

Yet, sometimes, it becomes a ‘bedtime story’, this… litany, a story of tasteless passion. Once and for a last, Uche writes of the poor beautiful girl who has become the chattel of a quack chemist at Onitsha Main Market; a man who, like many men, gives money quicker than he gives the warmth of fondness, which can be the true source of a woman’s happiness. NAFDAC burns down his shop and now, their only fondness is at the table, eating rice more frequently than ever. It is perhaps the commonplace of monotony that the writer wrote to be ‘something that entered her head, something like a fly, constantly buzzing’.

 

“One night, she could not contain the buzzing… She opened the door s-t-e-a-l-t-h-i-l-y, her chest heavy and redolent with breast-milk, milk her baby would be needing in the morning. She walked into the welcoming darkness, with no fear in her eyes. She kept on walking. Someone said they saw her in Sapele, haggling with the fish sellers. Another said she saw her in Lagos, having a nice time. Another Abuja, looking young again. A city, a new home. But for how long would she hide? Three years later, a knock on her door. Madam, a letter for you.” (VIII)

I smiled and lifted my face off the windowsill. I knew I had read a lost story from the newest Adichie, salient beyond recall. I was waiting for a drop of brighter thoughts, an unmistakable sensation, something.

 

 

Image credit/sources: Othep Javier, Adelheid Duvanel, amazon.co.uk, toperfect.com, aliexpress.com.