Chinua Achebe - Anthills of the Savannah

'No. It's called hydrangea.'

As I went into the kitchen to open the store for Agatha to get a coconut out I kept asking myself what Ikem might be up to. Was it Chris? Had their relationship, dangerously bumpy in recent months, taken a nose-dive now for the crash? Ikem always avoided complaining about Chris to me. Was he going to break his own scrupulous practice for once? When I returned to the parlour he had lifted the vase of flowers to his nose and was sniffing it.

I ate my corn with ube and he his with ube and coconut in alternate mouthfuls. Outside, the storm raged the way I like my storms — far away, its violent thunder and lightning distanced and muted as in a movie. I would have felt completely comfortable if Ikem had not been behaving a little strangely. Let's hope it's the storm, I prayed. Tropical storms can do so many different things to different creatures. That I have known from childhood. My older sister Alice always ran around the yard, if our father happened to be out, singing a childish rain song:

ogwogwo mmili

takumei ayolo!

Finally exhausted she would come indoors shivering, eyes red and popping out, teeth clattering away and make for the kitchen fire. As for me whom she nicknamed salt, or less kindly Miss Goat, on account of my distaste for getting wet, my preference was to roll myself in a mat on the floor and inside my dark, cylindrical capsule play my silent game of modulating the storm's song by pressing my palms against my ears and taking them off, rhythmically. There was for me no greater luxury in those days than to sleep through night-rain on a Friday knowing there was neither school nor church in the morning to worry about.

'When you were little,' I asked Ikem, 'what did you do when it rained like this?'

'But I told you it never rained at all in August. We had a month of dry weather called the August Break.'

'OK! In July then, or September.'

'When I was really little I used to take off my scanty clothes and run into it.'

'Singing ogwogwo mmili takumei ayolo ?'

'Did you sing to the rain too?' He fairly jumped with excitement.

'No, but my older sister did.'

'Oh… what did you do?'

'I listened. The rain sang to me.'

'Lucky girl! What did it say, the rain?'

'Uwa t'uwa t'uwa t'uwa; tooo… waaa… tooo… waa

Dooo — daaa… Booo — baaa… Shooo — shaaa…

Cooo — caaa… Looo — laaa… Mooo — maaa…'

'Pooo — paaa,' said Ikem. 'Great song!'

'BB, you may be wondering why I am behaving so strangely today. Well, I've come on a mission the like of which I'd never undertaken before… I've come to thank you for the greatest present one human being can give another. The gift of insight. That's what you gave me and I want to say thank you.'

'Insight? Me? Insight into what?'

'Into the world of women.'

I held back a facetious comment trembling on my lip. Ikem's sudden change and extraordinary manner forbade its utterance. I held back and listened to this strange annunciation.

'You told me a couple of years ago, do you remember, that my thoughts were unclear and reactionary on the role of the modern woman in our society. Do you remember?'

'I do.'

'I resisted your charge…'

'It wasn't a charge.'

'It damn well was! But I resisted. Vehemently. But the amazing thing was that the more I read your charge sheet…'

'Oh my God!'

'… the less impressive my plea became. My suspension from the Gazette has done wonders for me. I have been able to sit and think things through. I now realize you were right and I was wrong.'

'Oh come on, Ikem. You know I detest all born-again people.'

'Don't be facetious!'

'I'm sorry. Go ahead. What happened?'

'Nothing happened. It simply dawned on me two mornings ago that a novelist must listen to his characters who after all are created to wear the shoe and point the writer where it pinches.'

'Now hold it! Are you suggesting I am a character in your novel?'

'BB, you've got to be serious, or I will leave. I mean it. I'm already losing my train of thought.'

'I won't breathe another word. Please go on.'

'One of the things you told me was that my attitude to women was too respectful.'

'I didn't.'

'You bloody well did. And you were damn right. You charged me with assigning to women the role of a fire-brigade after the house has caught fire and been virtually consumed. Your charge has forced me to sit down and contemplate the nature of oppression — how flexible it must learn to be, how many faces it must learn to wear if it is to succeed again and again.'

He dug his hand into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper and carefully unfolded it on his knee. 'I wrote this strange love-letter last night. May I read it?' I nodded.

'The original oppression of Woman was based on crude denigration. She caused Man to fall. So she became a scapegoat. No, not a scapegoat which might be blameless but a culprit richly deserving of whatever suffering Man chose thereafter to heap on her. That is Woman in the Book of Genesis. Out here, our ancestors, without the benefit of hearing about the Old Testament, made the very same story differing only in local colour. At first the Sky was very close to the Earth. But every evening Woman cut off a piece of the Sky to put in her soup pot or, as in another version, she repeatedly banged the top end of her pestle carelessly against the Sky whenever she pounded the millet or, as in yet another rendering — so prodigious is Man's inventiveness — she wiped her kitchen hands on the Sky's face. Whatever the detail of Woman's provocation, the Sky finally moved away in anger, and God with it.

'Well, that kind of candid chauvinism might be OK for the rugged taste of the Old Testament. The New Testament required a more enlightened, more refined, more loving even, strategy — ostensibly, that is. So the idea came to Man to turn his spouse into the very Mother of God, to pick her up from right under his foot where she'd been since Creation and carry her reverently to a nice, corner pedestal. Up there, her feet completely off the ground she will be just as irrelevant to the practical decisions of running the world as she was in her bad old days. The only difference is that now Man will suffer no guilt feelings; he can sit back and congratulate himself on his generosity and gentlemanliness.

'Meanwhile our ancestors out here, unaware of the New Testament, were working out independently a parallel subterfuge of their own. Nneka , they said. Mother is supreme. Let us keep her in reserve until the ultimate crisis arrives and the waist is broken and hung over the fire, and the palm bears its fruit at the tail of its leaf. Then, as the world crashes around Man's ears, Woman in her supremacy will descend and sweep the shards together.

'Do I make sense?'

'As always. Go on.'

'Thank you, BB. I owe that insight to you. I can't tell you what the new role for Woman will be. I don't know. I should never have presumed to know. You have to tell us. We never asked you before. And perhaps because you've never been asked you may not have thought about it; you may not have the answer handy. But in that case everybody had better know who is now holding up the action.'

'That's very kind of you!'

'That was the first part of this love-letter, the part I owe specifically to you. Here's the rest.

'The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest. But they are not the only ones. There are others — rural peasants in every land, the urban poor in industrialized countries, Black people everywhere including their own continent, ethnic and religious minorities and castes in all countries. The most obvious practical difficulty is the magnitude and heterogeneity of the problem. There is no universal conglomerate of the oppressed. Free people may be alike everywhere in their freedom but the oppressed inhabit each their own peculiar hell. The present orthodoxies of deliverance are futile to the extent that they fail to recognize this. You know my stand on that. Every genuine artist feels it in his bone. The simplistic remedies touted by all manner of salesmen (including some who call themselves artists) will always fail because of man's stubborn antibody called surprise. Man will surprise by his capacity for nobility as well as for villainy. No system can change that. It is built into the core of man's free spirit.