Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

The reason they hated him was because they believed his tongue harboured a catalogue of catastrophes. His tongue was a scorpion. The prophecies he gave to people bred fear of the dark fate awaiting them. At first, no one heeded his words until event after event buried the possibility of the things he saw being taken as mere pockets of coincidences. The earliest, most prominent one was when he predicted the ghastly motor accident that claimed an entire family. Their car had plunged into a bigger portion of the Omi-Ala close to the city of Owo, drowning them — exactly the way Abulu had said it would happen. Then there was the man he said would die from “pleasure”; that man would be carried out of a whorehouse a few days later, having died while having sex with one of the prostitutes. These strings of occurrences engraved themselves in flaming letters on the memories of people and carved a fear of Abulu’s prophesies in their minds. People began to see his visions as ineluctable, and they believed he was the oracle of the scribbler of the telegraph of fate. From then on, whenever he gave a prediction to someone, they went about believing in its inevitability so much that in many cases, people attempted to prevent it from happening. One very memorable instance was the case of the fifteen-year-old daughter of the man who owned the big theatre hall in the town. Abulu predicted she would suffer brutal rape by the child she would bear. Gravely shaken by this grim future awaiting her, the girl took her own life and left a note saying she’d rather not wait to face that future.

In the fullness of time, the madman became a menace, a terror in the town. The song he sang after every prophecy became known by almost every inhabitant of the town, and they dreaded it.

Most bothersome was Abulu’s tendency to peek into people’s pasts the way he could into the future, so that he often dismantled vain kingdoms of people’s thoughts and lifted shrouds from the swaddled corpses of buried secrets. And the results were always very dire. He once revealed, upon sighting a woman and her husband getting out of their car, that she was a “whore.” “ Tufia! ” the madman had cried, spitting. “You keep sleeping with Matthew, your husband’s friend, even in your matrimonial bed? You have no shame! No shame!!” Then the madman, having set that marriage on fire — for, after a string of denials, the husband would find out about the affair and divorce his wife — walked away, totally oblivious of what he’d done.

Yet in spite of all this, a fraction of Akure’s population liked Abulu and wanted him alive, for he frequently helped people, too. An armed robbery attack was botched when, foreseeing it, Abulu went about announcing that four men “clothed in masks and dark clothes” would attack the district that night. The police were called in to watch over the street, and when the robbers appeared, the police stopped them. Just about the same time he predicted the robbery, he also revealed the hideout of certain men who had kidnapped a little girl for ransom. The girl was the daughter of one of the state politicians. Following Abulu’s accurate directions one night, the police arrested the men and rescued the girl. Again, Abulu earned appreciation and people said the politician loaded the madman’s truck with gifts. It was said that the politician even contemplated taking him back to a psychiatric hospital for healing, but others countered, arguing if his insanity left him, he would be of no use to them. Abulu had always escaped psychiatry. After the incident in which he’d walked on a pool of shattered glass, he was taken to a psychiatric hospital. But while there, he challenged the doctors, threatening that he was sane and claiming that he was being incarcerated there illegally. When that did not help, he set himself on a suicidal hunger strike, refusing — no matter how he was pressured — to drink even water. Fearing he would die from the strike and because he’d begun to demand a lawyer, they let him go.

THE FALCONER

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

W. B. YEATS

Mother was a falconer:

The one who stood on the hills and watched, trying to stave off whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children. She owned copies of our minds in the pockets of her own mind and so could easily sniff troubles early in their forming, the same way sailors discern the forming foetus of a coming storm. She occasionally eavesdropped on us in attempts to catch snippets of our conversations even before Father moved out of Akure. There were times when we gathered at my brothers’ room, and one of us would slink to the door to detect if she stood behind it. We’d pull the door open and expose her in the act. But, like a falconer who knew her birds deeply, Mother often succeeded in tracking us. Perhaps she’d already begun to sense that something was wrong with Ikenna, but when she saw the M.K.O. calendar ruined, she smelt, she saw, she felt and she knew that Ikenna was undergoing a metamorphosis. It was thus in an attempt to find out what had started it that she’d coaxed Obembe into divulging the details of the encounter with Abulu.

Although Obembe had left out what happened after Abulu went away, the part about how he’d told us all what Abulu had said while the plane flew past, a monstrous grief seized Mother nonetheless. She had punctuated every point of the account with a trembling cry of “My God, My God,” but after Obembe finished, she stood up, biting her lips and fidgeting, visibly ripped from inside-out. She went out of our room afterwards without saying a word, shaking from head to foot as if she’d caught a cold while Obembe and I sat pondering what our brothers would do if they knew we’d divulged the secret to her. Just about then, I heard her voice and theirs as she confronted them on why they never told her such a thing had happened. Mother had barely left their room when Ikenna stormed into ours in a rage, demanding to know which idiot had revealed the secret to her. Obembe pleaded that she forced it out of him, in a voice that was deliberately loud so Mother could hear and intervene. She did. Ikenna left us with a vow to punish us when she was not around.

An hour or so later, when it seemed she’d slightly recovered, Mother gathered us in the living room. She wore a headscarf that was knotted behind her head into the shape of a bird’s tail — a sign she’d been praying.

“When I go to the stream,” Mother said with a voice that was husky and broken, “I carry my udu . I stoop at the brook and fill my udu . I walk from the stream—” Ikenna gave a wild yawn at this time and heaved a sigh. Mother paused, stared at him for a while and continued. “I walk — to my home, to my home. When I get there I set my pot down only to find it empty.”

She let the words sink in, rounding us up with her eyes. I had imagined her walking down a river with an udu —an earthen jar — balanced on her head with the help of a wrappa formed into many layered rings. I’d been so drawn and moved by this simple story, by the tone in which she told it that I hardly wanted to know what it meant because I knew that such stories, told just like that after we’d done something wrong, always had kernelled meanings; for Mother spoke and thought in parables.

“You, my children,” she continued, “have leaked out of my udu . I thought I had you, that I carried you in my udu , that my life was full of you”—she stretched her hands and carved them into a convex—“but I was wrong. Under my nose, you went to that river and fished for weeks. Now, for even longer, you have harboured a deadly secret when I thought you were safe, that I would know if you faced any dangers.”