Chris Abani - Song for Night

I leave the market, crossing a small bridge humping a tired stream. Under a mango tree, in the deeper shadows, cows drink from the belly of a canoe sailing on a pile of sand. Everywhere, madmen and mendicants call. Children: bulbous heads pendulous over hunger-distended bellies with eyes washed out like the earth here. I stop in front of a flaking, dusty building. Somewhere inside, a generator hacks in coughy spurts and the lights flicker in sympathy. A worn sign announces: Die Hard Motel and Eatery. I make to enter, but lying across the threshold, dry, brown, dead, and molting, is a lizard. I hesitate. Lizards are sometimes seen as symbols of rebirth, but every rebirth requires a death. I hover on the porch and an old man hunched in the corner sees the lizard and me, and smiling says: “Faith is not a gift. It is earned.”

I don’t know what he means, so I ignore him.

He spits into the night: “Tufia! Even the dead ignore me!”

Shellshock , I think, and return my attention to the interior of the bar. Several rebel soldiers, officers, I think, are eating at a table near the door, although they seem to be doing more drinking than eating right now. I stare at the plates of rice and stewed meat on the table and feel my stomach knot and my mouth water. Judging by the number of bottles strewn about the place, the men are drunk. One of them is telling a joke so loudly I can hear it out here.

“There are three construction workers, one of them is Igbo, one is Yoruba, and the other Hausa …” At this he spits.

“Enemy!” one soldier slurs, interrupting.

“Shut up, I’m talking! Anyway, the Igbo man opens his lunch pack and says, ‘Oh no! Not rice again. If I get one more rice dinner, I will throw myself off this scaffolding.’ The same is repeated by the Yoruba and Hausa man, except that the food in question is beans and okra respectively. The next day they all get together for lunch. The Igbo man sees his lunch. It is rice. He throws himself from the scaffolding and dies. The Yoruba man sees his is beans and throws himself after the Igbo man. The Hausa man soon follows.” The soldier pauses to take a drink from his glass, puts it down, and regardless of the fact that his comrades are half asleep, he continues. “At the inquest, the Igbo man’s wife says she had no idea he didn’t like rice and she would have changed his lunch if she knew. The Yoruba man’s wife says the same. The Hausa man’s wife is completely confused. ‘I don’t understand why he killed himself,’ she says. ‘For the past twenty years, Hassan has been making his own lunch.’”

Ever since the troubles, and the war, several racist jokes about the enemy have been circulating. This was one of the more famous ones. It is funny, but nonetheless I am tired of all this hate. The joke reminds me of my life in the north before the war.

The call to prayer cracked the skin of sleep. Starting softly, the muezzin’s voice trembled and then the chant grew robust. As the muezzin’s voice ruffled its feathers and strutted, the call rose to a single point. One note screaming in adoration of the most high. It trembled there in the sunshine for a few minutes before cutting off abruptly. There was a pause, a silence that itself was a call, a prayer. Then the muezzin’s voice began the call again. Softly, it built to a crescendo, then died again on that abrupt point, dropping the faithful into the pit of belief. Every morning the call came, rousing me. For the faithful it was joy, while the infidels fought it, struggling to wrap sleep tighter around the senses, but for me it was the voice of my father the imam. When the call ended, its last note a silent scream to Allah, the compound came awake.

It is a terrible thing in this divided nation, even in its infancy, for an Igbo man to be Muslim. I will never know why my father chose that path; one that put him outside his own community, his own people, most of whom are Catholic, and made him a thing that the people who would later become our enemies feared: a hybrid. Even though he had been a Muslim since he was fifteen and traveling as a singer with a band, and an imam for twenty, the only mosque they gave him was inside Sabon Gari: the foreigners’ ghetto. Everyone hated the mosque, sitting as it did by decree of the Saraduana in the midst of the Christian enclave. Everyone hated my father. Yet he was the one they came to for arbitration, for help, to borrow money, and to circumcise their sons. For a long time I hated my father too, but since he died, I have been trying to love him.

I look in at the soldiers and realize that somewhere along the line, somewhere in this war, I have lost my appetite for it. I want nothing more than to return to the safety of my platoon and to outlive this madness. I am tired. I sink onto the floor of the porch, not too far from the old man who spoke earlier, and I wonder if he just grew tired too. I light a cigarette, turning to offer one to the old man. He takes it greedily and lights up from the match I hold out to him. The price of coming this far has been too much. From my hiding space in the ceiling to this porch, there has been nothing but blood since the night my mother died. I didn’t come down for days after.

It was hot up there, the zinc roof heating up quickly in the sun, my hiding place soon becoming an oven, and I had to strip naked and sip continuously on the water my mother smuggled up. The roof was peppered with rust holes and the sun dripped through in rivers of hot oil, mixing the shouts of the marauding mobs outside, the scent of death, burning flesh, and the screams of the dying into a fire that burned me, patterning my psyche in polka dots of fear.

Finally, I unfurled my body from its cramped position. For the past two weeks there had been pogroms against the Igbos, a frenzy of murder and looting, and the streets were littered with so many bodies. Anyone who had even the slightest resemblance to the Bantu Igbo was killed. The litmus test for those in the shadowlands between was the ability to recite obscure sura from the Koran, or the taking of a life identified as Igbo. The night I left, I stood in the backyard of the tenement, which was enclosed by the U-shaped building. One wing housed the kitchens and bathrooms, the other L the two-room flats that housed the eight families.

Before the troubles, the yard echoed with life: children playing in giggling starts, mothers shouting gossip at each other, men sitting on benches playing checkers and drinking beer, music spilling out of rooms mixing with smells from the kitchens, giving the courtyard extra spice. I remembered the games of cricket, and Paul, who could bowl so fast his main job in the rebel army, if he is still alive, must be lobbing grenades instead of curve balls.

It was deserted. Most of the neighbors were dead or had fled south to safety. Something was rattling in the empty kitchens; some hungry rat despairing. Cobwebs hung in fine lacy decay from the soot-blackened walls. The bathrooms stood still in bracken-scum-surfaced puddles. A lovely breeze blew a newspaper across the courtyard vainly fluttering against the silence.

Hidden in a small latch space behind the headboard of my parents’ bed, I found the rolled-up bundle of knives. I took them out. One of my chores was cleaning and honing those knives: the imam’s circumcision knives. Small, curved blades that could cut through flesh with a whisper of effort. I grew to love them, polishing the silver blades until they shone. I stroked them, played with them, spoke to them. They in turn spoke of the blood-spattered hysteria of the younger boys and the grim, tight-lipped grunting and moaning of the older boys and the honest wails of babies. They spoke of the wisdom of blood — veins, capillaries; of flesh and bone — brisket, tendons, ligaments, and skin. When some of the other boys in school started bullying me, I took to carrying one of the knives hidden in my dashiki. Pain was a sharp, ripping lesson those boys learned early on.