Everything Good Will Come (36 page)

“
Na wa
, I'm flattered. It is nice to see your face again. You should come to the reading if you can. It will be good to have support. They say that great minds think alike, but in this country it is the stupid ones that have a consensus.”

I decided to go to the reading. I wanted to be around people who had taken a stand against our government. At home, Niyi's silence was upsetting me, and I couldn't forget about my father's detention. I invited Dagogo and Alabi. They said they weren't wasting precious petrol, driving somewhere to listen to poems or whatever.

Looking back on the choice I made to go, I really wasn't interested in attending a literary event either. I never even realized writers in my country held readings, except within academic circles, or except when one retired senator, general, diplomat or the other, wrote his memoirs and threw a large party afterward to raise funds. I'd heard that there were published writers who had not yet seen a royalty, because publishers just didn't pay. My library at home was short on their books, because in an economy like ours books were scarce, if they were not banned by the government. If ever I did come across a book by an African author, it was in London, in a neighborhood where I'd gone to buy plantains, in a bookshop with kente cloth drapes. None of the books I encountered had characters as diverse as the people I knew. And African authors, it seemed, were always having to explain the smallest things to the rest of the world. To an African reader, these things could appear over-explained. Harmattan for instance. You already knew: a season, December–January, dust in the eyes, coughing, chilly mornings, by afternoon sweaty armpits. Whenever I read foreign books, they never explained the simplest things, like snow. How it crunched under your shoes, kissed your face both warm and cold. How you were driven to trample it, then loathed it after it became soiled. All these things! No one ever bothered to tell an African! This never occurred to me, until an English friend once commented on how my accent changed whenever I spoke to my Nigerian friends. That was my natural accent, I told her. If I spoke to her that way, she would never understand. She looked stunned. “I don't believe you,” she said sincerely. “That is so polite.”

After I'd come to terms with how polite I was being, I became incensed at a world that was impolite to me. Under- explained books, books that described a colonial Africa so exotic I would want to be there myself, in a safari suit, served by some silent and dignified Kikuyu, or some other silent and dignified tribesman. Or a dark dark Africa, with snakes and vines and ooga-booga dialects. My Africa was a light one, not a dark one: there was so much sun. And Africa was an onslaught of sensations, as I once tried to explain to a group of English work mates, like eating an orange. What single sensation could you take from an orange? Stringy, mushy, tangy, bitter, sweet. The pulp, seeds, segments, skin. The sting in your eyes. The long lasting smell on your fingers.

But people concentrated on certain aspects of our continent: poverty, or wars, or starvation; bush, tribes, or wildlife. They loved our animals more than they loved us. They took an interest in us only when we were clapping and singing, or half naked like the Maasai, who were always sophisticated enough to recognize a photo opportunity. And for the better informed: “How about that Idi Amin Dada fellow, eh?” That Mobutu Sese Seko fellow, that Jean-Bedel Bokassa fellow, as though those of us who just happened to be living in the same continent could vouch for the sanity of any of these fellows.

We had no sense of continent really, or of nation in a country like mine, until we traveled abroad; no sense of the Africa presented outside. In a world of East and West, there was nowhere to place us. In a graded world, there was a place for us, right there at the bottom: third, slowly slipping into fourth world. A noble people. A savage culture. Pop concert after pop concert for starving Africans. Entire books dedicated to the salvation of African women's genitals. If only the women themselves could read the books, critique them: this is right; this is incorrect; this is total nonsense. If only Africa could be saved by charity.

Niyi said it was as simple as economic prowess. Economic prowess equaled respect and love. If we had economic clout the rest of the world would love us; love us so much they might even want to mimic us. Why did I think England was beginning to resemble an American colony? Why did I think the most stylish people in the world were forcing themselves to eat sushi? He made sense, I had to admit.

The reading began at 7:00
P.M
. but I arrived late, Lagos- style. It was held in a small hall that normally served as a venue for wedding receptions. The hall was the size of a school assembly hall, with folding doors, which, once fully pushed back, allowed air to flow freely from one side to another. Two white fans were suspended from the ceiling. There was a low wooden stage where I expected various brides and grooms had been set on display during their wedding receptions together with ribbons and balloons. The lighting was poor. I sat at the back, under a broken light by the door, wanting to observe. I hoped no one would notice me.

There were about forty or so people present. They were mostly men. One of them caught my eye because he was smoking a pipe. He looked about my father's age. Another, a skinny tall man, walked around with a serious expression. He was handing out leaflets. I saw Grace Ameh. She laughed and patted her chest. She was chatting with the man seated next to her. The skinny man got on the stage. He talked about activism and writing. His voice was so soft it made me wonder if he breathed. He spoke about a rally he had attended, where state security agents had arrested people. They arrived during the first speech and none of the speakers had been seen since. His friend, a writer and journalist, was one of them. He himself wrote poetry and he didn't believe that writers had any special obligation to be activists. “Why must I write about military tyranny?” he asked. “Why can't I write about love? Why can't I just write for the rest of my life about a stone if I want?”

The next reader was Grace Ameh. For a while people adjusted their chairs and she waited for the noise to die down. “In this state we're living in,” she said, “where words are so easily expunged, from our constitution, from publications, public records, the act of writing is activism.” The audience clapped.

She begged our forgiveness if she was out of touch, but she hadn't read the papers since her return. The news was so heavily censured and she hated to come across the words “socio-economic” and “socio-political,” which were over-used by her colleagues in the media. This brought on jovial hisses from the audience. I was surprised Grace Ameh didn't talk about her arrest, only about her trip to South Africa. She said she felt like an honorary white, drinking South African wine and discussing literature. She feared the world would judge Winnie Mandela as a woman, not as the general she was in the war against apartheid.

Grace Ameh was an entertainer. She was also openly self- absorbed, as if she'd decided to crown herself because no one else would. She flirted and quoted from English poems and Zulu sayings. She dared to move daintily. After her, the man with the pipe read an excerpt from his short story about a surgeon with a missing finger, followed by another man who read a poem full of words like sweat and toil. I imagined it had something to do with the demise of farming in our country.

I was in awe of the people I was listening to, that they wrote without recognition or remuneration, and more so that they denounced injustices as a group, at the expense of their freedoms and lives. At the same time, I thought that none of them could be fully conscious of the implications of speaking out. They would have an awareness only; an awareness that manifested itself in whispers, omitted names, substitute names when people discussed politics at gatherings or over the phone. I had lived with the awareness so long, it had become normal. But what made a person cross the frontier of safety? It wasn't consciousness. Anger, I thought. Enough to blind.

The evening ended with a question-and-answer session. I would have stayed, but I was already feeling hungry. These days my hunger was as fierce as thirst. I took note of the next reading, slipped out of the back door. Outside, I hurried to my car in the dark. I'd parked by the gates because I expected to be boxed in. The grounds of the property were over an acre wide with a huge flame-of-the-forest tree in the front court. There were no lamps in the lot, so it took me a while to find my car keys. When I finally did, the headlights of three cars blinded me. I kept perfectly still, recognizing the familiar Peugeot shapes. One car stopped before me and the others carried on toward the hall. The back door of the car before me flew open. A man jumped out. I raised my hands. He was carrying a rifle.

“Don't move,” he warned.

They threw us into a cell, Grace Ameh and I. They said we had disobeyed public orders.

The police stormed the reading and ordered people out at gun point. They arrested Grace Ameh; she was the one they came for. They arrested the four men who came to her rescue. I was arrested because I was the first person they saw.

“Why?” I asked the police officer.

“Inside de car,” he said.

“Why?”

“Inside de car,” he said, pushing me in.

Through the back window I saw the other policemen running into the hall. They aimed their rifles and shouted orders; I shut my eyes and blocked my ears. I thought they were about to shoot the people inside. I heard Grace Ameh screaming, “Don't touch me.” They marched her into the car. I felt so ashamed; I wanted her to be quiet, but she wouldn't stop until we reached the police station, telling them what cowards they were.

There were twelve other women in the cell they threw us in; fourteen of us in a space intended for seven, with ventilation holes on an area the size of an air-conditioning unit. There was no air, no light. My pupils widened in the dark. Outside crickets chattered. Mosquitoes buzzed around my ears. The women lay on raffia mats, overlapping each other on the cold cement floor. One woman had been ordered to fan the others with a large cardboard sheet. Another sat by a shit- bucket in the corner, carrying on a conversation with herself: “Re Mi Re Do? Fa So La Ti Re. La Ti La Ti... ”

Grace Ameh stood by the cell door. I was crouched behind her, as far away from the shit-bucket as possible. The smell was already in my nostrils, in my stomach, churning it over. My breath was coming in gasps.

“Get away from the grill,” a loud voice said.

It was the woman who seemed to have assumed control of the others in the cell. She had been giving orders to the fanner: “Face north. Face south. Quicken up. Why are you slowing down? Are you crazy?”

Her voice was full of mucus. I was able to make out the roundness of her face, but not her exact expression.

“I stand where I want,” Grace Ameh answered.

A woman of words, her voice had broken in her rage.

“I've told you, madam,” the loud woman said. “Get away from that grill. You're disrupting everything inside here since you came, and I don't like disruptions.”

“I'm not part of your little brigade,” Grace Ameh answered.

She was spent from screaming. One or two people slapped mosquitoes from their legs. Someone coughed and swallowed. I gritted my teeth to control my nausea.

“You think because you're educated,” came the woman's voice again. “You think you're better than me. I'm educated, too. I read books. I know things. You're no better than me. You and your butter-eating friend in the corner who can't take the smell of shit.”

“Look at you, treating people so badly in here,” Grace Ameh said.

“Don't speak to me like that,” the woman shouted. “You're no better than me. Not in here. We sleep on the same floor, shit in the same bucket. I'll deal with you in a way you least expect if you insult me. Any of my girls here will deal with you in a way you least expect. Even Do-Re-Mi in the corner. Ask her. She kills people and can't even remember. Ask her. She'll tell you.”