Mother does not end prayers until she says a house built on a rock does not rot. A house built on a rock shall never be uprooted by any man whosoever. Her English gets bigger in prayers. Like it’s another person speaking it for her. I am proud, though I wonder if she knows what the words mean. She calls upon Jesus like Jesus is her younger brother. Our house is persistently on the rock, will indefeasibly be on the rock, all in the triumphant name of Jesus.
Mother clears the cushion so I can sleep on it this night. She gathers her scarves, skirts, and blouses piled on its arm. Our room smells like exhaust or condemned oil. Everything is cleared now. You can see the roses in the velvet. My mouth is unbrushed from eating beans, but I drink water from the rubber gallon, rinse my mouth, swallow it, then curl into the cushion.
In the night, Mummy’s husband slips in like an earthworm. They do circles in the main bed. I don’t see him so well as there’s always half current when he lands, but I know he wears an up-and-down, and the up-and-down is easy to remove from his body. He’s always too fast like he’s been fasting and now there’s food in his front. They cover themselves with the bedspread, even when the heat is biting. Their bodies touch. Their voices don’t come out. You hear everything like he’s using his hand to cover Mummy’s mouth.
They stay there until the bed falls down. Mummy says something I don’t hear, like she is whispering into his ear. I don’t hear anything else. My sleep is perfect. I close my eyes, and the next thing I see is morning.
Mummy’s husband disappears before my eyes open. It is Saturday. Before she leaves for her table shop at Douglas, she puts bread and tea on top of the stool at the foot of the cushion I’m sleeping on. It is for me to eat for morning food, before I go to meet my friends: Ablegod and Chikwado and Destiny. Good people.
2.
They set the large hall on fire at 2 a.m. When we wake up in the middle of that night, we don’t see anything—only smoke that is crawling up and up, and the smell of burning grass and timber and sawdust. Someone screams from the other side of the railway, things we can’t hear, but it’s about a burning fire coming to eat us all again. The same creeping silence, the petrol, the fire. They want us to leave and forget our houses and our shops and our lands. They come and go. They always come, check, and go. Today they want us to leave. They have a plan. To build an estate, one we can’t live in, because it will be for rich men and rich women with their children wearing eyeglasses. My god.
Here won’t be the same again. Everything will change. There will be beautiful coconut trees and a fake beach for rich people. Mummy will become a woman who climbs the stairs to the tenth floor, to mop, to clean, to leave neater than her clothes the homes of the rich people living in the large upstairs apartments.
3.
We pull our faces from our beds. We reach for our clothes, our slippers, our shivering Panasonic TV, always shivering in harsh hisses and never gets network. We watch out in case fire crawls to us. It comes like rain, when no one expects it. Then it crawls like a snail. The men try to pour water and sand to stop it. But it doesn’t end there. It can come from the air again tomorrow night and burn many things before we wake.
We prepare, pack our things. We look like vigilantes. Beside our own house, Ablegod’s grandmother runs helter skelter, like a worm that has been poured salt. She waves at me and calls my name, asking me to carry a large box. But Mummy, winking, uses her eyes to tell me not to go; we also need to carry our own cushion.
I pretend not to see Mummy’s talking eyes and run fast to answer Ablegod’s grandmother. After I help her with the box, she rolls up two almanacs, Blessed Iwene Tansi and Obafemi Awolowo on the front pages, both of them wearing eyeglasses. Like two small circles on top of their eyes. I leave everything and start looking at the almanac and their eyeglasses. What an eye uniform. When she finishes with the rolling and ties them with a wobbly rubber band, she crosses her upper body, tracing her forehead and the middle of her chest and shoulders.
I fly away from Ablegod’s grandmother, and in front of me, Destiny’s mother is dragging their mattress through the settling smoke—just like they dragged his father to the hospital the day he died. It was the same day the governor announced that the newly planned Eldorado Housing Estate would replace our houses.
The governor had said we couldn’t keep living at Akwakuma, unless we wanted to offer our lives for the railway to eat. They dragged Destiny’s father to Umezuruike hospital where he died at the reception. I’d seen him once or twice while he was sick on the mattress in their parlor.
He was always lying there, his face wet with olive oil and sweat. The day Mummy sent me to give him boiled corn and ube, he was coughing, each cough bouncing him up and down on the spring bed and I was wondering what teeth he would use and eat the corn. His body had vanished into the foam, just a lot of bones, his face full of teeth and eyebrows. There is a King James Version on his chest. The pillow under his head breathed in sweat and breathed out saliva.
He didn’t speak. Destiny said the sickness had tied a rope around his throat. Whenever he tried to force words out, the rope pulled tighter. He had to die on top of this land case that has been swallowing us for years.
The fire still spreads like a snail. All of us are slowly packing and sliding away. A woman I don’t know, one Mummy and I have never spoken to, screams because she failed to get her elementary school certificate before it burned. I hear a silent gunshot. I hear some people breaking bottles at the other end of the railway. People just break bottles to make sure the chaos is complete. No one sees anyone because there is no light. The only light is the firelight that reddens our faces, and you can’t really know your neighbor from a reddened face.
The flames are sluggish. They come from planks, from dry grasses, from dustbins. The flames moisturize the edges of our houses until the edges disappear. And the houses begin to tilt and to shrink. What is left if not pain? What can hurt us more than pain?
4.
Our houses are boxes of plain woods, sitting on plain earth, just an outlined length and width. There are no real windows like the ones in picture books. Mummy built our window herself, borrowing the hammer, the nails, and the plier. No fancy, no ceremony.
Nights smelled of burning mosquito coils, candle waxes, and kerosene.
When we wanted a good door, Mummy didn’t spend any money buying planks from the timber market, because her husband works there. He has a shed and a large machine that turns iroko trunks into flat planks.
Me and Mummy go to greet him in his machine shed. We do not hear ourselves. The engine collects our voices and saws them along with the iroko. Mummy uses sign language until he finishes, then he says, “Baby, wait another one minute. Let’s go to my main shed.”
Then we start walking there, where he sits us down, flips through receipts in the sagging drawer of his metal table, his leather slippers gleaming. He tells his boy to run very fast and buy us Maltina.
When he says two Maltinas, Mummy says, “No, Divine likes Fanta or Limca more. Maybe buy him the Fanta one, inụ?” She turns to me quickly, “Divine, abi?” I nod.
Before we close and open our eyes, the boy stands in front of us with one Maltina and one Fanta. Did he fly? I do not know. His feet, though, his long toenails begging for a razor blade, stand on the cement floor like claws.
5.
Those men are here now, soldier-anting all around in their police uniforms, around us and our small plank houses. They carry a large measuring tape. They smile like emojis, taking pictures with their big camera phones that flash when they snap.
They say they come from the government.
Still snapping, flash upon flash, even though the sun is everywhere, hot enough to fry eggs, they don’t seem to feel it. They try to capture a perfect before and after.
Their phones are clean: no casing, no screen guard, no jackets. On the back sits a partly eaten silver apple—blinking and shimmering in the sun like a reflector.
The only person in all of Akwakuma with a camera phone that flashes and has a silver apple is Sergent, who sold his motorcycle to buy it. Even after buying it, he still doesn’t know how to snap an ordinary picture. He carries it deep in his pocket and uses it to show he’s bigger than all of us.
Mummy’s husband also has a big camera phone with flashlight, but his own doesn’t have any apple on it. Besides, he doesn’t live with us in Akwakuma, so he is not one of us. He is for Mummy only.
6.
Packing is still happening. A train pulls through the railway. We cover our ears with our hands from the horn until it moves farther, smaller, and disappears.
Too many people are outside, just looking. I’m tired from carrying cushions, dragging mattresses, running to gather gallons and buckets. But I look again, and it’s Ablegod and Chikwado. They look hungry, yawning, like they want to swallow me. Ablegod is wearing oversized shorts that look like his Daddy’s own. The rope he is using as a belt is slippery and the short is sagging. Chikwado is in a rumpled off-shoulder dress that I don’t know where she got it from.
We finish helping a woman carry her long bench to the side of the railway that is not burning, and then we run to the empty building close to the highway. We play there, pray there, laugh there, do other things there.
Chikwado tells us to touch her. We do it too fast, like we are paying for it. We close our eyes. We put our hands on her off-shoulder. Our bodies begin to melt like sugar.
I wish Destiny was here with us. We miss him. He doesn’t follow us again because the last time, he didn’t know what to do. Or how to be. He was touching us more than he was touching Chikwado. His tongue reached for my tongue; he pressed me instead of pressing her. It was too much confusion for three people to be doing one thing.
Every time Destiny touched Ablegod, he kicked his hands away and told him to touch Chikwado. “Destiny, are you mad?” Ablegod would say. “Are you wearing mask? Can’t you see again?”
But I liked it. Always.
7.
It is one of the nights that Mummy’s husband arrives to bounce into Mummy’s bed, removing his up- and-down in front of me, placing them on the chair, stretching his arms. I want to ask him if he’s trying to become my new daddy now or what? But I just look at him and ask it in my mind.
This is Mummy’s second husband. First was Uncle Febuwari, always arriving in the afternoon, always angry, always asking Mummy to make me leave the house whenever he was around. Mummy would bring him a take-away of fried rice and a stout. He’d sit on the floor, place the take-away on his lean thighs full of rings of hair, and dig into it with a white plastic spoon.
8.
Those men with camera phones come every day. They walk everywhere like people without jobs or families to feed, always scouting for something, like they are looking for rabbit hole. They’re preparing to set Akwakuma on fire again, because that is the easiest way to make us leave. It is in fire that their whole power lies.
9.
Mummy sits on the chair where her husband puts his clothes when he comes at night, before burying himself in her mattress. In the morning, she gives me butter biscuits and cheese balls, saying her husband asked her to give them to me. I take. I eat. Later, I shit them out inside pit.
10.
Today, we are all outside, watching. Waterproofs full of clothes in our hands—looking for where to keep them, just in case another fire comes. It just rained, so there is no more burning, and the smoke is gone. Adults think of where to go, how to carry back their cushions, how to buy planks to build another house.
Mummy holds my hand and tells me to stay beside her. She says her husband can’t bring us into his house in Amakohia because he has a wife and three children, two boys and one girl, she says, as if I am going to do anything with how many they are.
She calls Ifeyinwa, her friend in Aladinma. Ifeyinwa says her one room is already overflowing with her, her children, and her mother who just came from Ubommiri.
When Mummy calls Angela, another woman she wants to be her friend but who does not care, Angela says no. Nevermind that Mummy is always dressing up and taking taxi to her house, Angela never comes near ours.
11.
Chikwado and her mother vanished this morning. They didn’t tell anybody anything. Their house didn’t burn well, but still, they vanished.
NGO people always come and go and leave us with mosquito nets as though it is only mosquito that is worrying us. There are white people too, their hair is always looking like they are hungry to be plaited, both their man and woman. The other man’s hair is too full and covering his eyes and it needs scissors or clippers. Then the government people arrive, looking at the burnt houses like our area is now a museum. Press people are snapping pictures like they don’t have any job—now with very large black cameras that flash like streetlights. They carry microphones and push them into every face they see.
We all gather around them, arms folded, held by Mummies and Daddies. I’m wearing a big shirt that smells like Mummy’s husband because it is his. The hole in it is as big as the neck itself.
There are soldiers in army uniform, carrying guns and not letting us to see the big government man who looks like the assistant governor. His stomach is looking like a round basin for washing clothes. Just look at him. His English is as big as he is, and he’s speaking it while pouring spit in front of the camera. He wants to use spit to blind the press people. I follow Mummy and sneak into the crowd to hear him better, but his English does not allow my ears to breathe. I am small like the size of an arm chair. I stand on my toes, I hear. I jump up, I see.
I hear him say this place is where thieves and husband-snatchers and weed-drinkers come to hide. Nobody says no. Nobody shouts. Army people with guns surround us. Army people with guns are watching us.
12.
After government people and army soldiers leave, NGO people arrive, led by a short woman everyone calls Lawyer Madam. Her jeans flare at the ends, carrying dust and mud as she walks. She arrives with three other men and two women in jeans and sneakers. They are with small-small cameras.
There is no type of camera that I haven’t seen since this fire started. Every adult has one, as if camera were a water bottle. They start asking us questions. When did this happen? Where were you when the fire started? What and what did you lose? Who and who do you think is responsible for this? What’s next for you? Question upon question they already know the answers to. They keep asking, writing things down in their jotters. Their jotters carry the name of their company, their cameras and their shirts—everything is the same. They stroll close to our houses, taking pictures of our mattresses, our buckets, our bags full of clothes.
I’ve been following Mummy everywhere. My body is starting to feel like I’m carrying a stone inside it. The rice I ate in the morning is no longer in my stomach. Now we’re gathering around Lawyer Madam and listening to her speak. She says we must protest today, deafen the government with our voices. She mixes English with Igbo, and she keeps saying her father came into this city like this until their legs stood strong in this city. She says everyone belongs in the city. She says poverty should not be a sin for government people to use and deal with us. She asks what they want to achieve by driving poor folks away. Is this government’s way of driving poverty away? She orders those men and women she arrived with to go to the boot of her car and gather the placards. They share the placards, and soon, they start marching down the street. Mummy tells me to stay back, because there’s little a child can do, and the breeze that came after the rain might give me pneumonia. The large placards read: “Compensate us first,” “Illegal demolitions must stop,” “This city belongs to everyone,” “Resettle us before you burn us,” and “This community has sucked a lot of blood, save us now!” They march toward the government house, while we stay behind.
I am staying with Aunty Joy in her hair-braiding corner until Mummy returns. We haven’t even neared the school because it’s closed. School is the last thing on our minds now. What is school when our breathing suffocates us? Can you think of school when your sleeping is no longer perfect?
13.
The sun is out early today. I’m sitting on the pavement on the other side, waiting for Mummy’s husband to give her a missed call, hoping he’ll agree to find another bedroom for me and Mummy. We gather to watch Lawyer Madam on Ifeco’s TV. She speaks crispy English to the camera while they zoom in on us, our tired faces framed in the center of the screen. I see myself standing, Mummy sitting, Ablegod running with a pail of water on his head, Ablegod’s mother dozing in the sun, his father holding a large plank that he wants to use to build a new small room on the other side of the road. All of us on TV hovering. Then the camera goes back to Lawyer Madam, still speaking English. The English is like she is speaking it in capital letters, hitting the hammer at the nail.
When the newswoman in brown jheri curls announces that the interview with Lawyer Madam would continue after the break, an advertisement for Philip’s Special Bread takes over. But we’re all still standing in front of the TV, watching the light-skinned woman and her husband and two children slice down a large loaf of bread on their glass dining table, there is a large container of butter looking at them too. We wait for her and her fine children to disappear so that Lawyer Madam can come back and speak English about us, for us. We’ve never eaten Philip’s Bread. We do not want Philip’s Bread. We agree that Lawyer Madam will save us. We can afford her voice but not Philip’s Bread.
When the camera finally returns to her, she says one thing, then the petrol in Ifeco’s Tiger generator runs out, and the TV dims off so innocently.
14.
Lawyer Madam says we will go to court, and the government will pay us millions when we win. Millions we can use to build our own houses. Mummy will get enough money to buy land and build a small, rain-ready bungalow in Ikenegbu Layout and also send me to boarding school in Umuahia. Lawyer Madam is like our mouth, and all she wants from us is to be ready to protest, follow her to court as one community, one voice, and appear for her on TV.
But lately, Mummy feels tired so easily. She vomits after drinking water or smelling anything like kerosene or burning mosquito coil. Today she wants to eat agidi jollof, tomorrow it’s three-leaved yam and palm oil. She says her body feels like something is changing. Of course, something is changing, our homes have been stolen by the government.
15.
We don’t win in court. Lawyer Madam says to us: Bye people. It’s concluded: the government will occupy our land and develop Eldorado estate none of us can afford.
Before we vanish, army men and soldiers pour into Akwakuma, screaming at the top of their voices, carrying longer measuring tapes, with caterpillars rumbling behind them. All the children like standing and watching caterpillars as they do their work, laughing and pointing at how large the teeth of the caterpillar is, like a vampire, as though it is not the caterpillars that are killing us and our Mummies and Daddies. The caterpillar drivers wear large eyeglasses that cover most of their faces. Like Mummy’s husband digging into the take-away of fried rice, the yellow caterpillars are digging deep into the land and eating concrete our eyes have never seen. They swallow everything. They vomit it back. It remains just a little more for them to swallow us as we watch.
Mummy pauses and looks at my face and says it feels like someone is inside her stomach. She swallows spit, picks up her phone, calls her husband, tells him she’s pregnant. Someone new occupies Mummy’s body as Government occupies our land.
Chimee Adịọha
Chimee Adịọha is a PhD student of Rhetoric & Composition at the University of California, Irvine, and the founder of Black Boy Review, a Nigerian literary blog.