Inheritances

‘But I have peeled away your anger

down to its core of love

and look mother

I Am

a dark temple where your true spirit rises

beautiful

and tough as chestnut’

Audre Lorde (Black Mother Woman)

Everything I have, my mother gave to me.

My dark skin, the color of rain-soaked soil, rich and ready for seed. My wide hips, spreading with every passing year. Even my spinal cord is curved like hers, an inheritance of bent things that cannot be straightened. Even my impatience is hers; the quick-tempered way we move through life, unwilling to be slowed down by those trudging behind us. We have the same flat feet, no arch, only more and more flesh. We are both given to obsessiveness; if we like something we buy it in one hundred colours. Our weakness is a slice of cake, a bar of chocolate, anything sugary, sweet crunchy, our dopamine sensors firing off at maximum capacity. Even my mind, the one that makes all these words possible, was forged in the cubicle of her womb – the anvil of her blood welding me into existence. Maami, the ocean of your body was the first place I existed, even as a shadow of myself. Maami, you split yourself open to bring me here. Maami, in every world that exists you are my genesis. The two of us, tethered by all these irrevocable things.

My mother gave birth to me in the early hours of a Sunday morning, at the end of March. The rains had not yet come, and harmattan was now finished such that we lived in the inbetween; not drenched in water, but not scorching in dry heat. A delicate balance; much like the inner workings of a womb holding a child. Just the day before, she had worked late into the night for an Eid party just a few streets away from the house, frying baff after baff of ram meat, stewing it to perfection, the swell of her body almost full to the brim not deterring her from working. She sat with all her cooks, swatting away mosquitos with raffia fans, laughing at the lofty demands of customers, biting into tiny pieces of meat until she felt a tension inside her, and called for my father because it seemed I was ready to come.

She did not have an easy time carrying me.

Oyun Fiyin fe se mi lese — my pregnancy wanted to injure her — nausea so persistent and violent, she vomited herself empty so often it led her to the hospital to take intravenous drips. Sleep became a distant memory. Heart always beating three times its original pace. She was convinced she was carrying a boy. Hence the turbulence and turmoil. Because three years ago when she carried her first born, my older sister, the pregnancy was nothing like this. So sure was she that she bought a trunkful of blue clothes, blue beddings readying herself for a bouncing baby boy. So when I slid out from her easy and eager — węrę ni mo bi ę, you came out so easily, it was a dream, by far my easiest delivery, you came out as if you were already tired of the womb, like you wanted to see what was on this side of the world – she was pleased.

Between my mother and I, it was not clear who was more terrified of my endometriosis diagnosis. We discovered the sickness together. Our faces split by confusion and panic. Three months before I received the diagnosis, my mother had a dream where three elderly women appeared to her rubbing her belly and shaking their heads. She woke up immediately worried about me. Something in the dreamscape, something in that place of interior knowledge was warning her that the same body she forged inside hers was about to fall apart.

In his novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong calls the placenta ‘a kind of language – perhaps our first one, our true mother tongue’ – for me this means that before I even had a mouth I was speaking to my mother and before I even had ears, I listened to her voice. Blood utterances. It was blood that told my mother of impending doom. It was blood that bound us both in the Bola Tinubu Diagnostic Center in Ikeja, in a crowded doctor’s office as he explained in no sugarcoated terms what exactly this disease did, more importantly what it threatened.

Anything that could take away my ability to have children was not only a sickness, it was a curse. When a Yoruba bride is being married, there is a part of the ceremony where her mother – underneath a canopy of intricate lace, with floral patterns encircling both their bodies – lays hands on her belly and prays, bi mo se bi e, iwo naa ma bi ti e; just as I birthed you, you will also birth your own. The prayer is a promise sealed in blood. It is the promise of eternity etched beneath brown skin. When we received the diagnosis, it came with the fear, the sting, the betrayal of a broken promise.

Would I not be able to give to my daughters what my mother gave me? What her own mother gave her? Would I be the one to truncate this flow? Will I be the one that seals the mouth of my mother’s blood?

I never met my grandmother. She died the year my mother turned twenty-three. The same age I was when my blood circled within me to become something dangerous. Because I never met her, I studied her in photographs. I looked at her lean legs encircled in gold anklets. I stared at her tall frame, encased in exquisite lace. I asked a thousand questions. Learned that she went to Mecca, completed the Holy Pilgrimage and could be called an Alhaja. Learned that she spoke fluent Hausa, and was born in the North, in the desert so she was never afraid of the heat. All the answers I got, beautiful as they were, did not ease the ache in me. So in search of my mother’s mother I went to Ibadan, to the house she built, the land in which her body rests. The sunlight struck my grandmother’s grave with exquisite precision. The black marble of her headstone, polished to perfection shone like a still river, untouchable by any and everything. I ran my fingers along the sharp corners, longing to feel the softness of a body that left the earth long before I arrived.

My mother’s mother is buried beneath a mango tree so huge, it almost kisses the heavens. Its dark green leaves shine almost leatherlike in the heat of the afternoon sun. When the tree fruits, hundreds of mangoes fall to the ground, in varying colors and varying degrees of ripeness: some fall when they are still green-green and entirely unripe, some fall when they are a little yellow, almost riding the edge of ripeness. Some fall when they are a smooth yellow, perfect to eat. And some fall when they are heavy with ripeness, maggot-soft on the inside, too big for the tree to hold onto anymore. I like to think that the rotting mangoes are feeding her, making the ground that houses her even just a little sweeter. Showing her that even the dead can enjoy the blessedness of fruit.

My grandmother had four daughters. Her first born, Bukola, resembles her the most. The same slant of cheekbones, the same quaint nose, the same piercing yet gentle eyes. As my mother ages, she begins to look more like her sister, more like her mother. The longer we spend here, the more we reach for the places we come from. I know this. It is the same hunger to know what my grandmother’s laugh sounds like. It is the same ever-deepening desire to hear her call my name, every syllable flowing with the heft of belonging. I hungered for her even more after the diagnosis. I photographed the photographs of her and kept them on my phone and stared at them while I cried as pain wracked through my body. My own mother never had her mother hold her hand throughout pregnancy, rub her back, bathe her babies. I knew how much she wanted to eat the fruit her mother never could. I dreamt of my daughters, I knew them by name. In the tongue of our blood, I knew they would come. Sickness be damned. But my body wavered in this knowledge. The pain cracked my convictions until only fear remained. The Yoruba word for a barren woman is only two syllables yet the word is heavy as stone.

ÀGÀN.

It is the very worst thing that could happen to a woman in my place: to be bereft of children. What I am trying to say is that in my culture, blood is a covering and to be without is to be naked, is to be unmoored, is to be forgotten. Blood carries within it the current of memory, the marking of remembrance and the potential for immortality.

For the longest time, my mother was disgusted by my tears. She is not one given to outbursts of such emotion. She is practical. If a problem arises, let us solve it. Before the sickness, whenever I would cry, she would face me with a thinly-veiled disgust combined with apprehension and sometimes, even anger. But when I started the hormonal regimen that was to correct my endometriosis by putting me in a state of pseudo-pregnancy, my tears became a daily companion. I cried when I woke up next to her in the morning. Wept all through the night. Halted our conversations mid-way with my tears. Soaked the entire house in my eternal downpour. As much as she tried to care for me in that time, I could see the questions forming in her mind:

‘If I made this girl in my body, why is she so

soft?

Why is she so breakable?

Where is the hardness I bequeathed her?’

But my suffering answered the questions.

As she watched my body and mind bear the weight of turmoil, her eyes became heavy with the weight of my breaking. Who births a girl only to watch womanhood empty her of herself? Who weaves a daughter in her womb only to watch her come undone? While I cried, she would go on her knees next to me and begin to pray to the God that made her body my vessel of passage into this realm. But when she prayed, she did not beg. I heard her challenge Our Maker. Before the blasphemy of it all could settle on me, all I could think was oh, what a precious thing to belong to a woman who will fight God on your behalf. One who will shelve the hardness she has known all her life, and unearth a strange tenderness with which she will caress the skin of your aching belly and whisper over and over;

‘You are well. This will not defeat you. As long as I am alive you are never alone. As I birthed you, so will you birth your own. Your womb will not be empty. You will bear your own fruit’

There is a picture of my mother as a twenty two year old woman, that I love dearly. In it, she is wearing a turquoise blue skirt suit with golden buttons. She is smiling with her eyes closed, the smooth brown of her face glistening from within. In the summer of the year I turned twenty, I went to Spain with a few of my friends. Courtney takes a picture of me, smiling with my eyes closed, my lips coated in purple, my hair a halo of perfection. When I show my mother that picture, her eyes soften in the most tender way. She rises to retrieve her own picture and she places them side by side and it is exactly the same smile, exactly the same slant of the eyes, exactly the same inner radiance. Decades apart, continents apart: blood is witnessing blood.

Written by Mofiyinfoluwa O