“In Eden, Eve” by Kenechi Uzor was awarded the second place prize in the 2021 Open Border Fiction Prize by judge T Kira Māhealani Madden.
“I’ve never read anything quite like this, the opening is amongst the most stunning I’ve ever experienced. Every beat of ‘In Eden, Eve’ contains its own miracle, both in story and craft, with Kenechi Uzor bringing their readers to the landscapes of Nigeria, and to the edge of becoming. An ode to storytelling itself, and a gift to those who listen.” — T Kira Māhealani Madden
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The way my mother died was this: a man in tears had walked up to her and snapped his fingers in her face and told her that she would see, that this night she would burn the way his heart burns, and that it would only be fair. There were two cows up in the sky, one goat. We had not seen the crying man because we were looking up at the clouds and naming them the way my mother said Adam named everything in the world. My mother pulled me closer to her side and we watched the man walk away, wiping his tears. We looked around for people, for my father who we’d left back at the church to wind himself down and off the anointing, to close the church after the service. We were going ahead of him to start the evening meal.
As we continued down the wide path that led home, my mother’s hand on my shoulder began to feel warm, then hot, so I looked up at her and found that she’d begun to sweat and was blinking the sweat off her puzzled eyes. She stopped soon after to loosen her scarf, and a few paces later she untied her wrapper. There were mango, cashew and unknown trees on both sides of the road, their roots crisscrossing and disrupting the tire threads on the dirt road. My mother sat down under one of these trees, perhaps a mango, her back resting against it, and began to pant for water.
A woman ran back with me from the house I’d gone to ask for help and water, and we gave my mother some to drink. The woman began to scream for more help when we poured a little of the water over my mother and steam began to rise off her. By the time more people had gathered, my mother’s hair had singed from her own body heat and she had fallen silent and blue.
Internal combustion was what the people said killed my mother. They told my father this when he came home soon after the people had carried my mother in and covered her up. He raised his hands up to heaven in silent anguish and prayer, like the preacher he was, but the anointing had left him, there was nothing he or the Lord could do.
It was too late too for the crying man who came the next morning pleading that he hadn’t meant for the preacher’s wife to die, that he’d only wanted her to suffer a little, just a little, for her to feel the pain she had caused him when she preached to his lover who then left him to return to her husband.
“I swear, I didn’t mean for this to happen,” the crying man explained, looking sorry. “I didn’t even place her effigy that close to the fire. I got drunk, you see, and forgot.”
People were sad for us and mad at him. They said spiritual powers ought to be handled with more care. They said these things used to be secret and sacred and reserved only for the spiritually gifted and not just for any fool with a gripe who knew what incantations to chant, what herbs to pluck, what potions to mix. They said maybe this recent concern to share these sacred practices was abusing rather than preserving the culture. They were going to ring car tires round the crying man’s neck and set him ablaze for letting the preacher’s wife die, for rendering a little girl motherless, but my father stopped them with preacherly words. He said what was done was done and vengeance was the Lord’s. The people were going to let the crying man go free if the constables hadn’t arrived.
“Murder is a capital crime,” the policemen said. “Very heinous.” So, they beat the crying man into their truck and drove off.
My father, the preacher, took me on his knees after my mother’s funeral and told me the only history I knew of her.
“I bought your mother off an old chief who was maltreating her because she was a Money Woman. This was in Cross River State, near the Obudu mountains. I’d gone off on a mission there after I returned from Bible School. The most beautiful place I’d ever been where the people were so evil. Your mother had been given off to this old chief, a former professor, to pay off a debt her family owed his. This was their culture, to use their daughters, many just a little older than you are now, as collateral for loans and payments for debt.”
What my father wanted me to do with this history he never did say. This was his way: a well- meaning human adept at handing off misery to other humans. A preacher of doom. I never saw a person leave my father’s church service given off signs of happiness. Yet they loved him. Over and over as I grew and we moved from church to church sowing the word, I saw how much the people adored him, how much they revered this source of their fears and memory of their ills.
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What I am doing is what we all do as humans when we tell our stories to ourselves as if we are telling it to others. I have a folder in my mind I call Life. This is where all of these have been coming from, have been going, neatly filed away for myself and perhaps my grave, or whoever it is that tells the story of those gone dead. On occasion, I go into the Life folder and revise what I have already lived. I edit for sense, for clarity, to leave my tale as clean as a well licked bone. I check to make sure that the file remains that place where reality and memory meet. I omit needless details. I am digging around now in this file trying to rearrange what I can in chronological other, but there are many gaps lost to inconsequence and mundanity, like the years between my mother’s death and when we moved to Tofa.
I was nearly 15 when we moved to Tofa to start a new church. Tofa was one of those rare towns that had a lot of things going for it, especially nothing. Cocks crowed in the mornings and frogs croaked at night, and that was a day. The rains came after the harmattan blew dust, and that was a year. Neither the sun nor the moon had any character. It’s only in my revisions that I see how much the town seemed like a farmland, a field of crops with the men like weed and the women unattended embers fanned by the wind.
I met a boy in this town whose eyes were as green as the grass on the banks of the Hadejia, the river the community revered because it flowed uphill and sourced their fadama. His name was Aliyu, and if he’d been a girl, his eyes would have marked him out as a witch. But he was merely a boy, a young man really when I met him. Aliyu was my father’s first convert, if one discounts the cows that chew-stared through the windows during services and broke through afterwards to think their thoughts and shit on the altar. Aliyu was born blind, but I could not tell for weeks after we met because he blinked and stared at things, looked at me like he saw me as much as I could see myself. His feet knew the depths and bush trails of Tofa so that he walked with assurance and a straight head and not like some blind people who slant their heads as though listening for their paths. The day I found out he was blind, he had laughed at my dismay and told me that he could see better than the rest of us. Many evenings we would sit by the Hadejia, and he’d describe the world to me. He demonstrated how he could identify colors by feel and showed me how to skip stones across the river with my eyes closed. I still have no words to describe the tree he drew for me on a wooden slate using a piece of charcoal, but I knew deeply that it was how the trees saw themselves.
The night I took Aliyu’s virginity and offered him mine, the cows watched us through the window while the moon peeped through the thousand cracks and slats of the church. We were lying on a reed mat by the altar as my father snored his way into visions and dreams in the parsonage behind. It was the dry season. The harmattan was a song out in the night to which we danced supine, our bodies awave and awake, singing along to our feelings.
When the screaming began the next evening, I knew instinctively that it was Aliyu and that life had come to even things out, to correct the over-pleasure of the previous night. I ran towards his screams with tears flooding my path. I was in time to see some men tackle the screaming Aliyu and begin to flog him with their koboko whips. I thought the worst when I saw my father at the scene, in their midst. But I saw quickly that he was flapping around in the chaos, fending off the men whipping Aliyu.
“Leave the young man alone. Stop it, all of you.” My father’s voice was the kind men listened to and obeyed. The men paused with their whips raised, waiting for my father’s reason for interfering.
“Why are you doing this?” my father said, “the young man was only screaming for joy that he had gained his sight.”
There were glances all around. The men were unsure. They said when they heard Aliyu’s screams, they’d thought he’d gone mad because insanity often started that way. They knew such madness could be flogged off if one got to the victim fast enough.
“Preacher, you are saying this is not bori? He isn’t running mad?”
“No, those were screams of joy,” my father preached, “the young man can now see. It is a miracle from God. I laid hands on him and prayed for him to receive his sight. That’s what he was screaming about. Look at him.”
I saw the one they call Maigari, the town leader, raise his whip and ask Aliyu how many prongs it had. I saw my father hold up his fingers, and Aliyu counted it right. Someone had gone for the gboka, the native doctor, who now proceeded to examine Aliyu’s eyes while the people waited and whispered.
My emotions were like the grass on the ground the people were trampling. I had never seen or heard my father perform a miracle, but I could see that Aliyu’s eyes had lost their green. The people were jubilant after the gboka confirmed that indeed Aliyu could now see. Some could see now that his eyes had acquired the normal eye color of ordinary people. They clapped him on the back and praised my father. Aliyu, too, was ecstatic; forgiving the welts on his body, he danced with the people and marveled at the world of his new vision. He had no sight for me, though. He did not see me. He did not come to me that night even though I waited in the church till dawn.
I watched him walk towards me as I sat by the Hadejia a few days later. Aliyu had lost the confident and assured walk he had when he was blind, and as he sat beside me without a smile, I saw that he was troubled. The clouds that evening looked like flames, like open mouths baring serrated teeth. The frogs were silent. Up and around was that kind of lull they say comes before the heavy first rain.
“I don’t know how to say this, but…”
I watched the rest of Aliyu’s words rush up his throat and then down, never quite making it out his mouth. “Your sight?” I asked, “you can still see?”
He nodded and looked around his world as if tasting it, as if comparing his now to his then. “Just not sure I like how I see…”
The pebbles he was trying to skip across the river have lost their usual buoyancy, their ability to leap from his hands and dance along the water’s surface. I saw him close his eyes and try again, and then again. I saw the stones obey at this last try and skip, skip, skip, skip and plop.
“Let’s get married,” Aliyu said, turning to look at me. “I will leave for Kano… tomorrow. I will get a job. I will come back to ask your father for your hand.”
Maybe I said yes, maybe I said no, that chapter of my file is missing a page or two. I have tried a few times to go back to revise Aliyu into a complex and round character, to give him a look and a background, to expand on the love I am certain we shared, but I keep seeing a hole where he ought to be, much like the one without my mother. I could do nothing much with the way he died either. The facts were scant. When the news came into town there was that one long and sad ululation from some woman more emotional than others. And then a strange silence.
The way Aliyu died was this: on his first day in that busy city where he had gone to make good so he could come back for me, the driver of a lorry loaded with cattle had seen Aliyu too late. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’ un, a crowd must have said— from Allah we’ve come and to Him we shall return.
My father’s healing miracle had taken Aliyu from me.
It was then, the day I heard of Aliyu’s death that I had a feeling I recognized I’d had before, long ago as a little girl when we lived in Bauchi and the crying man had snapped his fingers at my mother and told her that she would see, that she would burn that night the way his heart burned, and that it would only be fair. It was after Aliyu died that I finally recognized grief as the source of the holes in my heart. Innocence had robbed me of grieving my mother, so I grieved for Aliyu with perhaps much more pain than I should have.
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I think, often, of what governs the details I recollect, of what guides the hand that paint my life. Here there be white clouds, there, details down to the green, to the veins of a leaf etched into the mud. I have no year sixteen, but I have seventeen, and even that, I have only the few hours on a bus to Ibadan to start my first year at the University of Ibadan. I don’t know why I recall that ride so vividly. I have gone back to that bus a few times to revise its reality and to place it at least on its rightful page by tracing what came before. There was the miracle, and Aliyu’s death, and then months of cloudy white gaps that ended at the bus with this older man sitting beside me for the 6 hour trip, dozing off on my shoulders, smelling up my space, touching my thighs to emphasize a story, to point out a landmark, to ask me questions.
“17 years old. Philosophy. My first year.” I nodded a lot in response to other questions. “My father? A preacher, ECWA church—”
“Preacher’s daughter, eh? You know, I was once in that church business thing myself. When I was younger, before I got into radio. I was living in Calabar at the time, Cross River State. Let me tell you a story you might not have heard about Calabar, and it’s not about Mary Slessor and how she stopped the killing of twins. This one isn’t in the history books because it is not yet history. It was told to me by this retired journalist who worked for Radio Nigeria, Calabar. It was about this town where the women were known as Cash Women, or Money Women. I am from Cross River, by the way, and my hometown was only about 60 kilometers from this town the journalist told me about, and yet I never knew about this despicable use of women. That is the thing with this country and its foolish diversity. A town next to yours can be as different as another continent with dark and weird cultural practices. And you won’t hear nothing about anything until some white student, or a BBC documentary… I have plenty thoughts about those white people with their cameras, putting their yellowed teeth into what does not concern them. I worked with many of them in Calabar, even Frederick Forsyth. You know Forsyth? He has a book on Biafra, made lots of money. But they do dig up things, these white people, things you didn’t know were in your own backyard. Did you hear about the Homo Mountain in Yola? Exactly. You know what, let me tell you first about the Homo Mountain. We have time. The story was on the network news a few years ago.”
Taking the consent I had not given, the older man launched into his story.
“The settlement was up in the mountains of Yola and had, apparently, been there longer than anybody knew. They seemed fine and normal, a people tall and fair and obviously unafraid of heights. They were unlike the other settlements that had been found in seclusion, tucked away up some mountain without clothes or care. This settlement had electricity and phone lines and brick homes with furniture. They had a school.
“The thing that was different about them was this: they were a settlement strictly homosexual— you know, the men wanted men and the women wanted women, etc, etc— and had been so from their beginnings. A white postgraduate student discovered this, of course, and about three months later or six, the BBC shot a documentary of The Exclusive Homosexual Community Hidden in the Mountains of Northern Nigeria, or something like that.
“The documentary aired on the network service of the NTA, which was how the young evangelist came to know of the community.
“He was a good lad from all accounts, filled with the spirit and knew no sin, except for the one time he fell into temptation and slept with the deacon’s daughter, twice. But he had a good singing voice, played the organ well, so the church forgave him. If he had any faults, perhaps it was that his zeal for the Lord burned in him more than was necessary.
“After seeing the documentary, he felt led to travel to Yola and preach the truth of the gospel to these gay people living up the mountains. He could not be dissuaded.
“His first day up there went alright. The locals accepted him and assumed he was one of the people that had been coming up to the settlement lately, perhaps he too would want to stay like the few new settlers. The young men fluttered their fingers and eyelashes, and winked at him— the evangelist was good-looking and had city ways about him.
“But the next day or so, he began to preach about sodomy, about men burning with lusts one toward another, and women doing that which was unseemly in the sight of the Lord, and blah, you know, from the bible. He cried and pleaded for their repentance because the kingdom of God was at hand, etc, etc. When they paid him no mind, he resorted to threats: this here community is still subject to the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and I will have you know that there is a 14-year jail term for homosexual activities. If you don’t accept the Lord and turn from your evil ways, the police will be here, the government will send in troops. Your ways of life will be changed, etc, etc. And so, naturally, the locals called for his head, and one night they caught him—”
The bus veered sharply at this page and threw the man against me. I am sure there were screams. The tire fires and roadblocks the driver was swerving to avoid need no revisions. Out the bus windows, I saw bundles that looked like bodies set on fire.
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I am feeling, at this moment, exactly how I felt that day the bus crashed into the roadblock. Men with guns and machetes pulled us bleeding out of the wreckage. The Muslims were free to go, the men said. They were out for only the Christians. I remember the men laughing, leading six of us Christian women off into the bushes.
The pages at this part of my life’s file are filled with feelings but no words. Feelings are hard for me to revise. The white clouds come in here, and I suppose three years go by before another legible page opens up. This time I’m twenty years old, in my final year at the University of Ibadan. The university administration had gone on another strike action to force some demands from the government, so I had gone back to Tofa to await the university’s re-opening.
The church in Tofa had grown its members by this time, and most of them were women.
Coming into the church and seeing one or two heads of men among the splash of women made me think of stray millet stalks in a cornfield, one or two sheep among a herd of cattle, cloudy dots on a blue sky— made me wonder what my father had been preaching to put off the men and pull the women in, securing enough trust from these women so that, just a day before my return to Tofa on account of the university’s strike, a woman had run off to the church with her twelve-year-old daughter because the gboka had just finalized plans to marry the little girl after paying her father the bride price of 3 cows and a motorcycle. How the woman hoped the church would withstand the gboka and frustrate his wedding plans was not clear to me. This was the gboka, the town healer and spiritual power. Everyone knew he had been luring little girls and boys into his medicine shack. They knew he gave boys charms to hypnotize girls so they could have their way with them. The gboka had the might of unchallenged wrongs behind him. What did the church have? An old preacher and his word and a congregation of submissive women. Perhaps this was enough, perhaps the glowing embers that were the women of Tofa needed just a little puff of wind to be enflamed, perhaps all the women needed was a place to combust. So it was at the church that they congregated the evening of my return, from where we began the demonstrations, where we regrouped before marching off to flog the gboka into flight.
I wrote the placards, that much I admit—‘In Eden, Eve was the Power,’ ‘Stop Child Bride,’ ‘We Can Say No,’ etc.,— but finding myself ahead of the demonstrations was an ordained arrangement and had nothing to do with my will. I will also admit that I watched a few other men get whipped by their wives and that I found it all enjoyable— lord and masters of the home fleeing their female subjects, dashing up trees with shock in their eyes. I don’t think any of the women, any of us, wanted the few men that died to have done so, except, maybe, the almajiri boys who were a general menace. The point was to teach a lesson, and that the men be alive to learn the lesson. The one person I wanted to be taught such a lesson was Ado, the young man who had tried a few years back to use one of the gboka’s Touch & Follow charms to lure me into doing his sexual biddings. I regret not seeing him during the protests, to serve him a dish of a life stripped of agency and the dignity of choice, of consent.
We made the news. “The Wives Revolt: a new town order” was what the BBC called the demonstrations. There are still scenes of the revolt clear in my head: a woman up on a roof dancing bare-breasted; another, riding a big brown bull calmly through the marketplace; the five naked women hanging out the doors of a speeding Peugeot 504. And the songs, the butchered lyrics of Christian hymns and psalms remixed into war chants. But yes, a few men died during the Wives Revolt, which perhaps should be regretted.
I have revised the revolt a few times more than necessary because I wanted to re-experience the thrum of my blood as the ground thumped to the women’s rush through Tofa. What a thing it is for the oppressed not to be aware of their power until the day it asserts itself to exert vengeance. For a few days, the men of Tofa were like women, subject to the whims and feels of their opposite sex. It did not last long, the revolt, but the new order reverberated around the country, men saw fear and took notice and thought about it for a few days. At the heat of the revolt, soldiers had come to Tofa in their trucks, but overwhelmed by the sight of naked, angry women careless for death, they’d decided to evacuate most of the men.
I remember the men trickling back into Tofa, days later, with peace in their eyes and fear, and how the women had given them back their illusion of power.
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The university strike must have been called off. I must have gone back to school. But those white clouds again billow across that part of my life so that I have blank pages over my university graduation and the two or three years that came after, over the details and decisions that led to me securing a job at Better Life for Women. I am in Lagos too by this time, and twenty-four. In my life’s file, my past is much closer now to my present, I am nearing the end of my chapter. A page before this present holds the account of the two years I have now spent at Better Life for Women.
What we were supposed to be doing at Better Life for Women was to empower women through education, teach them their rights, push for inclusion in decision-making positions, fight for fairer treatment. But our director was a man, and one of his wives was the sister to the Lagos State Military Administrator. So we donated bags of rice to local women, tinned tomatoes, cans of milk, brooms, gallons of palm oil. We held sewing symposiums and knitting workshops, distributed pamphlets on Family Planning, with illustrations. For these, the director won two awards from the state. For these I have resigned. This is my last week at the job, my last week in this Lagos. I am leaving for Calabar in a few days, to start at this new job with an NGO whose mission statement includes…liberating ‘Cashwomen,’ and putting an end to all barbaric cultural practices that exploit women as collateral…
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What I am really doing is dying, which I see now is a necessity of creation, of life. My penultimate moment has lasted more than the usual seconds allotted to many, enough time though, for me to revise the highlights in my Life folder before the entire spool is unreeled in that flash of cognition before the final breath. I have now done this. My life has been put down. I see the stars as I fall upwards. I see the sky too, the clouds like cows gathering, chasing nothing across their field…
The above paragraph was supposed to be the last, its ending sentence crafted to express finality. It was—it is— not a revision, it was the present now in the past. I am lying down in Tinubu Square in Lagos, near the bus stop, a few meters away from a newspaper stand. I am waiting, been waiting for my life to flash before my eyes, waiting to see if the flashback would be true to my lifelong edits. But enough time has elapsed now to create a past before my current present. I will proceed to edit this new page that has opened up for me, to revise how I came to be lying here. I hope I have enough time to craft a worthy final sentence.
The way I came to be dying was this: A truck fleeing the policemen who were trying to extort the driver for overloading had crashed into the newspaper stand where a paper headline had stopped me on my way to the office at Better Life for Women. I felt no pain. My blood was racing, but that was because of the headline and the news story I had just begun to read. I knew I went up into the air because there was a boy in school uniform whose eyes followed my flight as I flew slowly over his upturned head. I saw in his open mouth the remnants of what he’d been eating. I saw his tonsils. I saw the truck catch up to me again. I thought of that second rush a bull makes to finish off a man it has tossed into the air. The thing that worried me as I lay dying was that I would be leaving this world in anger. If I could just turn my head to the newspaper still clutched in my hands, to read the story under the headline that was like the screams going off all around me: Money Women: Minister of Culture says government helpless to combat —