A Grieved Woman
Agomuo Juliana Chinaza is a final-year law student, an avid reader, a lover of animals, and, most importantly, a writer. She has always been interested in the art of storytelling from a very young age. She has been longlisted in the 2022 Kendeka Prize for African Literature, and was a runner-up for the 2023 Best Okereke Prize for Short Fiction. She loves watching people, and can be overly emotional at times, believing these are the best ways to aptly understand and write beautifully about the world around us.
A Grieved Woman
We were sitting under the cashew tree when Iyabo started the conversation. Disturbed, she picks up a broom and begins to sweep—a gauze of dust scattering in the air between us, before progressing to the lawn just a few steps away. She begins to prune the grasses, plucking the weeds, and shovelling out muddy earth. And to me, it is still an awe how her mouth never gets weary with talking.
“Not everybody here is mad, you know?” She caws, briefly stalling her chore for a moment, a puckered face appearing. She is tall, a broad-shouldered woman with wider hips than most women, her gait intimidating. Her left hand propped to her back, she arduously alternates between talking, cleaning out the garden and sweeping the little patch of earth under the cashew tree for the third time today. They are lanky broom strokes that allow her to clear her head, she says, her hips swaying to the dance of her exercise.
I frown, but only with my eyes so she does not decipher my emotions. “And what makes you think so?” I pull out Uncle Obiora’s folded picture—the surface frayed a peeling-white, edges chipped, dog-eared—from my shirt pocket. I take it with me everywhere.
“I killed my uncle. See! The only reason I roam here with everyone else is because I pleaded insanity. Heavens bless that brilliant lawyer sent by my father.” I pause to take a deep breath. “We are all mad, so tell me something different.”
“Oh, shut up! Your endearingly remarkable uncle again?” She wheezes, flinging the broom to the grass. “He fucked y’all. And besides, he’s not dead, you sneaky little b—.” She wags her fingers in my direction.
I turn away, pretending I didn’t hear her vulgar words steeped in colloquial Americanisms: my parents’ discipline a lasting course of instructions in my mind, heavier on my lips, and the truth that I still cherish my uncle’s memory, regretting what I had done. Iyabo realises her mistake.
But before she scurries towards me and tugs at my cheeks to begin the cuddling of a lifetime, Nurse Eliza appears at the foot of the verandah door, calling out my name. She does this every afternoon, sounding like the spiteful, hesitant woman who has left me for rot in this institute, my mother, her scowls abandoning me with high blood pressure at this tender age of twenty-two. Seven years have I been in this mental institute, three years spent with Iyabo and her sad, yet satiric woes on wifehood, and not a day goes by that this nurse in a staggering reflection of my mother fails to provoke me. A bitter pain in the ass.
Nurse Eliza calls again. This time, one hand to her side in anxious waiting, the other with a blue capsule she usually forces down my throat or, on good days, prods me to drink. “Nwakaego, your medication!”
Perhaps, I should also ask her about the doctor who prescribed this blue capsule. How tall is he, how slim, how religiously inclined is he to have diagnosed me without meeting me? Perhaps, with the progression of each question, her frown grows stiffer, wilder, because there’s been no doctor, only nurses and warders with batons. So I instantly rise from where I am sitting to reply to my tormentor.
“Drink this,” Nurse Eliza sneers; her face is a tightly fixed frown from yesterday’s tightly fixed smile. Whenever I’m called upon to take my medication, my memories with Uncle Obiora take precedence. How he had often held me about his head to that local bar with motley lights in the street adjacent from where we lived, how my lips frothed a thin bronze line from the Maltina he bought me, so that I always shut my eyes to dream that I was drinking Maltina again and that our lives hadn’t so abruptly changed. In the end, the blood smudged all over his face hurls me to reality.
Nurse Eliza seems impatient, “Wetin you still dey drink since morning?”
She has probably decided to expel today’s anger on my person; yesterday it was Bolu. That squinty-eyes Bolu with her skin as soft and so palely fair as an albino, and who is only resident with us because her children had gotten enough of her ominous prophecies. The prophecies have gotten better though. Or perhaps Nurse Eliza’s husband had yet again lashed his brown rusty belt across her skin, the sun a blistering glow that dutifully blurs the wounds from my vision. Perhaps someone would be grateful if another thrashes me a ghostly hot slap on both my cheeks for these dirty thoughts—Are women’s problems only defined by the men in their lives? Oh yes! I will retort even avidly, despite the hurt from the lashing, palms pressing against my pain. My mother, a definition of my uncles’ manoeuvres, and my father’s frailty; Iyabo, her husband’s selfishness; Nurse Eliza, probably all the terrible things I’ve just assumed.
I gulp my medication with pride, content—whatever—over Nurse Eliza’s stern eyes, tightly fixed frown, swallowing the last of the acrid taste. My torment ends, and so I walk back to the cashew tree.
“That fucking bitch,” Iyabo writhes in disgust when I sit.
I interject, “By God! Why all the vulgarity?”
“Oh, Look at us, gallivanting like puppets while these other women live free lives.” She pulls at a weed and yanks out its root, staring strangely at the leaves. The mudded soil reaches my lips, I lick it. Iyabo turns to me almost immediately. “We are puppets, don’t you ever forget that.”
‘Puppets’, reminds me of the mountain in Abeokuta where my mother had taken me the morning after Uncle Obiora was rushed to the hospital, the morning before the police and the coroner arrived. The neurosurgeons had pinned our hopes on a five-percent chance of survival; his brain was badly damaged. And, for my mother, she had pinned the remainder of the fraction in the heavens, and on the pastor at the mountain who kept staring at my breasts till it came to the prayer session when he could finally place his filthy hands on them. That Bastard! I want to say the word but constantly rethinking the past evokes bleak emotions, so I keep my mouth shut. “You were too good for your mother, you know. Now you are mine. Just mine,” Iyabo often chipped in during our several conversations. And even though we laughed all day and shared stories of our past, I couldn’t imagine Iyabo being my mother. She is certainly a crazy woman.
“You are definitely not her child.” Iyabo blurts out as though she has been listening to my thoughts.
But whilst telling Iyabo my story, I’d always intentionally omitted the part where my mother found me standing over Uncle Obiora’s bloodied face. And what is a mother to do after finding herself in such palaver, caught between the imperishable fences of familial ties, blinded by the horror she has just discovered? Distraught, alarmed, wounded, red-eyed, she had shoved me away and dashed to Uncle Obiora, climbed on him, performing the CPR in the most clumsy manner that I wondered if she’d only seen the action of it in movies, and not outrightly taken time to study its mechanics. If she’d known what she was doing, not hinging her hope on mere leisurely-earned information. I had stood there, watching, both hands streaked with blood. And when the police and the coroner came the next day, she told them about the pocket knife she’d seen me holding. How it was defiled with her brother’s blood; how she had pulled it from my hands and had slapped me; how she will never recover from this. With the evidence for my conviction replete in their hands, and my father feeling helpless to the suddenly dreadful trajectory of the crisis, they took me away and locked me in a juvenile prison.
“I won’t blame her regardless. She’d done what she thought best after all.”
Iyabo is quiet, her eyes upwards at the blistering sun, as though a stubborn child asking God for something impossible. “She betrayed you, you know.”
I said it; she’s crazy.
And who is Iyabo to even talk about betrayal, her situation is by far worse than mine. Her husband had conspired with his relatives to dump her in a mental institute, and here she is, infinitely scarred, always plotting her next scheme. One day she will kill her husband, shove a knife down his throat to thwart his selfishness, she’s told me this once in whispers. But I know this is the only thing that hangs her throat. It is the one thing that has been the pounding migraine in her brain whenever she picks up a broom and begins to etch lanky strokes in the sand, her back curved under the equatorial sun, infinitely scarred from betrayal. Most times she only gathered dust without the dirt, and other times she just picked at the weeds in the garden. Observing her, she wears this betrayal like armour, a justification, a pity party that garners attention from the other patients in the institute who have only now become curious and listen to her grieved story. Their support for her has become a looming rebellion to her advantage, one that will shake the supposedly corrupt system of this institute and enable her escape.
“I prefer we go inside.” The atmosphere is already hot, battering hard against our skin. “Today is game day.”
The institute’s hallway which every patient must overcome before arriving at the parlour open-area for games, makes us cringe(;, so dark you can only trust on muttering The Lord’s Prayer to redeem you from this crusade through the shadow of death. Overcome, because the hallway constructively separates the patients’ wards from the staff’s and the outside world. And our scrawny-looking, lanky shadows cast on the beige, hands-stained walls were a periodical trial, a gory ordeal worthy of experience to ensure we were fit for this crossover. An outright dumb building plan.
Because the hallway is so lengthy that I think the architect must have been hibernating when his fingers added extra metres to the building plan, there is a juncture where the day’s light halts and endless darkness truly begins before you enter the parlour. Because it takes three whole damned minutes to cross this dark hallway, halfway into our trip, Iya Benji bumps Iyabo against the wall, a metallic thud that has now caused their fight. Until Nurse Mimiko pulls both women to the red table for reconciliation, a reformation technique learnt from that Jada Pinkett’s show, they will certainly for weeks claw at each other’s throats, sneer and hiss over the other at the dining, and struggle for trivial slots in the parlour open-area during game time.
“It’s okay,” I penetrate between them, my body a punching bag for their blows, before Nurse Mimiko and the other warders eventually arrive. Ever since they found out both their husbands had gotten rid of them to have second wives, the war began. Perhaps it is human nature to despise a reflection of yourself. Perhaps this notion is only applicable to mad people.
With my gist partner, Iyabo now dragged into the reconciliation room, the interest in chess and monopoly and scrabble dissipates as swiftly as they had triggered me whilst I sat under the cashew tree. Anything leisure can wait another day, I resolve; the walk back to my room, a lonely mission I must embark on.
“Once you’re in this institute, you’re mad,” I tell myself, every day.
These letters have taken up all the space in the drawers of my wooden shelf, and caused me to beg Nurse Ijeoma for an extra shelf. It would probably amount to exchanging mine for the newer, larger, finely-polished brown shelves a church charity brought in last week. Addressed with ‘your bloody mother’, the letters have exacerbated into an unapparent pattern of invasion: brimming at the edges of each drawer, in the centre pages of every book I’ve kept, dimpling the space alongside the pillow corner of my bed, over my wardrobe where I organized my shoes and hid my pocket knives. These letters from my mother are everywhere.
“What are these letters?” Iyabo asked once. My mother had never visited in the seven years she dumped me here, the letters have been her only way of communicating. And I always replied to her though, my heart downtrodden with anguish and in flowery calligraphy I secretly hoped would deaden her bitterness. But my eventually unaddressed letters were always disposed of in the bin, the large ones outside of the institute where Nurse Mimiko discards the bloodied carcasses of the broilers we only ate for Saturday’s rituals.
I never did tell Iyabo the content of these letters. I had only shrugged, arranged the letters back into my drawers which I made sure to padlock and left the room. I had left her hanging. Unlike Iyabo, I guard this betrayal like a secret, a private ritual that has for a long time been the heaviness in my chest. While mine is a pressure that has been weighted on my person to suffer, Iyabo’s betrayal has continued to soar, having now turned a wing, a sort of feat that cannot be muffled in the tightness of lingering anguish. Last week, I had overheard some patients in the parlour whispering about an escape—the repercussions of Iyabo’s shenanigans, bent in a ring to prevent the warders from listening before Nurse Eliza had arrived and shooed them all away.
I unlock the first drawer, and the second, then the third, watching horror-struck at the letters pouring all over the floor in a surge as though they’ve all been smothered by each other’s presence. I rifle through the bunch and the first I open is dated January, last year. Uncle Obiora cannot even lift a finger, this one says, only his eyes twitches wide in disgust, in sadness, in happiness; he’s barely eating these days too; Do you know how many times the Monsignor from Holy Cross Cathedral has come to bless him with the last communion? An accusation, the letter spills, and I can only see blood, guilt, and hate written all over. The next is dated March, this year. He is beginning to smile, though his face is as numb as a brittle muscle you would think him half-dead; and the neurosurgeons, their unfiltered talk now promise that he may walk again because he has since defied all odds. And yet I see blood, guilt, and hate written all over.
Fat tears the size of an orange pulp cooling my cheeks, I wipe my face and begin to organize all the letters back into each drawer, hoping Nurse Ijeoma comes through with the larger, finely-polished brown shelves she’s promised me, though, in exchange for some services. After several days of begging, she had covertly drawn me by the collar yestermorning, and whispered in my ears, “These puppets have been conspiring funny dealings under my nose.” She hesitated as if rethinking her confiding in me, but went on. “I know something big will happen soon. Tell me, and the larger, finely brown polished shelf is yours.”
It is already evening when my room door creaks open, noisily, the sun receding gradually to respite. Iyabo comes in and we do not speak to each other. She flings her complete weight across the bed. Once, when it had marvelled me that even the sun needed to rest, she had resolved the troubling inquiry.
“Yes nah. Every living thing needs to rest. Body no be firewood.”
I had laughed, her hysterics a trigger to the soul.
“All of us here also need a break, from all the abandonment and the hate and the disgusted looks by these nurses that always think we’re having a manic attack. Me, I am not mad o.”
I interrupted, “Then how did we find ourselves here, quarantined from a sane world.”
“I am a victim of circumstance, you know. A grieved woman.”
I join her and lay on the bed, our bodies touching; warmth.
Iyabo had returned from America after her Master’s degree when she decided she wanted children, save for the children from her womb. She had wanted to adopt children. There it goes—crazy, an utterly stupid thing to have spoken of as an African woman. “There is so much love to give in the world, you know,” she had spoken with her husband in their matrimonial bed while he had, in the coming days, spoken with his relatives about it. Mind you, they were the same hungry-looking selfishly agitated relatives whose mouths were often pouted downwards in bitterness, in disregard for everything that seems conventionally alright. The next week Iyabo found herself sitting on a metal bench with me, dawdling our morning away, as we listened to birds chatter tirelessly, their feathers wet in the dawn dewiness. These days, Iyabo’s unscrupulous husband still dared to visit with his new wife; the plump, uneducated wife timidly young enough to have only just run past her teenage years. Their freshly cooked meals and notebooks for Iyabo’s daily diaries were a reparation for his cruelty, which we both shared. All of our acts are a seemingly contented routine, a life of pretence, an outright lie.
It is already morning, again, and I am trembling so much that I can feel my body falling, beside me, Iyabo is snore-sleeping quite peacefully that she doesn’t budge even when I noisily shuffle out of bed. These days she prefers my room, the quiet it welcomes because it is closer to the verandah, far from the disorderly world of insanity that surrounds us. The whetted early morning songs of the birds from my window inviting, she could sit all day and watch the rusty leaves fall on top of each other till they heaped with algae and smelt of gunk. It showed she could want simple things too, and so I mulled over how she could be so content, at tranquillity, despite the bogosity of her rebellious schemes, if she truly meant all of her cusses, if she truly meant to kill her husband; if her words are just the juvenile tantrums exhibited by mad women.
This is the first time I am crossing the hallway this early in the morning. As the grey morning light softly lingers my shadow against the beige, hand-stained walls, I am starting to appreciate that the architect’s adding of extra metres must have been intelligently intentional, and not the flimsy excuses of his hibernation. Where the light halts, and the darkness continues afterwards, means something: the reflection of yourself in two worlds, the meditation, the self-finding, the self-truth. The hallway now seems so beautiful, the most intentional art I have come across in a long while, but there is also a mission I must accomplish.
Now I am caught between hard choices. Iyabo is a crazy woman, certainly, and not just on some occasions; a woman saddled with a baggage of insane inclinations, which to me will never depict her as someone I could greatly depend on. We’d only just met here in the mental institute, and found a fleeting reprieve in our shared miseries, just acquaintances of circumstance. But for my mother, there is a bond ever bound by blood, that awaits the possibility of a soulful reunion with tears, forgiveness, and the casting of our bleak past into the shadows of what it truly is, the past; only if I were to report Iyabo’s imminent rebellion.
“Nurse Ijeoma, I need to tell you something. I need to get this off my chest.” I say as I approach her. She is at the kitchen sink with other sleepy-eye nurses, washing an appalling pile of plates from yesterday’s dinner, their hands froth with the sickly-sweet lemon scent of dishwashers. To me, it is not so surprising that being a nurse in this country obviously entails the concession for additional non-related job descriptions too.
Before Nurse Ijeoma turns, quite anxious about this secret I am about to spill, Nurse Eliza at arm’s length holds out one of my mother’s letters. It seems opened already. “This came in early this morning,” she says, her lips wry with irritation; it is almost impossible to decipher her thoughts. I collect the letter and return to my room.
Addressed with ‘your bloody mother’, it is unsurprisingly about Uncle Obiora’s improved condition from last week to this morning. Last week, he sat up and ate Amala and Ewedu, the palm oil stew dripping blood-red across his lips to the end of his jaw, then to the new baby-blue shirt she’d just bought. She laughs, a cackling pitch that bounces in her chest with such reverberation that I feel the fire of her ecstasy in mine—all these, I imagine. Yesterday he ate gbegiri with a spoon, a fucking spoon, his muscles, bones, and his will functional with motive. Only one motive that I could think of. Revenge. The past remerges, sharp as shards, bites through my skin, a cloud of gloom hovering steadily even as much as I have tried to bury it. Before our lives went ominously haywire, Uncle Obiora would sneak into my room every night, ignoring my whimpering as his filthy hands wandered about the skin underneath my nightie until my safety was battered by my mother’s mistrust, and I had gently slid out my pocket knife from under my pillow and thrust it into his brain. Yet he has the bloody nerve to live?
I am already crying when I feel Iyabo’s hand splaying over the little expanse of my back. She has always understood me even when I would not talk, knowing that all I’ve ever needed was a mother to hold me, to understand me, a father to fight for me; that there could be language even in silence.
“What happened?”
“I had hit him and hit him and hit him, till I could no longer see the bastard’s face. It was all covered in blood when I was finished.” I begin, sobbing, tears damp on my cheeks, her fingers an occasional absorbent.
“Tell me everything now, don’t dare hold back,” she says, and I know it is time I allowed her to share in this ritual, in this pressure that has continued to burn and weigh me down. On a mental note, the reflection of my life too bleak a past and present, and the future lingering to trail a similar path, I plot how I shall set a fire and watch it viciously hiss to devour. I shall watch how it licks and catches at the papery substances. I shall watch it sizzling the letters of my past, in the same way my mother has kept on burning me in seven years, portly wisps of haze ascending haphazardly and scattering in the air between us.
And then, I will open my heart to begin to love another.
