“It’s come at last”, she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache.”
A child is vengeance.
A child is a missile into the coming generations.
I launched him: I’m still trembling.
But as the Ada moved out of our shadow and into her body, we found ourself watching her with a grim pride. She was scarred, yes, gouged in places even. But she was — she has always been — a terrifyingly beautiful thing. If you ever saw her at her fullest, you would understand — power becomes the child. She is heavy and unbearably light, still her mother’s hatchling. Think of her when the moon is rich, flatulent, bursting with pus and light, repugnant with strength.
The surface of the sea when calm is another mirage, ever changing and shifting, like the mask on my mother’s face.
The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom.
For most men, the most beautiful thing they will ever see is the body of a naked woman. For most women it is the face of a firstborn child, a face that cannot be folded back into the womb, the face that will love you, steal you and ultimately devour you.
When we first entered this world, even after our eyes opened in the village, we remained fogged in newness. We were very young. But soon (a matter of years to you but nothing to us), we were forced into sharpness, forced by blood wiped along a tarred road, the separation of a bone at three points, and the migration of a mother.
When I was smaller and sulking for one reason or another or having a tantrum, Mama used to make me dance with her, and she would say jokingly, “Dance your sadness away.” Or if she was too angry with me to be jokeful, and if it happened to be mealtime, she would make me wait to eat, saying, “We must learn to fast our sadness away.” Or if it was bedtime, she would pull me to her and begin praying, and afterward she would say, “It always helps to pray our sadness away.” I was thinking of the ways in which I could dance or fast or pray this sadness away when Mama spoke.
I became known as ‘the pregnant woman with the ripped dress’, even after the baby was born. But I did not care that people pointed and smiled behind their hands during a hymn or the Nicene Creed at the church. I had become immortal, part of a never-ending chain of life. New life kicked within me and soon I would have someone that I could call my own. Not a stepmother or half-brother. Not a father shared with two dozen other children or a husband shared with Funmi, but a child, my child.
Perhaps it takes courage to raise children.
Words: Betty Smith, Yehuda Amichai, Akwaeke Emezi, Tayeb Salih, Charles Dicken, Natasja Fourie, Akwaeke Emezi, Chinelo Okparanta, Ayobami Adebayo, John Steinbeck.
Images: Gertrude Käsebier, Vivian Maier, Sally Mann, Gordon Parks, Seydou Keïta, Rachel Kainy, Carmen Winant, Sally Mann, Mary Kelly, Deana Lawson
Curated by Fegh & Magic M
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