Drought

When the house is finished, death follows. That is what Nanabaa would say. No glass in the windows and no paint on the walls, but stacks of cash hidden around the house – under sandy mattresses and in broken cupboards – enough to build the house twice over. For decades, Nanabaa’s windows remained unglazed, allowing savannah winds to blow dust through the house, day and night. Before she became frail, she would sweep the dust away. It was her meditation, her connection to the earth. When she could no longer sweep, the inside of the house became indistinguishable from the dust, indistinguishable from the drought. A few times, the men in the village offered to fit her windows. ‘When the house is finished, death follows,’ they were told. They supposed she liked to live among the dust, that – like the drought – it was connected to her spirit.

It was a suicide, I assumed - the body at the crossroads. I came across the burial as I walked back to Nanabaa’s house. The body was so famished, so obscured by dust and fading light, that I could not see if it was a man or woman, elder or child. But they always bury suicides at crossroads; at the intersection of realms, forever suspended in the thin crack between this world and the next. A troop of grey mourners dug feebly. The Harmattan winds caressed sand around their ankles, pushing barren grass to and fro. In drought, each movement is precious, as though each lift of the spade might catch its sallow wielder and have the dull Harmattan winds blow him away. The meek forms dug, silent and slow, as if here at the crossroads the buzzing of the universe had been stifled, and time passed ever more slowly, tending towards eternity.

Death is Wednesday-born; that’s why they call him Owuo Kwaku. In drought, he removes his veil and stalks the savannah in the open. In drought, creation and destruction cease to be separate; in each tree that grows, in each human who walks the sand, both life and death are ever-present. I returned to Nanabaa’s house to find the wind had picked up and dust was cascading through the hot window frames, merging into open brick walls. In the bedroom, where she had slept and where I now set out my mattress on the ground, the thin net curtains were the colour of desert sand. Her lamp, encased in a centimetre of dust, shone only thick orange light. Were it not for her unworldly skill at evading death, that dust might have suffocated her in her sleep. Now I lay watching it, letting it engulf me, praying it would suffocate me in the night and take me with it into the hard savannah ground.

My son was Thursday-born, though he didn’t take the Thursday name. When I received the call to come and bury Nanabaa – on account of her having no other relatives left – I was sitting in the hospital at his bedside. Or, what had been his bedside. I remember only how empty it was. Nothing but emptiness. That emptiness had hollowed me from the inside out. It had spread thick from the hospital room into the world outside, until it engulfed every corner of the universe. The only sound to punctuate it was the shrill ring of the phone, which I answered only out of reflex. When they asked me to come, I would have said no. Had they called an hour earlier, with my son still alive, or an hour later, as I walked the vacant streets, I would have said no.

Nanabaa’s husband had been Wednesday-born. He had died in that dusty house, two months before the twins were born. He had fallen from a motorbike somewhere east of the village. When they brought him home he seemed alive and well, but when she woke the next morning she found him stiff beside her. The village doctor supposed that either the fall had punctured his insides, or he had contracted a curse. Amidst her grief, she became convinced of the latter. The spirits, she believed, had reason to want the father back before the birth of her twins. It was a terrible omen, and the deep foreboding it brought her persisted until the birth and thereafter, unabating, becoming fused with her daily life.

Her husband’s death split Nanabaa’s dusty house in two. One house to continue in the normal world, where the people around went about their business as though nothing had changed. The other to be occupied only by her, trapped in limbo for eternity, somewhere at the edge of the world. Was it his death that brought the drought to the village? Or was it the birth of the twins? The twins were Thursday-born, given the name of the Thursday God Asase Yaa, Goddess of the Earth. But a shadow befell the earth that year. The sorghum crop had dwindled, and Sahara dust encroached upon the fertile soil.

When I left my son’s hospital room and emerged blinking into the streets, I could only stare numb at those around me, for whom the universe had not stopped. It was then that I noticed how the world had split in two. The world I had known just hours before had continued, while I was ripped from it, transferred to a parallel realm where everything was unfamiliar, and even the mundane was tainted with hopelessness. They had died on the same day. She in the early hours of the dusty morning, before the hot African sun rose. He in the harsh English midday light. I buried him first, on an entirely unremarkable grey day. Then I flew without returning home. I could not. I wondered if I might ever return, or if this journey was my own pilgrimage towards death. After burying Nanabaa, I would lie down myself in the dirt.

When Owuo Kwaku had come for the twins years later, she had not been surprised. She had seen the path of their future from the day their father passed. The twins had grown into young men, but their minds had not developed. They were prone to spells of brutish violence, during which their mother would shut herself away in that house and leave the twins outdoors until morning. They would spend those nights wandering the forest, killing snakes. In the daytimes, they would sit in the dirt, drinking bottles of beer from the city until they fell asleep in the afternoon heat. They died within a day of each other, just before their thirtieth birthday. The first slowly, of what seemed like alcohol poisoning. The second found a day later at the edge of the bush, bitten by a snake. They say that from the day the twins were committed back to the hands of Asase Yaa whence they came, the drought intensified. The Harmattan winds blew heavy and long. The rains stopped. The lush savannah shrivelled and cracked. Asase Yaa herself was starving.

Perhaps, somehow, my son had also died from that drought, from the starving of Asase Yaa. Perhaps all around the world, there were Thursday-borns dying from drought. As the plane descended above the savannah towards landing, I was struck by the redness of the earth. The drought had sucked every drop of moisture from the air, replaced it with the overbearing dryness of dust. Alighting the plane, expecting a stifling choke of heat and dust, I found strange relief in the suffering. The drought was all consuming, crept into every bone in my body. I invited it in, begged it to suffocate me and take me with it into the earth.

They had said the drought came from Nanabaa’s house. That drought was steeped into the dusty walls, just like eternity was etched in the air. Perhaps that’s how she had avoided death for so long. A year after the twins died, she had sat with her three sisters at the wedding of her niece, the sisters drinking palm wine and she - nothing - as she had become accustomed. The next day, two of her sisters were dead. The third – heavily poisoned – died some days later, a result of the bad palm wine. It was another act of Owuo Kwaku. Again he stalked her, but he would not take her until decades more dust had gathered. Perhaps she would have been better to finish the house and go first. Perhaps, at the end, all her strength depleted, she begged Owuo Kwaku to take her; kneeling in the dust her hands clasped in prayer, mouth dry; she had not the strength to finish the house. There she remained, trapped in an eternity of drought, where death would not follow because she had not the strength to fit glass in her windows and spread paint upon her walls.

One has to take a bush taxi out to the village: battered rusty cars with suspension long corroded which bounce across the dry savannah, heat burning through metal. I asked the driver how long the drought had lasted, but he did not understand my question. Drought had eroded the meaning of time. It occupied its own state of eternity. When I arrived at the village I did not know where to go. The driver stopped on an empty dirt road by a single bush-willow tree. As I alighted, I had the sense that my feet were sinking into a foot of mist that hovered above the ground. That was the Harmattan winds sweeping Sahara dust across the parched savannah. It was comforting to walk in that haze and to feel as though I was sinking into nowhere. I wondered if I might be already dead; whether this were the afterlife. If I were dead, this must be limbo - an empty place where lost spirits roamed for eternity. I could imagine Owuo Kwaku stalking these planes in human form, and I resolved that should I come across him, I would beg him to take me with him. I walked up to the crossroads and here I stopped, because I had no sense of where to go, but also because I had the sense I was being watched

Opanin – the village elder – had come to find me. He told me in broken English that the house was west and that beyond it, there was nothing. I assumed he meant the end of the village, but I got the impression that the house might be perched at the edge of the universe, not even matter beyond its dusty walls. It is not finished, it brought too much death, he said, as we stood outside and watched the wind sweep through the open windows, batting threadbare curtains aside. Water only from the taxis, he said. Food only from the taxis. The drought had taken everything. All the fields were barren. All the wells were dry. The villagers subsided on passing trade from bush taxis and motorbikes, bringing water in plastic pouches and food in dry packets. I wondered why the people didn’t leave this place for the towns and cities, where the reach of drought was less. As though he had read my mind Opanin said, in drought, there is still beauty left.

I could not see beauty, only dust. When night fell in Nanabaa’s house there was only deep, deep blackness. The kind of blackness which exists only at the edge of the world. More black than my son’s funeral, where the white flowers and the occasional rays of sun had not been able to pierce through; where the dribble of black figures, sombre-faced, had not been able to make their empty words heard above the blackness. They would return to their lives as though the world hadn’t shattered in two. Over the course of the nights I stayed in Nanabaa’s house, I began to befriend that blackness. At the end of each empty day, it was the only thing which could wipe away the emptiness and the dust and the drought. It would wipe away the whole world, so I could pretend that the pain and the emptiness were wiped away with it, that it was just my empty skin sitting at the edge of oblivion.

On the night before her funeral, I sat awake with the blackness heavy upon my chest. It was heavy with fear of the emptiness extending beyond the coming day. When both funerals were done, what would remain? To where would I return? To the hollow emptiness of home? To Nanabaa’s dusty house? Both routes were barren, subsumed by drought. I did not sleep. As the first rays of dawn tinged the darkness, I walked down the empty track. At the end of the track were the crossroads, where I stopped to watch the shapes of life form from shadows as a bleary sun emerged above the horizon. I sat on the parched ground. I wondered how many barren souls lay beneath me in limbo. I wondered if after the funeral, I should return here and lay down in the sand, to remain forever in the emptiness and the dust.

I would have stayed there. Had it not been for her funeral, I would have stayed there until the sand had swallowed me, and the village, perhaps the world, was long gone. But the village was waking, and the funeral beginning. As I stumbled on, I thought of my son’s funeral. An edifice of black stone. Deep mahogany. Shined pews, and the crucifix – looking down upon us – expecting us to feel something. In Nanabaa’s village, the church was a shed. The congregation sat outside on plastic chairs to avoid the heat of its four walls. In the midst of drought in the empty savannah, I had imagined her funeral would be made of dust, like the house. I arrived expecting those plastic chairs to be cracked by the heat and a trail of black-clad, empty-faced mourners to drift like skeletons among them. Instead, I came upon an oasis in the void. Bright colours leapt from the churchyard and lively music drifted through the still air. Instead of shifting shadows, appeared a congregation of colour. The stillness had been overcome by dancing. I stood at the entrance, so struck by the scene that I could not enter. It affronted the emptiness to which I had become accustomed, in which I had found safety. I considered turning and returning to the crossroads, where I could merge into nothing, but a hand touched my back and led me in.

Inside, the music was louder. Women and men, dressed in rich cloth like the savannah in bloom, danced through sweat and smiles as though there were no death, as though there were no drought. When they laughed, their joy rose above the makeshift awning and out across the savannah, so strong one might have imagined it condense and turn to rain. I could do nothing but stand, speechless, and watch. Opanin stood beside me. What about the drought? Was all I could bring myself to say. Opanin smiled. He said, drought is not an absence of life, but persistence against the absence of life. I wondered then what death was – whether death was the absence of life or something else. And then I wondered why there had been no dancing at my son’s funeral, and no colour and no joy, like we’d all of us assumed that in death, there’s no beauty left.

Her funeral lasted well into the night and filled the blackness with sound and colour. Walking back through that blackness, I noticed it was not as deep as I’d imagined. Above the rolling plains, a collection of distant stars pierced the darkness, strong enough to cast a faint shadow from the bush-willow over the tracks. How had I not noticed these stars until now? As I approached Nanabaa’s house, the stars glistened beyond, as though it really did hang in space at the edge of the world. Inside, starlight filtered through the sandy curtains, lighting thin strips of dust along the ground. I had returned, I supposed, to a different house. To the house which had continued in the world of the living, and not the one Nanabaa had occupied in limbo at the edge of eternity. For a short time I lamented those glimmers of light, as I lay on the dusty floor, wishing the return of the blackness, wishing the world would remain empty. But the veil had been lifted on the emptiness, and the light had shone through.

It was a gathering of some kind – at the crossroads. I came across it as I walked through the village at dawn with my bags packed. As I drew closer, the men shouted and waved. ‘Osu,’ they were shouting, and pointing at the sky. I looked up, but saw nothing other than the dusty air of dawn. They think it is going to rain, said Opanin, when I met him by the taxi. Is it? He shrugged and said nothing. Surrounding us, the parched earth was glowing red in the early morning light, as though the blood of all those buried there had leached into the sand. I wondered how many bodies it would take to feed the earth out of its drought, to quench the thirst of Owuo Kwaku so that he might return beneath his veil, to restore the reign of Asase Yaa. When the bush taxi pulled up, I took out the cash I’d found in Nanabaa’s house and handed it to Opanin. To finish the house, I said.