The Dynamics of Silence

You are a Margaret, born to a raffia weaver and a petty trader.

Silence was a language you refused in your mother’s womb. You kicked your soul-song across the dark murk. Scattered your voice across the humidity of the candle-lit room as your mother groaned you into the cup of the the midwife’s palms. You were a clammy thing, face framed in a rictus as if you knew you had a lot to contend with. Seeds of perspiration fell onto your face from the midwife’s brow and you wailed harder. She made a mental note instantly. This one go stubborn. The mama go need hold am well or she go scatter family.

You were in a new womb now—a weather-beaten apartment in an ailing neighborhood riddled with epileptic power supplies, if any at all, and a searing stench of lack. But you couldn’t know it yet.

You strike the doh to silence at age 3, after your mother scores two quick slaps on your face because you wanted ice-cream and had cried out for it.

She tells you, “No carry our nakedness comot for open”, as if she weren’t already letting you roam au naturel because buying meat for your father’s food is more important than clothes for a 3-year-old. Of course, very soon, the neighbors are singing your praise because you don’t run after ice-cream-men like their children do. You don’t know what ice-cream tastes like, but that’s okay. You have to be a good girl. Your body breathes better when you are.

You eat your lessons in the kitchen first, and then in your mother’s room as you get older:

“Close your leg Margaret. You no know sey na girl you be? If you siddon, jam your leg together.”

“Wen I bin dey your age, I don dey carry dis basin go stream go fetch water. I go sweep compound on top, come cook food wey we go chop.”

“Girls no dey talk too much, dem no dey do too much. How you wan take get husband?”

“Dat boy wey i see you follow talk dat time na wetin e say e want?”

These things are important; but even more so are the science practicals, the essays, arithmetics, the things you’re taught in school, the books you don’t read…doxology.

Your grades drop like jowls. Apparently, your mother knows she’s wasting a perfectly good child if you don’t come home from school and come help her in the kitchen, if you don’t spend the better half of the day learning new ways to better sell her soap bars in the street because you’re a fine girl now with developing breasts.

You want to tell her that you feel quite antithetical to what she has you do. That you’ve got this tune in your heart that you’d rather play to. However, for some strange reason, there’s a firm clamping on your soul. It’s something that has always been there, becoming, like a massive star folding in on itself. This same thing now gentles you into marrying this old man. God, a grinning mother, has willed it, and your father will sit on a raffia mat and enjoy the dividends.

“James go be better husband,” your mother effuses. “E get money. You no go suffer like you bin suffer here.”

What she means to tell you is that this is their time to sit and bask in the monies of an in-law. She has fulfilled her calling as a Margaret. Her time is done.

Not long after, you will have a Margaret. You will love her, but only with the language Margarets understand.