The Liquid Eye of a Moon, page 1
Praise for
The Liquid Eye of a Moon
“A poignant and punching coming-of-age with bewitching prose and memorable characters.”
—Debutiful
“Deeply committed to class and the clash of tradition with modernity, The Liquid Eye of a Moon is a . . . stoic coming of age story without any of Holden Caulfield’s phony fussing.”
—Literary Hub
“A wonderful debut. The Liquid Eye of a Moon is funny and moving in equal measure. A coming-of-age story that readers won’t forget.”
—DIPO FALOYIN, author of Africa Is Not a Country
“Like the great Igbo writer Chinua Achebe before him, Uchenna Awoke has given us a stunning debut novel in The Liquid Eye of a Moon. Magic is the word that best describes this book. The magic of felt life for a young person seeking a place in a senseless world. The magic and madness of superstition, exploitative beliefs, and other outmoded practices. And the magic of literary prose in the hands of a master. If there is justice in the world, this brilliant novel will change the literary landscape.”
—JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN, award-winning author of Fat Time and Other Stories and Song of the Shank
“After reading only the first paragraph of The Liquid Eye of a Moon, I knew this story was special. Awoke’s prose is immersive and alive, and you sink into it without effort. I had to blink a few times whenever I stopped reading, and I always looked forward to sinking back in. A beautiful coming-of-age story I will not forget.”
—MARY ADKINS, author of Palm Beach
“In The Liquid Eye of a Moon, Uchenna Awoke casts a spell that is at once enchanting and haunting. An important story full of love and wonder, family and culture, strife and tribulation—this is not your typical debut novel. You are in the hands of a masterful storyteller, one whose grace and lyricism will win you over and then burrow deep inside the muck and marrow of your soul, where it will remain for a long time.”
—ROBERT LOPEZ, author of Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere
THE LIQUID EYE OF A MOON
In memory of
my father, Edoga Nicholas Ugwokeja Awoke,
my mother, Obloko Rosaline Obeta Awoke (née Ijere),
my younger brother, Chijioke Awoke,
and my aunt, Monica Onyishi.
Till we meet to part no more.
THE LIQUID EYE OF A MOON
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Acknowledgments
One
YESTERDAY IN MY MIND I REBURIED OKIKE, MY AUNT, in a proper grave, in a coffin my memory grabbed from Aku Road, a beautiful white box edged with a blue stripe, a patterning of hibiscus with yellow blossoms embossed on its lid. Sometimes I sneak out to Aku Road to see the coffins sampled outside carpentry workshops, edging the fine arc of the road, in all their colours and shapes. The road is a piece of artwork that I walk with my eyes, rising where it rises and curving where it curves. Even the Bishop Shanahan Hospital fence is artful in the way it curves then rises elegantly as if determined to hold those coffins back from strolling in and claiming their bodies waiting in the mortuary. I picture the coffin makers standing in their dusky workshops behind piles of their coffins with ambitious stares that call for patronage. Their bare bodies covered in fine powdery wood-dust and a sheen of muscle-gloss. But passersby always look the other way. Always focused on the curve of the Bishop Shanahan fence opposite, fear and repulsion rimming their eyes, like the dark lines of kohl around my mother’s, as if by merely looking they are summoning death.
Okike’s actual grave, in a garden near our house, has been overtaken by weeds, half buried in wild growth, umbrellas of mushrooms and small climbing-grasses sprouting wildly over it. My mother tells me that today marks a decade since her death. I am going to weed the grave neat in commemoration of her passing, and, one day, I will make Okike a tomb. My mother says Okike lived with us when I was a child. She looked after me. She and I enjoyed a special bond, my mother says. “Ahutubeghi m,” she wonders at such closeness. “I have never seen a child that close to an aunt, even more than he is to the mother.”
Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine Okike bathing me, soaping me all over, oiling my scalp and patting my baby neck and tender back with talcum powder, folding me in diapers and tossing me up in her arms, a happy, smiling, fat thing. But did I wear diapers as a baby? I can’t seem to connect my small village of Oregwu, a remote, rural place in eastern Nigeria, with the townshipness of diapers, talcum powder, and coconut oil. Or this starved-looking boy that I see in the mirror to the round baby of my imagination.
Okike was my grandfather’s lastborn. My mother tells me she drowned in the Ezenwanyi cave on the eve of Palm Sunday. According to my mother, she was plucked out of the water and hastily buried without a proper funeral. Her grave lies unweeded. Time has blurred its edges. I want to build a tomb over her grave, a beautiful tomb, to thank her for caring so much for me. But that will have to wait until I can afford it.
I was four years old when Okike died, and eight years old when my father took me to the attama—the priest—of Ezenwanyi. He took me there in secret because my mother, a Catholic, forbids her children from going near Ezenwanyi’s shrine. My father might be the last proud worshipper of Ezenwanyi in our village. His face is probably the only one unfamiliar to the parish priest of the local church, Holy Trinity. But my father says the parishioners are hypocrites, not minding that my mother is one of those competing for the front pew during Sunday Mass. He says they bring nocturnal sacrifices to Ezenwanyi to seek his favours, and then they wear long scapulars to the morning Mass the next day to please the parish priest. “Pietists,” he sneers.
“You must not tell your mother that I brought you here,” my father whispered.
I nodded, excited to share a secret with him, a secret between men.
The attama is a tall, stooped elderly man who lives a few houses away from us. When he is not at the shrine he looks like any dried-up old man from our village, with a nose that dribbles snuff mixed with snot, who goes to work at his farm in the morning and spends the afternoon sitting on one of the huge old trunks in the village square. But he is a different man when he is seated at the shrine, distant and withdrawn, shrouded in dark mystery.
“My son here has been acting strange lately,” my father said from across the square floor of the little thatch hut where we sat on a short bench. “He has been unsettled in his sleep. I want to know the cause of his strange affinity with my late sister, his aunt Okike.”
The attama asked my father to get a stick, and to break the stick into the number of my father’s siblings, and then name the broken sticks after the siblings. This my father did in secret outside the shrine. When he returned, he handed the broken sticks over to the priest. Holding the sticks in his crooked palm, his nose unusually clean and dry, the attama spoke a few words of incantation and cast the broken sticks onto the earth floor. They fell in a line, the seven of them broken into uneven lengths. He touched the broken sticks one by one with a short staff, back and forth a few times. And then he stopped, picked up the one to his right, and gave it to my father, who acknowledged that it was the very one he had named for my aunt Okike.
“She has reincarnation ties with your son,” the attama said. “In other words, she is your son’s ancestral benefactress. Their souls are tied together from the land of the spirits. Do not try to separate them or forcefully stop his predispositions towards her, no matter how strange they may seem. The connection between them is very strong, stronger than you can imagine, and that is why she comes to him in the dream, as a sign of that everlasting bond, a sign that she will be there for him if called upon in times of need or distress.”
It seems the attama was right. For as long as I can remember, I have often seen a young woman drowning in my dreams. In these dreams, I always see myself standing by a riverside. The woman approaches the river in a bright yellow dress with floral patterns. She bounds up onto the rocky track, hesitates at the riverbank, her shoulders quivering, her face glistening with tears, frozen white. And then she trembles and walks into the water. She walks on until the water reaches her shoulders, her chin, her nose, her eyes. Finally, it covers her.
Later, my father took my younger brother Machebe to the shrine of Ezenwanyi for his mood swings and belligerence. The priest took one look at Machebe and revealed to my father that his second son was reincarnated from our forefather through the energetic village spirit Agubata. This is why Machebe is strong and hot-headed, and withstands me in a fight even now that I am fourteen years old, three years older than Machebe.
“The forefather he is reincarnated from was descended from the tiger spirit animal,” explained the attama. “When the totem appears to Machebe, the tiger’s passion and energy are released to your son the same way it happens to the masker.” He gave my father a knowing look. “You understand what I mean.”
My father nodded, but I was lost, and it wasn’t until much later, when I learned about my father’s masking prowess, that the cryptic message that passed between the two men unfurled to me.
“At least I am not reincarnated from a woman,” Machebe sneered.
We argued hotly. I did not like the jeering note in his voice that suggested that being reincarnated from Okike was a stigma. Machebe and I were like water and oil, and I knew that he would act even more arrogantly now that it had been revealed he was reincarnated from the tiger.
My father walked in then and shouted us down. Such matters were sacred, and must not be profaned, he said. “And you must not mention it to your mother. You know her views on Ezenwanyi.”
Two
MY VILLAGE MUST HAVE BEEN FULL OF NAKED TODDLERS without birthdays, or enlarged photographs of their childhoods taken in studios and displayed on smooth painted walls. I probably grew up the same way, naked and running around with poop in my buttocks. One of those potbellied, food-loving imps whose mothers would beckon the family dog over to lick them clean. I smile each time I indulge myself in those thoughts. But my mother talked about my childhood without nostalgia. She said I was a snot-faced child with nameless longings. I’d cry loudly, squealing like a squirrel baulked of a ripe palm nut. “Ibekazi,” my mother would tease me. “You always preferred to be tied to the back of your aunt, and when anyone tried to take you away to ease the poor girl’s burden, you cawed and fought like a crow, nearly clawing out their eyes.”
When she said this, I hid my face and said nothing, feeling slighted that of all the pretty birds in the village, it was a crow my mother likened me to, but in her good mood I could ask, “What did Okike do when I squealed?”
My mother smiled. When my mother smiles, you catch a glimpse of distant beauty. It flickers and is gone, fiaam, like the dash of a glowworm. “When you squealed because you needed to suck my breast and I had gone to Ogige market,” she said, “Okike plugged her nipple into your little mouth and sang for you until I returned and kissed away your snot and tears.”
My mother said I sucked her like there was no tomorrow, and even suckled Okike’s milkless breasts for comfort.
“Like seven famished puppies,” she chuckled. “After you fed, you insisted on going up again on Okike’s back, leaping with happiness.”
So much for my mother’s similes: first a crow, then seven famished puppies. But I was a big sucker, and that’s the truth. I am amused, and sometimes angry, when my mother retells this story. Angry because I am embarrassed, amused because it is my love story, my childhood, the beauty that lies in not knowing the difference between breastmilk and breast, and because my mother never gets tired of it, this serial retelling.
“What kind of songs did Okike sing for me?” I’d ask my mother each time.
“She sang you baby songs.” My mother would smile again even more broadly, and I’d catch a glimpse of the ghosts of her dimples, long receded into her sunken cheeks. Now they ornament my younger sister Usonwa’s face.
“Sing me the song,” I’d insist.
My mother would clear her voice, laugh a little as if shy, and then she would sing the song about the little bird: Nwannununwannununta turuzanzaturunza nwannununwannununta turuzanzaturunza tukenekisiatu tunwokenikenike tunwanyinikenike tutumeropipiro piropirororo pi.
It reddens my cheeks when I think of all this, now that I am an all-grown skinny boy who finished primary school at the age of fourteen after I lost one year to pneumonia. My mother says it was pneumonia, but now I think it was malnutrition, too much cocoyam and tasteless cowage soup. Some people say I laugh like water. Curiously, I find myself going to the creek in my village to listen to its ululations. Others say it is my father I laugh like, that it is his most telling feature, but most people agree that I look like my uncle Onumonu, my mother’s brother, a primary school teacher, a man who reminds me of a squirrel. I can’t imagine myself growing into a diminutive man in clothes that outsize me.
Let me tell you a little about my family. I am my parents’ third child and their first son, if a boy like me being anyone’s first son is anything to be proud of. So you know, about a year ago, I did pass my Common Entrance exam and raced home to flaunt my result.
“You are not going to secondary school,” my father said in a parched voice. “Unless you will have me trade my manhood for school fees.”
Heartbroken, I went to a corner to sulk. My mother came back and found me there, like a cat starved of affection. You have already met my mother, my heroine, the vibrant force in the family.
“Get up.”
Her voice warmed my heart.
“Tomorrow you are going to the new school to begin your registration.” My mother untied her wrappa, washed threadbare, one of the few pairs left on the clothesline. She reached for a grey pouch-like cloth bag she ties around her waist and emptied its contents, all her life savings. “I am sure I have enough in here to start you off,” she said.
The next week found me walking the street proudly in the white and indigo of Community Secondary School. But after one term, my family could no longer afford the fees and I was forced to drop out.
“Nnam, don’t worry. You will go back to school if I have to work my fingers to stumps,” my mother reassured me.
I have six siblings—two elder sisters, Oyimaja and Ekete; my younger brother Machebe, my younger sister Usonwa; and the twins, a boy and a girl, Ebube and Ihebube—and you already know about my aunt Okike, my benefactress, and that I am her reincarnation. My father is my greatest critic, and I often feel he stands in my way. He has five siblings, but I know only one, my aunt Ogbom; the rest are either dead or lost. Sometimes my father talks about his father, my grandfather, a man my father says lived a lonely life. Ngwu is a white-haired little man in my father’s last memories of him. He did not live to a very old age, and he was drunk more often than sober. My father talks of his late mother, my grandmother, too. He describes her as a tall, stern-faced woman with a glossy dark complexion and a strong will, the opposite of my grandfather. My father smiles brightly whenever he talks about his parents. He leaves me with a sense of guilt, because I don’t think I smile, let alone brightly, when I talk about my father. He used to accompany my grandfather, a roofer, to work.
“A very good one when he was sober,” he said, “but he was often getting into strife with those he disappointed.”
I sense that my father had been proud following his father and making roofs with bamboo, raffia, and thatch, but ashamed of his father’s drinking habit, as I am of his. I also don’t believe making roofs is a great employment, even if my father treats this story as a delicate heirloom that, if allowed to slip and fall, would shatter like glass.
My father is now the second-oldest man in our village. He is not so old, but he has many strands of grey hair and a rough salt-and-pepper beard. He definitely looks too old to have fathered the twins, my last two siblings. I think it is because he hunches over in the sun to mould bricks. Maybe it was because his older brother Alumona chose to become a roofer like their father that he chose to make bricks instead. I hope that one day he will become the oldest man and thus the Onyishi of our village. Then everything—the hills, the caves, the land, and the trees—will be ours, and everyone will have to do as he says. He will superintend the slaughter of funeral cows at the village square and bring home a big lump of meat. And he will be respected. We will have farmlands to grow crops and drive hunger far away. My mother will become the Obloko, with more palm trees in her custody than any woman in the village. There will be money for me to return to secondary school, and to be reunited with Eke, my childhood friend. We desperately want to go to university and learn to speak big English words that fall from heights like breadfruit heads. And there will be money to build Okike a proper tomb.
