Chapter 34
MOVEMENT TEN
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
MOVEMENT ELEVEN
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
MOVEMENT TWELVE
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
MOVEMENT THIRTEEN
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
GLOSSARY
AFTERWORD
My deep appreciation goes to Judith Miller who read the manuscript of this translation in its early stages and, as always, contributed greatly with her invaluable comments and suggestions, most of which I gratefully accepted. I always learn from her! My warm thanks to Michelle Mielly for her fine and thoughtful Afterword, once again carefully read and edited by the inexhaustible Judith Miller. I am deeply indebted to Jean Casella for her meticulous editing and her finely tuned ear, which certainly improved the final version of the text. I am equally grateful to Anjoli Roy, Assistant Editor of The Feminist Press, whose generous help and constant vigilance go beyond the call of duty. To the multitalented Werewere Liking go my boundless admiration and gratitude for yet another beautiful work, for her devotion to helping the flowering embodied in all children, and for reminding me that she began writing this book at the kitchen table in our home in Astoria, Queens, some ten years ago. As always, my work—and life—would be diminished without the concrete and emotional support of my husband, David Vita. And last but certainly not least, profound gratitude to Florence Howe herself, without whose lifelong dedication to publishing the wisdom and talents of writing women, works such as these would not make their entrance in this country.
Marjolijn de Jager
Stamford, Connecticut
June 2007
The Amputated Memory takes place in an unnamed West African nation, clearly representing the author’s home country, Cameroon. The central story focuses on the Bassa people, and is set in their part of this unnamed country and in a city called Wouri, a stand-in for Cameroon’s largest city, Douala.
I am Halla Njokè.
My family affectionately calls me Fitini Halla—little Halla—to set me apart from my paternal grandmother, whose namesake I am, and who was known as Great Halla or Great Madja. I am in my eighth decade. Tired of pursuing a thousand different professions, I am, more than anything, a singer. At one point in my life I became a writer, thinking that’s what I would always be. But I grew weary of vainly writing words or marks that none of my own people could read. It’s discouraging to describe emotions that only you seem to have, and all they ever say to you is: “Now, where did you get that?”—especially when you are surrounded by family every day of your life.
So I tried looking elsewhere and with different eyes, creating simpler things: food, clothes, jewelry, and especially songs, since they are more likely to make people happy and bring them closer to at least a modicum of lasting contentment with life, whether times are tough or trouble-free. From then on, the folks around seemed to be more in tune with me.
So it had been a long time since I’d written anything at all, and then one day, on my seventy-fifth birthday, the same desire came to me again. It happened when I was watching the peaceful face of my Aunt Roz, the third one of that name and a distant cousin of my father, whom I found again in Laguna, the town where I retired.
“Auntie Roz,” as everyone here calls her to tell her apart from the other two (“Aunt Roz” and “Tata Roz”), was on the terrace resting on a Senufo bed that served as our couch. She had to be a good fifteen years older than I, and yet her gaze breathed the innocence of happy childhood.
Every day she rises between four and five in the morning to visit the inmates in Laguna’s large jail, as big as a whole city neighborhood. Working as a volunteer, she prays for and with them, runs errands for the imprisoned pregnant mothers, and helps their children. She walks miles and miles just to go back and forth. In the afternoon she visits those who are confined to hospitals. And still she finds time to remember birthdays, prepare cookies made with peanuts or cucumber seeds, and bring us her good wishes, as old as we are! All of it in complete serenity. I wanted to pay tribute to her.
Auntie Roz is single and has no children. But she has a thousand children all across the globe. She has so many that taking care of them has become more than a profession; it is a vocation, a calling. . . .
She never arrives anywhere with empty hands, and when she leaves, her hands are filled with things for the next person. Here, she may have brought some smoked fish given to her by a brother pastor, and she’ll use the money she receives for it to cover her return transportation, or to buy medicine for the daughter of a sister domestic worker who cannot find the time to take care of it. Clothes she receives as a token of appreciation from another sister go straight to some hospitalized female prisoner, and so on. All by herself, Auntie Roz embodies the entire circle of women through whose solidarity Africa will be reincarnated and restructured.
She prays here, intercedes there, and brings hope, comfort, and a zest for life with her wherever she goes. And when, exhausted, she is all alone again in the evening, the only purpose of her tiny television is to link her up once more with the other children for whom she had no time that day. The clichés that politicians spout remind her how political prisoners are forced to endure the despotism of these men, and how the populace is turned into beasts of burden. Perversely violent movies make her ponder the people upon whom these crimes are inflicted, and in her nightly prayers she has a word or two for God about perversion, violence, and their innumerable victims—prostitutes and delinquents, her other brood, who have been dumped into the street and for whom her heart bleeds in compassion. Even in her delayed and furtive sleep, Auntie Roz is never cut off from her thousands of children: In her dreams she fights the crooked cops who, on every corner and for all to see, rip off her poor little public transportation drivers and street vendors and get away with it! She fights and fights, surrounded by angels with swords of light, striking the evildoers and liberating the virtuous, healing some and feeding others, until she wakes up, always with a start. And once she’s up, the first prayer is a new surge of inspiration to serve her youthful thousands. For them, Auntie Roz imagines a better world made up of small certainties, a world just livable enough for all of them as they wait for the Eden that’s far too long in coming and impossible to foresee honestly, at the center of a world that’s worse than hell and not even truthful enough to call itself by that name.
With each rising day, Auntie Roz creates new pieces of advice for all her sons and daughters. For an all-too-silent girl, she suggests rebellion: “Ask God and be more insistent, protest strongly with all your heart, and he will hear you. Sometimes God is distracted because he is so absorbed in the untold number of his creatures in distress on the earth, deep down in the water, and in the air. You may have to persevere to get his attention, stand up for yourself, and also plead with others—men and women—but especially yourself, as you wait for God to make a move.”
To a boy