Alternating between God and people, she asks for clemency and revenge, generosity and thrift, forcefulness and patience. She doesn’t believe there’s any situation to which you can’t comfortably adapt if you are one with your God. In short, Auntie Roz is in the service of her children and of God at every moment of her life.
When my decision to write about her and pay her tribute had fully gestated, I told her about it and tried to get her to tell me the story of her life.
“How did you manage to have such a fascinating life?”
“Because of everything that has happened to me—or at least, what I remember of it,” she answered with a smile. And instead of telling me about this mysterious life of hers, she turned the question back to me.
“Look at you, for instance: What has happened to you to make you what you are? Delve back into your own memory. What you’ll draw from that will allow you to know me thoroughly, and then you’ll be better able to talk about me and appreciate why I am as I am.”
“I don’t see the connection between you and me, Auntie Roz. We haven’t had the same life. . . .”
“How do you know? Sometimes we don’t really know what’s happening to us. Our only truth is the memory of our memory. Actually, we often perceive what happens in a light that’s totally opposite from what’s really going on. An important lesson may become a torment or a joke. An exit door may become the bars of a prison, a dead end, or the underpinning of success. We are marked by the things that stay engraved in our memory. So try to remember. . . .”
“Where the confusion of memory is concerned I agree with you, Auntie Roz; but I still don’t see where you’re heading. Just tell me this: Will you give me permission to write your life, yes or no?”
“Yes, my little Halla, but if you really want to honor me, you should first unearth what your own memory holds. Track down its transformations and metamorphoses in its double game of surfacing and receding. Pull out some snatches of our Unwritten History. You know we’ve been living in a context that made us choose oblivion as a survival method, a secret of life, an art of living. And surely you know what a colossal joke, what a farce Africa’s history is, especially when they try to refer to ‘records.’ The civil registries don’t list who we are, who was born where and when, who are siblings or husband and wife, who has died, who is alive, who is son or daughter, and on and on. More than ninety percent of the data is made up in wild and perfectly fiendish confusion.”
“Yes, but who or what’s to blame, Auntie?”
She argued that our ways of identification had not been able to withstand the global assault on African spirituality and cultures by the dominant civilizations. That it was no longer really a question of identifying who or what might be the cause, but of surviving, climbing over walls, and attempting to escape the ghettos.
“So they’re happy to forget to register a birth or a death. To the living without any papers they give those of the dead, they claim to be the wife of an unmarried brother, or the sister if not the daughter of what is actually a husband.
“And the thickness of the layers of silence became shamefully tangible, since the governments had total control over the records and made sure that every trace of every deed that disturbed them disappeared. Once so-called democracy made its entrance the journalists were in on it, too, reporting opinions rather than facts. Under such conditions, when the atrocities a person has lived through are passed over in silence for lack of any trace or archive, paying tribute to someone would be a hoax. How do you convey Africa’s silences?”
Then Auntie Roz stopped talking, absolutely refusing to have her story told. It was a wasted effort. And so I was obliged to begin exploring my own memory, as distant images actually began to emerge. Bits of stories, and the emotions that accompanied them, increased in number every day. Finally I had to admit that my aunt was right: If I were to truly get hold of my share of both individual and collective memory again, it was through myself that I would discover her. Then I would be able to pay her a well-deserved tribute and, through her, honor all the women of my clan, who, in spite of all the vile acts perpetrated against them, had nevertheless managed—and were still managing—to remain cherished, indispensable, and self-possessed.
But for this homage to be truly worthy of their sacrifices and battles, of the gift of themselves they had been forced to make, I needed to break the silence myself, to wrench from my personal memory some harrowing secrets. I needed to shake loose the silences about experiences that should have been told, seeing them as facts of life if not test cases, and at least force my own people to say, “Never again!”
Thousands of memories flooded in. Yes, at all cost, I would have to shed light on all the swallowed and forgotten words. I wanted them to brand the memories, indelibly imprinting these reminiscences on the spirit, so that at the moment of death, that great leap toward greater perfection, the memories will be ready, fresh, at any time in any place.
I wanted to raise my voice and set a new path, as firm and trenchant as that of a Gandhi or a King, and just as nonviolent, before our pierced eardrums would forever erase from our memories the true exaltation of a word at the door of perfection.
Then, in my memory, three images rushed forward—three kinds of images of women:
The image of my namesake, my paternal grandmother, Grand Madja,
The image of my mother, Naja,
And that of my Aunt Roz.
From the depth of and all through my earliest childhood, I have images of women, beloved or rejected, scorned or confronted, but always inseparably planted on the edge of my destiny like road signs, luminous signals that drivers could not ignore without impunity, without dangerously exposing their own lives.
So I resolved to write down what my memory would release, without imposing on it any order or priority, and certainly no exterior rhythm.
The moment of first words takes us back to early childhood.
Childhood, innocence, luck—the marvelous luck that protects the steps of the beginner and the innocence that becomes a formidable rebuttal to malice.
We speak of an unhappy childhood when someone hasn’t been this lucky and, with precocious insight, discovers the pettiness of adults; when someone learns to feel fear and abhorrence for growing up; when the child is caught in the web of condescension. Yes, I, Halla Njokè, was really lucky.
My luck is all the more miraculous because I was born insightful, my eyes like magnifying glasses wide open onto the lies, the thievery, and the violence of adults. But I always told myself that they acted out of fear. Never once did it occur to me that it was out of malice.
Malice is revolting, and, had I discovered that, it would have contaminated me. I would have been filled with hate and, without a doubt, become a killer. I would have murdered my father and every man like him. I would have murdered my stepmother and every woman like her. To this day, more than seventy years later, I still don’t understand or tolerate viciousness.
But even though my adult years led me to encounter a great deal of malice, if I never killed anyone, it is because the luck of my childhood stayed with me. I discovered I had been correct right from the start: It really is fear that causes despicable actions, and someone who is afraid actually deserves compassion. And I sensed that I would not be able to express my compassion with greater feeling than through song.
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