So Long Been Dreaming (14 page)

This is the moment he chooses to be in, the place he goes to when the club flattens him to the Surreycentral tiles. He holds himself there, in the boat with his brother, his father, his mother. The sun on the water makes pale northern lights flicker against everyone’s faces, and the smell of the water is clean and salty, and the boat’s spray is cool against his skin.

Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
is a writer and journalist from Chicago. Her novel,
Zahrah the Windseeker
(Houghton Mifflin), is scheduled for release in late 2004. Her short story “The Magical Negro” and her essay “Her Pen Could Fly: A Tribute to Virginia Hamilton” were published in
Dark Matter II: Reading the Bones
(Warner Aspect), and her short story “Asuquo” was published in
Mojo: Conjure Stories
(Warner Aspect). In 2004, her short story “The Ghastly Bird” will be published in the
Other Half
Literary Magazine. She is currently working on her PhD in English at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

When Scarabs Multiply
Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

I was only twelve years old when Sarauniya Jaa, the Red Queen of Niger, returned to my town wanting to cut off my father’s head. But I don’t hate her. I don’t fear her either. But I feel . . . something. Something strong. And that’s why I plan to do this.

Kwàmfà was a great town because of Jaa. It was she who came and organized it, and then ran it. Though she’d left Kwàmfà a year before I was born, I’d been hearing about her all my life. From my mother I had always heard about how good life was because of her, before she left.

“It was relaxed here,” my mother said. “Even after the bombs fell and everything changed.”

Jaa came decades ago with her nomads, when Kwàmfà was just a tiny dying village. Under Jaa’s guidance, Kwàmfà became a booming town of palm and monkey bread trees, old but still useful satellite dishes, and neatly built mud brick houses with colourful, Zulu-style geometric designs and conical thatch roofs. The streets filled up with cars, motorbikes, and camels. Kwàmfà became known for its exquisite carpets and after the great change, also for its flying carpets.

But after Jaa hopped onto her camel and rode into the Sahara, my mother said, things changed yet again. And it was all due to my father.

My father was wealthy, influential, and highly respected. When he spoke, people listened. My mother said he was born with a sugared tongue. And also he had always been quite popular amongst the women because he was very lovely.

“When we were younger, I didn’t mind,” my mother said. “Your father was strikingly beautiful. How could I expect others not to notice? You know, when he was in his twenties, he was the winner three years in a row of the Mr Sahara beauty contest.” She smiled and shook her head. “It was those eyes. He could make them go in two different directions. The judges loved that. It’s a shame that stupidity took over his heart.”

My father did very well selling and buying houses, but he had always been interested in politics. He never missed a town meeting, and he was most attentive when Jaa was speaking. My mother never thought anything of it. Mother was also interested in politics and liked attending the meetings.

Nevertheless, the same day Jaa left, my father did too. And he refused to tell my mother where he was going. He returned a month later riding a bejewelled camel and wearing a golden caftan and turban and an equally golden smile on his handsome face. My father was somewhat light in skin tone, the colour of tea and cream, but Mother said that day he looked much darker, as if he’d been out in the sun for weeks. Probably bargaining for the camels and jewels. Behind him marched more camels, freshly brushed, ridden by several of his close friends. They threw naira notes to the gathering crowd and the crowd gathered faster.

“Jaa is gone, but no need to worry!” he shouted in his booming voice as he smiled and winked at the women in the crowd. “In her absence, I can make sure Kwàmfà remains the great town she built! Make
me
your chief and there will be no need to worry about greedy shady men destroying her council!”

My father was playing off of people’s fears that without Jaa, our world would crumble back into corruption. They followed him because he promised to keep things as they were.

In a matter of months, Kwàmfà had a chief, my father. And only a few months later, after throwing a lot more money around, flashing his pretty smile, making sure he had the right people on his side, making even more promises, and silencing Jaa’s most devoted devotees with money or indirect threats, my father succeeded in making many changes to Kwàmfà.

My mother said that before, when Kwàmfà was Jaa’s town, everyone learned how to shoot a gun, ride a camel, take apart and rebuild a computer. My father made it so that only the boys got to do these things.

“Women and girls are too beautiful to dirty their hands with such things,” he told the people with a soft chuckle. The women and girls blushed at his words and the men agreed with them. My father also thought us too beautiful to be seen, so he brought back the burka.

He cut off several food and housing programs, which left many starving and destitute.

“Soon we won’t
need
such programs,” he told the people with a wink. Most people backed him in his iron-fisted fight against even the smallest crime. Kwàmfà was safe, but no place is free of all crime. My father wanted absolute perfection. Soon there were public whippings, hands cut off, and in the rare cases of murder, public executions. All was in the name of Jaa, he constantly said, although Jaa would never have approved of these things.

He was so confident in himself that he didn’t fear Jaa’s wrath, so sure he was that she would never return. My mother watched him become a different man. It must have been most painful when, to top it all off, he started marrying more wives. The better to look the part of the “big man.”

He was like one of those wild magicians who goes astray in the storyteller’s stories. Talented, self-righteous, and power-drunk. He used the shadowy magic and spells of politics to pull together a mountain of power. But like every magician of this kind, it was all bound to come back to him.

It’s no wonder Sarauniya Jaa wanted to cut off his head.

Even before she returned, everyone knew the legend of Sarauniya Jaa, Princess of the New Sahara. On clear nights when the full moon made streetlights useless, the storyteller would come out of his hut and sit under the ancient monkey bread tree and wait for the children to gather around him. As he waited, that tree would tell him what stories to tell; or so my mother said. He usually recited Jaa’s tale last. And he told it in Hausa, not English, and spoke loud enough for his voice to echo high up into the Aïr Mountains. By this time, I was always tired and the story was like a vivid dream.

She isn’t the daughter of the prophet as her name suggests.

No, no. “Fatima” was just what her parents named her. Her true name is Sarauniya Jaa, Queen of the Red. She is the dreamer. Simply call her Jaa. Whenever she storms into the cities and towns here in Niger, she’s draped in a long red dress and a red silk burka so sheer that you can see the smile on her face.

Her sword is thin as paper and strong enough to cut diamond, and it bears the scent of the rain-soaked soil. It’s made of a green clear metal that has no earthly name because it doesn’t come from earth, but from the body of another place called Ginen, where Jaa often travels to when her Sahara queendom is calm. Years ago, she left our town to go there.

Jaa is always accompanied by her two wild and sword-swinging husbands, Buji and Gambo; ask me for their stories and I will give them to you on another day. Jaa is a tiny woman, small like a worldly child. But size is deceptive. You do not want to be the enemy of her sword.

Her voice is high-pitched and melodious. Sometimes when she speaks, red flowers fall from the sky. Legend has it that when she was a young woman, she was stolen by a group of New Tuareg nomads called the Lwa. They claimed that the reason for the kidnapping was because she was their queen.

They were right.

Soon, the queen in her awakened, and before they knew it, she was laughing loudly and telling men to straighten up their clothes, women to learn to ride camels, and whoever would listen, the stories of her past life as a daydreaming medical student. This was just after the Sahara was no longer the Sahara and the world had changed. Soon Jaa was ruling the new land with her army of devoted nomads. She feared none of the talking sandstorms, flocks of carnivorous hummingbirds, or the nuclear fallout that drifted from countries away. The subsequent return of magic to the world didn’t bother her.

I tell you, if it were not for this woman, death and blood would have run through the irrigation lakes and soaked the sands. No empire would have thrived. But it is not Jaa’s wish to rule.

Whenever things grow calm, she has her group of nomads settle in a town. This last time, it was our town, Kwàmfà. I myself was one of those nomads who traveled with her and settled here. When we were comfortable, Jaa and her husbands rode off into the desert. She hasn’t been seen since.

But Jaa always knows when to return.

The storyteller usually recited the last line with a knowing look on his wrinkled shiny face. Then he’d glance in the direction of my father’s big house. I always wanted to ask him why, but I never found the right moment. I knew the answer anyway.

It was during the New Yam Festival. I was twelve years old. It had been thirteen years since she’d left and my father took over. My father liked to have an opening ceremony where he gave a speech and ate the first piece of yam. The festival was set up in the centre of town. There were booths made of thatch where food and jewelry would be sold and performances would take place. As always, the wrestling match would be held next to the giant monkey bread tree. I’d always wanted to go watch, but women could only attend if they wore the full veil. The matches were always in the middle of the day under the hottest sun, so few women ever attended.

My father made sure that there was a specific spot next to the stage for plenty of journalists. He loved to be seen and talked about. He also wanted to “put Kwàmfà on the map.” They brought their digital cameras, and the footage and photos would be posted on the Naija Net News and talked about on the even more popular net radio stations. My mother said that Jaa would have been disgusted, for she viewed the yam festival as a private Kwàmfà affair.

A stage was set up in the center of all the booths and festival spaces for my father to give his speech. A high golden top covered it, and around it were several bushes and a palm tree. The stage floor was covered with a thick red cloth – Jaa’s colour – and decorated with red and gold pillows. The air already smelled of palm oil and the pungent aroma of pepper soup, sweat, and cologne. It was going to be a fun day.

I sat on some of the gold pillows with my half brothers and sisters. Today I wore my yellow veil. It was light, so although I had on a long blue dress underneath (blue was my favourite colour), I wasn’t too hot.