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Nukpien's Sunrise by Arthur Musah, Class of 2004

The sun was not yet up, but soon it would be. It would heed the summons of the roosters and show its face, dispelling the darkness and chill. If only the sun could warm his heart like it did the air, Nukpien thought.

Nukpien was the fastest man in the village when it came to tilling the earth with a hoe. Like the rest of the village, his day began at the break of dawn, when the men set out in a large party on the two mile walk to the place where they farmed. The crops were doing nicely again on the soil of the old farmland. How it pleased him every morning to note that the stems of the yams had crept a little further up the stick he had stuck in each mound of earth. He liked to pause for a moment before he started hoeing each day to admire the immaculate shine on the new leaves, the ones close to the tips of the yam shoots. It was a good thing that the village had agreed to let the land nearby lie fallow for a while. Now, once more, they no longer had to do eight extra miles to reach fertile land as had been necessary last year. They could get to their farms faster and had more time on their farms each day before the sun got too high up in the sky and too hot to work in.

Nukpien sat in the darkness outside his hut with his right hand dipped into a large calabash half-filled with water. It irritated him that he had to wake up earlier than his colleagues and go through this half-hour ritual each morning, but there was nothing he could do about it: a man had to wash his face at the start of a day.

Resigned to enduring this activity, he sat quietly and bit hard on a chewing stick. In this way he converted one end of the stick into a set of bristles, which he then used to brush his teeth with such gusto that the enamel soon squeaked rebuffs of indignation. First he worked his way steadily from his incisors - they turned slightly inward where they met, enough so that you noticed when he smiled - up down up down, all the way to the far left corner of his mouth. Then he worked all the way back to the right.

His wife, Asana had been shuffling about indoors for a while. Now he heard her stern voice utter a tirade of discipline as she tried to wake their sleepy sons.

Nukpien was proud of his sons and daughter. They were hard workers, his boys. Not lazy like many he could point out among the village youth. Well, apart from Asiru, that is, his second son who dodged work to chase lizards with catapults in the company of cotton-brained friends. But the other three far more than made up for their rascal brother. Even little Tanim did his best. Razak's complaints were understandable: which boy wouldn't object if he had to perform all those girlie chores because he had a sister who got into more fights than any child, male or female, in the village? And just yesterday at the communal weeding of the chief's farm, his eldest son, Abu, did his father proud by completing twice as many mounds for the yams as any other boy. The family's reputation would be perpetuated. Sleep had no place here. It was good for his children that they learned this early.

And as for Lara, who would have guessed that she would be the one to inherit her grandfather's warrior spirit. That fire that made him famous in the wars of old. He knew his girl was special. Somehow, he associated with her the deliverance of his family. When he observed her, he felt a warmth inside him that was different from love -- although he had love, too, in abundance for her. The best he could do at describing that feeling was to recognize that it was similar to what he felt when he saw the sun come up. Not the physical warmth of the sun, but another, more abstract warmth, like hope.

Sometimes Nukpien wondered what his life would have been like if, like his brother who lived in the city, he had stayed in school and learned to read and write, to put meaning into symbols and decipher meaning from symbols. That one ability that his brother possessed, which remained so cryptic to Nukpien, seemed to be the single factor that had placed his brother on a completely different life path from the one Nukpien traveled. Would Nukpien have returned to village of his boyhood, to the huts whose walls were made of clay and straw and whose thatch roofs had been replaced with corrugated iron sheets only a few months ago? Would he have come back to no electricity, to communal television only five nights a month when the trailer driver returned from Bolgatanga and brought with him his spare car battery recharged? Could he have borne having no taps conveniently dispensing water just about everywhere in his house? Would he have married a woman who had never learned to balance a pan of water on her head and carry it home from the bore-hole pump?

Nukpien had to make a conscious effort to remember that the Mr. Sisere Nanfuri, who came home from the city once a year these days (unless more than one very important person in the village died in the course of 12 calendar months), was the man who as a boy had cried - no, had wailed - until everyone thought his heart really would break when he had to leave the village to attend boarding school in the city. These days his brother came to visit in an air-conditioned car. He always wore a shirt with long sleeves. Too much dust was his brother's excuse; he had become allergic to dust, a concept that baffled Nukpien to no end. Sisere had also developed a habit of illustrating and emphasizing his speech with his hands, even though when he spoke he usually delivered his words in a voice so loud that it bordered on being disrespectful. (Nukpien was Sisere's older brother, after all.) His gesticulations grew more and more agitated when the expression he sought in his native tongue failed to come readily to his lips, until his arms looked frenzied, as though they belonged to a drowning man clutching for air, clutching at life itself.

His brother's world seemed like a different universe altogether, a universe he was content to simply visit occasionally to see his brother and his wife and their two sons. He, Nukpien, belonged in the village, with the men he had grown up drinking pito five evenings in a week with, with his wife and his children, and with the farm that was his family's livelihood. Still, he wished he did not have to turn to his younger brother for help so often. Nukpien wished he had been able to pay for his son Razak's operation himself when the boy had been afflicted with appendicitis. He wished he had had some savings to tide his family by three years ago when a fire had destroyed his farm. They had lost their source of food and income in one blow, and Sisere had ended up paying for everything they ate, everything they wore, everything. He could not admit it to anyone, had not had to admit it to anyone, but he was still ashamed that his family had depended so entirely on his brother's generosity.

If only he had a tractor. The work would be so much easier. More rewarding too. But that was one thing Nukpien would not ask for from his brother. Maybe this year the village would make enough profit to start saving for one, Nukpien mused.

But probably not. Usually they made barely enough to sustain their families. He was lucky to have just four children. Asana's heart-piercing silence when he had proposed getting a second wife had been effective in nipping that polygamous contemplation in the bud. Now he realized that she had spared him a doubling of his worries.

His thoughts went back eight years to the presidential elections. Only the opposition party had bothered to hold a campaign rally in their area. They had voiced the people's feelings that the government had failed to recognize their contribution to the nation's growth through agriculture. Under the opposition's rule however, their land would taste the blades of tractor ploughs, their crops would fatten on chemical fertilizer and their fatigued muscles and blistered palms would acquaint themselves with well-deserved rest. If only the villagers voted the opposition into power and gave them the chance to do these wonders...

The villagers, impregnated with great hope, had given the opposition the chance and the politicians had taken that chance and flushed it down the water closets in their luxurious city mansions.

Four years later, another opposition came. This time there was even a display of some action. For two weeks tractors turned up the soil to the awe of the villagers. And then sudden silence; for four more years the short memory of the politicians in government kept the corners of the people's mouths turned down.

Each election year, the handful of educated brethren who taught in the village school were given time off to undergo "training" for the upcoming elections. They returned to urge their illiterate colleagues to vote. Voting, they claimed, was the sure way to choose a better life for oneself. But Nukpien thought otherwise now. Voting only allowed the next batch of politicians to reveal themselves as hypocrites.

No, this time he had decided not to vote. And he wasn't alone. Politicians and their promises never did anything for him or for his village. He would not waste his time on voting.

The horizon had begun to ripen: time to be setting out. Nukpien took his hand out of the water that had been softening it. It had soaked enough. Washing his face with it would still not be comfortable, but his palm was now soft enough not to scratch his face. People could call him Nukpien because he had the coarsest sand paper for skin in his palms - the price he paid for his hoeing exploits - but they would never call him a hypocrite! His sun was not yet up. But soon it would heed the summons of his sweat and labor. He would work the land faithfully and wait patiently for his sun to rise. Yes, faithfully and patiently he would wait for his sunrise.

Nukpien finished washing his face. When the group of men heading towards their farms walked past his house, he joined their company.

*

The drive had been more of an ordeal than usual. Sisere had driven the six hours it typically took him to get from Kumasi, the city where he lived with his wife and two sons, to Bolgatanga, the last city before the village. Then halfway between Bolgatanga and the village, on the dustiest portion of his journey, the air-conditioning in his car had simply stopped working. "This is what I call a fix," he had muttered under his breath, because that is how he swore, and had debated turning back and driving to Bolgatanga to get his air-conditioning fixed before continuing his journey. However, the elections were looming and the work that he had to do would best be completed sooner than later. In the end he had decided to continue to the village, and stay for the night only instead of two nights as he had originally planned. He had stopped on the side of the road, rolled down the windows on the driver's and the front passenger's sides of the car, stretched for five minutes, and swapped the white and blue striped long-sleeved shirt he had been wearing with a t-shirt. "A man's got to do what a man's got to do," were the words that played in his head like a song on a radio.

It had been another two hours of bouncing and jiggling every which way in the car as it traversed the dusty third-class road before he reached his hometown. He had arrived red-headed from the dust, and not in his most pleasant of moods. It had annoyed him further to find that his brother Nukpien was not at home, even though it was to be expected that he would be on his farm. "Just my luck!" he had exclaimed in his inner voice, allowing his eyes to roll skywards, but suppressing the urge to throw his arms up into the air. Only the sight of his niece, Lara, who pranced ecstatically about him, holding his hand and breathlessly asking him a million questions until her mother drove her away with a broom, succeeded in alleviating his foul mood. "La-ra. My dar-ling little girl! La-ra," he sang in time to her jumps.

She was a bright one, that girl, and he loved her for it. He identified a kindred spirit in her boisterousness, her inquisitive ways that often went against the customary standards for girlish propriety, and her good command of English in spite of the less than nurturing environment of the village primary school that she attended. He encouraged her liveliness, rewarded it by lavishing her with more gifts than he gave to her brothers, claiming her gender as an excuse when his sister-in-law protested that he was spoiling his niece.

He had suggested to his brother to allow him to take Lara to live with her nephews in the city so that she could attend a better school. The suggestion was never pursued any further than in conversation, because he noticed a flicker of panic in the eyes of his brother and his sister-in-law, even as they praised his bright idea and thanked him for his generosity and claimed they were looking forward to the day their daughter would be old enough to make the transition to live in the city. He understood the fear he discerned in their eyes for he recognized it from his own first-hand experience with seeing his older son leave for boarding school in the capital city 250 kilometres away from home. He himself was quite comfortable with merely suggesting but not pressing the issue, because he was not sure that he and his wife had what was needed to raise girls. They had done fine with their two boys, but the rearing of girls, he was sure, placed demands on resources he was unfamiliar with. And they were no longer young, patient and eager to learn from scratch the art of child rearing. No, not anymore. So he made the offer and let it remain at that, there for his brother and his wife to take him up on it if they ever found the courage to.

After prying Lara off him, his sister-in-law, Asana, had her turn at fussing over him. She exclaimed her welcome, served him calabashful after calabashful of water from the earthenware cooler until his thirst was quenched, asked after her sister, his wife, asked after her two strong boys in the city, his sons. She wanted to know how his job was going, whether the blessings she had frequently asked of the ancestors on his behalf had manifested. She asked how the road had treated him. She displayed horror and indignation when he told her that his airconditioning had given up the ghost when he had needed it most, and called Lara back to prepare a bucket of warm water for her uncle to clean himself with.

Would he honor her and her husband enough to want tuo-zaafi with dried okra soup and smoked rabbit for supper? She had ground the smoothest millet flour for it that very morning. Or would he prefer a rice dish? A widely-traveled son has wonderfully educated tastes after all, not so?

Sisere was listening hard for subtle insinuations in her voice, and he was quick to answer, "Sister paa, my one chance to satisfy my stomach's yearning for its favorite food of old, and I shall let it go? I'll have the tuo-zaafi, of course!" He knew that she held great distaste for his civil ways, that she regarded them as shamefully foreign, and that she guised her insults as praise. He wisely picked the traditional dish from the menu she had uttered, and thereby avoided the first of her traps.

Asana asked why his family had not come along with him; were the boys still in school? Yes, he had come because of some pressing issues he wanted to discuss with his brother; and the boys could not come visit because they were still in school. He wondered if she was asking because she was thinking about the wireless set she had coaxed her older nephew to promise to buy for her the last time his whole family had visited. "Crafty little woman, but a good match for Nukpien," he thought to himself, for he considered his brother a little too principled and upright and easy to shame -- consequently, a push-over. Sometimes that was useful, but there were other times when it was a pain. This time it would be a useful thing.

She wanted to know if his boys still spoke their father's language. He told her, proudly, that the younger one did, that he had a gift for languages, and that he had practiced his father tongue until he spoke it with a fluency that rivaled his father's own. "Better than me; better than you, my sister; like he invented it himself." They burst out laughing together, Asana a little forcedly because she had failed to uncover an inadequacy in Sisere's rearing of his children, over which she could gloat. She had no way of knowing that the boy Sisere boasted of struggled to respond correctly to simple greetings in this language that he was supposed to have such great command of.

When the warm water was ready, Sisere bathed in the walled square space with no roof and an entrance draped with a straw curtain. As he scrubbed himself free of the layer of dust that had settled on him, he thought about how he was going to convince his brother to help him get the village to vote for a particular candidate to represent the constituency in the upcoming elections. He would convince him by arguing how supporting that candidate was the best thing for the people to do. His brother would be rewarded for his campaigning efforts, of course, so there was no way he could refuse. It would be an easy, sensible choice; it had nothing to do with whether he, Sisere, stood to gain anything from getting the people of his village to vote for this particular candidate or not. It was for the people's own good, he tried to convince himself.

An old song came to him, one his and Nukpien's mother used to sing while she cooked, and he hummed it as he finished his bath. Pog fa de nen oor che mie baa nuore, pog fa de nen oor che mie baa nuore. It occurred to him that he didn't know what the proverbial bad woman in the song, who ate the meat in her soup and hit the dog on the snout, had to do with anything he was thinking. This made him stop contemplatively for a second on his way out of the bathing area. He decided that his simply being back in the village had triggered his memory of the song and, wrapping the towel tighter around his waist, he stepped out, humming on.

*

That evening Asana cooked a feast for her husband and brother-in-law. Then she shooed them out of the house to go drink fresh pito with the other village men, because she knew there were things they had to talk about. When her husband returned from his chat with his visiting brother, Asana could tell he was not in an agreeable mood. Something in their conversation had not been to her husband's liking. She drew on the expertise she had gleaned from their eighteen years of marriage to work on dispelling his dark mood.

At first she let him sit outside in the foldable chair he liked to relax and chew his tobacco in. She paced her next move by the frequency of his grunts, allowing them to grow more spaced out before stepping out of the room to inquire why her husband was depriving her of warmth in her bed. Was it not too cold at that time of the night to be sitting outside? He grunted twice and she jabbed his head playfully, laughing a little. "Always acting like a child when his back starts to hurt," she said. "I'm going to prepare a mat on the hard floor for you. Then I'll come out and get you."

Inside their bedroom, she pulled the single piece of cloth from the foam mattress, lifted one long side of the mattress from the floor and propped the mattress against the wall. From a corner of the room she got a straw mat, unrolled it and spread it out in the space she had created on floor. She took off the extra layer of cloth she had wrapped around her from her waist down and stepped outside again to where he husband was staring into the speck-less sky.

Nukpien's breathing was more regular now. She tickled him in the armpit as she raised his arm and pulled him up from his chair. He stood like a reluctant child next to her. She pretended to chastise him and led him into the house and to their bedroom. There, she sat him down on the mat and placed herself next to him.

She knew he would not use a condom that night and she didn't fetch one from the stock she kept in the coolest corner of their room. It would only anger him further, because it was his brother who had driven down two years ago with his car full of boxes containing square satchets and had organized an educational session for the men in the village, during which he had talked about the evils of having too many children, about diseases they could catch from rampant, unprotected sexual activity. Sisere had said he held in his hand a simple and effective solution, one that had worked for him and his wife, as he had demonstrated unrolling the oily bag of rubber onto an impressively accurate piece of carved wood. Nukpien had been annoyed that his brother had insisted that all but the youngest of his sons attend the session. In Nukpien's eyes, their eyes would be opened to vices, but his brother had dismissed the notion impatiently. She didn't want to raise the ghost of another sore spot her husband held against his brother.

In the warmth of satisfaction at having accomplished his goal, Sisere determined to enjoy his night in the village, even though usually he slept poorly when he didn't sleep in his own perfect bed at home. In his room he was pleased to note that his sister-in-law had remembered how he abhorred dust and had made sure to have the floor mopped. He had expected the floor to feel gritty under his feet, but when he pulled his foot out of his shoe and placed his big toe on the concrete he found it cool and smooth. He counted the similarities between Asana and a snake feeding off the eggs of a hen, smiling because he enjoyed the cleverness of his analogy. "That snake of a woman knows how to keep the hen that lays her eggs happy," he thought out loud.

Sisere thought of the first times he had come home to the village after being away at a city boarding school, how the excitement he had felt after a year's absence had been stunned into a feeling of apprehension when he arrived. He had found himself out of sync with his former friends. Their humor had turned crude, silly, ridiculous. When he had accompanied his cow-herding friends on their duties, his graceless antics had agitated the cattle and caused his friends to roll on the ground, pealing with laughter. He had been embarrassed to find that he had become the slowest boy in all the village when it came to hoeing. Soon, his apprehension had turned into boredom.

Sisere had grown impatient with the older brother he had once looked up to with fanatic admiration. Before Sisere had gone to boarding school his brother had had an answer to his every question. Why..... Because.... Would the ... Of course.... On his return he had found his brother so severely deficient in basic knowledge that Nukpien had seemed outright stupid. Sisere had not realized then that his exposure to the world outside the village had begun to change him. Now, as an adult, it was all too clear.

"What capacity for change resides within the human being," he mused as he lay on the mattress. "The extents... the ease... how quickly...," were the words that lulled him closer to sleep. The question,"Reversible...?" finally dragged him into the net of dreams.

Later that night, before they fell asleep, Nukpien told his wife about how his brother's visit that evening had negated all his resolutions not to get involved in the upcoming elections. She sided with him, nursed his hurt pride, and told him how they would put the money he would be paid to good use, so that even if the politicians disappointed the village again, their family would still be better off for Nukpien's efforts. In the privacy of their bedroom, away from the society's strict eye that demanded stoicness from its men, Nukpien allowed himself to be cuddled by his wife. Then he told her about another thing that was on his mind, how he needed her to be strong. For him, for the family, for Lara. They needed to make a decision, he said.

She cried when she heard what he had to say, and it was his turn to lend his arms for comfort.

*

Sisere woke up in the same dark he had drifted to sleep in, and fell into the wistful mood that had fueled his dreams. A fresh sound enveloped him, that of a xylophone being played. It was not intrusive, did not feel out of place. He listened for a while to the clear ripple of the instrument, not quite the sharp tinkling of glass nor the dull thud of wood but a unique sound somewhere in-between. His mood called for a walk so he took one.

It was pitch black outside; there was no moon, not a single star. He could not see a path to follow, but he trusted his old instincts to guide him. He thought about going towards the music but decided he did not want to interrupt the musician, be he man or spirit. "A spirit," he said out loud and smiled to himself at such childishness. That was a thought for the people who remained in the village; his superstitions had been excised a long time ago.

He strolled away from the xylophone music, in the direction opposite to his brother's house. He walked toward the row of mango and sheanut trees where he had spent many an afternoon reading out of boredom during his vacations from school. Shortly after he started walking, however, the music abruptly stopped. Sisere stopped, too, and cocked his ear, wondering if it would start again. When the xylophone stayed silent he shrugged and moved on.

He passed the Bimbla family house and then the Zamire family house, knowing they were there without seeing them. He paused to brood over the odorlessness of the air, groped inside of himself for the part in him that had written poems as a student at university and challenged that part, if it still existed, to name a metaphor for the quality of the village atmosphere. Crispness, lucidity and lightness occurred to him, but he quickly discarded them. Simplicity, he finally decided. Satisfied, he grunted to himself and was about to walk on when a voice sprang from the cold darkness not very far from him.

"Is that you, Sisere?" he heard. It made him jump, adrenalin coursing through his body like a knife stabbing upwards. The voice was accompanied by a brief sound like water being stirred, small amounts of it falling into a bigger mass from a small height.

An instant later, in his heightened sense of alertness, he realized it was his brother and reflexively called out his brother's name. "Salia," he gulped.

"Ah," Nukpien's voice, a little less croaky, said, "I told myself it was you."

"Yes, it's me." He had been focusing in the direction from which his brother's voice emanated, and the reclining outline of a man was beginning to take shape from the amorphous darkness. "You're up early," he said in Nukpien's direction.

"I'm soaking my hand to wash my face," his brother answered. Sisere noted a surprising mirthfulness in Nukpien's voice, which asked, "Did I startle you?"

"Yes, I couldn't see. What are you doing here? Couldn't you wash your face at home?"

"I am home," his brother's voice said, even more amused, "Are you lost?"

"No, no, of course not," Sisere insisted. "I just strayed from my path a little."

Nukpien chuckled, was quiet, then said, "You still call me by my given name when you forget yourself. That's how I knew I had frightened you. Gafara, it was not my intention."

"Yes, I think I do. I forget your nickname sometimes." Sisere, too, was amused by the observation.

"No one calls me Salia anymore," his brother noted.

"The first time," Sisere said, "The first time I came home from boarding school and you were away at the farm I was screaming your name and Mma -- Mma herself -- asked me who I was looking for. In one year you had become Nukpien. Salia was so completely forgotten."

It was Nukpien's turn to agree. "Yes, it happened quickly."

They were both silent for a moment, remembering in the darkness, visible to each other as definite outlines now, but no more. Then Nukpien spoke, "You called me by my old name throughout your vacation, almost. You had come back different, your nose was always buried in some book you had brought with you from school, but you still called me Salia until the last few days before you returned to school and we didn't see you for another year. It seemed like you were the only one that remembered my old name. I liked that."

"I remember. Afterwards I called you Nukpien, like everyone else," Sisere said, and another moment of easy silence elapsed. There was something momentous about that morning, brought about by the inebriating power of the darkness, which made everything malleable. Sisere recognized this without being able to give it a name. For once he didn't try to define what it was, however; he didn't wrestle with himself to name it, but stood and allowed himself to soak in its delicate importance, like meat in a marinade. (It was only later as he drove back to Kumasi that it struck him: in all their adult lives he had never before heard his brother speak of a childhood memory.) But the night was finally spent. Daylight, like an antidote to an intoxicating drug, was beginning to put a carved rigidity into the shape of things.

"So," his brother finally sighed, breaking the silence, "You're leaving this morning. The children have not seen their uncle in so long."

"Ah, I know, but what can we do when duty calls?" he paused. Then remembering one of his favorite sayings, he added, "A man has to do what a man has to do."

Nukpien sighed again, then repeated Sisere's words, "What a man has to do."

Sisere was surprised by the note of sadness in his brother's voice. His brother was struggling with something, and Sisere found himself fending off a wave of guilt at having made his brother agree to get involved in the political campaign. When they had talked the night before, his brother's reluctance had not been wasted on Sisere, but Sisere had chosen to ignore it.

Then Nukpien spoke again. "Lara is a big girl now. She's clever, like you. She was made for education and the big things beyond. I think she's ready for the city. I think you should take her."

"Today?" Sisere asked. His voice was barely audible as he was hoarse with surprise.

"Yes, today."

Sisere nodded. He knew his brother was facing the terrible fear of letting one's child venture into a world that one did not know, a world where one would not always be there to guide, to help, to keep safe. If Nukpien was facing that, then he, Sisere, would face his. His greatest fear in suggesting Lara come live with his family and attend school was that she would become a stranger to her own family, that she would become irrevocably ill-fitted to her origins and her home, like he had become ill-fitted years ago. But it was necessary, this terrible remolding of the people, was it not? "Salvation is bought at a price," was the single sure thought in Sisere's nodding head, when Asana stepped out of the house holding a bag she had packed for Lara. It was obviously not an easy morning for Asana either, but she wasted no time in giving directions to her boys, who followed her out of the house sleepily to prepare departure gifts for their uncle.

The boys caught waking roosters in mid crow and bound their legs together with string, while Lara filled a jute sack with grain. Lara was the most awake among the children, excited at the prospect of going to live in the city with her uncle so unexpectedly, but keeping her excitement under control out of consideration for her brothers who were staying.

When all the gifts had been loaded into the boot of Sisere's car, the goodbyes grew more sullen. Sisere gave each of his nephews pocket money, which made their faces light up. Then he took his sister-in-law aside and handed her a wad of cash, making her promise to get new school uniforms sewn for his nephews.

One end of the sky was already lit when Sisere and Lara finally drove away, waving and being waved back at. They drove east, into the rising sun, and the boys chased after them for a while in the dusty cloud that the car created. Nukpien could not place a finger on the specific grudge he bore the sun as it rose that morning. He only knew that he felt something like betrayal, but it was stupid to feel betrayed by a sun that had not failed to lend its radiance to the world as promptly as it did every other morning. Maybe he had betrayed himself, had given too much. He wasted no time wondering about his feelings, but returned to his calabash of water and resumed the process of washing his face, which Sisere had interrupted in the preceding darkness. The day had begun, there was work to be done.

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