Voices on the New Diasporas - an MIT student journal
Submission deadline for Spring 2008 issue is March 15, 2008.
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Lost Sheep
by Melissa Latigo, Class of 2005
“Luo was born from the ground,” mother said, “just like Adam. His mother was Earth and his father was Jok or God. Luo had one son called Jipiti and a daughter called Kilak. Kilak never married but one day she came out from the bush with a son whom she named Labongo. People say Labongo was the son of Lubanga, the devil. Labongo was a dancer, a magical dancer born with feathers in his hair and bells dangling round his ankles and wrists. When Labongo became a man he married. He had an axe with which he broke the earth, producing a line of Rwots or chiefs. Labongo was first in the line of Rwots. He moved north-east of Pubungu in Uganda where he intermarried with the people from Sudan and birthed the Acholi.”
My mother is Acholi, my father is Acholi, so I should be Acholi. Except I don’t speak like one.
* * * * *
In the village everyone gets up when the wood from the night’s fire still glows red and sits on a pile of gray, ash, when you can just begin to make out the crimson lines on the horizon kissing the night sky goodbye. There are no bathrooms in the cement building that Ada calls home. Just four rooms with doors made up of bed sheets, kitenges. One of the kitenges says “For God and My Country.” The main door is a rickety wooden one, with a huge padlock bolted by the last person to get in at night. I don’t like having a bath in the village because the water is cold. But everyone is used to it. I’m not. So I stand naked in the small hut looking at the dirt-rimmed basin with cold water in it. I’m supposed to squat anytime soon and scoop out water and let it run down my back. I take out some water but instead throw it passed my shoulder so it makes a splattering sound on the soil, coating my ankle with red pellets. Then I put the yellow-brown bar soap in my hands and make lather. I do that until the scent of roasted maize tickles my nostrils and I hear mother saying that she wants to have a wash. I smear the lather all over my body, let my body vanish in the blue and purple kitenge and walk out. If I smell of soap mother will think I’m clean. I don’t like the smell of the bar soap. Back at home bar soap is only used for washing clothes.
If Ada calls my name I say “Abino.” If my mouth is shaped like an ‘o’ when I say Abino it’ll come out right and I will not see her sagging eyes look at me like I am a fly on her banana. And when I wake in the morning and I have to serve her some tea, I kneel down and call her Ada (Grandmother in Acholi, pronounced “Atha”) because that is what she is to me. Not Grandma, not Grandmo-ther, but Ada. Yes, I still keep the ‘o’-shaped mouth because she doesn’t want me sounding like a muzungu. I say Ada over and over again and try to make the accent of the white man disappear. I try to sound like Owori, the boy who takes care of Ada’s cows. If I say Ada fast enough maybe she won’t tell the difference.
Married at sixteen. That was Ada. I couldn’t see myself walking the aisle or getting married the way she did in the next two years. Maybe I’d have to wear a flowery gormarsy and shave my head. I’d come out of a room that I’ve been sitting in, isolated from the rest of the village, to meet jubilant ululations of women and my husband to be, whose father has bought me for 26 cows. I wonder what a traditional wedding is like and whether I’d look like Ada in one. I have her thick hair that nobody can comb except mother. When she does comb it, it feels like my head is going to pop off. She tugs away at my matted afro and when the comb finally comes through it’s decorated with millions of tiny black springs. Her skin is much darker than mine but I’m still dark. Acholi people are dark people. It’s the southern Sudanese in us mother often said. In school they called me African Midnight for weeks. Oh, and I have Ada’s slightly flattened nose too. My friend back at home told me that if I narrow my nose down with my fingers every day it’d look more pointed. She had done it for the past seven years and her nose was “beautiful.” I did it for a week and then I stopped. She asked me why. I said I’m an Acholi. All Acholi people have flat noses.
Mother and I have been in the village two whole days. It doesn’t feel like two whole days, it feels like a month. Mother brought me to the village because I am the youngest and I have never met Ada before. Grandfather died several years before I was born. So Ada lives with my orphaned cousins who are in boarding school but will be coming back the day before mother and I leave. When they are away, Owori, the neighbor’s child, takes care of her cows. A young girl about my age also comes in to make the food. She’s bald but I see the girl in the tender pools of brown shadowed by her longer than usual eyelashes. I don’t see much of her but when I do she’s busy scrubbing the sooty pots, gathering firewood for the night’s fire, beating her small black hands against the maize cobs to remove the ash. Or I see her tiny arms moving up and down as she grinds millet on a large stone. I just sit there. I wonder if I’m lazy and I hope mother won’t use her as an example when I sulk because I have to wash the dishes after dinner at home.
I tell mother that I’m bored. There’s nothing to do. No one to understand. She tells me to go play. To go join Owori taking care of the sheep. I don’t want to. I want to go home. I sit in the sun until I am dizzy and my forehead feels hot, then I go inside. It’s very dark. I go to the room and Ada is showing mother the different mats she has woven so mother can pick one to take home to father. The mats are made from colored straw. I’ve seen Ada making a mat outside. She grasps the sheaves of yellow, purple, red and blue in her hands, which are the closest color to the obsidian rock I studied in Geography. Except her hands have contours of bulging veins and deep creases at her knuckles. In and out. In and out. Flashes of her black hand that stands out against the colorful straw creating the mats she has been making for fifty years. I think the mats are pretty. Suddenly she takes one of her breasts and thrusts it in front of my mother’s face and mutters something to her and then to me in a deep voice. Her breast looks like a burnt, giant raisin. I don’t believe I just saw that. Maybe it’s a tradition mother hasn’t told me about. I’m confused so I walk out. I walk out of the gate and up the dirt path to the field where Owori is taking care of the cows. He’s clad in a ripped, red vest and gray shorts with a faded Adidas logo. They look like my brother’s old shorts that mother gave away. There are flies everywhere. I wave my hands over my face and hair to chase the flies away unlike Owori, who lets them settle and crawl around his ears and mouth like they are his friends. They could form a blanket all over his body and he wouldn’t mind, I think. I try not to show that I am irritated by the sharp smell of cow dung. I can taste it in my mouth.
“Kopango,” he tells me. I say “Kope” back. That’s all I know how to say. I sit there for a while listening to the ripping sounds as the cows tug at the grass. Then he asks me about school in English. Except he says “What times you go back school?”
I say in two months. He laughs. I didn’t think that something was supposed to be funny. He picks up a blade of grass to chew and asks me if I want one. I look at the green-brown droppings sitting comfortably on the grass. I look for the cleanest patch and pick up a blade. I scrape it clean with my nails till they are stained green then I place it in my mouth.
“Ewehhhh! The fly tastes good!”
I don’t understand him.
“Huh?”
“Fly on your grass” He chews some more and flashes his row of brown stained teeth into a smile.
I spit and spit and spit until my mouth fills dry.
“I jok with you” He says, and then laughs.
When Ada calls me she calls me by my middle name, Alum, or she just says wok, which means child. Alum or “born in the bush” mother said, because I was born in another land. Maybe I can start my own breed of people – a mix of an Acholi caste and a tongue home to phrases like “cheers” or “making the mickey out of me.” Ada calls me and I run to her and kneel down because if I don’t it’s disrespectful. If I don’t kneel down when I serve father at home mother tells me not to act like British people. I remember when my sneeze used to come out as a high pitched “Choo!”, my father never said “bless you”, he just said “sneeze properly” because he thought my sneeze sounded British. I still don’t understand why they’d send me to a British School and expect me to act Ugandan.
“Aluuuumm” Her voice is slow and raspy. She holds my right arm and shakes it to and fro, mumbling some words in Acholi. I make out a “chi”, “kwo” and groan.
“Ada?” I get the fly-banana stare. She shakes her head then slaps her thighs and laughs.
“Eh Betty…” She shouts something to my mother who’s behind the house making some porridge. My mother laughs too. Before I feel the ripples forming on my forehead, Ada yanks me forward so that I sit beside her. Her skin reminds of me of a sheet of dried office glue peeled from the back of my hand. She smells like old people.
Jane, Musa and Onyango are home today, which means I’m going home tomorrow. Jane is ten, Musa is fifteen and Onyango isn’t sure about his age, though he’s a little older than Musa. They can speak English but they prefer to speak in Acholi. So I only laugh when they do or offer a faint smile. They do a lot of the work now and I don’t see much of the bald girl anymore. So they don’t think I’m posh I help them scrub the pans. Jane takes one of them from me and tells me that there’s still dried sauce on the side. I say “Oh” and watch her smaller hands rub the steel wool against the pot. Onyango talks to me the most. He says that he wants to visit me in Kenya. It’s a twelve hour bus ride but my mother and I flew in. I don’t tell him that. I tell him that it’s really noisy in the city and not as green as here. But he says that I’m lucky to watch television. He wants to be a chemistry professor at Makerere University. I tell him I want to be a doctor. He says that Makerere has a great medical program. I nod and realize how attending university in Uganda has never been an option for me because all I think about is King’s College or Newcastle or even Cambridge.
At supper, the table is covered with boiled eggs, chicken in groundnut sauce, qwon, fried beans, mashed matoke wrapped in banana leaves, rice and beef stew from the cow Owori slaughtered last week. The children are all on the floor eating with their hands. If you’re a girl you have sit with your legs to the side. Ada is sitting on one of her prized mats. Two of my aunts drove down from Kampala today and they are sitting up on the bench with mother. Musa and Jane are arguing about who gets the last chicken leg and Aunt Linda scolds them in Acholi then tells me something. I shove a mound of matoke into my mouth so I can’t speak. Thankfully Onyango tells me to go and get the last chicken leg because I’m the visitor here. Everyone laughs. I think it’s because they know I didn’t understand the first time. I look at Ada and her eyes are smiling. Maybe I’m alright.
Mother tells me that when we come back Ada has promised me a cow. I jokingly ask if I can take it with me now. Mother tells her in Acholi and Ada laughs. Her laugh sounds like she’s wheezing. We take pictures. In one Ada begins to walk away, in another Aunt Linda is flailing her arms and telling me to wait, and in the last one I’m sitting by Ada but I think I blink when mother clicks the button. The van is stuffed with sugarcane and sacks of sweet potatoes and yams because they taste better than the ones in the city. I don’t know how they’ll fit on the plane but I think mother will give some of the food to the rest of our cousins back in Kampala.
Beyond my thick lips and dark skin, sometimes I wonder if I’m really Acholi. I ask mother what she thinks.
She tells me that a sheep does not lament the death of a goat’s kid.
“Huh?”
“You’ll always be my sheep.” She smiles then lays her head back on the head rest. I’m still a bit puzzled.
“But why didn’t you teach me anything? Why did I grow up speaking English?”
“Adaonce scolded me for that. For thinking that the muzungu’s have the better language…you can always learn. I’ll start speaking to you.”
That’s what she said some time ago, I think. I curl up next to her. It’ll be another four hours before we reach Kampala then finally take the plane to Nairobi. I place my hands underneath my head. I can still smell the bar soap.
