THE WEIGHT OF WORDS

I jumped from the roof of my twelfth storey building and fell to my death. Well, I suppose I am not dead because I am lying here, wired up to these machines making a racket. I have no brain activity according to the doctor, but weirdly enough, my thoughts have never been more stringent and I can hear everything. I heard the screams in the street when my body hit the pavement. It made a loud sound like when a butcher flips over fresh meat on his block.

My name is Noxolo Badohou and I came to this land of opportunity when I was twelve years old with the catholic sisters that had been living and working amongst my people. They spoke our language and understood our culture with the obvious exception of the colour of their skin, eyes and hair. They were white. The Ewe tribe are from the Gbe ethnic group that come from the South region of Benin Republic, West Africa. I come from a dogged-spirited society that has lived through incursions of a vicious trans-Atlantic slave trade, the influx of Islam and Christianity. When I think about it now, it seems I am the direct contradiction to such a brave people. That no matter what came at them, they were still standing. I, on the other hand, cowardly falling to my death because of what was said to me, or about me. If people knew the weight that words carry, they would be gentler and more cautious with them. The Ewe tribe had slaves of all types at the bottom of its social hierarchy; those conquered in wars also known as Ganto, outcasts known as Ouemesi, or people who were assigned to the gods or goddesses also known as Kan-nou-mon Vodunsi, people who committed incest or were cursed by the gods. It is not that slavery was new to us, it wasn’t. Our royalty were served by slaves. Some, conquered from wars with our neighbours while others carried the burden of servitude from their ancestry. What was new however, was the insecurity the Trans-Atlantic slave trade created, were suddenly, free men or anato easily became slaves and the indignity and inhumanness meted on them which would have shocked even our animals.

?My village, also my birth place, is called Essaka and it is situated in a valley, hedged by giant trees and mountains. As a little girl, I always thought we lived at the end of the world, protected, and that nothing foreign could find us. Slave trade did, and so did foreign religions and the white sisters. My father, Glele Badohou was a vodun priest, who was next in authority to the village chief. He upheld the traditions of the land and had no business with the ever growing stream of religions infiltrating our culture. Therefore, I am what the modern world would describe as a heathen; which has always amused me. Just because you have no knowledge of my belief does not automatically make me an irreligious or uncultured person. He performed all the traditional rites like initiation rites of young boys to manhood, male circumcision, coronation and crowning of a new chief, sacrifices for good or bad harvests, and occasionally, the more sinister rites like human sacrifices to clear curses. My culture is patrilineal and allows polygyny so my father has three wives and 26 children. Each wife, trying to out-do the other in the number of children they bear, especially boy children. In my culture, a man’s respectability is largely dependent on the size of his family. The number of sons he had, the number of wives, the number of his children and even his domestic slaves. Wives knew too well that the more children they had, the more they stood to gain at their husband’s demise because boys and girls inherited. For the men however, the larger your family, the more hands you had at the farm as agriculture was a dominant part of our economy. My mother, Hangbe who is from the Fon nu tribe is the first wife and she has ten children of which I am the first. The other two wives, have six and ten simultaneously between them. I was born at a time when communal wars had started becoming rampant and so my father called me Noxolo which means Peace. I was betrothed at birth to a boy ten years older whose father was an elder in the village and was known as a wealthy man in our village because of his commercial activities in Port Novo, the capital city. Glele let us his children attend school which the white sisters brought to our village because it did not cost him anything. It was however, an open secret in our culture that immediately a girl had her period, she was to be married off to her betroth. Such was my fate and that of all my sisters. I loved school. It gave my mind a freedom that I never knew existed. I learned a new language of the white people and cultures that either didn’t know mine existed, or thought of it as uncouth. I also learned about the white man’s god who I was told would love me unconditionally if I accepted his son as my god. Our people were naturally loyal to the point where dodgy characters could be ostracized. This was the dilemma I found myself in at school. I always felt I was being disloyal to the gods of my ancestors Vodun who by the way lived in the middle of my father’s compound. An elaborate shrine with pots housing century-long concoctions of things unknown, chicken feathers, cowries, animal skulls and a small sized gong-like bell. My fathers room walls off the shrine in the middle of the compound and all around it are huts, one for each wife and the other three huts, for the children. The smaller huts at the back of the compound are for the slaves and next to them, the yams and cassava barns. Every hut in the compound had a small calabash shaped like a gong tied to the door post which contained a charm to wade off evil spirits and bad luck.

I received scholarship as the best overall student from a non-governmental organisation to continue my high school and university education in Chicago, Illinois. The sisters were excited and eager for me and a handful of girls to travel. Apart from impacting education at the only school in my village, the sisters ran the first and only out-patient clinic in our district. They seemed not to accept our practice of circumcision of female children and I never understood why, until all my relationships failed, mostly because all my partners thought I was rigid. Every girl child in Essaka is circumcised at two weeks old, it is impossible to escape it because every birth is announced by my father, the mouth piece of the gods. He hits the metal gong hanging upside down in the market square to a peculiar tone for every situation. A death, a birth, the birth of a boy sounds different from the birth of a girl, a wedding, and so on. Gogo Nawilo, who used to be the village’s only mid-wife before the catholic sister’s arrived has been circumcising females in our society for years. When I think about my village now, and what I did to get here, it feels like another life. In a way, I would say the education I received was a two edged sword, it exposed me to worlds and things I didn’t even know existed, and it made me my father’s arch enemy and inadvertently, the enemy of Vodun, the god of our land. Maybe I should have succumbed to ignorance, I should never have told the sisters my father’s plan to marry me to my betrothed immediately my period came and my desire to go to school in America because this act, totally changed the trajectory of my life. My college professor in psychology used to say, 'everything starts and ends with the mind'. I never truly understood what he meant then. it's funny how it all makes sense now. I am a prisoner of my programmed mind. programmed to believe in father, his god and his curses.

My period showed up one day, as unexpected as a fart. I was on the farm with my ?step mother and some of my siblings. Unaware of myself, my step sister started giggling and whispering. Such an unexpected guest as a girl’s period is met with celebration because it signals her advent into womanhood as well as into marriage. Before I realised it, my sister ran off to tell Glele, our father who would send word to my betrotheds’ family so they can prepare to come and pay my bride price. Two thin streaks of red lines snaked their way down my legs as I hurried home to clean myself up. The weeks that followed were a distant blur. I do not know where I got the courage to face the mouth piece of the gods, Glele, the one no one dared to look at in the face. I told him I did not want to get married and I wanted to go to school. Nobody dared to defy Glele and this, coming from his offspring, who should indeed know better, infuriated him. I was his first born child, who had denied him a bride price, and brought shame to his household and good name, now he would have to perform a cleansing rite to avert this omen from spreading amongst his daughters. I ran away that night. I hid at the Sister’s convent for three days and on the fourth day, under the cover of darkness, Sister Judy and I left for Port Novo and then, America. Glele however placed a curse on me. I know this because joy and pain are public business where I come from. When a man dis-owns or places a curse on any of his family member’s, he did this at the shrine, with Glele as a witness. Glele, would then beat the gong at the market square and announce it for the whole village to hear. The cursed and the dis-owned were guilty of the unthinkable and therefore, the village had a duty to publicly ostracise them whether they knew their crimes or not. The sister’s and I (in hiding) heard clearly Glele’s curse from the market square. It was a dark rainy night and he beat the gong three times with so much force, it seemed like we could hear it from the next compound. Preceding a deafening lightning and thunder, my father shouted out my name three times, ‘Noxolo, Noxolo, Noxolo Badohou, m?kpo dzidz? gbe?e o’, which translates to ‘Noxolo, Noxolo, Noxolo Badohou, you will never find happiness’. It was all so sinister and dramatic. The gods have a sense of human after all. I had to put on a brave face but Glele’s words stayed with me through, middle school, college, university, at my job, everywhere. It became the reason why my relationships at work and with men failed. It was why I was covered with dread at the idea of intimacy and sex, It was why I lost two jobs in one year and why my last house mate thought I was weird in a voodooey way. This isn’t freedom, I am as much a prisoner to Glele’s words as I was to a culture that limited my existence. I was a baptised catholic on paper because of the route my life took to get me to America but Vodun ?is what I know. I am not one to rationalise religion but I think whatever you put your trust in, may just seem to work for you. A persons trust or faith activates their gods. Life in Essaka was simple and communal, the people are happy and content with their way of life. In Chicago, I find life to be always, lonely, little chit chats here and there but no strong attachments to real people. Phones and pets receive more care and attention than real people and I feel like a plant with no roots. My inability to formulate real relationships was because, I think my life is only worth my loyalty to my culture, one slip away from it, cost me an ostracising that uprooted me from belonging and threw me out to a prison created by my faith in Glele’s words. So I jumped to what I hoped would eventually bring me freedom but here I…………(beeeepppppp the machine screamed as the doctor turned it off until it quietened to a deafening silence).