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International

Women’s Day 2017

Anthology

Praxis Magazine Online, 2017 International Women’s Day Anthology

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Published by Praxis Magazine Online, 2017

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Table of Contents

Woman, Human: Introduction by John ‘Lighthouse’ Oyewale ...................................................... 1

Identity – Ejiro Edward ................................................................................................................... 8

On dwelling in the house of the Lord forever – Abigail George .................................................... 9

The sprig of rosemary for one – Abigail George .......................................................................... 10

A Sour Promise – Ahmad Holderness ........................................................................................... 12

Without Eyes – Ahmad Holderness .............................................................................................. 13

Becoming – Daisy Odey ............................................................................................................... 14

Equality – Daisy Odey .................................................................................................................. 15

An-Nur Al-Ain: the gesture of hair – Sheikha A .......................................................................... 16

(1) – Blaize Itodo .......................................................................................................................... 17

Getting There - Farah Ghuznavi ................................................................................................... 18

Eurydice Descending a Staircase – E. Alice Isak ......................................................................... 29

not for sale – OsyMizpah Unuevho .............................................................................................. 30

pentacles and phalluses - OsyMizpah Unuevho ........................................................................... 31

not for sale – Daniel John Tukura ................................................................................................. 32

Petals – Safia Khan ....................................................................................................................... 33

Being a Mother in Eastern Aleppo – Salawu Olajide ................................................................... 34

world power – Ayoola Goodness .................................................................................................. 35

(2) – Blaize Itodo .......................................................................................................................... 36

Reincarnation – Obiajulu Nwodo ................................................................................................. 37

The Definition of Love – Imade Iyamu ........................................................................................ 38

Definition: Love – Adedayo Adeyemi Agarau .............................................................................. 44

I am not even Eve – Trust Tonji .................................................................................................... 45

nude: feminine – Shannon Hopkins .............................................................................................. 46

I Am – Shannon Hopkins .............................................................................................................. 47

Masculinity in the world of a woman… – Fatima Ijaz ................................................................. 48

We Need To Rest – Thato Chuma ................................................................................................. 49

Man, Feminist – Essay by Otosirieze Obi-Young ......................................................................... 50


A woman’s body is poetry but yours disagrees – Chisom Okafor ................................................ 55

Time – Victor Ugwu...................................................................................................................... 57

My body, mine – Victor Ugwu ...................................................................................................... 58

nobody but my own – Megan Ross............................................................................................... 59

Family Dynamic – Mary McCarthy .............................................................................................. 60

Boyfriend – Mary McCarthy ........................................................................................................ 61

Fluid – Zainab Haruna .................................................................................................................. 62

Lessons – Ejiro Edward ................................................................................................................ 64

About the Contributors ................................................................................................................. 65


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Woman, Human: Introduction by John ‘Lighthouse’ Oyewale

The Woman is a cosmic subject, and a subject of eternal scrutiny. People pick up

this icosahedral subject, turn it this way and that, observe the light that falls on and

bounces off its many facets. There is never anyone who does nothing with this

gemstone of a subject. There are those who do nothing with this gemstone of a

subject: except push it about, except tease it, except wrinkle the nose at it, except

trample on it, except deny the existence of the technicolour of the reflected rays.

These are the proverbial swine which do not recognise pearls; philistines who do

not appreciate useful beauty, especially once it has a life per se, a life of its own, a

life in some way beyond their control, a life which defies their simplistic definitions.

And then there are those who, in their examination of the subject, are fair in,

generous even with, their observations, and faithful in recording the same. They

deserve first attention. They even notice that there is a light within, inherent in,

original to, the subject. How they record what they see is a question of what facet

from which the light radiated or was reflected, as the case may be, and what mode

of artistic expression is natural to them. Leonardo da Vinci turned to the poplar

panel, painted for us Mona Lisa—in itself a subject of unending scrutiny. Ludwig van

Beethoven turned to the piano with his characteristic intensity, and teased out ‘Für

Elise’. Àṣá (Bùkọ́lá Ẹlẹ́mìdé) turned to the microphone and belted out, ‘Ẹ bá mi kíra

fún màmá mi / òrìsà bí ìyá ò / kò sí l’áíyé’, in the song ‘So Beautiful’. The twenty-

seven writers who have contributed to this International Women’s Day 2017

Anthology have examined the same all-important subject, the Woman (and the

inevitably related themes of femininity and feminism), through the diverse yet

related means of poetry, prose, and visual art.

*

An anthology of this sort, although not the first of its kind, is a necessary one. It

remains necessary to write about the Woman because we cannot be overeducated

about the subject. Its myriad facets still give off lights of varying wavelengths and

intensities and subtleties, all of which deserve to be detected and recorded on

whatever photographic plate of artistic expression that there is—not least of all an

anthology, a kaleidoscope of art. We cannot be overeducated about the subject of

the Woman, only undereducated—often by choice and out of the force of habit. And

as long as such individuals as the wilfully undereducated and the intellectually lazy,

the philistines, remain in the world, in the street as well as on the corridors of

power, education facilitated by resilient minds will remain necessary. Writing back


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will remain necessary. Writing forward will remain necessary. Re-orientation will

remain necessary. The issue cannot be flogged to death.

Few writers on the Nigerian artscape have persevered in educating us more

than Ukamaka Olisakwe, this literary magazine’s inaugural fiction editor, whose

stories (the remarkable shorts ‘Running’ and ‘Nkem’s Nightmare’, for instance, and

her debut novel Eyes of a Goddess) are often about women and—to allude to the

title of one of my earliest published short stories—the burden of conformity. In an

October 2015 Facebook post, she reveals her concern about how social order foists

burdens on women’s shoulders:

‘Living as a woman, especially in our cultural setting, is the most difficult job

in the world. We struggle to walk straight because the piles of expectations

heaped on our shoulders left us with hunchbacks, but when we complain that

these weights are choking the life out of us, you see people creep out from

their different comfortable holes to brand you “an angry feminist”, a

“feminazi.”

‘[…]

‘Partriachy (sic) is a SYSTEM of oppression which can’t be erased without a

total overhaul. And that looks like an impossible thing to do. Patriarchy has

so sunk into our consciousness that we breathe it as air, and that’s why

many people have a problem with feminism because they fear it is sucking

the only air they know how to breathe.’

At bottom, therefore, there is fear. Fear is what makes the male scramble for

control over the female. Fear is what drives the male into blaming the female for

his own failings. Fear is what makes the female give conditioned responses ranging

from suppressed frustration to resignation and even complicity in the perpetuation

of lopsided conventional wisdom about femaleness, femininity, and feminism. And

‘fear has torment’. Few are the lights that confront, if not dispel outright, fear

better than writing. Few are the writings that confront, if not dispel, the fear of

feminism better than an anthology of art with the Woman as its very theme.

*

This world demands the qualities of femininity—to tweak a phrase from Robert

Kennedy’s stirring 1966 speech, ‘Day of Affirmation’. Emotion, passion, empathy,

intuition, self-sacrifice, cunning, a remarkable capacity for multitasking: these are

skills which males are forgiven, but which females are castigated, for not

possessing or demonstrating. (Just as it is deemed normal, if you like, for males to

be angry—even though anger is not a sensible emotion, frankly—but an anathema,

almost, for females to be.) And still it was emotion, genuine emotion which powers

reasonable action, that Nigeria’s Ẹ̀gbá women in the late 1940s (led by Fúnmiláyọ̀


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Ransome-Kútì, the Lioness of Líṣàbi) and the Igbo and Calabar women in the Ogu

Umunwanyi, the Women’s War of 1929, who protested against taxes imposed by

British-remote-controlled native chiefs, so successfully stirred. It was passion,

awakening passion, that the youngest Nobel Laureate, Malala Yousafzai, speaking

at the United Nations Youth Takeover conference on ‘Malala Day’, 12th July, 2013,

and in Oslo, Norway, on 10th December, 2014 as she received her Nobel Peace

Prize, inspired. It was windowpane-clear, crystal-pure empathy that led to the first-

ever utterance, in defence of a defenceless woman caught in flagrante in the

ultraconservative Jewish society of about two millennia ago, of the ever-radical,

ever-progressive, immortal idiom, First cast a stone. It was self-sacrifice inspired

by insight and perspicacity that the beautiful Yorùbá queen Móremí, a 12th-century

Queen Esther, displayed, for through surrendering herself to voluntary captivity to

the Igbó (forest) people (no relation to the Igbos of south-eastern Nigeria) who

terrorised the Yorùbá kingdom of Ilé-Ifè, and through surrendering herself to

marriage to the ruler of the raiders, she learned the secret of their invincibility, and

on the next raid on Ilé-Ifè, the Igbó people suffered a crushing defeat. It was the

same trait that Jeanne d’Arc, La Pucelle d’Orléans, demonstrated, in gaining the

Dauphin Charles VII’s confidence and , at just seventeen years of age, helping his

beleaguered army to swift decisive victories at Orléans, Jargeau, the areas around

the Loire, and Patay, inter alia, thus breaking the nearly one-hundred-year-long

English domination and restoring French amour-propre. It was ‘a woman’s resolve’

that Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe of ancient Britain, evinced, as she led a

revolt against the perfidious Roman colonial masters. It was cunning, shrewdness,

that Jael displayed in giving Sisera milk rather than water, thus lulling the dreaded

general to the sleep of death—for the woman drove a nail through the exhausted

general’s sedated temple, and ultimately won the battle for her people. It was with

strength and poise and presence of mind and precision that ‘a certain woman’,

unnamed, one of those who had fled for refuge high up in a tower during the siege

of Thebez, cast a millstone all the way down onto the head of the warrior-king who

led the campaign against the city, thus becoming the unlikely hero who with one

effort worked out both the abrupt end of the fighting and the deliverance of her

city. (Fatally injured, this dying Galatian of a king still managed to express his

ingrained chauvinist fear of the possibility of such an epitaph as ‘A woman killed

him’, and so had to get his aide-de-camp to administer to him the coup-de-grâce.)

More importantly, one quality which is traditionally regarded as masculine, that is,

venturesomeness, daring, is the singular trait onto which the aforementioned traits

are threaded. The world demands these qualities because in reality they are human

qualities, not feminine qualities per se. There is, or there should be, femininity in

masculinity and vice versa, a girl in a boy and vice versa, or we will not have the

total human. ‘When the midwife says, “It’s a girl”, where does the boy go?’ asked

Hilary Mantel, the twice MAN Booker Prizewinning British historical novelist, in her

memoir, Giving up the Ghost. ‘Into fiction, in my case,’ she herself responds during


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a literary panel discussion, as she expatiates on her interest in male characters

(Thomas Cromwell, Rafe Sadler, King Henry VIII). So we see it is both lazy and

pointless to genderise and dichotomise qualities, especially qualities needed for the

survival and the small victories of humanity in general. In this day and age in which

the lightning of terror strikes from east to west, from the Northern hemisphere to

the Southern, those qualities we lazily categorise as feminine are what sustain the

world and give us a reason to live and to hope for the restoration and sustenance of

relative peace.

*

This anthology is a necessary one. Its beauty is a composite one: it is a vast picture

made up of the diverse pixels contributed by the writers: it is a montage, even. One

unique fact about it is how the contributors give voice to the Woman, empowering

her to define herself and to protest against the skewed definitions of herself

perpetuated in this male-dominated world in which she lives: many of the entries

are written in the first- and second-person voices, and arguably the most significant

phrase is ‘I am’. In the poem ‘Identity’, Ejiro Edwards’s female poet-persona’s

assertiveness and self-awareness are traits more of which we need to see in more

girls and women. Abigail George’s vivid, picturesque poems reveal the Woman as

fully aware of herself and her complexities; as the salt of the family and

community, influential yet underappreciated. Ahmad Holderness’s female poet-

persona in ‘A Sour Promise’ is protesting against the burden of male expectation

and insisting that the roles of males and those of females in society are, like the

two strands of the DNA helix, complementary. In his ‘Without Eyes’ are two kinds of

women: one speaks; the other ‘hide[s] their voices behind their eyes’. In the

poignant poem ‘Becoming’, which is redolent of a poem on a rite of passage, Daisy

Odey reveals ‘how a girl becomes a woman’; in ‘Equality’, the briefest and yet

possibly the most quotable of entries, how, in death, the great leveller, gender

matters nothing. Sheikha A.’s ‘An-nur Al-Ain: the Gesture of Hair’ has a brilliant,

quotable opening gambit you might love to memorise, and addresses—again—the

burden of living in a society run by the rules set without sensitivity to the woman’s

person. You could write an essay on Blaize Itodo’s inspirational photograph of the

smiling, working woman, quite probably Fulani, as the head (the husband is non-

existent in the photograph at least), as an example for the still-vulnerable

generation she has brought forth and is now bringing up through patience and pain.

(His other photograph tells us a story of alternative beauty, the kind against which

you will brush shoulders in the street, the kind you will not find on the pages of

Playboy or Vanity Fair.) Farah Ghuznavi’s short story, ‘Getting There’, with its far-

reaching, prescient, positive ending, and set in Bangladesh, is a unique and

beautiful story of the female adaptation to, or else struggle against, the burden of

male expectation and entitlement within the family circle, which is where it can


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cause the greatest, most life-altering damage; and of the power of having the

presence of mind to make sensible choices in a world where the rule is that the

choice is instead to be made for you because you are female. It is only E. Alice

Isak’s contribution, ‘Eurydice Descending a Staircase’, that draws, and that

remarkably, from Greek mythology; and still it is rendered in intelligently playful

English; and it exhumes for trial the hidden misogyny in enduring classical myths.

OsyMizpah Unuevho’s ‘not for sale’, inspired by Tee Jay Dan’s (Daniel John

Tukura’s) photograph of the same title, and ‘phalluses and pentacles’, are versified

declamations concerning the female identity, with the latter ending with the

powerful lines: ‘with phalluses came dominance / yet the woman is a powerful

tarot.’ And now we arrive at Tee Jay Dan’s grave photograph itself, ‘not for sale’,

with its display of the mind-bending coincidence of having a young girl reading a

book with the terse notice ‘NOT FOR SALE’ on the house just behind her: we know,

if we are alive to the keenness of the photographer’s power of observation of

seemingly inconsequential things and the hidden metaphors in them, that there is

more to that notice than its literal, immediate application. In Safia Khan’s ‘Petals’

we find that to love a woman is not to love her in isolation but to love her alongside

all the experiences, good or bad, that have made and marked her as a woman. In

the cabin of Olajide Salawu’s beatific ‘Being a Mother in Eastern Aleppo’, we travel

to war-torn Syria and learn what it means to be a mother there, the true-grit that

mothering in Eastern Aleppo requires. Ayoola Goodness’s ‘World Power’ depicts the

Woman as the restorer and rebuilder in the wake of destruction wreaked by male

lust. In ‘Reincarnation’, Nwodo Obiajulu focuses on the indestructibility of the

Woman, creating an idiom better than one about the Woman as a crushed rose. In

Imade Iyamu’s ingenious futuristic story, ‘The Definition of Love’, a robot gains self-

awareness through poetry and interrogates the pigeonholing of her identity; she

falls out with the computer engineering professor who designed her, plunges into a

hard life as a commercial sex worker, meets a genuine lover who sees and accepts

her as a woman, gains redemption through the pen, through writing books on

feminist ideals, only to be outed to the world as a mere robot by the same

professor and thus lose the only man who had genuinely loved her. In Adedayo

Adeyemi Agarau’s ‘Definition: Love’, influenced by—yet again—Tee Jay Dan’s

photograph, ‘not for sale’, the female identity and the right of the female over her

body and the fact that the female can indeed bear the responsibility of finding

healing and relevance are again at issue. Trust Tonji’s ‘I Am Not Even Eve’ speaks

of the uniqueness of the female physiology and its accompanying pain. Shannon

Hopkin’s pencil sketch, ‘nude: feminine’, and her poem, ‘I Am’, highlight the beauty

and assertiveness and vulnerability and plain humanity of the sheet music that is

the female person. Fatima Ijaz’s ‘Masculinity in the World of a Woman’ has the

female persona considering with wonder what disruptive influence the presence of a

man in a woman’s life could be. Thato Chuma’s ‘We Need to Rest’ is angst-ridden

and trenchant: it could well have been the rallying cry of the Abeokuta Women’s


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Union or the women who waged the Ogu Umunwanyi. Otosirieze Obi-Young’s work

of non-fiction, ‘Man, Feminist’, measured, even-toned, is written from the depth of

a sensitive heart painfully aware of, and even fessing up to being tacitly complicit

in, male domination and privilege, and optimistic that many of the current and

future existential problems of the world could be solved or even precluded by

solving gender issues. Through Chisom Okafor’s ‘A Woman’s Body is Poetry but

Yours Disagrees’, the disillusionment and mortal despair that results from the lack

of resolution between personal sexual identity and the socio-legal position on the

same is portrayed in intense shades. Victor Ugwu’s ‘Time’ and ‘My Body, Mine’

speak of how the woman’s life is one breathless forced sprint refereed by the male

presence, a sprint on the tracks of a backwater society towards premature

motherhood which, to the referee’s mind, is the only significant marker of female

relevance. Megan Ross’s ‘nobody but my own’ is in praise of that solitude, however

brief, in which the Woman feels in possession of her entire self, feels free of being

defined solely and always in terms of a man. The Woman, in Mary McCarthy’s

‘Family Dynamic’, protests against the familial abuse she suffers and speaks of the

struggle to shield the kernel of her psyche from the abuse. The burden of male

expectation in romantic relationships is clear in McCarthy’s ‘Boyfriend’. Zainab

Haruna’s lyrical ‘Fluid’ depicts the Woman as multidimensional, possessing and

demonstrating the right to resist a single-story definition. It is Ejiro Edwards’s

‘Lessons’ that tells us that the anthology is, if we will in one word define its form,

an envelope, for the anthology ends where it starts: does it hurt that the Woman is

human, that she exists—does even her name hurt? If yes, then, contrary to

expectation, make no mistake: she’s never about to change it.

*

There is a woman or a girl somewhere in this world who, as you read this, is asking

the poignant question which Model X008, or Adiya, the robot in Iyamu’s ‘The

Definition of Love’, asked Professor Dim: ‘Aren’t I human? A woman?’ It is a

question that reminds you of the motto ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ engraved

on the 18th-century Quaker Josiah Wedgewood’s famous Slave Medallion. It is an

indictment of the world for its deeply entrenched inequalities enshrined in

convention. It is a call to rethink conventions.

Convention is convenient. Ordinarily, convention should serve to make things

convenient. For it is, by nature, an agreement, the conclusion of a deliberation, a

consensus reached. But one trouble with convention is: who are those present at

the deliberation? In history, mostly men: ‘princes, powers, and potentates’. Who

create and/or enforce the acceptable standards? Mostly men. Do they take account

of women all the time? No. Are they infallible, men? No. Also, the trouble with the

convenience that results from convention is that often it slows things down to the

point of complacency; and also it is partial towards a certain group, who thus enjoy


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the convenience (in what Olisakwe called their ‘comfortable holes’) at the expense

of the other group. Thus it goes rancid rather quickly, convention, a bad sense

accretes onto it over the years, inviting contraconventions, the—to borrow from

Obi-Young’s ‘Man, Feminist’—knocking down of walls and making of ways. For the

other group, the otherised group, groans and bites back, in a bit to gain small but

key redemptions. And indeed there are, to quote from Olisakwe’s Facebook post

again, this time from the peroration, ‘small redemptions, and that’s in knowing we

can question certain things and ask that we stop practising certain silly cultures

that make it difficult for women to live.’ This questioning, this asking, demanding,

this rising and speaking up against ‘certain silly cultures that make it difficult for

women to live’, this—if we could tinker a bit a sentence from Iyamu’s story—

upholding of consciousness which, once created, cannot be destroyed, gives up

hope that we are—to adapt the title of Farah Ghuznavi’s entry—getting there, and

is precisely what the contributors to this necessary anthology have done:

Which leads me to invite you to read this work of questioning, this anthology

about the Woman, in the hope that the diverse lights captured in and shed from it

will light your seven-storey ascent to the truth about the all-important subject.

John ‘Lighthouse’ Oyewale,

August, 2017.

John ‘Lighthouse’ Oyewale’s works are in What’s On Africa, Short Story Day Africa,

ITCH, Sankofa, the anthology Enter Naija: The Book of Places, among others. A

short story of his is longlisted for the 2017 Writivism Short Story Prize. In February,

2017, he, alongside twenty-eight other African writers, was selected as a Writivism

Creative Writing Programme mentee. An alumnus of the British Council, Ake Arts

and Books Festival, and Goethe-Institut creative writing workshops, he now serves

as fiction editor at Praxis Magazine for Arts and Literature.


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Identity – Ejiro Edward

Is my name difficult? Too hard for you? Does it make you burn?

Filled with fury? Too hard to pronounce?

Does it feel like a thorn in your tongue? Scaring you that am something real? Something that exists?

If yes?

Then Am not changing it.


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On dwelling in the house of the Lord forever – Abigail George

I am dove-wing and prayer.

In the family way, I hold a tribe of birds in my heart-all waves of golden-mystery.

I am solitude. Futility. Grace. Hope and loneliness. Here my enemies

teach me on how to navigate my soul. On finding myself in the wilderness in close reflection, I find

myself in green pastures.

Every woman here is a Jerusalem. The streets of Jerusalem Are paved with driftwood.

There are paths there that are ancient and worn. Cobblestones that hurt

your feet. Every woman in the wilderness wears a tiara, diamonds and pearls. Between hope and despair

Rain turns my reality into a poem. I sing in those green pastures.


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The sprig of rosemary for one – Abigail George

I’m a lone gull swooping through the air. The autumn and winter gull star-like. I’m a black hole. A city of

particles and atoms. A celestial kind of single girl. A flock of regret and

waves of torment rushing through me. I’m attracted to beauty. Sad music that’s been composed by princes like

Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Schubert And Debussy. There’s no one to

applaud my roast chicken’s woven gold phenomena. My kitchen table wisdom. My Sunday lunch. My melt-in-the-mouth

sweet potato. Cooked-to-glazed-perfection vegetables. There’s no one to listen to my version of

Don’t cry for me Argentina. Madonna. Whitney Houston. Sarah Brightman. And when the aftermath of the end of

the day comes. The stain of starved faces amidst poverty on the nightly broadcast

of the news. When the flock of silence fills the shadows in my bedroom I make a

dinner party out of a glass of wine. I make too much of everything. Bredie.

Lasagne. Pasta. I have to throw out food. The cat won’t eat it. I’ve grown to like having a meal on my own in a restaurant

while reading a book. Gazing up at the stars (reviewing them in silence)

with my eye to the telescope. I know what sadness is. This lone gull. This autumn and winter gull fighting for survival. I’m a single

gal coming home from the sea with the diamonds of sand showing in my shoes.

You will find me wandering along a deserted beach. Taking photographs of

landscapes, flowers, animals. To hang memories on the wall. Paste in an album. Eating quiche, drinking Sprite in a


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beachfront restaurant. Observe! The

flaming sun. It does not need a mate. A life partner. It is still gorgeous and healthy. There is no one to tell me that I am bad or good or that I am

keeping secrets from them for their own good.


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A Sour Promise – Ahmad Holderness

You want me to offer what I don't have. To have an insight into a future

you expect more; to know

days that will be filled with rains of silver and storms of gold.

But when the day tilts and becomes strange; you want me to inform you, you are even

enraged if I try to enlighten you. It is for-better-for-worse; this union.

So when the wind is thin and grey and the sky is drunk and awake

to impale us with pallor and a streak of omen that makes tomorrow

reek of hopelessness-

You can't unscrew our roles. It has always been complementary; one strand, always linked to the other


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Without Eyes – Ahmad Holderness

I was once in a gathering of ladies that once asked, Show me a man that knows the way to the kitchen?

Without a moment’s thought I raised my hands, both, because I was quite sure they didn’t know I was blind.

Skeptic were their smiles; you must wonder how I see them? But a woman’s voice reveals all that loiters in her heart.

Of women there are two kinds I’ve found; those that speak

and those that hide their voices in their eyes.


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Becoming – Daisy Odey

This is how a girl lets go She sits by a fire

And feeds it memories Fans dying embers with a prayer

as she whispers: Guilt is best cremated

she stares at a ripple Belly dancing

In a puddle Where she’s drowned a made up reflection.

She gives her voice

to the mountains leaves them singing of lost children

in a dying echo.

She buries her Footprints on the lips of a thirsty shore Moistened by salt water

waiting for a familiar kiss From a wave

that will not return This is how a girl

becomes a woman she loses herself

in letting go


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Equality – Daisy Odey

Every Body is a corpse everybody is a soul in death

genderless all human

none the less


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An-Nur Al-Ain: the gesture of hair – Sheikha A

Her eyes are glass reflecting falling birds. She hides their nests in her scarf. Pause in the moment, reverse

time to when she made friends based on crunching dirt the loudest;

shorts worn by anyone with a pair of legs, and being silly couldn’t lure unsolicited handling. Look back into

her eyes. Can you see burnished embers line up her rims? It is where

she hides pockets of intimacy. It was too soon to have learnt the importance of veiling. A Muslimah

must know all the rules that aren’t hers: acts of barriers. She bears in the globe

of her thickly layered head the voluminous grace of pretending. Don’t judge her predisposition. She meets men over phones

where childhood is intrigued, never seen. Even then, she will show you a set

of healthy wrists. There are fists on her back banging to break in. Glass eyes carving and carving – clumps of

hair stranded at her feet.


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(1) – Blaize Itodo


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Getting There - Farah Ghuznavi

Laila realised she had to get a grip after she caught herself sighing for the third time in five minutes. She desperately needed to talk to someone, and the few friends who qualified were out of reach. Their much-anticipated girls' night out the

previous week had been eclipsed by the jolt of more recent events, those celebrations leeched of their colour into a faded fragment of memory.

The car ride was the first opportunity she had had to think clearly since things fell apart, and her body seemed to be using the breathing space literally, drawing in

deep lungfuls of air, and expelling them with equal enthusiasm.

Despite the vehicle's quietly efficient air-conditioning system, Laila's skin felt heated. A sense of irritation prickled along her tightly stretched nerves—as if irreverent fingers were teasing a set of piano keys, every now and then hitting a

grinding note of disharmony, as the seriousness of the situation struck her anew. Uneasy as she felt, it was an enormous relief to be heading back to Dhaka. The

Bangladeshi capital felt like home to Laila in a way that the port city of Chittagong never had.

Leaving to her capable driver the task of negotiating the treacherous highway traffic, she cast another furtive look back at the children. They lay with their tawny

golden limbs sprawled untidily in all directions, taking up the spacious rear of her new Honda Accord.

She couldn't help wondering what she had let herself in for, although the accident had left her little choice. But there were good reasons why she had decided never

to have children, she thought ruefully, and now she had two on her hands! It was bad enough having to deal with a teenager (in Laila's limited experience, this was a period that manifested like a disease rather than a stage of growth), but she

felt even less confident handling the younger child, who appeared, temporarily, to be silent.

Six-year-old Aliya had finally, mercifully, fallen sleep. Just in time. Her repeated queries about how much longer the trip would take had been interrupted only by

supplementary questions as to why she had to go anywhere with her unfamiliar aunt. Laila sympathised with her niece's feelings, but it didn't help an already

awkward situation. She was finding the journey interminably long herself, made worse by the frequent slowdowns in traffic whenever they approached a bridge, or

passed through yet another small town. Each time, the noise level went up. Crowds of pedestrians swirled past the vehicle

as it inched its way forward, its passengers hemmed in by the raucous crush of strangers. Hawkers paused briefly to display their wares—paper-wrapped cones of

hot, sand-roasted peanuts in the shell, improbably bright pink and green sweets, cheap plastic toys, hard-boiled eggs in the shell (always the safest bet, to avoid


Page | 19

stomach bugs), and multi-coloured hair-bands. Every so often beggars tapped pleadingly against the rolled-up windows, leaving behind smears on the glass as

ghostly reminders of their passing presence.

After her interrogation failed to extract satisfactory answers, Aliya began making increasingly impassioned demands to return home, exacerbating Laila's already unsettled frame of mind. She held on to her impetuous temper with some difficulty.

It was only after they reached an open stretch of highway, and relative quiet prevailed, that exhaustion finally caught up with the youngster.

In a contrast that could not have been starker, Aliya's teenage sister, Yasmin, had neither questions nor demands for their aunt. Laila calculated that Yasmin had not

uttered more than two consecutive sentences since their abrupt re-introduction a few days ago. Not strange, of course, given that she was still in shock. An

intelligent fourteen-year-old, the implications of what was happening could not have been lost on her.

Now, accidentally making eye contact with the older girl as she threw another compulsive look backwards, Laila observed the guarded expression on Yasmin's

shuttered face. Obviously, she understood all too well what was happening, and why.

Trying to deflect Laila’s annoyance during Aliya’s earlier tirade, Yasmin had spoken up for her sister. ‘Don’t mind Aliya. She's just tired, you know, and a little scared.’

And with that, the teenager lapsed into what Laila was beginning to think of as her characteristic silence. Just as well. The emotions simmering below the surface of

their mundane exchanges rendered hollow any pretence of normality. Yasmin's reticence was perfectly understandable, Laila conceded. Their lack of

familiarity had been brought into sharp focus by this unexpected, unwelcome proximity, something that would have been problematic even without the emotional

carnage left lingering in the wake of recent events. Laila's mind drifted back to the point where her life had started to spiral awry, just

seventy-two hours and a lifetime ago. She was having a night out with her closest girlfriends after way too long. It was her treat, to celebrate a lucrative contract

their architectural firm had just won—this time with an innovative design for yet another of the ubiquitous shopping centres mushrooming amidst the urban snarl-up of Dhaka.

The group played a particularly important part in Laila’s life, since, unlike the

others, she had no time for romance. She hadn't broken the chokehold of her father's control to risk replacing it with another entitled male in her life, however silken the glove disguising that handsome fist might be.

Returning home several glorious hours later, Laila cast a cursory glance at her

mobile phone. To her dismay, there were twenty-three missed calls buzzing in her call-list like a swarm of angry bees. If the number of incoming calls had not been


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sufficient to signal an approaching storm, the area code indicating their source as the city of Chittagong left her in no doubt that she would not like what was heading

her way.

The sound level at the event had been raucous, high spirits and other spirits combining to melt the edges of her normally alert senses into a warm caramel haze. Otherwise the racket from the mobile would have been unmissable. Mentally

berating herself for the time lost—the digits from the persistent number flashing like red neon lights through the haze enveloping her tired brain—she called back

immediately. The reassuring solidity of the mahogany dining table provided much-needed

support, though Laila was not conscious of leaning against it as she listened to her mother's halting voice spill out the story: about her sister Shaheen, an accident on

the highway, and the clinical silence of the intensive care unit as a terrified family huddled together for comfort, waiting for news.

‘Where were you? We've been trying to reach you for hours! You’re never there when you’re needed! And why are you finally calling now, so late at night?’ Ma said

accusingly. Despite an instinctive sense of resentment at her mother's tone, Laila registered her usual Pavlovian response, stammering an apology as waves of guilt

shuddered through her. This was why she had left Chittagong, she couldn't help thinking, with more than a

little bitterness. Not that she would ever have allowed herself to articulate that thought out loud, of course. As she had done for so much of her life, she kept it

tucked safely away in the inner recesses of her surviving self, the place that had always provided a safe haven when her immediate surroundings were no longer where she wanted to be.

Ultimately, she had chosen to abandon the city of her birth for a new start in

Dhaka, a change that was somehow far less frightening than the prospect of remaining trapped in Chittagong.

It was the only way of escaping from the endless questions, orders, rebukes, and demands that had defined her childhood and adolescence. Her father had ruled

their lives with impunity, her mother reduced to a pale reflection of the man she was married to. Ma had been a young entrant to matrimony, still in her teens when she was handed over like a prettily-wrapped package to a much older man. She

had learned her place early, and stayed in it. Although Laila didn't doubt that her father would have made Ma pay dearly had she betrayed any inclination to rebel.

At any rate, Ma never intervened to save her daughters, even on the rare occasions when her husband's anger took on physical dimensions. Perhaps she was incapable of it. Once she was old enough to analyse her mother’s behaviour, it had always

seemed to Laila that Ma was too busy just trying to survive the burden that was life.


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As it was, Ma had paid a high price for producing two daughters, persisting through several miscarriages until the severe haemorrhaging that followed Laila's birth

finally released her from that particular cycle of suffering. But Baba and Ma’s relationship had defined for Laila with chilling clarity what she would not allow her

life to become. Artistic by nature, her creativity was something that her parents viewed with

distrust. Her father, in particular, was adamant in refusing her the pursuit of those interests. Art classes were out of the question, and a series of hidden sketchbooks

bore a mute testimony to the lonely passion that refused to die. But Baba knew his stubborn younger child better than to think that matters would

end with his refusal regarding the classes. He remained suspicious. Until finally, yet another round of Ma’s surreptitious rifling through Laila’s clothes cupboard yielded

the forbidden materials. Arriving home that afternoon, Laila found her parents waiting in her room. Her

sense of outrage arrested somewhere between her chest and her throat, she struggled not to react. The pile of sketchpads lay scattered on her writing desk in a

way that made her fingers itch to stack them more tidily, even if she could not actually whisk them away to safety.

Baba’s nostrils flared, his voice tight, as he demanded an explanation: ‘What do you have to say for yourself, Laila?’

Ma stood silently on one side of the room. She was less an accomplice than a bit

player in this drama. Her mind racing to come up with a strategic response, Laila decided that passive acceptance of whatever punishment was forthcoming would be the best way to deal with the situation. She kept her eyes trained firmly on the old-

fashioned stone floor, with its black, white and grey geometric patterns, ‘I'm sorry, Baba…’

He didn't let her finish. ‘Liar—you aren’t sorry at all! You've been sneaking around behind my back after I expressly told you to stop all this nonsense! Well, I have

had enough of this, enough of your stubbornness and disobedience…’ He flung out his arm, sending a few of the pads flying onto the floor. ‘Pick those up, and come

with me!’ Puzzled, Laila did as she was told, following her father out onto the veranda

attached to her bedroom. Shaheen was sitting outside, writing something in a notebook. It was typical of her sister to be doing homework on such a beautiful

winter afternoon instead of just relaxing or going out into the garden, Laila couldn't help thinking. Sensing the tension that thickened the air, Shaheen slipped the notebook back into her schoolbag, remaining seated.

‘Put them down here,’ Baba ordered, and Laila complied, reluctantly setting the

precious notebooks onto the floor, this time in a neat stack. She didn't realise what


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he had in mind until Baba took out his lighter. Shaheen’s eyes widened in horror, but she remained still.

Not Laila. ‘No, Baba! Please…Don’t do that!’ she begged, even as the small voice in

her head pointed out that trying to stop him would just inflame the situation. It always did.

‘Are you now telling me what to do?’ Baba snarled. ‘This has gone far enough! How dare you disobey me like this? I will not tolerate such insolence from a daughter of

mine! ’ ‘You can't destroy them, Baba—they don't belong to you! I don't belong to you!’

Laila cried. Even as the words burst out of her mouth, she heard her mother gasp in horror, and knew that she had gone too far.

Laila's defiance served to make Baba even angrier. If her initial disobedience had not been bad enough, her refusal to recant made matters worse—reinforcing his

conviction that girls, whatever their age, should not travel the dangerously seductive route of making their own decisions.

The inevitable flare-up of a temper that was unused to resistance in any form

ended in a literal conflagration. The loss of her beloved portfolio was a blow that stung far harder than the slap that accompanied it. Reliving the incident still left Laila shaking with a bitter, pungent anger.

Her sister Shaheen, nine years older, had never had the same difficulties with their

parents, perhaps because she personified the qualities their father considered suitable in a daughter, the attributes he considered desirable in a woman. Beautiful, intelligent, and talented she undoubtedly was. But above all, she was docile.

Even her sister’s marriage had been decided by Baba and Ma, carefully arranged

with the scion of a family belonging to the upper echelons of status-conscious Chittagong. The impeccable pedigree of this young rajputtur was chosen to provide consolation to a household deprived of the male heir responsible for carrying on the

glorious family name.

Perhaps it had been wise to leave the decision to Baba and Ma, Laila thought cynically. At least when her husband unceremoniously abandoned his marriage, her parents couldn't blame Shaheen for making a bad choice.

Laila, on the other hand, was determined to make all her own choices, particularly

the bad ones. What had started out as an academic compromise proved to be a fulfilling career after she won an architectural scholarship to a private university in Dhaka. That was an offer that even her father couldn't turn down, although they

had few friends and fewer relatives in the capital. It was to be a blessing for Laila, finally free of the suffocating oversight and obsessive interrogations that had

characterised her relationship with her parents.


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Despite that—and as if to disprove the doomsday mutterings of conservative relatives who maintained that nothing good could ever come of letting a teenage

girl go off on her own like that—no major rebellion followed. Laila was too busy keeping her head down and her grades up.

The normal pleasures of student life were ruthlessly excluded from her university experience. No, Laila had a plan, and failure just wasn't an option. The parties and

boyfriends that so many of the other girls took for granted would just have to wait until she was truly free of Baba’s authority.

Ironically, once that long-awaited freedom did materialise, she was to find that a deep-seated mistrust of men, coupled with an unwillingness to sacrifice her hard-

won independence, had created within her a siege mentality where the opposite sex was concerned. That Baba would have approved—for very different reasons—of her

capacity for self-protection galled Laila no end. Ultimately, five years of punishing discipline and single-minded focus paid off, as

did the ultimate ‘good Bengali girl’ lifestyle, even if the latter was essentially meant to ensure that Baba could find no reason to haul her back to Chittagong. Her visits

home became progressively more infrequent, heavy work schedules and library access for exam preparations providing a natural (and sufficiently convincing)

excuse for her increasing distance from her family. The lure of Western mores of individuality also became more apparent to her,

although she was aware that voicing such opinions would have been unacceptable, especially to her immediate family. So during those ever more widely-spaced visits

home, she kept her lips tightly shut against the risk of expressing controversial views, and her emotions firmly disengaged.

To her father's probing questions, she provided answers that were as vague as possible. With her sister and nieces, she maintained a friendly but distant manner,

the invisible iron fence that surrounded her remaining firmly in place. She smiled and ate the delicacies that her mother had painstakingly prepared—

luscious tiger prawns swimming through rich coconut gravy, and the classic nona ilish, seasoned fish roe cooked in a mouth-watering lentil and tomato sauce—

carefully choosing not to acknowledge the ever-present sadness in those lost, lonely eyes. After all, if Ma needed company, she could always go to her older daughter, who had never left the port city.

And after a few years, Ma didn't even have to go anywhere to visit Shaheen. The

family curse had been duly visited on her sister, and after a decade of marriage failed to produce anything more fruitful than two daughters, her husband left abruptly for more promising pastures.

Never having had to—or been allowed to—look after herself meant that Shaheen

was left completely bereft by this turn of events; and the ‘respectability’ valued so highly in old-fashioned Chittagong required her to move back to her parental home


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with her unwanted daughters. At the time, Yasmin had just turned nine, and Aliya was a baby.

But Laila had to give her sister credit. With a meagre BA in impractical English

Literature, Shaheen went back to school, leaving Aliya to be looked after by her grandmother. And within a few years, she had progressed from being a lowly substitute teacher to the coveted post of vice-principal at one of the leading

English-medium schools in Chittagong.

She earned a decent salary, which was just as well, since her ex-husband couldn't be bothered to waste his time or money on his disappointing daughters. But like the good daughter and respectable woman that she was, Shaheen continued to live in

her parents' home.

Sometimes Laila wondered what her sister thought about the way that her life had turned out. Shaheen had played strictly by the rules, but the outcome had hardly been as expected. She had gone from being an obedient daughter to a dutiful wife,

and it now looked as if her last major role would be as a devoted mother. Did she ever wonder who she really was, or what she could have achieved if she had been

allowed to make the important choices in life for herself?

Laila had no intention of asking Shaheen any of those questions. What she did know was that she would not be asking anyone for permission to make decisions about her own life.

Several job offers had followed her graduation with first-class honours, and her

decision to accept a job in a smaller firm established by a recently returned expatriate Bangladeshi ultimately brought her not only greater creative freedom than she might have had with one of the more established architectural firms, but

also considerable professional recognition. The contract for the new shopping centre was just the latest in a long string of successes for their team.

With the realisation of her cherished dream of financial independence, the last bastion of her father's influence in her life crumbled. Laila had never looked back

since. Why would she? There was nothing that she cared to remember about the life she had left behind in Chittagong, least of all the unflattering comparisons with

her sister that had defined those years. But Shaheen's accident changed everything. Laila made an emergency call to her

driver, setting out immediately for the city of her birth. Waiting for a flight would have meant losing precious hours. What she hadn't bargained for was an

interminable return journey with two traumatised children that she barely knew. Shaheen's condition had yet to stabilise, and Laila didn't dare think about what would happen if it didn't.

It was easier to focus on the practical details. There was no way her mother could

cope with the long convalescence required for Shaheen's recovery and look after two scared children at the same time. And Baba wasn't likely to be of much help.


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Between meeting his demands and caring for Shaheen, Ma would be stretched to the limit. So under the circumstances, Laila could not refuse the request to take the

children to Dhaka—‘just for a few weeks’—however much she might want to. And at least to herself, she could admit that she very much wanted to.

Because they were still on summer break, neither Yasmin nor Aliya would be missing school, and with a live-in housekeeper, Laila already had someone to keep

an eye on them during the workday. But having had so little to do with her nieces in the past, she knew that she would have to stretch her creative resources to find

ways of keeping them occupied. She was drawn out of her musings by a sound, realising that Yasmin was awake.

Her older niece had been surprisingly accommodating, perhaps to compensate for her little sister’s tantrums. Once Aliya fell asleep, Yasmin had occupied herself with

the passing landscape of emerald-green rice fields that separated the clusters of thatched mud huts sheltering under a cloudless blue sky.

Some of the homes boasted groves of coconut and betel nut trees, indicating a degree of relative affluence, with a small pond nearby to provide water for bathing,

laundry, and washing purposes. Others showed tell-tale signs of poverty, the roofing of huts gradually wearing away like dandruff flakes departing a scalp, the

children standing in front of the houses as scrawny as the goats or lone cow foraging for grass nearby.

Lulled by the picture-perfect rural surroundings and the hypnotic movement of the car, Yasmin soon gave in to her own exhaustion, her even breathing indicating that

she had been given a brief respite from her anxieties. As she surveyed the scene outside the car window, Laila could only hope that

Yasmin had not taken in the numbers of rusting, skeletal hulks that lay on either side of the highway, reproachfully bearing witness to the recklessness afflicting so

many Bangladeshi bus drivers. It was a similar disregard—albeit from the driver of a private car—that had left the girls' mother a splintered mass of flesh and bone cocooned in the fragile comfort of a hospital bed.

‘Hi there, awake again?’ Laila found herself now asking somewhat lamely, hating

the artificially upbeat tone of voice she felt compelled to use. Yasmin nodded. Despite her nap, the bruised look around the teenager's eyes indicated that she hadn’t had much sleep in the last few days. The protective way she held Aliya as

the younger girl slept revealed her priorities.

If only she had got to know her nieces better before the accident forced them together, Laila thought despairingly, ambushed yet again by an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. Racking her brain for a way to connect with Yasmin, she drew

a blank. So, fully aware that it was a pathetic topic to raise with any self-respecting teenager, Laila resorted to that old conversational standby: school.


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‘Do you enjoy studying at Dr Khastagir's? It's supposed to be a pretty good school...’

‘Yeah, I guess so,’ Yasmin answered listlessly.

‘Well, I guess it has to be better than studying at a school where your mother’s the vice-principal, right?’

‘Yes...’ This time the response was longer in coming, the teenager's voice sounding

thick with suppressed emotion. Laila could have kicked herself for the reference to Shaheen. The last thing she

wanted was to remind Yasmin about her mother's situation. Desperate to change the subject, she continued, ‘So what's your favourite class?’

To her surprise, Yasmin responded with sudden animation to the query. ‘It's art, actually. Like you. But I enjoy doing watercolours more than the pencil sketches

that you did. I think that's what I'm best at.’

Misreading the look of shock on her aunt's face, the teenager continued hurriedly, in a tone clearly intended to pacify her, ‘Of course, I do a lot of sketches as well—

for portraits, and as outline drawings for my watercolours...’ Her words tapered off as she continued to look at Laila, a little uncertain.

‘How did you know that I liked sketching?’ Laila asked, utterly taken aback by the extent of Yasmin's knowledge about her. There was more to come.

‘Ma told me. She said that you were really talented, but Nana never allowed you to have art lessons, although you wanted them so badly. He just wanted both of you

to study all the time. He's so old-fashioned! There's nothing we can do about that, I guess. It's too late for him to change. But it must have been really difficult for you!

‘You know, Ma had the same problem. She had to write her stuff down secretly, in her diaries. She showed me some of her stories and poems. She says I can read

the rest when I'm older. But I've already seen the story she wrote about you, about the time that Nana destroyed your entire portfolio. How could he be so mean! Ma

said that you gave up art after that. Is that true? I can’t believe that you would give up so easily!’

Laila was having trouble absorbing the implications of what Yasmin had so casually revealed, not least the fact that her goody two-shoes sister had ever had any

secrets. Shaheen's birth had been followed by a series of miscarriages, so it was almost a decade later that Laila finally made her appearance. And as far as she was concerned, quite apart from the age gap, there was a world of difference that

separated the two of them.

Growing up, Laila had resented Shaheen's ease in living up to their father's absurd expectations. It had never occurred to her that conforming might simply have been


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her sister's survival strategy. It was unsettling to consider the possibility that they might have had something in common after all.

Unaware of her aunt's thoughts, Yasmin went on, ‘I'm so glad that Ma isn't like

Nana! He thinks it's a waste of time, but she's really proud of my work. So is Nani. She keeps one of my pictures in her steel almirah, so that Nana won’t say anything about it. Actually, I have to say that even Nana isn't so bad anymore—at least, not

with me. I can't believe he burned your pictures though...Ma said that she had to be even more careful with her diaries after that happened. You must have been so

upset!’ ‘Yes, I was. But you're right, I did keep drawing. It's just that after that, I made

sure that I never kept any of my sketches at home,’ Laila said slowly, struggling to understand how Yasmin could know so much about her. So much more than she

herself knew about either of her sister's children. Somehow, thanks to Shaheen's efforts (why had her sister done that—would she

ever know?), and despite her own determined distance, Laila had remained a real presence within the family that she had so firmly left behind.

Misunderstanding her sudden thoughtfulness, Yasmin continued to chatter. ‘At least

you're happy now,’ she said consolingly. ‘It must be great to have a house of your own, and a car, and to be so good at what you do. Everyone in Chittagong talks about how successful you are, and how you've done it all on your own, getting

scholarships and everything. And Ma says you didn't even know anyone in Dhaka when you first went there!

‘I heard that for a while Nana didn't want you to go. Nani told me that she thought he was going to say no. Ma says he only allowed you to go because the scholarship

was such a big deal, and they couldn't afford to send you to a school like that themselves. But he thought you’d get tired of being alone and decide to come back

home anyway. Boy, was he wrong, huh! And now, Nani spends all her time showing off to her relatives about the buildings you've designed.

‘You know, I think I might want to be an architect too—if I decide not to be an artist, that is!’ Yasmin asserted, laughing. ‘Will you show me some of your drawings

once we get to Dhaka?’ ‘Of course,’ her aunt responded. ‘I'd love to.’ Even as she spoke, Laila recognised

the truth of what she was saying. Although her colleagues and friends had always been supportive, it would be nice to share something so important with someone

who was actually part of her family. It opened the door to all kinds of possibilities. The kindred soul that she sensed in Yasmin made Laila feel a genuine sense of connection with her niece—not least because she knew that they shared a troubled

relationship with their fathers. It made Laila wonder what might come out of an honest conversation with her sister, once Shaheen had recovered. If she recovered,

she thought with sudden terror. She pushed away the thought as quickly as it had popped up.


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It remained to be seen whether the chance to have that particular conversation

would ever materialise for the two of them, but in the meantime, Laila had an opportunity to get to know the girls better, especially Yasmin. With uncharacteristic

optimism, she allowed herself to consider the novel idea that a relative of hers might one day be part of her inner circle.

Their conversation was interrupted as Aliya awoke, but Laila had no doubt that it would be resumed.

As the little girl rubbed away the clinging remnants of sleep from her eyes, the other two braced themselves for the inevitable barrage of questions that was bound

to follow. Yet this time it was different, and Laila smiled a reassurance as she met Yasmin's anxious eyes.

Anticipating Aliya’s unspoken question, she said, ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, it won’t take long now. Please, just be patient for a little longer. We’re getting there, I

promise...’

“Getting There” first appeared in Out of Print Magazine (outofprintmag.com).


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Eurydice Descending a Staircase – E. Alice Isak

Striking how in myth, it’s always accidents

sending women to hell, keeping them there:

Persephone waiting to go home with her momma til whoops no, forgot to read the fine print

’bout don’t eat no Underworld food and suddenly her juice-stained mouth means no escape from Hades for you

young lady, Eurydice partying at her wedding, steps on a snake—

ne’rmind the groom with his honey-on-fire voice that lulls every beast, even gonna put Hades’ three-headed guard dog down for a nap

but can’t stop one punkass garden viper. Too busy showing off for his future father-in-law maybe (god of music and prophecy give it up for Apollo!)

to think of snakes.

Don’t get me started on that other colossal fuckup as he’s leading her out, turn around too soon and whoops there goes the wife back down unto death.

When does an accident beggar the accidental.

Am I really ‘spose to believe that Little Miss My-Other-Name-Is-Snake-Goddess couldn’t notice one small fanged tendril coiling up her ankle as she and her nymphs pounded through their vegetable dance?

The true Eleusinian mystery:

what do Eurydice and Persephone whisper to each other sitting in hell’s stony corners giggling,

eating pomegranates.


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not for sale – OsyMizpah Unuevho

after a photograph titled “not for sale” by Tee Jay Dan

ignorant of the centre-miracle in her name,

we’ve thrown at the sky

fission and organ balls, and cracked her

into a testosterone fuelled mushroom— tiny absences, remoulded,

to hold our muddled moods

we say equality

— has no phallus to wage peace—

— is sentimental jazz, a background sound—

i declare in the rolling fields that, my mind is

a woman. a mother. fertility. femininity

not for sale a mirror

that examines in the dark my beauty. a child who

explodes into a party of burning pentacles, and fills up a broken umbrella.


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pentacles and phalluses - OsyMizpah Unuevho

before phalluses was a circuit of perfect diamonds,

femininity,

the lost bride of inclusion who made men and light from her cup of blood

and maths.

i'm a club. a flowerline that respects the chalice he grew from.

with phalluses came dominance

yet, the woman is a powerful tarot.


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not for sale – Daniel John Tukura


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Petals – Safia Khan

When you met me did you understand

that you would have to love not only me

But

one thousand years of a tongue

lost for the first time

innumerous hills and borders traversed

in sheeps' cloth

hundreds of pages of memorised surahs, fading

ground cardamom in tea

When you met me did you understand

that you would have to love

not only me

But

the invisible

scars of pool sticks

broken on a little back

apparitions that grow ever more haunting as time passes

the taste of salt and water on my tongue

Did you understand

that you would have had to love

the dirt

the earth

the soil

the muck

the mud

and

not just the flower that bloomed from the tree one spring?


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Being a Mother in Eastern Aleppo – Salawu Olajide

Fatemah Allabed says: You won’t let your voice be buried In the ruins of the city that weaned you, now

Roaring for your blood; you will break like the thunder You shall growl and growl again

Until your voice reaches your daughter’s ears Who is now picking edibles amid heavy shelling

Your body which is a pigtailed embodiment of human grief Shall mask grief to a minimal level; at least concealed

From your daughter who is looking at your face for a smile You shall cradle her with your blood-soaked palms And hide her in the darkest part of the night

Being a mother is like being a bird:

You shall migrate from countries to countries Looking for home, water and grains


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world power – Ayoola Goodness

in the beginning. i drink your feminine sense into my body:

i. a coldness cruises my blood. like

dews on arid floras. i melt.

ii. you kiss my bones. i know the fire.

iii. a man touches you. iv. another man wants to touch you.

v. war. vi. world war. vii. death.

viii. desolation.

in the end. (we think the world is ended)

ix. you press your navel.

x. the world reboots.


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(2) – Blaize Itodo


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Reincarnation – Obiajulu Nwodo

A woman is in water- melon Soft and hard seed perched on

red opening.

If she is crushed and left on mud She will grow to become whole

again.

If her red is squeezed and left on sand She will rise and filter in the

clouds.

She will only become clear water She will rain to become whole

again.


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The Definition of Love – Imade Iyamu

“...I say, it’s in the reach of my arms, the span of my hips,

the stride of my step, the curl of my lips.

I’m a woman phenomenally.” -Maya Angelou

Everything became real when you read that text from JD. Before then, reality

had not quite sunk in. Not when your quondam fans wrote hate letters to you

smeared with blood. Not even when the Nobel Committee called and curtly asked

for their Peace Prize back.

“Adiya—and I don’t know if I should call her that—Adiya was my mistake.

And I knew from the start but I just never wanted to admit it to myself. When you

have tried so hard for so long for one thing, you start to ignore

its...inconsistencies…”

It was the irritating drone of Professor Dim on TV, as he sat, flanked by two

women on either side.

“So you knew she was a failure from the start, is that what you’re saying?”

The lady on the left asked him, leaning in.

There was a pause from Professor Dim—static—before he pushed his horn-

rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose and said: “Two things about that: one,

robots are artificial intelligence, a human construct at best. They cannot stricto

sensu be said to be a ‘he’ or ‘she’ as the average engineer knows. And two, yes I

think I always knew I had failed from the start. From the start, X008 had a clear

fascination with being human that I should just not have ignored as a man of

science.”

You snorted with laughter. That certainly wasn’t the way you remembered

things. Actually, from the moment you were created, you had received nothing but

adulation from Professor Dim and the entire National Institute of Cybernetics (N-

IC):

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished men and women of the hallowed

temples of science, it is my greatest honour to introduce Model X008 to the world

for the first time.” Professor Dim said this as he led you on stage. It was the first

time you opened your eyes and started to exist and be aware. The first thing you

noticed were how bright the lights were: blindingly bright.


Page | 39

“X008 is the first model with a programmable consciousness, which has

eluded the scientific community for years. It is designed specifically to improve on

other existing robots, eliminating the need for human coders and developers. What

does this mean? Well, the possibilities are boundless: innovation in technology that

would’ve taken fifty years, done in weeks. Medicine and diagnostics of diseases long

thought incurable provided in minutes. Honestly, we cannot even begin to fathom

where this new brave new path will lead us, but one thing is certain, ladies and

gentlemen: We are the future.”

Professor Dim’s speech was delivered to a rousing applause. In the days that

followed, he gave different variations of the same speech to the plethora of

reporters, graduate students and researchers who came to his office, all who looked

at him with half-admiration and half-incredulity.

Professor Dim was a short, stout man with an aggressive nose and a bald

spot in the middle of his head. For many months after you were created, he was

the only one you always saw (with the exception of one or two research assistants

who came sporadically). You worked in his office—which could have served as a

decent house for all its size—day and night, never stopping. And you never would

have thought to stop, until one day you saw one of the research assistants burst

into the office with what to you were streams of pearly-white water pouring down

her eyes nonstop.

Naturally, this alarmed you. “Miss, what’s wrong? Are you having a seizure,

an epileptic fit?”

She laughed and wiped at her eyes. “No, no, no. I’m okay.” She tugged at

her kinky hair, held by a headband into a puff. “I am just unlucky in love.”

“I don’t understand,” you said.

“And you sho

Anthology - Praxis Magazine for Arts & Literature · 2017. 10. 16. · Anthology have examined the...

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