Always Another Country. Sisonke Msimang
in agreement.
‘She will learn,’ said Mama Terrence.
‘Ehe, she will learn. It will be pain that teaches her,’ said Mrs Mwansa sagely.
Mama Tawona continued. ‘Mmn, but you know men. One day he will wake up and decide that the only thing he wants in this life is the one thing that she has not provided him. Then we will see if she still smiles and says “Good morning” like that in her high heels. Eh! I don’t think so. No. Instead she will be crying, crying, crying tears of sorrow. Eh-eh! Because men are like that. If they don’t get their heir, they will leave you. Until she has a son, she will never be guaranteed that man’s love.’
And so the world’s obsession with boys revealed itself to me. We needed to have a baby brother and it needed to happen soon because my sisters and I would never be enough. The absence of brothers would bring untold misery to our parents. I hadn’t known boys mattered more than girls, that one fictional first-born boy was more important than a fistful of girls. This revelation – that a family without boys is really no family at all – was so significant I didn’t hear Terrence thundering around the corner. I was sitting there turning over our family’s boylessness in my mind, thinking about how I would formulate the question to Mummy when she got back from work, when I felt Terrence’s skinny knee connect with my face. I screamed, and the Rungarers jumped. My cheek puffed out instantly and I saw no sympathy in Mama Tawona’s eyes. She looked at me as though I was a thief.
It hurt.
I only learnt the word ‘primogeniture’ much later in life, but this was my first lesson in the concept. What an absurd idea: that my father may have grounds to find another woman so they might make another child, a boy who would ostensibly be made more in my father’s image than any of us. With my cheek swollen and this new idea thudding in my head I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or vomit.
How could anyone be more like Baba than me? Wasn’t his face in mine? Wasn’t he our dad who loved us more than anything in the world because he took us places – to the market and the mechanic and to visit with his friends to show us off?
Yet once it had been spoken I understood it. It explained all the other times Mummy had been asked – by women she had just met – whether she was going to try one more time. It provided a basis for all the times someone had said, ‘You can’t stop until you get a boy,’ all the times Mummy had turned her face away in anger and pulled us along quickly.
◆ ◆ ◆
A few days after the hallway collision, my cheek was still tender and slightly bruised. Tawona and I were playing hopscotch and – unusually – she was losing. I threw the stone and it landed firmly in its box. I began to hop. ‘You touched the line,’ she shouted.
I hadn’t touched the line. ‘I didn’t,’ I said.
‘You did. You’re a cheater.’
‘You’re the one who’s cheating. Because I’m winning you want to make up stories? You get out of here and go and cheat somewhere else!’ I shouted. I was still angry with her mother, still mulling over the conversation I had overheard, still mad that my face was sore.
Tawona was never one to take an insult lying down. She shouted, ‘Maybe it’s you who needs to go to the witch doctor, and not your mother!’
I had no idea what she was talking about but I felt my face flush. ‘Oh! Now you have no words, eh?’ she continued. ‘Let me tell you something, you stupid girl. If your mother was from our tribe they would have taken her to the witch doctor by now. Anyway, maybe it’s because you people are foreigners. In Zambia we don’t have such things. How can a woman have three girls in a row?
Non-stop. Three? Two is okay. But three!? Eh! Three is a curse.’ She ploughed on, determined to do maximum damage.
‘If she doesn’t fix this problem your father will leave her for a woman who can give him what he wants. No man on this earth doesn’t want sons. I mean! Eh! She should be careful. Do you think that man will stay in the house where there is no one to inherit?’
She continued.
‘A man can never ever love his daughters the way he will love his sons. Boys belong to their fathers. So now, what does your father have? Just girls? So then? Eh! So then he has nothing.’
I don’t remember going for her. I only know there was blood everywhere and I was not sorry that I punched her. I was not sorry at all and she was shocked and no longer smirking and that made me feel better although not much because she had just broken my heart.
Then there was a ring of screaming excited kids around us and she was up and livid, and storming towards the stairwell with the crowd billowing out behind us as she cradled her split lip and smoothed her bloody dress over her paunchy tummy. I hung back, afraid. Terrence turned, then ran back to me. His lips were dry as usual but he was serious. The gravity of the situation was clear to him. ‘You better come, you’ll just make it worse if you don’t.’
Terrence took my hand and led me to the front. We stood, facing Tawona, who was a bloody mess by now. Someone handed her the tooth I had punched out of her mouth. It was dirty and very small and looking at it set her to wailing once more and it made my lip quiver too. I hadn’t meant to knock her tooth out. I was scared; terrified, really. Mama Tawona would have my head.
By the time we reached the top step, Mama Tawona was waiting. Tawona’s little brother had run up to tell his mother that his big sister had been beaten and that I was the culprit. She stood there with murder in her eyes. I didn’t wait for her to start shouting. I couldn’t. I committed an even worse sin: I bolted. I broke the cardinal rule of all African households and ran from an adult who was trying to discipline me. I pushed past her and ran down the hallway and into our house. I was desperate for Baba to be home.
He was. He was sitting at the dining room table with his books on the table and a few beetles spread out in front of him. Mummy hated it when he labelled his specimens on the table and under normal circumstances I would have told him this but this was an emergency and so I rushed forward and crawled into his lap, which I was getting too big to do, and I started to cry. In the chaos of those few moments he thought I was hurt and so he looked for the cut, searching my body for the place where the skin was broken.
‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, confused.
‘No,’ I cried. ‘No. But, but Tawona said you won’t love me because I’m a girl.’ The words were a jumbled tumble – a snotty rush. ‘She said that, that you only want boys and that we don’t belong here in Zambia, we are foreigners and we should go back where we came from, and then she said we don’t even belong to you, that only boys belong to fathers, girls are a curse.’
I wailed. Ruptured.
He said nothing and this calmed me because, as every child knows, silence is always the beginning of listening.
Baba bent into my hurt and pulled me close. His insides thumped a sonata, his heart thudding dully against my chest: ‘You are mine, you are mine, you are mine.’ Tawona’s words lost a bit of their edge. My own little heart thumped back: ‘I am yours, I am yours, I am yours.’
That night, after she came home from work and heard the story, Mummy made me apologise to Tawona. We went to her house together and knocked on the door. Mama Tawona peered out imperiously.
‘So you have come to say what?’ she said abruptly. Mummy didn’t let her continue. She was curt.
‘We have come to apologise,’ she said. ‘Sonke should not have hit Tawona.’
Mama Tawona began to interrupt her. ‘You think that just saying sorry will be enough—’
But Mummy cut her off. She was not finished.
‘But understand this: your bitterness needs to find another home. It is not welcome in mine. And if it doesn’t, if you insist on this nonsense, then you will see. You will see me and you will know me. That same curse you think has been put on me will be on you. You will be cursed in ways your