Everything Good Will Come

Sefi Atta

• Publisher: Interlink Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781623710163
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Afrikanische Literatur

Everything Good Will Come introduces an important new voice in contemporary fiction. With insight and a lyrical wisdom, Nigerian-born Sefi Atta has written a powerful and eloquent story set in her African homeland. It is 1971, a year after the Biafran War, and Nigeria is under military rule—though the politics of the state matter less than those of her home to Enitan Taiwo, an eleven-year-old girl tired of waiting for school to start. Will her mother, who has become deeply religious since the death of Enitan's brother, allow her friendship with the new girl next door, the brash and beautiful Sheri Bakare? This novel charts the fate of these two African girls; one who is prepared to manipulate the traditional system and one who attempts to defy it. Written in the voice of Enitan, the novel traces this unusual friendship into their adult lives, against the backdrop of tragedy, family strife, and a war-torn Nigeria. In the end, Everything Good Will Come is Enitan's story; one of a fiercely intelligent, strong young woman coming of age in a culture that still insists on feminine submission. Enitan bucks the familial and political systems until she is confronted with the one desire too precious to forfeit in the name of personal freedom: her desire for a child. Everything Good Will Come evokes the sights and smells of Africa while imparting a wise and universal story of love, friendship, prejudice, survival, politics, and the cost of divided loyalties.

1995

People say I was hot-headed in my twenties. I don’t ever remember being hot-headed. I only ever remember calling out to my voice. In my country, women are praised the more they surrender their right to protest. In the end they may die with nothing but selflessness to pass on to their daughters; a startling legacy, like tears down a parched throat.

The first time I spoke to Niyi about marriage, I’d discovered my mother was scavenging our trash bags for my used sanitary towels and taking them to church for prayers. Her priest had said I would remain childless otherwise. She was still a member of his church, a senior sister now. She lit candles in the mornings and evenings to pray, mumbled to herself and hummed church songs. Her front door was padlocked by six o’clock and her curtains drawn. I would go out to see Niyi just to escape from her, from her house where I often felt shackled by afterbirth. It was hers now, since my father relinquished it. That happened three weeks after I moved in with her. I received a transfer letter from him with a covering letter accusing me of de-camping. I replied, thanking him for raising me and reminded him that I was never given a chance to decide what camp to be in. I apologized for my rudeness meanwhile. Really, I shouldn’t have called my own father a liar.

My mother began to boast to her church friends that I’d seen his hypocrisy first-hand. I watched her disappear every Sunday only to come back and accuse these same people of meanness. I pretended to listen. I knew that she hurt because of the sacrifices she’d made in her marriage. I finally understood why she turned her mind to church with such fervor. Had she turned to wine or beer, people would have called her a drunkard. Had she sought other men, they would have called her a slut. But to turn to God? Who would quarrel with her? “Leave her alone,” they would say. “She is religious.”

I had watched my mother worship, and seen the way she waved her hands and exaggerated her smile. Whenever she said amen, I thought she might have well have been saying nyah-nyah. She had tricked us all. Her fixation with religion was nothing but a life-long rebellion. Faith had not healed her and I hoped that one day, the birth of a grandchild would.

But when I told her I was going to marry Niyi she said they had madness in his family. Oh yes. One of his aunts was always washing her hands, and another one, pretty thing like this, had a baby and would not touch it for days. “Imagine that for a mother,” she said. I told my father about my engagement and he, too, suddenly became religious. “Not allowed,” he said, raising his forefinger; not allowed by the Pope, he meant. Niyi was a divorced Catholic, so he would not give his blessings. Not until Uncle Fatai persuaded him would he agree to the wedding, then he lectured Niyi about how our marriage would have to work. That ended any father-son relationship they could have developed, and Niyi, disturbed by my mother’s church activities, avoided her as if she were a sorceress.

On the day of my traditional engagement, I knelt before him according to the rites. He presented a dowry to my family, of hand-woven cloth and gold jewelry. I did not want a dowry and I did not want to kneel. Niyi, who was reluctant to participate in rites that would proceed as if he were 21 and without a child of his own, did not want to be there at all. During the ceremony my parents argued. My mother refused to sit by my father. He told her she was quite welcome to stand outside his gates. A week later, at the civil ceremony, I almost suffocated from the ill-feeling in the Ikoyi registry.

I did not shed a tear over leaving home. I, who cried easily. After the final rites, when a bride knelt before her parents and they blessed her, she was supposed to cry. An entire wedding party waited for this moment, so that they could say “Ah, she wept. She wept, that girl. She loves her parents no end.” But I’d always been suspicious. What were the tears for, on cue like that? One bride, almost 40, gray hairs all over her head, she was crying as if her parents had sold her. They had all but given up on her. What was she crying for? I was not bitter about my parents. We had healed the way most families did, enough to hold us together from one day to the next, but liable to split under any great stress. I still had not met my father’s outside son, my half-brother. At first it was about letting my father know I hadn’t forgotten about his deception. Then it was about being loyal to my mother. After a while, it was really about having other matters to worry about, like work.

At the time, I was working for the Ministry of Justice and supplementing my income with the odd business incorporation. After we got married, Niyi introduced me to some of his friends in banking and I found a job in credit control. I was not prepared for my new environment, handling large sums of money within tight deadlines. On the one hand, I had the hustlers from treasury pushing me to pass deals; on the other, management cautioning me to check credit lines. The treasury guys would come ten minutes to cut-off time, tallying exactly how much the bank would lose if I didn’t approve their transactions. I would get heartburn from arguing with them. Then, one day, I mistakenly approved a deal with an insufficient credit line and manage- ment hauled me in for a reprimand.

After work I drove home crying. Niyi took one look at me. “You have to be tougher than this, o-girl,” he said. “You can’t let people push you around. Tell them to go to hell if they pressure you.”

“You have no idea,” I said. Bankers were not like lawyers. We were accustomed to waiting for due process. We expected delays. Niyi pulled my nose. “Stop,” I said and slapped his hand away.

He patted my head. “That is what I want to hear.”

I was able to face work the next morning. From then on, Niyi led me through similar rites. Months later, when the company secretary left, I stepped into her position.

At work I consciously tried to imitate him. How he said “no” without moving his head; how his eyes, once locked, wouldn’t shift. At home, he had me howling with things he would do and say with that look. He played pieces on my piano and dared to call them jazz. I thought they sounded like a petrified rat scurrying back and forth over the keyboards. He walked around with nothing but Y-fronts on. On more than one occasion, he turned his back and pulled them down; to check. He had hemorrhoids, at least two episodes a year. I told him it said something about his personality, that he had a hidden weakness in his gut. He said I should get used to it, the pesseries and the ointments. I would eventually grow accustomed to this and other marital surprises. I didn’t know a man could have his own way of squeezing toothpaste. I didn’t know I could come close to lunging across the dining table to throttle a man, because of the way he chewed. Then there were more serious times, when Niyi’s brows knotted and I knew that silence would follow. This happened whenever he was reminded of his grudges, against his ex-wife, against their friends who had taken sides and his own family. That I would never get used to.

After he left his father’s firm, Niyi’s brothers avoided him for fear of offending their father. Only his mother sneaked visits to him. Then his wife left him. The day she found a new boyfriend, their son stopped calling. Now, years later, although they were all on speaking terms, Niyi swore he would never forget each person’s role. Whenever he wanted to speak to his son, I was the one to call his ex-wife. He was wary of his father and brothers, and he protected his mother like an egg.

Toro Franco. She was one of those women who swallowed her voice from the day she married. She was a nurse, and yet her husband and sons, all lawyers, thought she couldn’t grasp the rudiments of Offer and Acceptance, so she acted like she didn’t. She called “precedence” “presidents,” walked around with her underskirt hanging out. Whenever she tried to join in their legal discussions, they teased her, “Mama, look at you. Your Saturday is sticking out of your Sunday.” They laughed as she adjusted her underskirt. If they mentioned the word hungry, she ran into her kitchen and began to boss her house boys around. Soon she would summon me to help. I knew that she watched me botch my kitchen duties, dropping spoons, recoiling from hot handles, slicing my fingers.

“It’s hot in here,” I would say.

“Don’t worry,” she would say.

“The boys should help.”

“Boys? What can boys do?”

“They know how to tease you.”

“Who else can they tease?”

Once, I tried to trick her into a confession. “Don’t you ever feel lonely in here, ma? Isn’t the kitchen the loneliest room?” She looked at me as if I’d offered to strip.

“Enough,” she pleaded. “Enough now.”

I continued to stir her stew, imagining her in a mortuary, on a slab, underskirt hanging out, husband and children saying how nice she was.

Everyone said my mother-in-law was nice. I wouldn’t believe them until I’d heard a true word pass her lips. Her husband was a man who liked his stews prepared the traditional way, meat fried in thick groundnut oil, and he loved his wife so much he wouldn’t eat stews prepared by anyone but her. Forty-five years later, he had bad arteries and her hands were as dry and shriveled as the meat she fried. Francis Abiola Franco, Esquire. The first time we met he asked, “You’re Sunny Taiwo’s daughter?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Good breeding always shows,” he said.

“I’m a horse?” I asked Niyi later.

“He’s a horse,” Niyi said. “An old nag.”

He was one of those Senior Advocates of Nigeria, though he was now out of touch with the Law, and with reality. He asked his sons to dial if he needed to make a phone call. He sat in the back seat of his car, always, even when one of his sons was driving. He stopped speaking to me after I challenged him on a point of law. I disagreed with him just for the sake of it. I didn’t care much for him, but my brothers-in- law, I loved. They would all troop into my house, all four of them looking like Niyi with the same dark skin and thin nose, and I would kiss each of them feeling a rush of libido and motherliness as they greeted me, “Enitan of Africa!” “Obirin Meta! Three times a girl!” “Alaiye Baba! Master of the earth!” It was like welcoming my husband four times over. I didn’t even mind sitting with them as they scratched their groins and christened women’s parts: her foward, her backward, her assets, her giblets. About Sheri: “She’s, em, very talented. Hyuh-Hyuh-Hyuh.”

I knew. They were petrified of women, though they denied it. “Who? Who’s scared of chicks?” they asked.

“Sneaking,” I said. “Lying. Lying on your last breath. Then you cannot even face somebody to say a relationship is over? That is petrified.”

“I...