Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: Hmph! (03/04/10)
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TITLE: Scorned | Previous Challenge Entry
By Folakemi Emem-Akpan
03/08/10 -
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When your water breaks, you feel a dull roar of panic. You are not afraid of the delivery or scared for the baby. You’ve put to bed five times, and this pregnancy never gave you problems.
It is the scorn on their faces that you fear. It is the snorts and hmphs of ridicule. What makes your heart contract in fear is the fact that the birth of this baby could mean the final lid in the coffin of your condemnation.
From the day your belly started to swell, you suspected that it would be a girl. Again. Just like the others, this baby sat very high in your womb, close to your breasts in that delightful way girls are wont to do.
Soon your contractions are fast and furious and you send for your mother-in-law in the next hut. When she appears at your door, it is with a scowl on her face. This woman has single-handedly run her family for twenty-eight years. Widowed at an early age with four sons and a daughter to care for, she drew on an inner strength no one knew she had, raised her sons to be good farmers, selected wives for each of them, filled her late husband’s compound with dozens of grandchildren, majority of which are boys.
You are the only wife yet to produce an heir for the lineage.
When you got swollen with child this last time, your mother-in-law paid you a midnight visit and laid down the ultimatum. A boy or another wife for dear Leke.
Than night, you cried yourself to sleep, your husband’s back turned to you. You don’t blame him. You don’t blame your mother-in-law. It is the way of your people to care for sons more than they do daughters.
Sons carry on the family name. Sons contribute to the family wealth by farming the cocoa plantations. Sons are an honor.
Two the other wives arrive to help. Soon you are on your back, the leather tong clenched in between your teeth. Screaming during delivery brings bad luck to one’s husband so you bite hard each time the pain hits.
Your legs are held apart, your wrapper discarded as the women probe and prod you. You are instructed to push and you do so with all of your might. You push a second time, a third time.
The wail of a newborn rends the air. The three women fall absolutely silent.
You are exhausted but anxious and ask to see your baby. They don’t show you the face; rather your mother-in-law almost shoves the genitals in your face.
You’ve had a sixth girl.
But instead of the panic that plagued you all through the pregnancy, you suddenly feel a sense of calm. Love washes over you.
It doesn’t matter if you are scorned. It doesn’t matter that Leke will be given a second wife. It doesn’t matter if all your children are girls.
What does matter is that you are a good mother. There is tremendous love in your heart for this little baby just as there is for her siblings.
You cuddle your baby and look up into the eyes of your mother-in-law. She frowns. You smile. She shakes her head. You nod yours.
She walks out of the hut.
***In most African communities, male children are preferred above females and a woman who produces only girls is often ridiculed.
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This was amazing and sad; told in a voice that seemed just a matter of fact-as it was.