The compound was abuzz with people. Someone had set up a canopy in one corner of the open field where my friends and I had played virtual sports as children. From somewhere in the back the delicate smell of Aba rice and goat stew wafted out, making my mouth water. The building’s families had spared no expense for this event. I tried to slip in quietly, but I was immediately spotted.
“Azuka! Is that you?” screamed a voice from somewhere in the crowd. It was Auntie Chio, a close friend of my grandmother who’d lived in the building for as long as I could remember. I’d been best friends with her two granddaughters, both of whom now lived in the Eko Atlantic megacity. She was one of the few adults who’d kept in touch with me after my mother and I moved to Turtle Island.
I spotted her lithe frame dressed in her usual motley of clashing ankara fabrics as she swept out from the main bungalow. Her unlined face spoke nothing of her nearly ninety years, and before I knew it I was surrounded in her crushing embrace.
I smiled wanly. “Good evening, Auntie.”
“Ah-ah, when did you come?” She held me at arm’s length, taking me in from head to toe, her eagle-eyed gaze missing nothing.
“Just now. I had to finish some work before I could travel.”
She nodded and gave me a look that was skeptical but sympathetic. She opened her mouth to say more, but her cry had attracted others and soon I was surrounded by people.
“Azu-nne, welcome! See how big you’ve grown, eh! So tall!”
“Come, you don’t remember me, do you? You were so small when last I saw you.”
“My condolences, my dear. It is well with you.”
I tried to respond to each comment and query with as many smiles and as few words as possible, and soon I was ushered into the main house. It wasn’t until later that I realized one thing in the compound had changed: The small guardhouse that used to sit just inside the front gate was gone.
That evening at the wake-keeping, Auntie Chio and I sat in the living room next to the biodegradable pod where my father’s body lay, its feet facing the entryway. Earlier, she’d welcomed the community into the home as tradition dictated, presenting kola nuts and palm wine as an offering to the household gods. Another of my elder aunts—I forget how we’re related—led the prayers, pouring libations to beckon the ancestral spirits into our home and escort my father’s spirit to the land of the dead.
This was the night of mourning and I wished I was somewhere, anywhere, else. But as my father’s only biological child, I had to stay by his body and receive mourners until dawn. Then, a government representative would show up to sound an ogene and officially alert the neighborhood of the death. The body would then be interred with its own tree in the front compound. My grandfather told me that when he’d visit Onitsha as a child, this alert would be done by gunshot. After New Biafra banned guns at the turn of the 2140s, we turned to gongs—something he’d much preferred.
It was one of the many stories my grandparents told me about why they chose to return to Onitsha from Turtle Island, after Old New York drowned in the Catastrophe. As a child, I often joined my grandparents—Mama and Papa, as I called them—when they sat trading memories on the veranda at twilight. I would climb into my grandmother’s lap and lean into her chest, savoring the vibrations of her voice as she spoke.
“It’s a shame your father never got to see any grandchild from you.” My Auntie Chio’s voice jolted me into the present. “But we are glad that we will see them on his behalf, now that you have come home.”
I looked askance at her but said nothing. I didn’t need to be reminded that I’d failed to birth our family’s next generation. She must have caught something in my look, because her voice dropped to a reassuring register. “You don’t have to marry anyone: We can get a surrogate, if you like. There’s even a government program that could help.”
“Auntie, is this really the best time to talk about this?”
“But of course! The ending of one life is the beginning of the next.” She shifted to face me, and I couldn’t avoid her intense gaze. “My dear, have you forgotten our saying: ‘To have a child is to have treasure’? That is more important today than ever before.
“Look at our history. If it wasn’t for our children, how would we have survived the Civil War, when Nigeria wanted to see us all dead? And those in the western lands who laughed at us when they stopped having even one child after the Catastrophe, look at them now. Are they not the ones scooping us up to feed their hungry economies? Just look at the brokers who helped you and your mother resettle in the West—what didn’t they offer you to come? They have always known the value of our bodies. Before, they packed us away by force in the bottoms of slave ships, now they lure us with sweet songs of success.
“Azuka, do you know how quickly a people can disappear if they fail to value their children? It does not take centuries. Your grandparents understood this—that’s why we all came home. We wanted to bring our wealth back where it would do the most good. You are part of our legacy.”
I broke away from her gaze, a wave of grief welling up in my chest. How could I tell her that my father’s line would die with me because I still recoiled at any sort of sexual contact? Or that the thought of having a child sent me into a paroxysm of panic because I was convinced that what had happened to me would also happen to them? My grief began to curdle into anger. No. This was no longer my legacy. A family that had essentially abandoned me when I needed them most did not get to decide what I did with my life.
Auntie Chio reached out and placed a gentle hand under my chin, lifting my head up to hers. “I will be honest with you, I never thought I would see you again—not after what happened. But I am glad you have come home, and I hope, for all our sakes, that you will find it in your heart to stay.” With that, she got up and left, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
I sighed, my anger dissipating as quickly as it had come. After we moved, my mother turned her back on Onitsha—and all of New Biafra by extension—with a certainty that never wavered. As far as I know, she never spoke with anyone from my father’s side of the family ever again. I hadn’t been able to do the same, even though I had more cause than anyone to shake the red dust of this city from my feet.
My mother had scoffed when I told her I was coming down for the funeral. I hadn’t returned when my grandparents died, why was this burial so much more important? I couldn’t explain it. I’d always felt that I left New Biafra before I could take up my true purpose. That my life in Tkaronto was a shadow of what it could be. Perhaps I’d returned to bury more than my father.
I looked up and two women I’d never seen before were leaning into the pod, wailing and calling the dead man’s name, asking rhetorically why he had left them. I wondered how much of their performance was obscure cultural theater and how much was genuine grief.
Their wailing increased, and I wished I’d been allowed to bring my AI. That, however, would have been considered an insult to the body, like looking into the eyes of an elder while you were being scolded. I’d forgotten how quickly my people whitewash the truth about our dead. We fear that speaking ill of them will invite death on ourselves as well.
One of the women stopped in front of me, sniffling into an old cloth kerchief. She looked to be in her mid-40s—about my age.
“Your father was a good man,” she said, reaching for my hands. I slid them into my pockets, just out of her reach, and she made do with patting my leg.