Home
I watched as her tongue stretched out just a little to meet her lips, sliding in between her teeth as she made to pronounce the word “Lufthansa” slowly.
I tried to repeat after her but failed every time.
We moved on to other words like “theory”, “Neanderthal”, still, every time I tried to pronounce those words, I ended up sounding like Obiora, the drunkard back at home, whenever he came out to the village square, palm wine gourd in hand, telling the story of what the gods had allegedly told him.
I would never get this right, and my mother would not find it pleasing.
“Why are you crying?” Amanda, the dark-skinned longhaired girl who had been paid to tutor me and brush up my English asked.
“I cannot do this, Ike gwuru, I am tired”, I replied, letting my tears run its course.
“Hey hey, Ifeachi!”
I laughed at this point. She frowned a bit and asked me why I had laughed. I shook my head. I laughed because of how she pronounced my name.
Broken into three syllables, she went, “Ife-a-chi”– with a voice that made it almost impossible to keep a straight face whenever she called my name. Hence, the laughter.
I walked back home, looking at the trees around me shedding their yellow leaves to the receptive ground.
It was the dry season here, but they called it autumn, and since I could not pronounce “autumn”, I opted for the other name the season was called –“fall”. That was a lot easier to pronounce than autumn. Autumn sounded a lot like uto’m, and I was told that was not the correct pronunciation; so, I gave up.
As I passed by the trees whose leaves had turned yellow and were dropping to the ground with every communion they had with the wind, I remembered Power of Grace Ministries — a church back at home. I remembered the pastor, and how the members fell to the floor, shouting in a language that was definitely not Igbo, every time he touched them.
I used to think an evil spirit was causing them to fall and convulse on the floor because that shaking and rapid blinking did not seem normal to me.
It was Rita, my senior in school then, and a member of that church, that told me that they were under the influence of the Holy Spirit, and not an evil spirit as I had thought.
She said the language they spoke was called tongues.
I asked her what kind of people spoke tongues. She said people from Zion.
I asked her if she spoke tongues. She told me she did.
“But you are Igbo”, I retorted immediately.
She looked at me and said, “Things of the spirit cannot be understood by the mortal mind.” Then she shook her head and walked away.
She was the confused one, not me. She was in Mbaise, yet she was claiming to be from Zion.
I wondered if I’ll meet people here who spoke tongues too and came from Zion.
I heard my name.
It was pronounced correctly. I turned. It was Ifeoma.
I met her at the airport when I first came here.
Her parents live here.
She had been with her aunt in Nigeria since she was four years old. She used to visit, but now, she was here full-time.
She ran up to me and gave me a hug and a kiss on my left cheek.
I froze.
“What?” she asked.
“Why did you kiss me?”
“What is wrong with that?” she replied with a frown.
“I don’t think it is proper for a lady to kiss another lady.”
She began to laugh; it came in chuckles, then a burst of full-blown laughter. She threw her head back and laughed a lot harder until she began to tear up. Then she held her stomach and knelt on the floor.
First, I was taken aback. What was funny? Then I was pissed. Was she laughing at me? Then I was laughing too. I started softly and then harder. I was not sure why we were laughing, or if I was the joke, but something about the way Ifeoma laughed had me laughing as well.
We laughed for a while and then we stopped.
She looked at me and said, “Kai! Bush girl.”
I frowned.
She continued, “Kisses are a form of hello here, Ifeachi. Don’t let another ear hear this thing you just told me; they will think you are uneducated.”
I nodded.
I couldn’t afford to look stupider than I already did at the moment.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Home.”
“Where are you coming from?”
“I went to take speech lessons.”
“That’s cool. Your mother registered you?”
“Yes, she did.”
“I wish my parents would register me,” she replied with a sullen face.
“But you already speak well enough,” I said, surprised she would ever need speech lessons.
“Not well enough,” she said, shaking her head, “not according to American standard.”
We had a routine conversation for a few minutes and said our goodbyes. She hailed a cab while I continued with my walk.
“How did your classes go?” mother asked as I walked onto the patio.
“Odimma,” I replied absentmindedly. I felt her glare immediately, without having to look at her and I knew I had goofed. “It went fine,” I corrected myself quickly and rushed inside to avoid being hit by the next verbal missile she was probably going to launch.
I walked into my room and collapsed on the bed. I looked around the room as I rolled from one end of my large bed to the other.
I remember asking mother when she first showed me my room if I was the only one who would sleep in here because of the size of the bed. She had smiled and tapped my shoulder and said, “Why do you ask such funny questions?”
This life was different from the one I was used to.
I wasn’t used to a big room, a room which was bigger than our sitting room back in Mbaise, Imo State, Nigeria. I wasn’t used to going out and coming back to meet food already prepared. I usually had to cook by myself. But here, mother has a maid; she is Nigerian too, and she speaks better than I do.
While in Mbaise, I once came back from school hungry. Aunty Ogechi had gone to the market. Out of fatigue, I broke a few kernels and drank garri with them.
By the time Aunty Ogechi returned in the evening and found out that I had not cooked, what happened next had me hating kernels.
Now that I was here, maybe I could eat them without feeling bad. If I could find any.
I looked at the big wall clock in front of me. It sang every time it was an hour.
I had to study.
My English test would not write itself. Passing it would make me gain mother’s approval, that, which I had somehow failed to get since I was whisked down here away from the life I knew.
Sometimes, I wonder why she went through all that trouble to get me if she would keep getting mad at simple mistakes like mispronouncing some words.
I got up and took out my textbooks, went to the table, opened one of them and began reading. Few lines into the book, and I was already exhausted.
I shut the book and went back to my bed.
I did not want to disappoint my mother, but this “English” thing was beginning to prove too hard. The teachers at school spoke really fast, so did the kids.
Mother does not speak really fast to the maid and me, but when the pretty white lady next door comes visiting, she starts speaking really fast.
She has been here for 18 years. I wonder if she started speaking perfectly in her first few weeks.
Aunty Ogechi had told me that mother had left me with my father when I could barely talk, to run to America with a white man who came to visit the King.
I asked her why; she said father didn’t have enough money to buy mother the things she wanted. So, when the white man came and threw a lot of money around, it was easy to sway mother.
They woke up one morning and found a note. Mother was gone. I asked how they knew it was the white man she followed. Aunty Ogechi frowned slightly.
“Ehenu, because the white man was gone too”.
My curiosity wouldn’t let me be. So, I asked again, “What if it was not like that, what if she left….” She gave me the cold glare that said enough. I kept shut.
Father died six months later.
The day mother came to take me away, Aunty Ogechi had cried and rolled on the floor, hitting father’s grave and asking him to come out and stop them from taking his daughter.
A huge part of me wished he would come out and stop the car from moving out of the village that day.
I was pulled away from everything and everyone I knew and loved. No amount of screaming and crying could stop it.
As I said my goodbyes to Mbaise, it dawned on me that I would never return there.
I worried about Aunty Ogechi. She was old, who would take care of her?
Someday, I would have my own house here, and I will bring Aunty Ogechi.
I still miss father.
My hand slowly went to my belt, and I laughed.
I remember the day we went to purchase it, and every other thing I own. We walked into a big hall — mother called it “the mall”.
We picked a lot of things, and when it was time to pay, mother was told a price, and she brought out a card and then did a swipe movement inside a small machine thing.
I asked her why she didn’t price the goods we bought, that they were very expensive. She laughed out loud and told me that I needed to drop my mgbeke mentality here in America.
I was not slighted at all; I would have been mad if it was someone else. But, it felt good that just once since I came down to this place, she used an Igbo word, and she laughed too. It did not matter that the joke was at my expense; it only mattered that I saw her laugh and laugh hard. And for the first time, I didn’t feel like an outsider in her life. She was familiar.
The church service here is not long, unlike the one in the village.
The priest says a few readings, and it is over. We usually had to do the readings in both Latin and Igbo, and by the time it was time for benediction, it was already 1:00 p.m. But here, once it is10:00 am, the mass is over.
Mother usually takes the maid and me to MacDonald’s for brunch after every mass. She said brunch is the meal between breakfast and lunch.
The doorbell rang and jolted me from my trip to my memories.
“Ife, Ife!” mother was calling. I ran down.
She was talking to a man. He brought out a paper, and she signed on it.
He gave her a small box and left.
She looked at me and smiled. She called me to come and sit with her on the big couch. I did.
“Ifeachi, you have made so much progress since we came here,” she began. “Your English pronunciations are still awful,” she rolled her eyes, “but, I’m impressed at your mannerisms; they are becoming more…posh. So, I got you a gift.” She handed me the box. I opened it.
It was a phone; it looked expensive. I asked her the name, she said it was an iPhone.
A few months down the line, I would use that phone to call Aunty Ogechi to tell her I miss her and that I wanted to come home.
