Asisiriwa Day 7
14 November 2015
I am ravenous, devouring books like a person who has been starved, walking barefoot through a desert, delirious from thirst and hunger, not realizing they are deprived. I have not realized how I’ve been deprived until I began reading again, and now I am ravenous.
I will read all the books we brought with us for the library in the next six weeks, because after that, it is entirely possible that they will no longer be as readily accessible, just sitting, waiting in the suitcases we packed them into back in Denver, because they will live in the literacy center. But a strange thing happens when you read a book you enjoy, which is that, at its end, you feel as though it belongs to you. The two of you have experienced things together, have traveled together, have changed together, and now belong to each other. I belong to these books. They belong to me. But they have come for a specific purpose – to serve the literacy center – as have I. This ambiguous, amorphous thing, this idea currently being poured into existence with the aid of masons and carpenters and architects and engineers – this literacy center is like an arranged marriage suddenly, to which both I and the books are betrothed, though we now belong – have always belonged – to each other.
—
The man who had died was 109, and when it was our turn to walk around him, laid in state in a large glass case like a piece of jewelry, we saw his arms covered in gold glitter–literally, glitter–and his body–a real human body, only dead–wrapped in kente cloth like the swankiest mummy you’ve ever seen. Gold rings, hammered into bulbous shapes–an elephant, a sphere–hung on his withered hands, black and shrunken by time and death. His face was speckled by the glitter, making him look somehow ridiculous, somehow gaudy, as though he had been peeling some sort of dusty fruit carelessly, too quickly, and had made a mess. Someone should have told him to be more careful.
His mouth was slightly open, as if he were simply sleeping, breathing lightly, the corners of his mouth dry and taut, his nose smallish and pointed. There was a piece of glitter too close to his mouth, and one too near his eyes. It sparkled insolently as we progressed, counterclockwise, around his glass case. Prof, in his opulent black robes, spoke of the man’s activity–“He would walk to the lake–you know the lake which is just there?–until only one, two months before his death”–smiling his strange half-smile as he spoke, looking only at the man, who had been his brother. A young woman in a red and yellow dress moved past us, crying.
Later Prof told us how his daughter had begun senior high school at Aburi Girl’s School. He was only allowed to visit her the secondSaturday of each month, and she was not allowed to call home, except under extreme circumstances. She is fourteen.
“Today is a visiting day,” he explained while eating kenkey with pepper and sardines, a small plastic glass of wine languishing near his bowl. He could not attend. “I have sent her senior brother in my stead.” He smiles fully when he says she looks exactly like him–“just exactly”–but falters when he goes on to say her absence from the house is keenly felt. It feels like an empty house now, he says.
“I will not see her until sometime in December.”
—
The low thud of drums is audible even from our room, in the stately house with a veranda on the edge of town. The funeral continues.
A goat wanders briskly into the yard looking for whatever it is goats look for. Aponkye, I think to myself, practicing in the slow, unhurried way I practice language.
Life slowly grows smaller.
