Still Waters in Niger

by Hill, Kathleen

• ISBN13: 9780810150898
• ISBN10: 0810150891
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-05-17
• Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr

Summary

Still Waters in Niger is a beautifully observed account of a return to a place at once exotic and familiar, as well as a tale of inner discovery. As she reacquaints herself with her daughter and with the Africa of her past, the narrator meets other mothers and their children. Her own memories of young motherhood strong, she becomes aware of the strikingly similar ways in which the impassioned and often difficult bonds between mothers and daughters are revealed across the divide of cultures. Hill paints a compelling portrait of a community of women grounded by kinship and by care for their children, a society characterized not only by pain and exhaustion but by humor, delicacy, and strength. The narrator's journey to a place six thousand miles from home is also a solitary voyage of introspection. Visited by ancestral memories of the Irish famine, she is stirred by Muslim prayers that echo her own inherited -- but neglected -- faith. And with Zara, the daughter she had once guided, and whom she is now guided by, she encounters hunger, not only in its literal, most devastating form but in other guises as well: the hunger of memory when she and Zara return to the desert city of Zinder in search of the house where they had lived seventeen years before; and hunger for what is nearest and what is farthest away, in her encounters with a one-legged boy who befriends her and comes to represent the child she thought she had lost forever in her daughter.

Table of Contents

Prologue	1	(6)
PART I ZINDER
Auto gare	7	(7)
The Street	14	(10)
Boissons Fraiches	24	(6)
The Fort	30	(7)
The Hostel	37	(8)
The House	45	(6)
PART II MATAMEYE
New Moon	51	(12)
Moon in First Quarter	63	(19)
Full Moon	82	(70)
Moon in Third Quarter	152	(24)
PART III ZINDER
First Call to Prayer: Fajr	176	(10)
Second Call to Prayer: Zuhr	186	(7)
Third Call to Prayer: Asr	193

Excerpts

Chapter One

Auto gare

    My eldest daughter, Zara, and I, up from Matameye together to find the house we lived in seventeen years ago, step off the taxi brousse into the burning sand. The sky at noon is white. At this time of day no one who can help it is out in the open, head bare to the sun. People sit with their knees drawn up in front of them in the slender shade of a mud wall, or huddle beneath a straw mat elevated on four sticks.

    Certainly seventeen years ago Zara and I would not have been hesitating this way in the full blaze of the sun. She would have been at Mme. Renault's école maternelle , taking a drink of water from the blue plastic canteen that hung from her neck or learning the word in French for goat. Scratching the prickly heat on her shoulders, yanking the elastic from her ponytail. I would have been thinking about going to pick her up, wishing we had already eaten our couscous and sliced tomatoes so it would be time to close our eyes on a world too bright to look at: Mike, limbs flung wide in instant sleep, Zara and Lizzy, tossing, whispering, overcome at last, and Tulu, baby round as a pot, fingers twitching, sweat standing on her forehead. Time to wait, undistracted, for the shadows to tip, the sand to cool, the sky to appear in stars. For this day to turn into the next. Time to wait for the children to grow up.

    Zara drops a coin in the one-legged boy's palm and then, leaning down, places another in the little girl's. They look at the coins, murmur a thanks, and turn away.

    "An gode Allah." Thanks be to Allah.

    The gare is strewn with waiting taxis, vans whose doors will swing shut when each of their seventeen seats is filled with one passenger or more. Early this morning in Matameye, eighty-seven kilometers away, where Zara is working in a clinic and where I have come from New York City to visit her for a month, we were among the first to take our places. We sat talking back and forth an hour or more, looking up through the window of the van into the spiky branches of a gawo tree. This is the rainy season, such as it is, and storks are nesting. We could watch their descent, the long fragile legs pushed forward to break the flight, the feet closing round a branch, the leisurely folding of black wings. They stood on the sides of their nests, beaks opening and closing like shears. By the time the taxi was filled, the sun was hot. Nor did the gawo give any shade. During the dry season this tree, in a landscape of sand and thorns, ineffably breaks out in tiny green leaves. But during the rainy season it is dry as a stick.

    In Zinder both gawo trees and storks are more scarce. Vultures are the preferred bird, vultures and black kites, seen wheeling against the blank face of the sky. Fifty miles north, fifty miles closer to the desert and to a lack of food and flourish.

    More scarce, but not less distinct. That last month in Zinder seventeen years ago, when leaving had come to seem unendurable, when each evening had brought to a close one more day to which it would be impossible, ever, to return, there had been a pair of storks. The first rain had still not fallen. It was May, the seeds were in the ground, thirsting. We dragged our beds outside each night to escape the heat and slept on the sand in front of the house, faces raised to an immaculate sky. We could look directly up into the wheel of the heavens and see the stars moving above our heads toward morning. The day began while it was still dark with the name of Allah, with the call to wake and praise Him. By the time we had raised dreamy hands to brush away the first flies, men and women all over Zinder were kneeling on mats, dipping their foreheads to the sand, leaning back on their heels.

    It was then the storks began their to and fro, their journeys directly above our heads to the gawo tree on the other side of the wall. From our beds we could see the beginnings of the nest at the top of the tree, wisps gathered in a crook between two branches. Above us, the slow flap flap of great black wings, the soft white underbelly, the preposterous beak with its dangling bit of string or straw. The three little girls got up and came to lie on our bed, throwing their arms and legs, sweet from sleep, in our faces. We all lay still, watching the storks build a safe and sturdy place for offspring we would never see.

    Here we are, Zara and I, stepping off the taxi brousse onto the burning sand. She has dropped two coins: one into the hand of the boy leaning on the crutch and another into the little girl's. They have murmured their thanks and have turned away. We are off to get a drink at the Boissons Fraîches, anything to get out of this sun. We are tramping up the sandy incline to the street that runs through the center of the town. A bush Fulani, a Bororo, is striding down; his head is shaved clean from his forehead up to the crown; in back, a line of delicately woven braids are hanging to his shoulders. "Funky," that's the word Zara uses to describe him. He is wearing a leather skirt and white plastic shoes molded to include eyelets and a tongue. His long bare legs are moving like a fashion model's, bent far back at the knees, his feet are pointing slightly out. He looks straight at Zara, eyes ringed with blue. Around his neck are strings of amulets.

    She looks back at him and we pass on, up toward the street, the street on which I wonder if she remembers we once watched, on market days, the long caravan of Tuaregs coming into Zinder from the north, the caravan bringing salt gathered from the pits of Bilma.

    But is it possible to become extravagantly attached to a place where you are entirely an onlooker? Where you have no job, no appointment to keep? No letter of introduction, no plan for tomorrow?

    An Irish-American woman with very little knowledge of spoken Hausa, seventeen years ago I looked sideways at a world I didn't understand. While the children played in the sand with bits of wood and stone, and Mike gathered material for a dissertation, I sat in a wedge of shade and watched the time pass.

    It began with the veranda spilled clean with morning light, the gleaming floor, early, before the day's heat had gotten under way. Ripples of shade on a wall already stroked with light. By mid-morning all that had changed: the shadows ran along the floor in swift black channels, unstoppable. Noon, and there was only an abrupt pool, dark and very still, always in the same place in front of the ledge from which the wooden door had been swung back on its hinges and held against the wall with a stone. For at least an hour the shadows seemed not to move at all while the sun hung at the top of the sky; then, too slowly to be sure when, the pool in front of the open doorway tipped east. Again, the pause, the moment of stillness, before the pull back into darkness. By the time Zara and Lizzy, tired of lying in bed, had hauled Tulu out of her crib and fastened her into the stroller, the rush toward evening had begun. Bare feet flying, they raced her up and down the veranda, weaving through the alternating strips of shadow and sun.

    Zinder was a case, always, of unrequited love.

    Desire was fed on glimpses and surmises, on bits of knowledge baffled and withdrawn. The wind that blows down across the Sahara during the winter months is the same wind that in France is called the mistral, in Italy the scirocco. From North Africa it sweeps across the desert and on southward to the coast where it funnels into the Bight of Benin, spending itself at last in the Gulf of Guinea. South of the Mediterranean this wind is sometimes called the harmattan and in Zinder fills the air with flying sand so pure that for a time everything is seen through a mist. You could be walking along a stretch of sand. In the distance, a shape, a shadow. At first, it is only that. Then something can be seen bubbling up from the surface of the horizon, a dark tangle rising to a narrow twist, like a cyclone, before erupting anew in some fever of impulse and delight. Where have you seen this before? Surely no place on earth. Then there it is, the great silver baobab, its roots exposed to the air and sky, its trunk flung wide in a spray of leaf and branch.

    Or this: a caravan of Tuaregs moves through the center of town, camels ,emerging one by one, ragged knees adrift. And there, lofty in his saddle, bare feet riding a white swaying neck, is a man in an indigo turban, his mouth covered, his eyes looking down into yours. The caravan passes, it disappears in the yellow air, gone, the sloping back of the last beast moving into obscurity.

    In a dream, you see the birds screaming over one dimpled place in the water, then the spray, the jet of mist, followed by the back rising from the deep, the creature emerging from the waves, up, up, until even the great blind face is bared dripping in the sun. The sense of having known it all from the beginning, from the other side of the womb.

    Would I have fallen so hard if Zinder at first sight had appeared less monotonous, less grim? Something more than a windy scrap of sand where the heat made a nightmare of each new day and for relief the eye fell on a twist of thorny branch, a vulture hunched on a wall?

    The streets were open stretches of sand, deserted during the long middle hours of the day except for an occasional donkey huddled against a wall for shade. By noon the sky had become a flat dim surface, an expanse of emptiness so dazzling the gaze reeled backward and away. Nor were we strangers to Africa and its sun. Both Zara and Lizzy had been born on the coast of Nigeria, a place where steam rises visibly from a rain-soaked forest and where faces stream with sweat. But this was a different sun. In Zinder it blotted up every drop of moisture as soon as it hit the air: you had to drink, never forget to drink, if you didn't want to become ill with dehydration. Or take salt pills. There was no help for it; the sun absorbed sweat before you could lift a hand to wipe it away. What's more, sand settled in ears and nostrils, lips cracked and bled. At noon flies clustered on the bite of food lifting to your mouth, giant cockroaches scuttled at night. Nor did any of this change. On the contrary, there was more to come: toads in the shower, dysentery, scorpions.

    Yet it was on Zinder, floating the seeds of life and death indifferently, that desire fastened. Little by little the outlines of a face emerged, maddening in its elusiveness. Impossible to summon at will, desired beyond reason, it would disappear for days, then swim suddenly into view. Visible at first only from a distance, it fascinated by its air of extreme mystery. But gradually, and much more dangerously, it startled at midday, rising from beneath a swarm of flies. Without the least warning, it would be staring out through the empty sockets of the skull of a goat half-buried in the sand.

    It was then you were reminded of the beginnings of passion: the terrible jolt of recognition, the bleak notice that what you had thought commonplace, even undesirable, has become as necessary to you as your breath and that without it you will die.

    The lover never has any history, any past: no mother, no father, not to mention husband or wife. Not a single child. Nothing that will serve as identification or credential. Nothing by which anyone can say, "Didn't I see you once, a year ago, in the station waiting for a train?" No, all of that is spurned, rejected. It is the unleashed self, released from time and history, the lover offers in cupped hands. All the rest is an embarrassment, a source of confusion and lies. The child playing alone at twilight, the fifteen-year-old wandering in the rain, only these are of any use from the past. And in some sense, at least, the lover, waiting to be snatched wide and set adrift, is right: any attachment at all would only encumber and restrain, provide an intolerable impediment. The whole point is to stand again on the brink, to return to that moment before choice bound one to a slowly turning wheel of days; to fling oneself once and for all into eternity.

    The traveler, rushing blindly to an assignation, is the same. Bag packed, everything left behind, the blaspheming hope is that one can be released from a self mired in history. Gone, the stupid face of the clock, fixed at seventeen minutes after three. Gone, the leaves yellowing on the tree outside the window. This time, if no other, myth will overtake one's own stumbling story and all the griefs and longings spilled so messily over the sad confusion of one's days will at last assume a noble shape, both tragic and anonymous: Orpheus, unable to resist the backward glance. Demeter, crying for her daughter.

Copyright © 1999 Kathleen Hill. All rights reserved.