By Zoë Gadegbeku Download pdf, mobi, epub
“Ei! Is this how people are? How can you just leave it like that?”
“Darling I thought I read somewhere that these people respect their dead so much, but look at this! Maybe they thought the person was a witch or some other superstition…”
“Ewurade yesu! I won’t pass here again!”
“This is a disgrace! What do we have AMA for?”
Step right up! See the incredible invisible girl appear and disappear before your very eyes!
It was such a shame, and yet very appropriate, that after years of perfecting her disappearing act, Mawukoenya would exit in the most public and humiliating of ways. If invisibility was indeed a real talent that she possessed, why had it not manifested itself at this crucial time? And so she lay there, next to an open gutter that threatened to spew its contents onto the street, her body stiff, strangely pristine in its surroundings. Bushes were adorned with shreds of plastic bags, which clung to thorns where flowers should have. Rats tugged at her clothes, where an undertaker’s hands should have been busy cleansing and arranging.
Step right up!
Since childhood, Mawukoenya had harbored a curious obsession with the circus, but it never came to her town, and she knew it never would. It was a treat reserved for rosy-cheeked, pig-tailed little girls, for pudgy little boys with heads full of curls the color of wheat or spun gold or something they called “hay”, for milky white people who inhabited worlds she read about in story-books handed down from her older sisters. And yet, her fantasies took her to the big top repeatedly. She saw the strongest man alive, his swollen muscles glistening obscenely under the incessant heat of the spotlight. She saw twins striding through thin air in tandem, the tightrope barely visible to an enthralled audience who, aghast, held on so tightly to the edges of their seats that the metal almost cut through the soft flesh of their palms. But what arrested her attention was the freak show. Although the term “freak” was not one blended with her lilting vernacular, or the absurdly formal Ghanaian English she had been taught, she found this category of castoffs oddly endearing, familiar in so many ways.
There was the bearded lady with a full shrub of hair clinging resiliently to the lower half of her face. She stood with hands planted firmly on her hips, and turned her head slowly as if to survey the crowd, but really daring any one to mock her. But was a bearded lady so strange? After all, Mrs. Boadu, her Class Three teacher, had quite an impressive smattering of stubborn black hairs sprouting on her chin, with a generous patch of chest hair only slightly visible above her low-cut blouses; visible enough to make you question whether your imagination was indulging in its usual trickery or whether she was a man in disguise.
In any case Mawukoenya knew she belonged there, in that basket of misfits which contained all the God-given traits that other children begged not to be cursed with. Nothing else explained why she was such an expert at making herself invisible. It wasn’t even a talent she could call up on demand – step right up and witness the wonders – she was a natural. She started doing it before she was born. Unlike her sisters, she was such a restful tenant of her mother’s womb that it had taken her mother months to realize the nausea and dizziness were more than a particularly persistent strain of malaria. With her first two pregnancies, Mama Ashime (Mama Market as other traders in the Ashaiman market affectionately called her for her fierce presence and authority) had given birth to robust babies with the most piercing cries that could be heard up and down their red sand cul-de-sac. And yet, when Mawukoenya made her quiet entry into the world, her parents had looked down at her unhealthy frame wrapped in a faded cot sheet. Efo, her father, sniffed, shaking his head slowly at the runt of the litter, with disgust evident in his wrinkled nose and furrowed brow.
“Hmmmm,” he had said. “What is wrong with this one? Let us call her Mawukoenya. Only God knows why he brought us this… Only God knows why! Mawu! That face! So sad.”
“Kai daddy, what is wrong with her head?” asked Aseye, Mawukoenya’s elder sister.
When she grew up, and her wrinkly face had smoothed out to a less troubling plain brownness, and her body had grown to match the size of her head to a certain extent, she could never shake the feeling that it might be more convenient for all parties involved if she could just evaporate from sight.
She became an expert at disappearing, to save herself the obvious resentment, the drastic shift in her mother’s voice when she would introduce her other two daughters, “Here are my children, Seyra and Aseye! Babies come, come, come and greet aunty! Oh ermmm, Mawuko! Mawukoenya, where are you hiding? Ah. Here is the last one. Hmmm.” Only God knows. After the first dozen times it was no longer painful to hear the church bells and car horns blaring in her mother’s voice when she called her sisters. In her mother’s voice, her name sounded more like an elegy, drawn from vocal chords that had ceased to know joy a long time ago. Mawukoenya learned how to skirt edges of conversations and disappear into the periphery of the room. Where has this girl gone again? Always hiding in corners like she’s up to no good!
She was the sole proprietor of no man’s land, taking pleasure in the imaginary worlds she conjured and held tightly in her sweaty palm, stuffing them hastily away in the pocket of her brown pinafore before nosy classmates tried to snatch them, or snatch her out of her pleasurable reverie. She was not a playground favorite, and it intrigued her and made her laugh at the same time. They thought she was crazy, their fervent whispers brushed past the tips of her ears like the harmattan breeze, fleeting and strangely refreshing. Their fear was apparent in the smooth way their pupils slid away from hers when she walked past them on the narrow verandas of the school. Maybe she should extend an invitation into her secret spaces. But even in her imagination she occupied the fringes, the person left out of the circle when playing “mosquito”, the game with the sharp sound of youthful palms clapping and with the shrill chants of “Ama, Ama, close the door — because of what? — mosqui-t-o”. But she wasn’t alone on the outside, her fellow shadow dwellers stood beside her. They would form a second circle around the “normal”, “happy”, “well-adjusted”, “socially adept” children who knew how to “play well with others”, and they would laugh, and lick their cracked lips, and inch closer to those who had dared exclude them. And their wrinkled hands would sprout claws, and their milk teeth would turn into vicious fangs, and then…who knew enamel against young flesh felt so good?
“Mawuko! Wake up!”
Mawu! This child was laughing in her sleep again. If you could even call that laughter. It was more like a shriek, like tire rims screeching on tarmac, narrowly missing the slender frame that thought it could outrun the machine. Mawukoenya. Why can’t she just be normal? Walking back from the market one evening, Mama Ashime was sure she had seen the other children in the neighborhood running away from her. She was surrounded by them, and was lunging clumsily towards them like the neighborhood drunkard. The children would squeal and tear off in the opposite direction. Maybe it was a new game they were playing. Maybe her eyes were misleading her. After all, it had been a long day of dismal sales, and she had a migraine threatening to shatter her skull into a million fragments. Perhaps they were only playing?
But perhaps not. And Mawukoenya folded herself into smaller and smaller pieces, learning how to erase herself from sight. It really wasn’t difficult when everyone else was wishing for her disappearance deep in the obscure corners of their minds. Even those who had no choice but to love her did so very grudgingly, the endless parade of relatives and neighbors who dropped by their home in the hopes of leaving with a bag of provisions, or a container packed with stringy Okro stew, or some coins concealed in a tightly closed fist.
And with every condescending squeeze of the shoulder – Don’t worry! One day you’ll grow “fine-fine” like your sisters – it was as if they were erasing just one more trace of her tangibility; boring holes into her flesh which started off as pin pricks and transformed into gaping craters, letting out the last vestiges of light and carefree childhood and allowing insecurity and useless aspirations and never-will-you-be-good-enough and depravity and insanity to seep in. Eventually these dark infiltrators would mesh together, fibers of thick black wool knitted together, obscuring vision, shoved so far down her throat that her breath sputtered to a standstill – Don’t mind that thing over there, it’s just rubbish, we keep forgetting to throw it away. Ah! Where did this girl vanish to again?
Mawukoenya found enjoyment only in her private fantasies of revenge, and milk teeth dripping with warm blood, and clasped hands, and circles, and, and… the circus.
She had found the circus. One day Aseye had set down the Enid Blyton story book she had been reading to run an errand for Mama. Mawukoenya snatched it off the coffee table and retreated immediately to her usual territory, that sliver of space between the cupboard full of provisions and the wall, just big enough for her body to fit. She was enthralled with these cherubic children who tottered down garden paths and partook in strange rituals like “tea time”. But it was the circus freaks that had grabbed her by the neck and turned her head towards their display.
Step right up!
She recognized herself in their otherness, in the combination of curiosity and disgust pasted plainly on the faces of their spectators. She recognized too, that she could erase herself into infamy, disappear into the lime light. The incredible invisible girl.
Step right up! You’ve never seen anything like this before!
Mawukoenya continued to lurk in the shadows, meanwhile Aseye and Seyra laughed and bathed in the glow of the sun’s rays, Mama and Efo looking on and applauding with sickeningly indulgent smiles, and the flesh around their foolish smiles melted and coagulated into several rolls of fat, multiple chins folding over themselves and oozing over the collars of their clothes; what would happen if she sank a sharpened fingernail or two into them? Would they just ooze excess fats and oils, or would they spill some of their reserves of affection so she could lap them up before her sisters dried up the supply? She even tried to dance in the light with them, but no spotlight was bright enough to fill the ever-expanding darkness that blanketed her being. She tried, but the light didn’t catch her dark brown eyes in the same way it glinted in her sisters’ faces.
Sit down Mawukoenya! Aseye and Seyra are playing with their friends and you’re in the way! Ahba! Why is she so troublesome?
Even adolescence, with its naïve optimism, wasn’t kind to Mawukoenya. This was the time when girls’ breasts began to perk up and out, and their hips started to roll along rhythmically as they walked. Their minds began to fire conflicting signals in all directions, neurotransmitters driven haywire with lust and angst and exuberance and hope. This internal upheaval revealed itself however it chose, buttery smooth skin one day, infestation of pimples the next. Beyond the trauma of this constant transformation lay the expectation that young girls would emerge from this period refreshed and refreshing, exactly like Aseye and Seyra. They entered into young adulthood with the grace of flame of the forest flowers drifting in the breeze, before tumbling to a perfect landing on earth. For Mawukoenya, her petals were more shriveled than promising, nectar dried up before drought had even contemplated descending on the unsuspecting populace.
“Mawu! Menyo kraaa kraaa kraa ooh!”
“Mama Ashime take this cream for your daughter’s face! Those pimples will be gone one touch!”
“Mmmm! Mawuko! Did you use the lime today? Your armpit smells!”
Step right up!
Her audience was frozen in awed revulsion. That scraggly hair, more like the tangled tufts of fluff that lived in corners that were never swept, and less like cotton wool slipping meekly between fingertips. That face, nearly no inch left untouched by a blemish or at least the trace of one. But that mind – the backdrop for all this external chaos, the scene where the crime of puberty actually takes place – if only she could give people a tour.
Prime seats. Step right up!
Two concentric circles, the inner one tightly formed and emanating warmth from its core, hands lovingly clasped, and the owners of these hands self-satisfied in their own goodness and health. The outer one – gaping holes in some places where life should have been, dirty claws grasping for each other and holding on precariously, reluctantly. Closing in, the main event, sawdust thrown on the floor of the big tent, here come the freaks! Throw sawdust in their eyes, rip their smug flesh apart, rip it…
“Efo what are we going to do with this your daughter? We can’t send her to boarding house with this behavior! Shouting and kicking in her sleep like that? Ebei!”
Efo squeezed every last drop of juice, ripping out every string of fibrous flesh clinging to the thick orange rind. He spat out a few seeds onto the freshly mopped veranda, a habit that reddened Mama Ashime’s eyes to an impressive crimson.
“Chew the skin too! Tswwwww, see village people!”
She was more easily irritated these days, probably due to Aseye and Seyra’s absence. They had been away at boarding school for almost a year. They spent vacations with relatives to avoid the over-priced, over-crowded buses back into the city. And now Ama was left with this disgrace. This she-devil. Only God knows what she was always doing hiding in dark places, mumbling to herself in her sleep, always, always clawing at the air and grabbing fistfuls of nothing.
Efo dug a finger deep into his ear and examined the product he had extracted. “Hmmm. What do you want me to say? You’ve already made up your mind, or?”
“Efo, taflatse! I don’t know what else to do with her. According to her teachers, she stares into space all day long. When everyone goes outside for break, she squeezes herself into corners like, like – I don’t even know! She’s not normal! Asylum Down seems like the best place for her. Maybe they’ll know what to do.”
Efo heaved an exhausted sigh, exhaling what seemed like all the air stored in his lungs.
“She’s a handful, I know. But are you very sure? Even my biggest enemy, I wouldn’t send him there.”
“Efo, I’ve already spoken to a nurse there. One lady who comes to my stall, the one that always wants to buy on credit, she told me they can handle Mawuko. There’s nothing they haven’t seen!”
The Accra Psychiatric Hospital, or Asylum Down, was located at a busy intersection close to High Street. Every day, an endless procession of civil servants, bank employees, shoe shine boys, pickpockets, and students, would hurry past the non-descript building without giving it a second glance. You would have to pay very close attention to notice that some of its patients, or “inmates” as they were unfortunately labeled, spilled out of the grounds and mingled with the hawkers that crowded between the lanes of cars, selling TV remotes, mouse traps and any other item one might ever need.
Mama Ashime hustled Mawukoenya out of the taxi onto the pavement, which was littered with a sticky mess of neem fruits. A nurse met them at the gate. Mama eyed her white uniform with its seams stretched to the absolute limit to accommodate her rolls and curves. She had kept so much of Mama’s money, and she couldn’t even use some of it to sew new uniforms. Tswww. The empty look on Mama Ashime’s face did not betray her disapproval. She would be waiting for her in the market next time. But back to the matter at hand…
“Mama, I’ll take it from here. Mawuko is in good hands.”
Step right up.
The show must go on. Mama Ashime squeezed Mawukoenya’s arm briefly and turned on her heel back to the organized insanity of the traffic jam outside.
Look! There were cages and chains and a dusty courtyard! Sawdust? That must be where the lion tamer kept his ferocious side-kick! Was this the bearded lady? She didn’t have quite enough hair on her chin, a little disappointing to be honest.
And rows and rows of metal cots, and patients…inmates…performers. Rocking and moaning and crying unholy cries, barking and singing and wrenching their coarse hair out a few dozen follicles at a time. Perhaps the freak show was starting early? But these characters were rowdier than the shadow dwellers she had expected. Maybe they were rehearsing. She would rehearse too. Folding and folding and curling and curling pieces of herself until she wasn’t sure she really existed anymore. Maybe later when the invisibility wore off she would take a walk to try and find the lions’ cages.
Mawukoenya must have fallen asleep. She opened her eyes to a few strangers clad in white standing around her cot.
“What’s the problem with this one here?”
Unsure of what to do, she clammed her eyes shut hoping she would just melt into the closest available corner like she always did. Admittedly her act needed some work. But then a pain shot through her right arm all the way to her bone marrow. She tumbled through the fabric of the big top, and she swallowed a mouthful of sawdust, and she heard Mama Ashime screaming as her nails scratched her plump face…
The days were shrouded in an over-medicated haze, and Mawukoenya was sure she was actually disappearing piece by piece. Syrups for pain where there should have been blood and mucus, pills for sleep where there should have been muscle and tissue, injections for peace – pinpricks into gaping voids. The freak show was twisted and terrifying. She eventually found the lion cage, and she stuck a short stick through the bars, and a pair of large teeth clamped on to it. Success! If only the lion tamer was here to complete the moment… except the teeth belonged to a human head. Eyes embedded so far back in his skull they were barely visible; collarbones jutting out through papery flesh. And the smell… Mawukoenya yanked the stick out of this fake lion’s jaws and ran as fast her sluggish, sedated body would carry her, which meant she was really just dragging herself step by painful step outside the grounds of the hospital.
Step right up! Don’t miss the incredible invisible girl!
She might as well have been invisible, because the dozing security man didn’t even blink in her direction as she labored past. After all where would she go? Her family was definitely not coming back for her! It had been weeks, or maybe months, and not one relative had arrived with a basket of food. She would be back.
Torture the freaks. Why can’t you be normal? Where has this girl gone to? No milk teeth, just fangs, and thick needles. And blood everywhere. Today, Mawukoenya was choosing light over shadow, over invisibility. I’m right here! And there were taxi drivers yelling, and a cacophony of car horns, and blood and invisible forever, incredibly so…
Good evening Accra and welcome to News24. The dead body of an unidentified young woman estimated to be about 15 years of age has been discovered in the Asylum Down neighborhood, adjacent to the Accra Psychiatric Hospital. The woman is believed to have been a patient of the hospital. She allegedly wandered out of the grounds during lunch and was struck by a speeding taxi. The Accra Metropolitan Authority and some members of the police force were brought to the scene when a few concerned residents drew the authorities’ attention to the growing stench and presence of rats and other vermin. The Deputy Minister of Health has launched a probe into the administration of the hospital, after allegations of inmates being subjected to severe neglect and abuse. There have been reports of extreme solitary confinement, with some individuals being kept in zoo-like conditions. The family of the young woman is yet to come forward to identify her body.
“Ei! Is this Ghana?”
“Hmm my sister it’s not easy ooh! Now people are leaving their dead on the road like that. Chai!”
“It’s because she was mad.”
“Don’t say that ooh! Are they not people too?”
“Hmmm…but what of Mama Ashime’s daughter? It’s been long since I’ve seen her!”
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Zoë Gadegbekuis a very recent graduate of Georgetown University. She will be pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College starting in September. All she wants to do with her life is to write until she runs out of words, at which point she will probably begin to invent her own. Her studies as a French major have been dedicated to the history and cultures of Francophone Africa. She wrote her senior honors thesis based on the writings of Awa Thiam, Mariam Bâ and Ken Bugul. Zoë also draws inspiration from Ama Ata Aidoo, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Toni Morrison, and many other women writers she enjoyed from her mother’s book collection. She hopes to be half as great as these women some day, but in her own unique way of course, because that’s what they would want.
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Also in this Issue
Short Stories
Poems