Blessings
By Chukwuebuka Ibeh
Of all the things there are to worry about during pregnancy, a name for the child was what troubled Uzoamaka the most. She thought the suggestions from her friends – Chidera, Tochukwu, Ngozi – too regular, too simplistic, Anozie’s suggestions too practical, or, like everything about him, having a curious, archaic ring – who named their child Nnanna? She wanted a name to capture her gratitude for his decision to stay past the second month, for allowing her to witness his first kick by the fifth, a simple, wondrous proof of her body’s capacity to sustain life, after many miscarriages had led her to believe otherwise. And, although she quite liked the suggestion from Anozie’s mother, Obiajulu – ‘The mind is now at rest’ – she thought it was the kind of name a grandmother would give to her grandchild, a fond name, heavy with sentimentality. Not one to appear on a birth certificate, to be used stripped of context, by the general, uncaring public.
In the end, she had settled for a bit of both: the final decision, which she scribbled with certainty on his birth certificate, was straightforward and practical while also retaining its touch of sentimentality. Most of all, it felt apt. ‘May my heart not be lost.’ For his arrival had solidified, in some odd way, Uzoamaka’s sense of place, restoring to her a lost ability to believe in the concept of miracles. His birth, on a still Friday midnight in August of 1991, had taken her by surprise. He had arrived two weeks early, so that she mistook her early contractions for an out-of-character disturbance from him. She was up on her feet in the kitchen, putting away the plates from the evening’s dinner, which she had had alone because Anozie was away, and she thought at first she might sit down a bit to rest her back; and then, after a full hour of trying unsuccessfully to find a comfortable position and get him to relax, she rose from the chair and walked down the stairs to the neighbours’ door and requested a ride to the clinic to have her baby. Ironically, it was the man, Mr Adebayo, who flew into a panic, scurrying about his living room for proper clothes and emerging still under-dressed. In the car, he darted worried looks at her so often she feared the car would swerve off the road and slam into a ditch. She shrugged off his attempt to help her out of the car when they arrived at the clinic, walking the distance to the labour ward herself; and, in a few hours, she held the shrieking baby in her arms, watching with tears in her eyes as he furiously announced his presence in the world, and an end to her longing.
The midwives were enamoured by him. They commented with approval on his healthy birthweight, his lack of jaundice, which was endemic at the time, the ease of the labour. Uzoamaka herself had been a thing of wonder in the ward, and she revelled in the attention from the other patients seeking to catch a glimpse of the baby, light-headed with contentment and already tired out by the time Anozie arrived, his joy at the brink of bursting. He told her the car was outside, ready to take them home, and together they looked down at the baby in the crook of her arm, nursing at her breast. A child, after all these years.
Uzoamaka liked to recount, at the slightest prompting, the circumstances surrounding Obiefuna’s birth. His arrival had not just been an answer to the nights of endless prayers and tears that had lasted for years but also a reversal of their life’s course and fortune. Three months into the pregnancy, Anozie secured a massive supply contract by chance, being in the right place at the right time, with enough income finally to move them out of their public yard and into a better one uptown, where they had a kitchen and bathroom to themselves. Her hair-braiding business suddenly bloomed, with too many customers insisting on having her attend to them even though she was visibly pregnant and there were other free stalls around. A few weeks into the eighth month, Anozie, following the lead of his friend Udoka, had bought tickets for a raffle with a sizable percentage of his earnings. She nearly lost her mind when she found out, going for days without speaking to him, and when he informed her a week later that he had been notified that he was to receive his grand prize in Benin, being one of two lucky winners out of over two hundred people, she dismissed it as a lie, a mischievous attempt to get her to start talking to him again. And, when he arrived from work the following day, laughing and crying in her arms as he told her that the prize was a car, the new model Mercedes-Benz, she screamed and jumped around the house until she felt a protesting kick, a warning to be still, and yet a small and abiding reminder of the greater miracle that was now her life.
‘You know, he brought us all these blessings,’ Anozie used to say in the early days following Obiefuna’s birth. It was just like him to state the obvious with the self-satisfaction of one wielding esoteric knowledge. Of course she knew. She regarded the baby with certain gratitude. He was faultless, free of the anxiety inducing behaviours characteristic of newborns. He was popular at the market for his ready, dimpled smile and his full hair, which was soft to the touch and made people assume, initially, that he was a girl. Other mothers told her she was lucky – how the baby accommodated, and even slept in, the arms of strangers, allowing her the space and time in which to work, how he ate everything he was fed, saving them the energy and cost of scouting for special meals, doubling in weight with healthy, radiant skin, rarely falling sick. He was lovable and playful with everyone, effortlessly gaining their affection. Her customers took to dropping tips specifically for the baby, and, when he began to babble the ‘thank you’ she taught him to say, they laughed and stared at him in speechless wonder. He was not even a year old when he began to totter about on unsteady legs and pronounce babyish variations of the names of the regular faces he saw. The general teasing was that he was an old man in a child’s skin; the general belief was that he was a special child.
But when Uzoamaka woke up with that familiar morning sickness again and confirmed her next pregnancy, she was, for reasons she could not name, mildly worried. She found it difficult to share in Anozie’s joy, however infectious, and when his mother breezed in from the village with a trailer-load of foodstuff and a bigger trailer-load of goodwill, she wanted to ask the woman to leave right away. The mere thought of putting on a cheer she hardly felt, of performing happiness for its own sake, exhausted her, and she vomited her way into the sixth month, losing weight and appetite at every turn and needing to take an early leave from work, on the doctor’s recommendation, to rest. And, even when the baby came (born through Caesarean because he would not stay in the right position), small and overwhelmingly shrill, she tried and failed to feel something concrete. For him, Obinna or Chidera or even Ozoemena would do. But Anozie called him Ekenedilichukwu, ‘Thanks be to God’, and, in her dark, fleetingly misanthropic moments, she would wonder what there was to be grateful for when the child had nearly taken her life.
The considerable differences between the two children would become apparent as they were growing up. It was surprising and sometimes heartbreaking to watch her Obiefuna lose all his babyish charm, turning into a reserved, self-effacing child, and unconsciously relegating authority to the brash, forthright Ekene. Obiefuna transitioned before her very eyes into the exact opposite of his baby self, and Uzoamaka looked on with growing despair as he tried and failed to be accepted by his peers and became susceptible to bullies; and, more distressingly, he was now a source of irritated concern to Anozie.
‘That boy,’ he remarked often, with none of the grateful wonder that had characterized early musings on Obiefuna, ‘he’s abnormal.’
The first time, she had demanded an explanation for his statement, raising her voice to match his when he told her off, knowing deep down – and further angered by the knowledge she was unprepared to admit – that there was indeed something unusual about the boy. He spoke little, kept few friends, was likely to come home with bruises from a fight he had lost or in tears because of something mean one of the neighbourhood kids had said; and, while Ekene reminded Uzoamaka of the boys of her childhood, some of whom had been the objects of her childhood crushes, Obiefuna brought to mind the fun, loyal girlfriends she had grown up with. Sometimes, she was distressed by the nagging feeling that a terrible mistake had been made. But sometimes, such as when Obiefuna took to the dance floor, she was convinced that there was nothing remotely closer to perfection. He astonished her with his moves, his ability to manipulate his limbs into impossible angles. He was known in the neighbourhood for his gift, and she looked on with elation at parties as he outdanced the other children, ignoring the irritated snorts from their parents. It was among the many areas of his upbringing on which she and Anozie disagreed. Once, they had attended the baby dedication of one of Anozie’s old friends, and Obiefuna, in his usual fashion, had scooped all the dance prizes there were. Anozie, nursing a cold bottle of beer, had taken in the sight with a mere uninterested glance. He was in a jocular mood, exchanging pleasantries with friends and presenting gifts to the parents of the child, and on the drive back home he hummed merrily to the Oriental Brothers. But when they arrived, she was still unbuckling her sandals at the front door when Anozie turned round to slap Obiefuna across the face. Uzoamaka stood upright to see her son slammed against the wall from the force of the smack, corresponding welts appearing almost immediately on his face.
‘What is wrong with you? Anumanu!’ Anozie swore, his voice getting stuck behind his throat as it did when he was working himself into a fit of rage. ‘Are you a woman in a man’s skin? Asim, i bu nwoke ko i bu nwanyi?’ he demanded, undoing the hook of his belt for a proper assault. It was then that Uzoamaka wedged herself between them and dared him to lay a finger on her son one more time, telling him to wait and see if she would not feed him his own penis. They stood staring at each other for a long time, he surprised by her audacity, she seething in her newly found, compounding rage, the silence fraught with expectation, until Anozie put the belt down and stormed into the bedroom.
The boy cried until dinner was ready, all the way through dinner and late into the night. She sat by his bed, rocking him gently and whispering, ‘Ozugo nu, sorry,’ and a whole lot of promises. She held his head to her breast – his temperature was rising – and felt her blood rise to her head from rage. How ridiculous, how callous and absurd to expect perfection from a child. He was only eight years old, unaware of what ‘proper’ behaviour entailed. But, as she put out the light in the room, having managed to subdue his tears and put him to sleep, she wished he would be a little more conventional.
Excerpt from “Blessings” copyright © 2024 by Chukwuebuka Ibeh. Published by Viking Books.
About the book: When Obiefuna's father witnesses an intimate moment between his teenage son and the family's apprentice, newly arrived from the nearby village, he banishes Obiefuna to a Christian boarding school marked by strict hierarchy and devastating violence. Utterly alienated from the people he loves, Obiefuna begins a journey of self-discovery and blossoming desire, while his mother Uzoamaka grapples to hold onto her favourite son, her truest friend.
Interweaving the perspectives of Obiefuna and his mother Uzoamaka, as they reach towards a future that will hold them both, Blessings is an elegant and exquisitely moving story of love and loneliness. Asking how we can live freely when politics reaches into our hearts and lives, as well as deep into our consciousness, it is a stunning, searing debut.
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Chukwuebuka Ibeh is a writer from Port Harcourt, Nigeria, born in 2000. His writing has appeared in McSweeneys, The New England Review of Books and Lolwe, amongst others. He was the Runner-up for the 2021 J.F Powers Prize for Fiction, a finalist for the Gerald Kraak Award and Morland Foundation Scholarship and was profiled as one of the "Most Promising New Voices of Nigerian Fiction" in Electric Literature.
You can read our interview with Chukwuebuka Ibeh here
