Ghostroots
By ’Pemi Aguda
Manifest
This is the first pimple of your life. Question the foreign object with all your fingers.
If you were to draw a straight line down from the right corner of your lip, then another straight line forward from the corner of your jaw, the pimple would be sitting at that intersection. Your index fingernail—false, acrylic, painted a burnt orange—flicks at the tiny bump. You press the pad of your thumb down on it, hard. The pimple does not go away. You have just turned twenty-six, why now?
Tonight, your mother calls you Agnes for the first time.
Agnes is not your name.
You are sitting at the dining table, picking beans, picking at this pimple. You like to sort beans on the wide surface of the mahogany table that’s older than you, sliding weevils and broken beans to a corner, making a route through the good beans so that you never have to lift them up. You think of the bad beans and weevils as lepers, driven out of the colony to live amongst themselves in disease and brokenness forever. When a weevil starts to creep back to the good beans, you stab at it. You love to feel them die. The crunch, then the give, under the force of your finger. Flick the dead off, stab again. Your mother must have been standing there awhile because when you look up, there she is, frozen, gripping her Bible and hymn book bag to the gold buttons of her nineties suit. The illumination from the hallway bulb envelops her so that her edges are blurred. Half of her face eaten by light.
“Agnes?”
“Hmmn?” you ask. “Who’s that?” But your mother only shakes her head, retreating.
“Who is Agnes?” you ask your father later that night. He is eating while watching a news report on the South Sudan civil war. Since the start of the conflict, almost two million people have been internally displaced . . .
You sit at the foot of his armchair, pulling hairs from your arm in the glow of the television screen. Agnes is your mother’s mother, your father tells you. “She died when your mum was young, ṣ’oo mọ ni?” He questions your ignorance as he makes vile noises with his tongue and teeth in an attempt to dislodge beef. But what do Nigerian parents tell their children about their own parents? Especially the Pentecostal Christians? Nothing. If you took a poll of your friends, three out of five would be similarly ignorant of these histories of parents who moved from somewhere to Lagos, left behind religions and curses and distant cousins and grimy pasts.
You ask your father if he wants more beans and beef, your hand back on that pimple. He shakes his head no. Your father hates that you take the weevils out of the beans; he thinks they add a certain flavor to the dish.
Excerpt from “Ghostroots” copyright © 2024 by ’Pemi Aguda. Published by Virago.
About the book: A debut collection of stories set in a hauntingly reimagined Lagos where characters vie for freedom from ancestral ties.
’Pemi Aguda opens her collection of twelve stories with the chilling tale of a woman who uncannily resembles her sinister, deceased grandmother. When the woman shows a capacity for deadly violence, she wonders—can evil be genetic, passed from generation to generation?
Set in Lagos, Nigeria, Aguda’s stories unfold against a spectral cityscape where the everyday business of living—the birth of a baby, a market visit, a conversation between mothers and daughters—is charged with an air of supernatural menace. In “Breastmilk” a new mother’s inability to lactate takes on preternatural overtones. In “24, Alhaji Williams Street” a mysterious disease wreaks havoc with frightening precision. In “The Hollow,” an architect stumbles on a vengeful house.
Evocative, strange, and yet familiar, “the speculative conceits of these stories are elegantly balanced with the gorgeous fullness of human emotion, all the hunger and longing and fear and delight of being a human in the world” (Lauren Groff).
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’Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
Her writing has won O. Henry Prizes, a Nommo Award for Short Story, a Henfield Prize, a Tyson Prize for Fiction, Hopwood Awards, and the Writivism Prize. Her work has been supported by an Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship, a Juniper Summer Workshop scholarship, an Aspen Words Emerging Writer fellowship, and her novel-in-progress won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She was a 2021 Fiction Fellow with the Miami Book Fair, a 2022 MacDowell fellow, and is the current Hortense Spillers Assistant Editor at Transition Magazine.
You can read our interview with ‘Pemi Aguda here
