Shetani
By Lisa Lahey
The man I called my father despised me because I was my mother’s bastard. My skin was light black and my parents were very dark. Unlike my parents, my eyes were hazel and my soft, brown hair had a gentle curl. My father punished my mother for her infidelity by abusing me: he threw scraps from the dinner table onto the floor for me to eat with my hands. From an early age he beat me when I spoke and I never learned to talk. Despite this, the pity in the villagers’ eyes told me they knew of my suffering.
My father’s hatred was born of humiliation. He could accept my mother’s infidelity; he’d had affairs of his own. But when he looked at me he was confronted with my mother’s disloyalty. My birth was an ablation of his manhood. My mother had challenged his status in our family and in the village. He violated me with the pestilence of his disgust.
When he was drunk my father slapped my mother in the face and called her kahaba nyekundu, scarlet whore. One day she left my father for a man who lived in a far-off village. She left me behind with my father. My mother escaped the shackles of her bastard child and miserable marriage but I wasn’t so fortunate. She left me caged within my father’s rage and misery.
After my mother left, my father beat me every day. He kicked, burnt, punched, slapped me and called me mtoto wa bastard, a bastard’s child. His words pierced me like knives and I had none to throw back at him; I had no shield to defend myself. Bathed in the acid of his hatred I blistered with fear and shame. His contempt tore into my heart more than his beatings injured my body.
God heard my pleas and sent me respite in my dreams through the effervescent voices of silver-tipped birds. They didn’t need my broken words because they had their own and sang them so sweetly.
“Nala, how you suffer. Come with us to a land of peace!”
I felt myself shrink and shrink until the birds towered over me. Climbing on their backs, I soared into freedom, filled with glee as I flew through a sparkling mist down a rainbow of gold. When the birds brought me back they flew away, leaving me with my father’s rage and a torrent of tears. I begged them to return but my pleas fell on deaf ears; the birds came and went as they pleased.
My father starved me of both his love and food; I was always hungry. I dug through the garbage to satisfy my hunger and ate food the dogs wouldn’t eat. When my father caught me eating from the garbage he beat me with his belt, claiming it made him look bad. I was too afraid to run; my father might find me and destroy me.
My neighbour, Folami Abebe, tried to help. She fed me when she could but with six children of her own, it was difficult. After an especially wicked beating she took me into her home and her arms, tended to my wounds and held my broken body. I wept so much into my hair that it lost its curl. Folami sang mournful songs passed down through an eternity of children who suffered poverty, hunger and cruelty. Her voice wrapped me in the sheets of dead children who’d died at the hands of hatred. She prayed for God to take pity on me and to release me from a river of tears turned to drought.
Starved for love more than food, I cherished and fed my soul with every kind word, but each day’s torture at my father’s hands was worse than the last. Even in my dreams, my father crucified me and flogged me with a scorpion’s venom; it oozed from my wounds and trickled into my mouth. Impurity numbed my tongue, making it swell until the prayers within my heart became impossible.
One night, God answered Folami’s prayers and took pity on me; my father kicked me to death. He attacked my head and face until my brain swelled and burst through my skull. Blood and brain fluid oozed like lava out of my head, seeping into the cracks of the floor tile. In the midst of this ugliness I felt the growth of the silver-tipped wings of the birds in my dreams. I saw the beauty of my white feathered-coated breast and I soared into the treetops. As equals, the mystical birds flew beside me into the sky and beyond, showing me the secrets of a paradise they’d always known and I was just beginning to taste.
My father’s anger ripped me from paradise back into his house and I stood beside my emaciated body. My wings melted against me and my song turned into anguished cries. I saw the damage my father had inflicted upon me my body. It was covered with fresh and faded bruises and a spider web of deep scars. I sensed my father’s fear of what the village might do to him, but he had no remorse for what he’d done to me. Hatred blazed in the yellow glints of his black eyes. If he could, he would have thrown my remains into the river and let the silt and filth drag me into the sea.
I felt no animosity towards my father, even when he pondered dropping me into the well near our house. His soul was dark and withered; he was incapable of the truth. He had never known happiness. I searched his mind and learned we were kindred spirits; his life was a tapestry of misery woven with the scars of a tortured childhood. A lost, terrified boy that lived within his soul sang songs of wretchedness. I wept for the boy he had been and the man he could have become. My father had punished me my whole life but his wickedness had delivered me from my misery.
The village women prepared my body for burial. They oiled and swathed my body in linen, ignoring my wounds. They washed the dirt from beneath my fingernails and picked the lice out of my hair. Our Imam read the funeral prayers, calling my death a tragedy. It was a deliverance but no one heard me when I whispered this truth. Villagers offered their sympathy to my father, who thanked them for their kindness. They fed him for three days with rich foods he barely tasted. He had spilled the blood of an innocent and terrifying visions of the afterlife now haunted his dreams. He couldn’t escape the evil he’d visited upon me.
Folami came to my funeral. My father stared into an abyss of endless accusation in her dark brown eyes. He saw his hereafter in her and he turned away.
The village mourned my death for forty days then never spoke of me again, as if I’d never existed. My father was never punished for killing me. He remarried and had children he was certain were his own. I watched him treat them as well as he could. He didn’t love them because there was no love in his soul, but now he was too fearful of God’s wrath to abuse them.
I was trapped by my father’s cruelty when I lived and now I am trapped by my village in death. I was forced into an epic journey not of my making yet fuelled by my desolation. Since I died the villagers look towards the east and deny their wrongdoing. I can’t move on to my next home with no one to reveal the truth of my earthly journey. I cannot travel the three deep rivers into the afterlife, where the dead will rescue my grieving soul.
Like my father, I am a caged bird trapped without hope of escape unless someone sets me free. On dark nights when there is no moon in the sky, the villagers hear my mournful cries and lock their doors. They call me shetani, evil spirit. The evil isn’t mine; it is theirs. The village is filled with shetani but it isn’t borne of my essence. They turned a blind eye to a suffering child when I lived. For that, they feared uttering my name after my death. They hadn’t the courage to free me. I had no desire for vengeance; I offered forgiveness.
On the cusp of paradise and despair I realized a great truth: it takes a village to raise a child in ignorance or in love; it takes a village to kill and forever imprison a child. All I ask from my village is the key.
THE END
Author Bio: Lisa Lahey has been published in 34th Parallel Magazine, Spacesports and Spidersilk Magazine, Why Vandalism?, and she will be published in the April issue of Literally Stories.