By Adetokunbo Ajenifuja
The sun has failed to search the blackness your heart has become and the hole that has been your soul. The hole that deepens with each passing moment, plunging into an abyss, a dark eternity, where a speck of light could not brave, where echoes of words reduce to nothingness, not even the word of your mother who stays in your matrimonial home, whose word of consolation is always:
“Aminat, don’t hurt yourself with tears…See how frail you have grown. By the grace of Allah, you shall carry your own child. Five years after marriage is too long to wait, I know. But doctor says nothing is wrong with neither you nor Suleiman. Is this not enough to praise Allah? You are no longer the faithful worshipper you’ve been from your childhood. You no longer observe your five daily prayers at due time. All in the name of childlessness?”
And she would wipe your tears with the edge of her wrapper. But you are sick and tired of her consolations, sick and tired of life itself. Because, after all, nothing has changed, absolutely nothing, except your husband. Everything about him has changed. He no longer takes the meal you prepare. He no longer smiles nor utters those soft words to you. He no longer offers you the romantic touches, which you still crave from him despite that he’s no longer himself, despite that he reeks of alien perfumes and other wanton odours and his lips shocking with red gloss, which you never wear and which has never affected your beauty, according to Suleiman.
You have to rest your mind in the palms of your creator, your mother would say. Because when you lose hope, you lose your faith. You lose everything. You are lifeless. You are…
At this you scream like a demented thing, you scream in protest, cutting your mother short. This has been you, until one day when you open the window of your bedroom to view the world at the backyard of your husband’s mansion. Your eyes, running across the bushy landscape, suddenly take a pause on a tree, once a dead tree, now sprouting seedlings and fine green leaves. All these overnight? You wonder. This is not foreign to you. Not at all.
But this particular tree has been too hopeless for survival, has been there before you and your husband packed into this house – a burnt tree, a terrible thing. And your mouth has turned agape with the endless chants of “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great) without as much as a permission from your mind. You begin to seek divine forgiveness. You begin to feel the darkness in your heart give way to light. Your mother is right. Allah is wonderful, merciful, indeed, but the secret is: You have to remain hopeful. You have to remain faithful. You have to remain alive for that desire. These you recite to yourself, like a hymn, when the dead feeling of despair is about to wake again with her deadly weapons. These you repeat to yourself until after a few months when you’re pregnancy test is positive. Kneeling down before you, like a broken slave, Suleiman seeks for your forgiveness, apologizing for his change of altitude. Will you forgive him? Yes, you will, because Allah has condoned your ignorance too.
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