The scream that flung you out of sleep told of torture, confusion. Your daughter was in your dreams, the tenth time this week. She won’t let you take a sip of water and drop the cup in peace. This time, she stood on a broken bridge, calling out your name, “help me, Nneka.” You are worried about what it means for a child to call her mother by her name and the scream three houses away.
There is a supplication in that voice, it awakens your legs to action. You catch in its anguish the rawest of communication, a cry for help from a pure soul to anyone who cares to harken. With the dust reaching your uncovered head, you pursue the familiar voice to its home, alarmed at how swift solace turn to sorrow. Hours ago, she sat on a block with her playmates, singing some nursery rhymes in a honeyed Hausa accent. Why is the pain of that child seeping into your skin?
The day the colors of your world salaamed to grief and you struggled with your breath to reach home, her smile started a healing song as you traveled the road to a new dawn one step at a time. In that dark wary moment, you saw your dead daughter in Amina.
When you arrived at the little hut, her fragility stared at your face, pleading for safety. Your eyes met the rusted razor in the hands of a gray witless woman and an unfinished lollipop in a pool of blood; the bait that wounded her trust in womanhood.
“Stop!”
Surprised and disgusted at your presence, Nana continued to cut this crying child, spitting at her confusion.
“It is for her good…,” her mother quivered, “cutting it will chase away the bad spirits.” She preached of purity and morality, while Nana murdered Amina’s soul for tradition.
On this bumpy and bloody ride, you watch her teary eyes close in suffering. They see her as a silent threat, a rose flower with many thorns. They believe that after three days, buried in stale blood, she will grow into a virgin for him.
Once, you froze in the face of oppression, listening as women praised pain. Amina will torment you too if the supremacy in your name go sour, take her away from this wasteland and plant her bud in a rich black earth to bloom.
