Heartbeats and Arbour

In connection to my previous post, here's a short story told in the view of a suffering AIDS victim in Africa. This story, written by Laura Legge Age, age 17, won fourth place in a Canadian program that challenges youth to express their views on important global issues, i.e. poverty/world hunger.

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As a sleepy village awakes under the light of a thousand suns in the depths of the Sub-Saharan terrain, a lone woman remains asleep. It is on the floor of her kitchen where she takes in her last breaths of plantains and bean stew. It is on the floor of the very heart of her home, where her life began and was sustained, that her blind son listens to the sounds of his mother dying.

The night before, she slept, disturbed by the turbulence of rainfall and disruption of immune responses, enclosed within walls abandoned by promise. Her son, huddled against her breast, crusaded against fatigue, longing to feel the warmth that had long since been robbed from this frail woman's body. The virus, as always, takes with it more than the strength of the beautiful woman it infects. It robs from her the child she had fought down ramparts of adversity to bear. In her dream, she has visions of necromancers and doctors, handing her cups overflowing with the medicines her prayers have come to replace.

She gave life to Babatunde when she was only eighteen. In her Yoruba tradition, his name means "the father has come back", for he was born not one week after the succumbing of her own father to the AIDS virus. Now he lies in the midst of old ghosts and lost opportunity, nursing matriarchy's severed head.

As Babatunde slowly lifts his eyes to a tragedy he cannot see, he becomes painfully aware of the feeling of death. He has grown used to this phenomenon. Across the oceans perhaps a rock star is proclaiming the necessity of the situation in Africa, but in the bowels of his home Babatunde exists without hope. He will never traverse the oceans. Instead he dreams of Oshun and the terrible temper of love. He feels the dam in his sightless eyes give way. A flood of tears drowns his protector in the room where dreams come to die. His mother lies motionless in front of the fire, her hand still wrapped around the warmth of a wooden ladle.

It is hours later when Babatunde's only surviving relative returns from market to see him crouched above his mother, gripped by a hermetic sobriety. Babatunde's grandmother pauses, watching the sun expire with an excruciating splendour in a sky tickled by twilight. She ambles to her daughter's side, quietly humming dirges to pacify her tender grandson. She is a heroine. Each day she fashions with her own hands small wooden coffins as a means of livelihood out of the palm wood that grows in abundance around her home. It is this palm wood that caresses her daughter's skin as she is placed among the roots and soil of the underground. Her son weeps, his tears fertilizing the earth that swallows his mother. This scene is enough to lead Babatunde's grandmother to imagine an entire generation eradicated by a preventable virus. At this point, the reader perhaps begins to imagine witnessing firsthand the first instance of an entire continent of children adopting parental roles for sustenance. Sub-Saharan Africa has become a complex of nations of grandmothers and orphans, of bridges built through generations by heartbeats and ardour.

Faced with the direst destruction, Babatunde refuses to allow himself to be buried alive among the four walls of a kitchen compound that seems to swell with despair. He keeps his head raised so high that when he exits through the narrow doorway he hits his nose on thick cumulus clouds. Death has permeated his days in a way that life has not: it has been ever-present, omnipotent, the harrowing reality that has always overshadowed football victories and feasts of goat. It was in his first year of primary school that Babatunde lost his father, a mild man, blissfully unaware of his own majesty. The virus compromised his immune system, a process that was expedited by already prominent liver damage. Without the bastion of patriarchy to establish his family in good stead with the surrounding villages, Babatunde lost all economic advantage, even those school fees which brought verve to his slow routine.

Like so many of his generation, Babatunde is raised by his grandmother. An intense, squat woman, Babatunde's grandmother makes daily libations of honey and milk so that her children may be protected; at night, she secretly sneaks these rations into her bath water. Babatunde's grandmother channels all of the power of the ancestors, of the family robbed of her, into movements that are pointed and triumphant. She never once considers her hopeless situation with hopelessness. Each day is a struggle to support Babatunde, his wealth of siblings, and the teething infants the missionaries left under her vigilant care. And although she celebrates spirituality as a basis for renewal, Babatunde's grandmother begins to feel the effects of her age. She has raised her own children, her being has imparted upon them the knowledge she had gained for future undertakings; although she could not deny the role, she was not prepared for another cycle of parenting. Still, she believes in her own strength.

Babatunde grows to embrace the sense of solidarity his grandmother promotes, for the unity of hearts in his village has long since become poisoned by the stigma attached to HIV. Babatunde's grandmother hides her face in folds of thick cloth when she ventures to market for fear of taunts, but when she returns home to wrap Babatunde in her radiant folds of skin, he regenerates under her love. Teetering on the other edge of the world, balanced precariously upon a structure of privilege, a Western boy of Babatunde's age complains of earache and is pacified with the sweetest medicine. It will be eight years before he learns the meaning of death.

"Babatunde!" his grandmother calls in dulcet Nigerian tongues, "I have something to show you!" He urgently rushes to his grandmother, sensing in her voice a revelation. He holds out his hands for his grandmother, her callused fingers grabbing at his open palms, and waits without expectation. From the depths of her throat, Babatunde's grandmother lets loose a chuckle full of gravel. He has almost forgotten the sound of laughter.

He uses his hands as eyes to see the gift in his palms. It is small, yet secure in its stature; it is soft, yet incendiary in its incarnation. It is a leather-bound book, a book, he excitedly notes, by the ridges in its title, which contains his mother's memoirs. An oasis in the desert of his consciousness, Babatunde drinks in the knowledge his mother has left for him with a new sense of euphoria. The lost generation seems less like a phantom than a player in Babatunde's own narrative. He rediscovers the meaning of harmony.
And Babatunde's grandmother can only smile, flashing ridged gums and lips cracked in exhilaration. It seems that the wisdom of a generation has not disappeared; it seems, at least for the moment, that the sun will set as usual upon Babatunde's home. It is as if his mother has returned to breathe life into him.

The child in the next house, the young girl in the next village, the boy in the next country, continue to raise themselves, orphaned with the melancholy of an unwarranted burden of solitude, without the resiliency of a grandmother. They will never discover the lost generation's bible. The balance of power will continue to ebb and flow, never concerning itself that an entire continent has been consumed by a virus, that orphans and struggling grandparents have dotted the map of Africa like locusts, that this does not have to be the case.

http://www.bp208.ca/winners2006/ind_wri_4.php