(a story you must read)

Dear journal, you know me even better than I know myself. Telling you my stories is just as good as telling them to God. It is more for me than it is for you. Like a prayer, the crow of cocks, the croak of frogs; it is my way of staying alive.

My name is Chinaza. It means God replies or God answers. My mother told me that my birth was the answer to the prayers they hadn’t started saying. I was a beautiful child, she said, and healthy. But I grew to watch my mother go from one miscarriage to another.

It was then that the prayers started. We had different priests, prophets, apostles, and many others over at the house from time to time. Yet, there was no answer. It continued till my mother died a mysterious death.

God does answer, you see; just not the way we expect. Remember when people came together in unity to work so they could see God. They got a reply, one they could not understand. A different language. Thousands of different languages.

The thing about language and God is that we cannot truly comprehend them. We just know what we know; enough for us to be humans. Where I come from, we say faeces the same way we say poison. Nsị. Don’t you think that’s funny? Faeces is what we get out of our bodies for us to stay alive while poison is what we get into our bodies for us to die. How do you tell God that there is poison in your body? Of course, there are faeces in your body; you’re alive.

Mother must have prayed when she discovered she had been poisoned. But language was against her. God has not told us the real word for poison yet. It shares boundaries with medicine as well. Ogwu. The thing that we take when we’re sick to preserve our lives. So mother was a nagging woman, going on and on about how she had feaces or medicine in her stomach, like it wasn’t the same for almost every living person out there. Till she wasn’t alive anymore. The nsị/ogwu killed her.

On learning that my name was Chinaza, I assumed that I understood what it meant. I’m sure everyone would, including you, journal. It is basic Igbo. God answers. God replies. My parents gave me that name. It had always been me and my parents, through the good, bad, and ugly. Their love for me was never a question. But my mother died and that left us with two: me and my father. He became my pillar and my friend. He would listen to me cry about how life was unfair, and we’d play cards and watch TV all night. He said I was his everything. I didn’t have to tell him that he was mine.

When I got kidnapped by three men who came in my father’s car to pick me up from school, I thought more about what they’d done to father. Whether he was okay.  What he would do if anything was to happen to me. I begged them to let me go. I told them my father would pay any amount, provided they didn’t hurt me. And they laughed.

“If your father thought you were worth the same or more than fifty cows, you wouldn’t be here right now. He knew his choices, and he made it, so shut it.”

I could not bring myself to say another word for the next two hours. God replies. Chinaza. But in my tribe, chị is not exclusive to the almighty, all-knowing God. Chị is a lot of things to a lot of people. When father called me Chinaza, he may not have meant the almighty. The miscarriages we prayed against may have been answers to other prayers made by my father to chị.

Did my mother realize, in her last moments, that she had been offered as a sacrifice to the chị that answers? Could she have guessed that, six years after, her only daughter would be sitting on the floor in an abandoned building, with her hands tied behind her, waiting to be sacrificed to the same chị?

One of the men walked in all of a sudden and I thought that was it. He had a knife in his left hand. With his other hand, he yanked my hair to the right, baring my neck. At this point, I felt nothing. My father had given me up. My pillar, my friend. I wished I could cry. I begged for my eyes to grow moist, for my gut to be warm, for my heart to be heavy just this one last time. I wasn’t sure which chị I prayed to, but he didn’t answer. I felt nothing at all.

The man reached further and cut the ropes binding my hands. He told me I could go home. I wasn’t surprised. It could have been my ghost walking out of that building and all the way to our house. I knew the way from when we drove in. They hadn’t bothered to blindfold me since they were sure I’d be killed. Part of me still believed I died that night.

I wasn’t sure what father would do when he saw me, but I knew I’d walk slowly to him, throw myself into his arms, and stay there till it was okay to let go. I didn’t need for him to explain. I did not want him to. It was not that I understood, it was just okay that I didn’t. It was okay.

I walked into the sitting room and there stood a glass and a bottle of wine, almost empty. Father was there, hanging below the ceiling fan, still, a rope around his neck. I didn’t scream nor flinch. Almost like I expected it. I just watched him for a while.

Dear journal, you have heard my story again. Tomorrow is Christmas day. Everyone is happy. They say tomorrow marks the day a savior was born. It seems pretty simple, but I do not trust simplicity in languages. They’re often not what they look like. I don’t trust tomorrows too. You shouldn’t trust what you don’t know.

Today, however, is Christmas eve. I remember Eve from when she ate the forbidden fruit that became poison to humanity. Does it mean that we eat the poisonous fruit today? Is it okay if I die on the eve of the new birth?

Nah! It sounds too good to be true. I won’t fall for that trick again. Maybe I’ll pray some more. This time, to the God that made languages. I’ll tell him that my people often mistake breath for strength. That where I come from, ‘ụme dị m’ could mean ‘I have breath’, as well as ‘I am strong’. If I have breath, I am strong.