The Belly of The Rock

THE BELLY OF THE ROCK

by Busayo Akinmoju

Back here in this place—the underbelly of the rock that sheltered runaways and the last strands of a civilization escaping war—I feel no real connection to it. Even as just a few centuries back, someone who shared my DNA might have been folded up under this rock too. Their back bent over one of the many holes that pockmarked the rock’s otherwise smooth floor. 

Looking at the dark, hollowed out place, I imagine that ancestor had been rendered childless before he got here. Left without meaning or family. Grinding up his dinner in one of those pockmarks, making improvised paste. 

Or maybe that ancestor had been a woman like my mother; industrious, with hands that had built an expanse of wealth, and a small family—already planning an escape out of her new, unbearable reality.

But now, the place feels almost commercial. Our tour guide is a very young man, maybe nineteen, with faded jeans hanging limp over his bony hips. 

He speaks a lot with his hands, gesturing at the things he thinks important: the nooks people hid themselves in during the Egba wars, the route towards the back of the rock where prayers and libations were made. And always, I notice, his eyes avoid the less neatly-tied up bits of the place. Like the bare-chested women who walk around thinking nothing of their state of undress, the calabashes tied with red cloth among the low branches of trees. 

The eerie feeling in this place. 

He doesn’t look at that, doesn’t mention it. But I can tell by the way he glosses over such parts that he is uncomfortable. His silence is very loud. 

I can understand it. Coming here as an adult feels very different than with the wide-eyed voyeurism of a child: wanting only to see, not concerned about meaning, about significance. About the underbelly of things. Of the rock’s heritage. 

As a child, the whole thing was a story I had heard in class, or from older family members. The Egba wars were brutal, but not anymore than the wars and pillaging that had spanned from Persia to the realm of the Vikings. All of it was long ago, far away, washed off the crucible of time by many winds, many waters. You could come to this rock as a child and be bored by all of it. Only fantasizing about the donuts and ice cream at the end of the school field trip. Or the many other amusements if you had come on a family trip.

With the man in front of me, now, I don’t feel very much like a student. In fact, I likely know more about this place than he does. More than he might ever really get to know if he spent years learning and relearning the story. The edge that I have over him is not about the wars, or the history, or the old women.

What I know is my mother. 

That woman who had raised me as her only child while balancing a very tempestuous scientific career. She had found in this rock a path that many who have come here never dreamed could exist. Not the former people who walked this path seeking refuge. Not the anxious men and women in the present day, bartering sacrifices for their selfish ambition. Not even the bare-chested devotees who lived their whole lives in the rock’s embrace.  

Only a mind like hers could pick up on a wavelength that only this place has. And I worry that it is only I, weak-minded as I am, that can convince her not to follow that strange vibration that has been humming in her head for decades. That has hummed in this place since the rock landed on the Earth. 

•••

The first time I saw my mother on TV, like any other child, it was an event for me.

She was on the evening news—and I still remember the bright Ankara blouse she had worn; purple and peplum. She had dropped me off at school that morning like it was any other day—her floral perfume hanging over my own clothes.

That evening, my father called me into the parlour: he had the TV on and a mischievous smile on his face. I wasn’t interested in his boring 6pm news, and was wondering when my mother would be back so we could start dinner.

When I looked away from his smile, bored, my eyes widened as they hit the TV. There my mother was, with her glossy pink smile, talking about an award she won. I was mesmerized.

At that age, your mother is a set thing in your mind. Her existence revolves around yours: she wakes you up for school, helps you with homework, she is a good friend of your father’s, a voice that talks you to sleep at night. But here mine was, manifesting in a life, an existence very separate from mine.

In the few decades that have followed—I never remarked at any of the more obvious ways my life changed: in school, I became the daughter of the Okafor medalist—the person who the prize was named after was an 82-year-old professor who invented a new branch of math. Or something. 

I do not even think too much about the heavy burden of expectation that made me not want to be a scientist, just because of my mother.

Or her instant, international celebrity that would only grow, loom large over our family as the years went by.

Instead, what would always stay with me was that moment when I saw her on TV and realized for the first time that she could be: separate. I often have asked myself if it was premonitive. Did I begin to see or suspect the separation that she would later want? From the world? From life?

I have always asked: when did my mother begin to nurse the desire, when did she start to want to find out how to die, without dying, and dedicate her brilliance to such an ugly, ugly thing?

•••

For the few centuries after the Egba wars, the courtyard around the rock has been the place where people have come to drop a libation, a prayer. To exchange something they cared about for a thing they deeply needed. To someone like me, unimpressed by the superstitions that surrounded anything from the past, I found it to be silly. The fact that a place had been a haven for refugees of war did not give it an elevated status. It was just a place. It was like any other cave. Any other dry land that man had sought shelter since the flood of our existence started. 

I always held on to that. Even as a child, when my grandmother, or any older relative, told me stories about the powers of the place, I considered them to be just that: stories. 

As a teenager, jaded by the importance of my young life, I would sneer whenever I remembered those childhood stories. Especially the most recurrent one. 

That there had been a woman in our lineage, a figure, a matriarch, who after the Egba wars had gone back to the rock to seek something that doing without made her life unbearable. She had gone to seek meaning to her upended existence. 

After the wars, she had become prosperous, just as in her old life before the carnage. She had more children, gathered together those left of her extended family. Stitched herself into a new community. She became a titled woman, thick coral beads and gold bracelets heavy on her wrists. But the smoke of the war still hung in the air of her new life. She felt like the smell of the rock’s underbelly still hung on her new clothes. She was distraught, smiling in her new life with no real conviction that any of it had a point. The constant worry that it would all be taken away. Poof. Into smoke again. 

So, she went back to the only place she had felt any refuge for years. She trod the grounds around the rock. Saw the landscape of green from its peak, the town nestled at its feet. And spent weeks in contemplation. Listening to the wind that wove through the trees at the rock’s feet. And finally, she knew what she had to do. 

In exchange for meaning in a life that had lost all shape and taste to her, she would trade the last ten years of her life. And in her weeks with the rock, she got to foresee exactly what she was exchanging: the time in her life she would spend with her grandchildren, the chance to eat the ripe fruit of old age. More titles, more money. A new love. 

She counted all of it worth the bargain. The alternative was to give one of her own children in exchange, but she felt she had no right to do that. And it would be unforgivable, anyway. 

She made the deal and came back from the rock a changed woman. The lines of grief that were forming at the corners of her mouth faded.

She lived. 

And she lived a life without the pain she had been running away from. And the guarantee that what she had was hers. Would be hers till she walked into the shortened end to her years. No war, no pillaging would upend her world again. 

The story had sounded like a Greek tragedy of some sorts to me. Going into the belly of death, escaping, only to go back because you felt you had left something there. I didn’t pay too much attention to the story: it was like any other folktale, even if my grandmother promised it had really happened to a woman in our family line. As far as I was concerned, it was a fable: like how the tortoise had gotten his rough shell. Like how the dog was kicked out of the assembly of heaven for being too wayward. 

That was until a random evening I went to call my mother in for dinner. It was the last year of secondary school. I was as tall as she was, an angsty mess that she indulged out of devotion. Too caught up in my own concerns to notice the shadows of sadness that had begun to form around her. In those years, she was hard at work on a new invention, expanding the field of study she had won the Okafor medal for. 

She had a lab at the back of the house where she brought home her work experiments. I always thought she only did fun projects there, so I never had a problem with barging into the place without knocking. There was no worry that I was interrupting something important. 

That evening, I saw her at her desk, the lights in the room dimmed out, but I could make out what she was doing. There was a dead butterfly on the desk in front of her. Overhead, the eighty-inch computer was blinking. She punched in some numbers and folded her hands under her chin. Waiting. 

I was about to call out to her when I saw the dead butterfly twitch, flutter a wing. And take flight. Her face was expressionless, as though doing something like that was ordinary, and she was waiting for something else. 

The butterfly hovered in front of her for a while, and in a few moments it grew translucent, until it disappeared. She picked up a pebble that laid on her desk and held it up to the computer’s light. An ordinary pebble like any other. And it began to glow, a slight iridescence to it. And the butterfly that had disappeared showed up from that rock that she held in her hands. Stretching its wings out to flight. It was only then that she smiled.

She placed the butterfly in a glass jar and scribbled something in her notepad. 

I was confused. But I knew what I had seen. My mother had gone beyond the exceeding heights the world knew her for. The math she had discovered and proved was the foundation of advances in science people were stumped by; degenerative diseases were halted, and people were given the option to just walk away from things that had ravaged the continent for centuries. She taught weather patterns their ancient cycles, and forgotten riverbanks swelled with life once more.

Here she was now, transmogrifying objects. 

I went out the door quietly and said nothing. Minutes later, she joined my father and I for dinner. No trace of newness to her. She was just my mother, ordinary, like she had been before the TV fame. Before any of it. A simple woman whose voice was the first I ever heard.

My father dropped the newspaper he was reading when she joined us.

“Oh, dear, you’re here now,” he said to her, “I thought Morenike said she didn’t find you in your lab. How is work?” 

I felt her eyes heavy on me, but I didn’t want to look up. Worried she would know I had seen her. When I did finally look up, her eyes were no longer on me. In fact, I couldn’t determine if she had been looking at me at all, or if it was the guilt of my own imagination.

And it was always like that, my mother the enigma. I could never tell what she was thinking. But that evening, it became established that there was a whole side to her that she had kept hidden from me. That old fear from childhood: she was not completely mine. There was something separate, hidden, about her. 

•••

Before my parents moved into the highbrow suburbs of Ijanikin, we lived in a modest three-bedroom bungalow that I still consider to be my childhood home. I always think fondly of the simplicity of that house’s embrace, its lack of pretense: the drip-dripping of the bathroom tap that sang me to sleep on quiet evenings. The rust etched into the window panes. The third bedroom—our guest room—and its revolving list of relatives that stayed in it: my grandmother for years, an uncle who came after grandmother died, wanting to clear his head of his streak of loneliness. Sometimes, a friend of my father’s passing through town, and the tight-smiled responses my mother gave invariably to him. 

She had always loved her own space. And I had, too. My happiest memories were when it was just the three of us, my parents and I, a trilogy of comfort in each other’s company. Having dinner together. 

When we moved away, I used to think my parents had just become wealthy, that it was time to live up to the status the family had been catapulted to, with the patent monies that poured  in. 

We went from spending weekends visiting local sites like the state gardens, fairs, and yes sometimes, or many times, visits to the rock. We went from that to spending holidays abroad. And I began to notice a pattern to it. An infallible sign that a holiday was looming was when my mother would repeatedly join us late at the dinner table, all apologies when she did. And then one evening, she would be on time, setting the table even before I did. Dishing out the yam porridge with the name of the city we would be visiting soon: Valencia, Kigali, Accra, Helsinki.

One time, we went to Tokyo’s Disney World, and I threw up from all the food I ate. We still have the picture: me jetlagged but determined to eat my weight in cotton candy, clinging to my mother. My parents all smiles at the polaroid camera. Relaxed. In love. 

In hindsight, I see now that the rhythm of my childhood was built around my mother’s growing intolerance for the media’s harassment of her. We weren’t going on holiday because it was holiday season. We were escaping the onslaught of the country’s, and maybe the international community’s, disdain every time my mother brought out a new invention.

And their anger was crude, even if they tried to hide it under things like the ethics of her work, of tampering with the genome of ancient crops that had fed generations. 

They were saying this simple thing: how dare she, a woman, African too, be the one to lead the world into the new age of technology. And how dare she come around and say she had found the math behind the ancient methods of healing; no one had asked her to do it that way.    . 

My mother would liaise with the country’s ministry of health or the ministry of agriculture, and engineer seeds that germinated verdant leaves in the most drought-parched villages. Then she would bundle herself, husband, and child on a plane, and wait for the storm in our home country to settle over some weeks. 

It continued that way, until my father died when I was in uni, and the trips stopped. My mother spent more and more time in her lab doing experiments that I did not dare to intrude upon again. We never met at the dinner table again. It seemed like my father had been the glue that held us together. And with him gone, the awkwardness of our relationship became apparent. 

We would stumble around basic conversations about how I was doing in school, I asked how work was going; she only ever said “good.” I had grown out of childhood, and grown out of a child’s relationship with her mother. And there we were, meeting in a newly empty house, not knowing how to navigate the new texture of our feelings for one another.

So, I stopped coming home. 

I spent whatever time off from school abroad. Liming with friends about sights I had seen as a child, enjoying the novelty of familiar places in their own eyes. I was running, and I knew that I was. 

Until one day, I came back and my mother had a full head of grey hair. 

Grey haired, face-lined. Alone.

•••

“Mummy, can you not see, you are the only thing I have in the world.”

After all of this time, it feels imperative to say it. 

I whisper it now as I make my way past the distracted tour guide. Up, higher into the rock’s peak.

And under my breath I add “Mummy, please don’t leave me.”

I know she is here. 

I reach the top of the rock, and Egba’s ordinariness stretches out: the government school with the children singing on the assembly line, roads that lead beyond into places that I do not know. And I take a step further, further to the edge. 

And I jump off. Landing in the cosmos. 

She is standing in it, her back turned to me. Enjoying the view of the stars pockmarked in purple ether. She knows I am here, but will not turn to look. We have danced to this melody many times.

Every time I come to this intermediary place where the stars are born, I am ashamed of the inconsequence of my own life. At its smallness, its lack of beauty. 

If I were not losing the only loved one I had left in the universe, I too would be distracted by their twinkle-twinkle brightness. 

But my mother is here, slipping further away from me. 

“Mummy, please.” I beg. 

She hears me and still does not respond. 

In the days since I discovered how she shifts across time, space, form, we played an endless game of catch-me-even-though-I-know-you-can’t. 

It started one evening. 

It was in the early days, when my guilt was still a manageable thing. I had come back from my plane-hopping, alcohol-sloshed life a twenty-eight-year-old woman with nothing remarkable to her name. My father had been dead for five years then; none of the drugs or distractions had helped to numb the grief. Or the growing disillusionment of my own life: daughter of a genius, lost in grief. 

My mother had been bewildered when I stayed on beyond my usual few days. By the fifth week, I dared to think she had grown less standoffish. Less separate from me.

So, I asked her to join me for a picnic. I think I was trying to recreate the simplicity of my childhood. I was trying to rebuild our dissolved relationship by tapping into the many picnics we would have. She had chuckled at my suggestion. 

She was my mother; she knew what I was trying to do. 

“We can go to the state gardens.” I said that clear morning as I made breakfast. 

“No,” she said. 

My shoulders fell. 

“Let’s go to that rock; it has so much history, and a better view. I would like that.” 

For the first time in forever. We smiled at each other. 

It was a glorious day. The rock had gotten its own park then: built a short distance away in respect of its history. We ate cotton candy like children. Played games, danced with Father Christmas in the middle of November. In the evening, we stayed on as the stars began to blink awake in the sky. 

“I have something to tell you,” she said.

Around a mouthful of ice cream “What is it, mummy?”

I had expected her to say something profound about the sky, she was staring at it so intently.

 And she did.

“I wonder what it is like to be up there with the stars, you know, just far away from the concerns of this world. Being without being you know? No thoughts, no existence other than to sparkle. Shine far away, untouchable.” 

“That is so poetic.” I said, not knowing what else to offer. 

The stars were just a fact about the night to me.

“Yes, it is poetic. But I am a scientist, you know.”

She paused for a long moment, still staring at the sky. 

“I have decided that I want to be up there, or possibly nowhere with them.” 

I laughed. “Mummy, you want to go on a spaceship?”

She finally looked at me, a look of irritation at my simplicity. At my silly joke.

“No,” she replied, her voice losing its wistful air. 

“You know, you are not a child anymore; there are some things you need to know.”

At the tone of her voice, self-conscious, I lowered the ice cream cone. 

“Since your father passed, more than ever, I have wanted to be…” she hesitated “To be away from it all.

“Much more than I used to before. You might not have noticed it all the years you were a child, but I have often struggled with feeling like I do not belong in this world. This human one. Meeting your father made those feelings subside, at least to a manageable level, but I had often wondered about what I would do now that he is gone.”

A comet flashed through the sky.

“So, I was always working on a personal project. My insurance, I like to call it: my search for the nowhere equation. It would be wrong to kill myself as I have wanted to since I was eighteen.” 

A gasp escaped my lips, the ice cream plopped into the grass. 

She ignored me, and I felt like I grew smaller beside her. 

“Besides, who knows what exists beyond death: what if it is yet another existence of not belonging, of not wanting to—” 

She swallowed and a lone tear streaked her left cheek.

“Anyways, I did not want to risk it. So, in my search, I found the answer, I found this rock. Do you know that this rock, this old refuge of the Egba is a star, or the last shell of a very old star. In its last desire it morphed into this seemingly dormant thing.” 

She got up from the blanket we were sharing and walked a few steps forward, still staring at the sky.

“My great grandmother traded ten years for peace of mind. How did she manage to do that? I did not want the old tales of magic and sacrifices. I wanted the hard, reproducible truth. And I found it: or the equation found me. How to be nowhere, how to be nothing. How to be everything. 

“Morenikeji” she called to me and I stood up. 

“It is time for me to go too, just as that woman did long ago. I am trading in the rest of my existence—not only my life—for peace.” 

I was alarmed by her words. She was trying to kill herself without leaving a trace of her existence. Anything. Even a snuffed-out flame leaves a smoke behind.

I was lost for words.

“Come,” she said again to me. “I know you do not love or need me anymore, but let me show you where I will be going and not going, we only have a year before I go forever.” 

•••

We morphed across time and space for months. 

She showed me things a daughter should never know about her mother; sharp cuts to wrists at eighteen. Achievement after achievement dissolving under the bitter taste of an unkindness to her own self, and having to be unfailingly perfect. 

“You just need to snap out of it. No one wants to hear that from you,” her parents said to her. 

The new cloth of motherhood hanging awkwardly over her shoulders; she held me as a baby and I saw the look on her face echoing through time, confused. 

Her first kiss with my father, how he fiddled with the fat braids at her neck.

“I will always love you,” he said to her. 

The moment he died, her clutching his hand on an ordinary morning, they had fallen asleep together, he hadn’t woken up.

Then, our old house and its drip-drip tap. What I didn’t know about it as a child; the multiple break-ins at night to intimidate her, to steal her work. The morning she had woken up and our fence was painted in black, an ugly, unrepeatable word inscribed on it. She had rushed me into the car, shielding me from seeing it. 

Career breakthroughs. The day after my eighteenth birthday, the moment she opened the door into the cosmos. Found the right string of math to guide her into its path. 

The daughter that did not call when her father died. The emails, never replied to. Messages unread as the daughter went day drinking in Disney World, searching for a childhood she had lost. 

An old woman raising up her hands to the rock, centuries ago when the sun was not as warm. Tying herself, and unknowingly, one of her descendants to the rock as payment.

Before it was already a year, I knew how to enter into the cosmos without her. I had a feel, an intuition for where the doorway was in the rock. Some days it was at the peak, some days it was under the belly of the rock itself. 

And because it was close to the end, she had begun to dissolve. She no longer replied to my questions. Her form grew more distant whenever I came back, she was becoming translucent, just as that butterfly had before it disappeared. 

Today, by joining the little tour group that awkwardly paraded the grounds around the rock, I was trying to understand something I might not have seen before. Something that maybe another person could explain to me. 

What hold did this place have over my mother? What could I use to bring her back, to draw her out of that purple, starry darkness she had found?

Did I have any right to ask her to stay, after all I had not done. 

There were so many things to say to her. Even with her back turned to me, staring off at something I could not see. 

There was no beauty, no emptiness that could compare to her.

“Mummy, can you not see? You are the only thing I love in the universe.”

Something about today made me feel uneasy, as though I were closer and closer to losing her. 

Over and over again, I said those words. I ran towards her form, the purple ether quicksanding my steps. Still, she moved faster than I could. Levitated away, dissolved away. 

My mother’s back turned to me, echoing through time. Through the cosmos. Permanent. 

I blinked my tears away and when I opened my eyes. She was no longer there. 

I screamed. The purple emptiness breathed in my pain, and brought it back to me, empty. 

“I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry.”

Words I had always been afraid to say because of their permanence. 

But I knew. 

I had failed her.

•••

The cosmos kicked me out. Vomited me back into the underbelly of the rock. My face was to the ground, tears collecting into the grinding holes that pockmarked the floor of the rock’s underbelly. 

People walked by and said nothing. It was not unusual to see someone who had lost everything here. Grief a common stench in the air. 

And I had lost everything. Seen the vastness of the universe, and there was no one in the world to share that knowledge with. 

She was gone. 

“I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry.” I said it over and over again. 

For how long, I do not know. 

And finally, someone came. A hand rested on my shoulder. 

“I am sorry, too.” the voice said. 

And I looked up; it was a woman, her face young and framed in thick braids, just as my mother’s had been when she first held me as a baby.