Jude Dibia's Unbridled

Hello,

My name is Jude Dibia and I am a writer in Nigeria. A friend of mine pointed me to your blog after he read my new novel 'Unbridled', a book that tackles family constructed abuse (sexual and otherwise), spousal abuse and women issues in our society.

I think you are doing a great job enlightening people of this wrong in our society... I was doing the same in my book. I hope you can send me your mailing address so I can send you a copy of the book. I have pasted below an excrept that maybe shared on your blog.


Warm regards,
Jude Dibia

***
Memories.
It's amazing what sensations we retain in our hearts and in our heads; it is also amazing how we recollect them. As far back as I could remember my memories had always been clouded with shame, sadness and denial.
One of my earliest memories was my mother plaiting my hair methodically, double strands woven together, under the embracing shadow of the guava tree in our village-home. Ezi was a village in every sense, tucked away in the down southern region of Bendel State, in the beautiful Igbo-speaking part of my childhood land. I still recall the red earth that reliably left its orange stains under my bare feet whenever I chose to play outside, the profusion of trees, the numerous farms, and the long treks to a cool stream to fetch water. Most of the villagers lived in identical mud houses, only a few affluent families possessing cement houses with tin roofs. And of course I remember the missionary school where I learnt all that a child needed to learn. Or so I believed once upon a time.
My mother used to love plaiting my hair because it was naturally long, unlike hers or anyone else in our family. She used to tell me that I was different. I was special, she would whisper into my ears as she plaited my hair.
"No one is as fair as you in this family," she used to say lovingly. "You can see that we are all very dark—I, your father even your brother and sister."
"Why am I different?" I would ask.
She would sigh quietly and then proceed to tell me about the heavy rain that fell the night I was born. By the time I was twelve years old, I must have heard that story over a hundred times. I never knew how much of it I believed, but she always told it with such conviction in her.
"It was a unique rain and no one had expected its ferocity, not even the village rainmakers who had all been worried about the absence of the rains and the devastating effects it was having on agriculture." she used to say while she plaited my hair.
"What is agriculture?" I would ask and she would shush me, telling me it was the farms and all the things that grew on them, like papa's cassava and yam farm.
She would go on to explain that it had been a trying period for the villagers and many had begun to worry that the land was cursed. And so that fateful night when traces of the coming rain could be smelt in the air, there had been some sort of euphoric fervour that swept across the village. This was short lived however, for as soon as the skies opened up and the first wave of the treacherous rain came lashing down, all things fell apart.
I have been told that some lives were lost that day in the flood as well as property, farm animals and hope. Till the day I left Ezi, Nne Achili still mourned her missing five-year old, Amadi, who hadn't been seen since that fateful night. Like many other children of his age, Amadi had run outside in anticipation of dancing in the rain. That was the last anyone ever heard of him. He was not the only child reported missing after the flooding, but Nne Achili always stood out in my mind because she had lived close to my father's house and I had endured a childhood of scorn from the bitter old woman, who always glared at me with an evil eye and rolled her hands over her head and snapped her fingers at me in a curse whenever I passed by.
I had also learnt that I was the only child that was born that fateful night in the entire village. This had been the reason why many believed that my birth was in a way tied to that rain. The village elders had all come to that conclusion and when my father had been summoned to their midst, they had warmed him to be careful of that daughter of his. "The gods must have been angry when she was conceived, hence the catastrophic rain," they had warned him.
I used to go to bed at night feeling guilty. I would hear the voices of the missing children screaming for help in my head and I would also hear the bleating, mooing, clucking and braying of the lost animals. I had many nightmares as a child.
It was my mother who had named me Ngozi. Technically it should have meant "Blessing" or more appropriately "God's blessing". But what that name had always meant to me was simply "God's blight."
Memories could be such lethal things.
Then there was the day my life took a drastic turn. The morning started off like many other mornings with mother waking Nnamdi, Ofunne and I for what would be several trips to the stream to fetch water. The night before I had hid some dried pepper underneath my pillow and when I heard mother shaking Nnamdi awake, I quickly retrieved the pepper and chewed a few. I knew the immediate effect would be to make my body temperature hot—someone in school had told me about this and how she used it to fool her grandmother all the time to avoid doing chores.
It worked for me for as soon as mother tried to rouse me from sleep, I complained that I was feeling sick and she was a little alarmed at how warm my body was. She allowed me go back to sleep but not before she informed me that she would be rushing off that morning to the next village, Ìsse'luku, to assist her younger sister who was to be wed the next day. I was still awake when she finally left. Elder Chibike came for her with his noisy patched up Peugeot pick-up truck, which unfortunately was the only cross-village transport service available to us. It coughed its way in and then out of our compound in a cloud of grey smoke. If that wasn't enough, I had to endure the very loud greeting between my father and elder Chibike who never failed to brag about how he was one of the very few noble ones to own a "motto". I had never liked him. He drank too much, smelt badly of putrid saliva and always seemed to be scratching his crotch area. He reminded me of my father and I hated that too.
Not long after mother departed, I was about to drift off again, with the hope of catching at least one more hour of sleep before it was time to rush off to the missionary school. Though my eyes were squeezed shut, I could not still sleep. I felt I was being watched; I could sense an eerie presence that felt like an invincible weight on me. My inner spirit stirred; disturbed. I opened my eyes and immediately noticed my father by the doorway, staring at me. His eyes were like I had never seen them before. They looked hungry. Not hungry for food, hungry for something else. There was a raw animal longing in the depth of his eyes that scared me and I quickly noticed that his loincloth stood unnaturally at attention. Was that a staff he hid beneath his cloth? I dared not ask. I sat up abruptly when he entered the room but he said nothing, just kept staring at me like I was some ripe fruit or scrumptious meal waiting to be devoured.
"Papa," I called out. "Papa can I help you with anything?"
In what seemed to be a drugged voice, my father barked: "Mecha onu I—Shut your mouth. I'm not your father. You are a spirit child. You are not my daughter."
His tone scared me. His words carried no meaning to me. There was a claustrophobic sense of violence that seemed to hang around the little room and I was aware that there was nowhere to run to.
"You cannot be my daughter," my father kept saying. "No one in my family is light like you are. No one is yellow in my family neither is anyone in your mother's. We are all black… You are yellow."
"Papa, what do you want?" I asked as I made an attempt to rise and escape from him.
I was too late. He pounced on me and before I knew it, he had ripped off my wrapper and pinned me to the raffia mat on the floor. I screamed once. It was loud. It was piercing. It was animal. It was terror. He shoved one of his hands into my mouth to suppress my scream and I bit hard, drawing blood, which tasted salty and metallic. He withdrew his bleeding hand and hit me several times across the face until I stopped screaming and was reduced to subdued subs.
I didn't know what was happening. All my senses were filled with the acrid stench of my unwashed father and the heat emanating from him. I was also aware of my nakedness and of his rough hands on my young forming breast mounds and the roving thick finger that played rudely with the opening of my womanhood. Was this the same man, who when I was younger would carry me on his laps and play with my fingers? His thick black fingers that tickled me once now violated me.
He muttered something as he took one nipple in his mouth and sucked hungrily.
"Papa no… Papa… Noooo!" I cried.
The tears ran freely down my cheeks as I went into some kind of shock. Momentarily it felt like I had somehow floated out of my body and was watching this terrible thing happen to a person that was once me. He suckled my breasts, biting hard on the nipples before discarding his wrapper and roguishly parting my tiny legs, stinging his way inside me. The pain tore into me, taking me to that far away place that seemed better than death. All I could see were the cracks on the roof with the big cobwebs and red mud cocoons made by black wasps with the unusual maroon markings. I felt my father fully inside me and the pain brought visions of one particular wasp that always made its way into my room through the opened window. It was some sort of evil spirit, I believed. A wicked spirit that stole the souls of children when they played outside and hurriedly imprisoned them in the cocoons it built in the various corners of my room. I was always scared of this wasp. I felt another sharp, deep pain and I squeezed my eyes shut, trying hard not to scream. I had kept my eyes open an entire night before when that wasp had buzzed its way round and round my room with no hint of going away. I had been afraid. I had cried loudly and had begged my brother to chase the wasp away but he had laughed at me. Thus I had kept my eyes wide awake that night, crouching underneath my cover cloth and sneaking peeks through the little hole I created for my eyes. Through this hole I watched the wasp to make sure it made no attempt to come close enough to sting me through my sleeping cloth or steal my soul.
"Ku ni!" Get up. He ordered.
It seemed like no time had passed after all and at the same time it felt like an entire lifetime had washed itself over me while my body was defiled. It was over like it never happened and the only memento of the deed was the faint trace of blood that matted my pubic area and the obvious signs of struggle on the mat. I lay still while he walked away after tossing my stained cover cloth on my roughened frame.