Under the shadow of an international hotel chain, in a playground for Abuja’s wealthiest and whitest, where they go to buy meat pies and Cadbury chocolates and red seedless grapes, where they peruse the latest imports at designer stores and pose for professional portraits in a cool breeze of luxury, Mother and Daughter shop. Gently, they enter a local arts and crafts market, labyrinthine in its organization, the shops designed to look like thatched-roof huts à la National Geographic. There they look at bangles made of bronze and earrings of shell, balk at the prices, and put the fine pieces down where they found them. The mother says to the shopkeepers that the animal figurines carved of ebony and smoking pipes made of the bones of an unknown animal are not so very fine after all.
“This part is important,” Mother tells Daughter. “You must let them know that you can do without.”
Daughter nods and stays close. She has seen Mother haggle, and quite frankly, she has grown tired of it. It happens with the taxi driver, the woman who sells cashews, the cobbler, the small boy—no older than seven—who sells sugarcane.
“But look at how young,” Daughter says as they enter the market, aware of how naive this sounds but wanting to believe anyway, “he won’t cheat you.” She watches as the boy squirts his sugarcane stalks with water to replenish what the sun drank.
“Walking and talking is old enough,” Mother says.
And so, Daughter endures the haggling. It is in this country’s blood. The joy of jostling for a better price. To her, everyone has been dealt a raw deal, and what better way to exact revenge than on every customer and every shopkeeper? Not negotiating till last-last appears uncivilized, a break in decorum, ignorant.
In Abuja, the market is king. Anything can be bought and sold for a price, and vendors come from all over Nigeria looking for their fortune, some just arrived from their villages, others long removed from their tribal lands, all strangers in this place of commerce, this place of transience. Daughter is here to take advantage. She is here to see how far her recently exchanged nairas can stretch.
She keeps all this to herself and follows Mother’s lead through the arts market. This is a new element in their relationship. When Daughter was much younger, market-going had been for her a dreadful activity, one that she disliked so much, her attitude so sour, her walk so sluggish that Mother finally gave up taking her along and declared that at this matter, Daughter was useless. Daughter had preferred to stay home with her cartoons, books, or friends. But in avoiding the oftentimes-muddy pathways, the wheelbarrow pushers you had to quickly dodge or risk a collision, the stench of where they sold live hens, the rambunctious activity of the market and the hypervigilance needed to survive it, Daughter had missed a crucial bit of education in the fine art of market-going. And now, she must concede her ignorance and follow Mother’s lead where they should have been equals.
In and out of the stores they go. Mother fingers items and sneers at the prices. Yet, slowly, she begins to circle back to the shops where she had found something of value.
“Expensive in the market, priceless at home,” Mother says and giggles. Daughter laughs, too. She knows that this is Mother’s power. In the market, her tongue is a blade sharpened for blood if necessary, on the hunt for the best deal.
In one store, they purchase a pair of silver earrings with teardrop jade stones the shopkeeper tells her had been mined in South Africa. In another store, Daughter selects a hand-stitched, hand-dyed leather ottoman for practically nothing when converted to the currency she uses at home. In her real life.
The shopkeeper complains that Mother is depriving him of a profit. He explains that he bought at two thousand and sold at two-five. Such slim profits, and still the woman sliced. Daughter watches as the man takes possession of his goods and returns them to their place on the shelves. Mother disinterestedly gathers her handbag, and Daughter knows that this sort of posturing between shopkeeper and customer can go on for hours if she allows it. She seizes the opportunity to guide Mother out of the shop, wonders if the man has never heard of wholesale as a concept, or if he is just telling stories.
“Don’t mind them,” Mother says. “They are from the north. They go to the desert and buy for cheap-cheap. Small money here is big money there. They profit well. One man sells and everybody eats. That is how they share. You’ll see.”
Is that so, the Daughter thinks. She looks around and tries to see with new eyes. She notices that the market is mostly full of men in long dresses and leather sandals. But she is certain she heard some men just back there conversing in Yoruba, and that she had heard an Igbo man’s name being called. What she is certain of is that there are no women selling here. It is a quiet market day, with the heat undoubtedly driving the oyinbos indoors, and other than the few brave tourists entering and leaving the market, she and her mother are the only visible women here. But she is sure that she saw two youngish, somber-looking girls walking hand in hand behind a hut, maybe to ease themselves. She looks around for them, but they are nowhere in sight. Strange, she thinks.
She notices that a few of the shops are not like the others. These shops look abandoned, willfully uninviting without a clear entrance, forgotten as though the owner had long ago boarded up the business and not bothered to come back. She approaches one such shop, but a man she hadn’t noticed sitting on a low stool nearby hisses meanly at her, so unlike the smiling welcome that she had come to expect from the sellers.
“Keep up . . .” she hears Mother sing to her, “. . . or you will get lost.”
At the naming of this familiar threat, Daughter instantly feels small. She’d escaped her twenties and landed in her thirties solidly on both feet, yet the threat of losing herself and being forever lost to Mother reduced her to a single digit, back to a time when Mother held her not by the hand, but by the neck, her tightening hand a vice, proof of Mother’s love.
Daughter feels the constant pull from Mother, the invisible cord linking them that Mother has been tugging on with more urgency recently, calling Daughter back home. Ask Mother and she will tell you that all she wants is the opportunity to teach Daughter what she had been too young to learn before opportunity, the siren song of a foreign land, took her away. And now, she wants her back, for good.
But Daughter is not so sure. Despite the miles and dialects between them, Mother had remained the dominant force in her life, even as she passed from girlhood to young womanhood with her girl cousins and aunties for guides. She felt Mother’s influence everywhere, so much so that Daughter often wondered whether it was for Mother that she actually lived. The monthly remittances home were proof enough. The hidden facts of her personhood would agree. At least that’s what the Girl, her crush back home—her other home—had said the night before Daughter’s flight back, during a fight about phone calls and text messages that, in Mother’s house, under Mother’s gaze, would go unmade and unsent. Daughter, stuck between duty and desire, trapped by her inability to choose.
Given the choice, Daughter would have both, Mother prominently and appropriately displayed in her life, while it remained unquestionably hers, the life. Mother, she believes, is indefatigable. Daughter admires how Mother quickly finds the choicest item in any store they enter. Daughter knows that the shopkeepers inflate prices by four, five, and sometimes by ten if they spot white skin or detect a foreign accent. But for Mother, the price might be inflated to just twice its worth, or perhaps it might even be fair. But fair in Mother’s dictionary is defined only by the last word, which she insists on having. Always. When she feels insulted by a price, she doesn’t hesitate to rain abuse on the shopkeeper. To Daughter’s surprise, the shopkeepers do not seem affected by this. Slowly, they succumb to her brutal price-cutting. They become pliant, supplicant even, and yield, some after a mighty struggle, but in the end, they all bow down and sell. Daughter asks Mother how she can learn to speak to them like that, how to make clear what one was unwilling to part with.
Mother pulls Daughter close. “It’s very easy,” she says. “They only want your money. Not your trouble, not your talk, only your money.”
“But don’t they get angry?”
“You know we are Igbos,” Mother says. “With us, they are always angry.”
Daughter knows well Mother’s history and the terrible thing that had happened in her youth, in the infancy of this country. Yet Daughter cannot fathom this level of distrust for her own people. After the many lessons of a different country, a place that has at every opportunity showed her that the real fight is between oyinbos and all others, why should Hausa kill Igbo, Igbo cheat Yoruba, when onye ocha chopped all?
Inside one shop, Mother fingers an ebony figurine of two lovers embracing one another, their raised arms joining as one. Finally, she questions, “Ego ole?”
The man gives his price. Mother and Daughter scoff in synchrony.
“Haba,” Mother says, “shebi I fit find the same ting for Wuse Market for half, sef, mchu.” She sucks her teeth.
The man presently plucks the item from Mother’s hands. It is his own posture in the delicate market dance. All the while he mutters under his breath that if she is so sure of the price, she should please vacate his store and find her way to Wuse Market since she is not serious.
“My Daughter, biko, bia eba,” Mother says and leads Daughter toward the door, but Daughter knows this is only prevarication.
Outside, a watchful vendor plots: “Customer, come see my own. Many fine tings inside.”
Seeing the competition, the first man reconsiders. “Ah ah, madam, give me good price-now.”
Mother pauses and gives a price not much higher than her original, but she concedes small.
“Why you wan spoil market for me? Make I chop small now,” the man pouts, but clearly he is relenting. He is already wrapping the figurine in a small waterproof.
“If you no wan sell, make I go,” Mother says, feigning annoyance and readjusting her handbag. “If not for my pikin, I for don go, mchu. Beko, double bag am. Make e no fall.”
Outside, Mother and Daughter cling to each other in laughter. After watching Mother expertly negotiate, Daughter decides that she is ready to attempt it on her own. After all, didn’t the art of haggling also run through her blood? She begins to stray from Mother. She doesn’t go far at first, just to the next shop, disappearing inside for a moment only to come back out and find Mother patiently waiting, watching. She wants to speak to the shopkeepers but doesn’t want to be taken advantage of. She attempts to drop her foreign accent and assume the local one. Slowly, she forgets the expensive accent she had been sent abroad to attain and submits to the dialect of the market. She attempts a pidgin that isn’t fooling anyone, but at least she’s trying. The shopkeepers smile at her as they pocket her money. She thinks they appreciate her attempts at communication. She thinks they are calculating. They smile their teeth at her. She thinks that they are probably looking at her powdered face and fine figure and grinning because here, they have all the power, and she does not. She feels their eyes crawl all over her body, searching for where she hid her money.
She buys a huge, bogus necklace full of stones she can’t name. She manages to knock a little weight off the bottom line. The shopkeeper happily wraps it in a nylon waterproof and places it in her hand. He nods his head approvingly and asks her to please come again.
Her next transaction is better. She gets a leather clutch at less than half the asking price, but her mother is standing nearby, watching, and so the victory is only semisweet.
“Relax,” she says to herself. “Just be natural. Act like you belong.” You do belong, she thinks. Yet her confidence ebbs.
Seeing this, Mother encourages her to enter a shop and try on the fur-trimmed leather sandals the shopkeeper proffers. The sandals hurt her feet, and she can’t imagine how any of the men endure the thin, stiff leather, the un-cushioned soles.
“What kind of animal,” she mutters to herself.
Mother enters the next hut, comes out to show her some delicate one-of-a-kind item. They discuss in hushed tones, then separate and give the men their final offers. They pay the lowest bidder, pocket their goods, and for a while this seems to work.
“We’re wiping them clean,” Mother sings.
This is Daughter’s joy. The return to this native land of hers, flush with foreign cash, and relishing the luxury of what time spent abroad can buy. The allure of far-flung places is redolent in her voice, on her skin, it is evident in her clothes, and the market people see her coming long before she knows she has arrived. They open doors for her, offer her stools, bring her cold bottles of Nestlé water, intuiting that plastic bags of sachet water for this one will not do. Here, her feet do not touch the ground. Here, with the purchasing power of her foreign salary unlocked, she can allow her eyes to drift closed and imagine herself rich. This, she thinks, I can get used to.
They go on shopping, slowly drifting away from one another, so much so that every now and then Daughter has to ask the men where her mother has gone. They point and offer little else, and Daughter must blindly follow the direction of their fingers. Each time, their directions lead her to discover Mother hunched over an item or doing mathematics in the air with her finger.
Mother is fierce, battle weary, has lost everyone and everything so many times over that it seems she alone is indestructible and all else around her a trifle. With Daughter’s current visit, she claims that new life has been restored to her.
“You give me strength,” she often says to Daughter, squeezing her hand and swinging it like a little girl’s. She leads them to a rest spot where they order cold bottles of Coca-Cola. “We have much to make up, but I am getting tired. Age is catching up to me.”
Daughter understands the meaning behind Mother’s words: Mother wants Daughter back. Another country has made Daughter foreign, and Mother wants to remind her of what has been forgotten, replace what has been lost, and reintroduce Daughter to their way of life. She simply wants to pass on the proper way of doing things: how to select, point, kill, and roast fish, how to speak in proverbs, what it means when a man comes to pluck a flower from a family home. And she just wants an opportunity to do it before old age completely settles into her bones.
“I worry about you,” Mother says, “there by yourself where we don’t know anyone.” She is referring to the fact that Daughter has recently moved cross-country to take a fancy job in an overpriced city.
“I have friends there,” Daughter counters, readying herself once more for this duel.
She spots the two ghostly girls squatting nearby, drawing with broken sticks in the dirt, and she considers calling them over to offer them a Coke. Where are their mothers, she wonders, to whom do they belong? She makes a loud tssssk to get the attention of the girls. They turn in unison and look at her, frozen. Is that in fear?
“Friends can never beat family,” says Mother. “I want you to have what Daddy and I had, God rest his soul. I want you to have your own people. Are you hearing me?” Mother pulls lightly on Daughter’s ear, calling her attention back.
At this invocation of her father, whose funeral she had been unable to attend because it coincided with a grueling, days-long interview process, Daughter winces. Her guilt smarts. They are sitting under a prodigious almond tree, its fruit littering the ground and mashed by passing feet, the fragrant pink flesh exposed and smeared. When she looks again, the girls are gone.
“It’s a good job,” Daughter says, but what she really means is that the new job sustains Mother just as much as it sustains her own burgeoning life. This they both know.
“Shebi you said you can do the job anywhere?” Mother searches for the words and finds them, “remote working.” She smiles innocently, sweetly at this swift counter. She waves her hand dismissively, as if she doesn’t care about any of it at all. “And anyway, we know people here. We can lean on them.”
“That’s the problem with this country,” Daughter says bitterly. “It’s always who you know and what they can do for you.” She squeezes an almond fruit she has been fondling until the red juice runs free.
“Is it not the same over there?” Mother’s scrutiny is palpable, her delight in their sparring evident.
Daughter pauses, then switches tactics. “What am I coming here to do that I can’t do there? Sit in people’s living rooms, eating their food and drinking their kunu?”
“Settle down,” retorts Mother, arriving finally at her ultimate point, “have a family.”
At this, Daughter cannot help but laugh at the impossibility. How can she tell her mother that her heart is increasingly claimed by the Girl in another part of the world where one seldom remarks on the weather? Daughter searches for the words and settles on, “Kids aren’t easy.”
“They don’t have to be hard, either. Children make life sweet,” Mother says, going in for the kill now. “There, you are all alone. But here, you can have a maid and a driver, too. Someone to carry the children.”
She’s not lying, but Daughter knows this, too, is part of the negotiation. “There’s time for all of that,” Daughter says, feeling suddenly hot and thirsty. “I’m still young.” She ventures a reassuring smile. But Mother is unamused.
“That,” Mother says without mirth, “is an illusion.” As she speaks, her voice softens. “My Daughter, there is time for everything, and I am telling you that the time is now.” She raises herself from the white plastic chair with a show of considerable effort and gathers her bags. Before she leaves Daughter sitting there under the shade of the almond tree, she says what Daughter has heard her whole life in numerous terms, a sentiment that at once cements Daughter as self-effacing and Mother as all-knowing: “If not for yourself, do it for me.”
Daughter considers the weight of her mother’s words, the limitlessness of her expectations. She knows how custom dictates a girl’s responsibilities to her family and how they differ from a boy’s. Her own brothers, one an itinerant bachelor and the other sworn into priesthood, had no such consequences in their lives, no such pressures. She, on the other hand, hears constantly of Mrs. So-and-So who is now comfortably living out the rest of her life in her daughter’s marital home, and of Mrs. This-and-That, whose daughter has just delivered again, twins no less!
Daughter sympathizes with Mother, but the rest of her life is elsewhere. Previously, she had always enjoyed her visits, but she admittedly enjoyed them a little bit more now because she knew that in two or three weeks, she would be back in the comfort and freedom of the life she had made for herself. She had worked hard to establish herself in a new country, and it was that pride that ultimately kept her drifting further away. She knew that she would possibly come back one day, but not until she had made herself into something worth writing home about. Anything less would just be unfair. She reassures herself that there’s still time. Besides, she thinks, what about the Girl?
The Girl is her colleague, undoubtedly the smartest person she has ever met, the most beautiful person in any room she enters. They met on their first day on the job, during a weeklong orientation at the evil multinational corporation. By lunchtime on day two, they had bonded over the shared facts of their lives. They had both taken the job to appease their families, one with pride, the other with money; they had no intentions of making a career in the field; they were just buying time. Time for what, they could not say. That first weekend, they took each other out for beers to celebrate having successfully sold their souls and discuss in foul language what it might cost to purchase them back. In bed, they shared the bodily artifacts of their lived experience. The scar that had not healed well after a deep cut on a rusty nail, the small patch of hair that, to this day, refused to grow back after a father’s lost battle with cancer, the intense shame when anything pressed too close, and the intense relief when it slid inside and one realized that they were indeed still intact. For that, Daughter thinks, the world can wait.
It is getting late. The sun has disappeared beyond the roof of the huts and dipped below the horizon. All that remains is a thin crepuscular light, scanty like gauze, lacking in substance, but so pretty.
Arms already full of bags, Daughter wants to continue searching, to continue spreading her wings, to continue her gradual accumulation in hopes that it will solidify her. But she can see Mother’s fatigue. Mother has aged visibly since her last visit. Though she remembers and still thinks of Mother as a very clearheaded, upright woman who sees and understands all, she must admit now that her mother is thinner in her advancing age, more easily angered and prone to confusion. They were running out of time.
Daughter offers Mother a stool to sit down and asks her to hold on for just one minute. She saw something a few shops down that caught her eye, nothing significant, but she will just take a look and return promptly.
“Oya, fast-fast,” Mother says. “You know they are closing soon and it is getting dark.”
Daughter enters the store. She uses her cellphone’s flashlight to illuminate the tiny shop. Time slips away from her as she admires turquoise and silver necklaces, hand-carved bracelets. Even the cheap plastic beads catch her eye. As she flits from one bauble to another, feeling at once soothed and elated at the prospect of purchasing and possessing so many fine objects, she allows herself a small daydream of moving back home, buying a small flat near Mother’s bungalow, of Sunday visits, of falling in love with a nice Igbo boy, of whom Mother would be wary but would soon grow to love. When the time came, rather than getting down on one knee, he would carry palm wine to her Mother’s people in the village. They would have many children, boys to satisfy Mother, and a girl to quiet her own heart. But what about the Girl, her spirit haunts.
As she wrestles with the cost of her dreams, out of the corner of her eye through the open door she sees a woman in blue being led rather hurriedly by a group of men. Daughter’s attention, however, is caught by a large, brilliantly polished, perfectly spherical tigereye. She reaches instantly for the warm stone. What was it worth? What could she get it for? What was she willing to part with? She haggles with herself.
In that dim, phone-lit shop, as she is lost in her own private negotiations, a hand grabs her. She screams and drops the heavy pendants to the floor. The thud reverberates in her chest and, for a split second, she feels unutterably lost and small, abandoned in a foreign land. But the hand drags her out of the shop. It belongs to a man who speaks harshly to her and points down the path where Mother stands surrounded by the fractious men. Mother is being jostled away from a boarded-up hut, at which one man continues to point. Daughter runs forward, her bags knocking against her legs.
“Madam, see your pikin,” one man shouts.
Mother looks, and seeing Daughter, something visibly breaks in her. It is as though the final string holding her upright has been cut. Daughter runs to Mother’s side and catches her, struggling to hold them both on their feet. She remembers her mother’s constant admonishment to stand up straight, to always leave a gathering as gracefully as you entered.
“What happened?” Daughter questions. “Please talk to me. What did those men say? What did they do to you?”
But Mother will not hear. Shaken, weak, she sits heavily in a plastic chair that is offered by one of the men. The girl pulls a bottle of lukewarm water from her bag and holds it to Mother’s lips. As she drinks, Mother shakes so much that she dribbles on her beautifully embroidered blue dress.
“Sit, rest,” Daughter says. Her mind races back to the moment when, in the shop, she had seen the woman in blue go by. She should have recognized her mother, she should have read the fear in her face, the worry in her quick steps. She could have kicked herself. Her mother had needed her, and she had been too busy converting currencies to notice. “Were you looking for me?” she asks. “I was just there, in that shop—please, I’m OK.”
“No no no,” Mother says and shakes her head. “We have to leave this place at once.”
Ignorant to the growing chatter of the men, the girl begs her mother to remain calm.
“Madam, na my oga window you break,” says one man, flanked by the others. He is wagging his finger furiously at Mother as though he is speaking to an impudent child. “See how you don’ spoil market for us.” He gestures at his shop, and their collective eyes follow. The broken window hangs by a solitary hinge, a limp flag in the fray. Daughter witnesses what looks like a young girl being shuffled away under the snare of a man’s arms.
“Leave now!” Mother says with her old force and energy.
This mobilizes them, and together Mother and Daughter limp out of the market. As they hurry away, Mother repeatedly looks behind them. Near the gate of the market, they pass the two youngish-looking girls, twins, standing very close together as though they were of one body and not two.
The two women don’t slow until they reach the main road that divides the international hotel from the native market. Mother looks about hurriedly and spots a young man, perhaps in his midthirties. She flags him down.
“Nwa’m, bia bia bia,” she says, calling him with her hands.
Appraising the daughter and noting that the woman is in need of assistance, he rushes over.
“Mommy, are you well?”
“Are you Igbo?” Mother asks.
“Edo,” he replies.
“Oh my son, thank you, Jesus,” Mother says and takes the hand he offers. “Please wait here with us. Let us catch our breath and see if they are following.”
“Who is following?” asks Daughter. Now she makes no attempt at masking her accent. The gentleman raises an eyebrow as though taking her in fully for the first time.
“The men!” Mother says irritably, turning to her daughter. “I broke their window and they want payment!”
“Oh,” Daughter begins, her vision clearing. It was a simple matter of money. She would go now and settle the debt.
“No!” Mother grabs her fiercely by the arm. “Stay away from there! You must never come back here again. Never return to this place!” She looks about, frantic, and the man responds dutifully by holding onto her more firmly.
Daughter is frozen by surprise. She has never seen her mother like this, so frail. She doesn’t know what happened to leave her so violently altered. Deep, from a part of her that she does not recognize, she fears that Mother’s incessant haggling has finally landed her in hot water, that Mother had somehow insulted the wrong person, and now she, herself, would have to go back and pay the price. But as she listens to Mother’s breathless retelling, she has the sense that what has been broken can never be fixed, not at a cost she can afford.
“I thought I lost you!” Mother says, gasping. “I looked and couldn’t find you. I asked for my daughter and they kept quiet. I kept asking, and they didn’t say anything. You know, it’s dark, and they were closing up their shops, locking everywhere up. I called and called for you. The men were leading me about, confusing me and talking through their teeth. I thought they were lying. Then I heard screams. I’m sure I heard a scream. It was a young girl’s voice, like your own, very afraid. A girl in trouble. I was near the shop and I tried to open the window, but it was locked. Out of fear, I pulled the window right off the wall. I thought it was you. Inside, I saw a small girl, tiny little thing like those girls there by the gate. She was at the window and she looked like she was trying to climb out. The fear on her face, just like you. Behind her, more girls, so many, small, tied up, lying on their sides, sleeping, dead? I nearly collapsed. I thought it was you. My life—my life would have been over without my daughter. I thank God it wasn’t you. I don’t know. It could have been you.”
As Mother’s gaze retreats far away to the scene of the broken window, she prays silently for those left behind, and the one—her own—that she managed to save, whom she is eager to wrap with great care and ship back abroad. She remembers why she had pounced on the opportunity for her only girl-child to be raised by another country. This our land is too cruel, especially to our girls.
The young Edo man continues to hold Mother by the elbow, disturbed by the story he has just heard. The man that he is must at this moment be counting the warning signs of danger, of angry men with sticks and stones looking for retribution in the form of monies or bodies. And he looks as if he would rather they moved away from the roadside and beat a hasty retreat to the brightly lit safety of the international hotel across the street. But before he can suggest this solution, the lights shut off all at once, the windows like eyes go dark and unseeing, and it will be some time before the generators pick up where NEPA had once again failed.
Daughter looks about in her own confusion. She squints back at the shuttered market where the bodies of young girls are being sold alongside the promise of easy, unaffected luxury, a piece of which she had pined for just moments ago. She feels unrecognizable, unable to locate herself. In university, she had joined the Nigerian Students Society to chant, “Bring back our girls.” She had felt mighty in their purpose but remembers the way the student body had either paid them no mind or looked on with mouths agape. She recalls how the once-disparate and competitive banter of the market men had aligned into a spear to take by force, from her mother, what they felt was due.
With each passing second, she is planted more deeply to the ground on which she stands. And with each new revelation, she is more firmly rooted, feeling the weight of choice falling away, the sloughing of the promise of other selves. Now, she sees Mother not as she once was, towering and domineering and infallible, but as she is now. An image of Mother flanked by her sons at their father’s graveside floats across Daughter’s vision. The clarity is striking. My mother needs me, she thinks. And she knows what she must do. As Daughter grows tall by the darkening and dust-swept roadside, her path forward is intermittently lit by the headlights of her fellow Nigerians rushing forward into the night, homeward bound. Her roots dig deeper and spread, absorbing the unconscious knowledge of this land that tells her who she is, where she comes from, and to whom she belongs.
