Rebel: A (fakini) short story

“Fakini,” he said. “You told the chairman fakini?”

“Yes,”

I insulted the chairman. I could not control myself.

They said my mother had been a loose woman; that she had killed herself and that I should have been dead. The chairman and the catechist- they said so.

I ran to my grandfather, weeping uncontrollably and collapsed in his bony chest.

My grandfather hugged me very tightly. The he dragged me by my hand over to the Catechist’s house. My eyes were still running with tears, and my nose with phlegm when we reached there.

“Tell him. Tell him.”

I hesitated at first, but he stuck his tobacco pipe which was wrapped in his long bonny fingers into my spine and growled: “Tell him!”

So I told the Catechist “Fakini” too.

My mother died by suicide.

She had been my grandfather’s favorite child; a very patient child in her childhood; a sweet, kind and submissive young woman in her youth; and a sweet, kind and submissive young woman in her early death; a death she was found sprawled on the floor and completely invested in fighting for. She really wanted to die.

My grandfather says it is a miracle I survived. I was cut out of her belly before she was stitched back together and abandoned at the mortuary as none of her other relatives would pick her body. Eventually, they picked it up somehow but then there remained the issue of me. My grandfather tells me that he woke up the morning following my mother’s burial and there was nobody left in the compound. It was the sound of my sharp cry that woke him up from his drunken stupor. That is how I was raised by my grandfather and his very young wife –an unstable woman by every definition- who took to loving me insanely because she was, well, insane. 

She got worse as I grew older; disappearing for days on end and returning each time looking more disheveled than the last time. Then she would clean up and dress up really well and just when I thought that everything was normal, she would disappear again. I was nine years old when she disappeared completely for the final time and a pubescent fourteen year old boy when her meat and bones were brought to us in a sack –she was crushed under the heavy tires of a truck that was transporting marble; and she had been having one of her manic episodes when she knew too late to move from the road.

The neighbors helped to have her buried. The other relatives did not show up. Again.

I quite do not understand how I am able to have grown up and be sane despite the circumstances under which I have grown. I have not been able to describe the complete story and circumstances of my mother’s death and why I was abandoned with my grandfather. I had hints of it, but the chairman and the catechist seemed to know even more.

Later that evening, when he was drunk and half-sitting, half-falling off his chair, my grandfather declared that if my mother had said fakini more often, she would perhaps still be alive. He spent the whole night howling and talking to himself and telling me to fakini leave him alone when I urged him to come into the house and sleep.  

Myself, I went to my room and closed my eyes but could not sleep. Then I heard my grandfather call out to me from outside. It was around two o’clock in the morning. I went to where he was and sat at his feet.

“You have every right to be angry when anybody defames your mother,” he said. “But when they know how much it hurts you, they will defame her to provoke you. What you need to learn, is how to disregard their provocations while not tolerating their disrespect.”

He continued, “You can love Jesus all you want, but these people are the devil. Do not think for a minute that you can win them over with your kindness. Your kindness is a weapon for them; they do not see a good heart. They see weakness and a hesitance to defend yourself. They just want to destroy you. Make no mistake about that. Your mother was a kind woman, but they killed her. They handed her every tool to kill herself. If someone is getting too far with you, you owe them no mercy. Serve them exactly what they asked for. Never be afraid to offend a person who is not keen to respect you.”

“Son, I am pleased that you stood up for yourself today.”