Along with South Africans Nadia Davids and Songeziwe Mahlangu, Nigerian-American Chinelo Okparanta was recently shortlisted for the 2014 Etisalat Prize for Literature; read her short story “Marta”, shared by PEN America.
Okparanta was shortlisted for the prize for her debut novel Happiness Like Water.
This short story first appeared in Tin House: Winter Reading (Issue #58, Winter 2013), and was submitted by Okparanta as part of the 2014 PEN World Voices Online Anthology.
Read the story:
There are six of us. We are gathered in the cemetery where the tombstones rise low. We are loafing and loitering; we are chattering among ourselves. We are lions and lionesses, and the cemetery is our den.
At first it is raining, so we watch the deep dents of the concrete slabs fill with rain. When the rain dies down, we simply trace the yellow weeds with our eyes.
Yesterday we did not gather by the tombstones for long. The crowd of people came, singing, moaning loudly, all dressed in gray and black. The men lifted their shovels and held them above the earth. They dug a shallow hole and lowered the coffin into the hole. We watched from our hiding places among the orange and mango trees. We whispered at the slightness of the box: a simple wooden rectangle, its lid flapping gently, appearing not to have been sealed.
“Will make it easy for us,” Bunmi said.
“Better than easy,” Ayo replied.
Today, we have settled down on the new grave, the way we always do. M-A-R-T-A, the tombstone reads, and though we have not the slightest idea who Marta might have been, we have commenced the telling of her story.
In Chika’s version, Marta is a woman who goes to America to attend university but ends up cleaning the toilets and scrubbing the floors of old white people in places called nursing homes. Because that’s what happens to all Nigerians who go abroad, Chika tells us. Haven’t you heard? And of course, we all have.
“That’s not how it goes!” Bunmi scolds.
“If that’s not the way it goes, then how does it go?” Chika asks.
“Marta doesn’t go to America!” Bunmi responds, as if Marta were a close friend of hers.
“Of course she goes to America,” Sola says. “Everybody and their mother eventually goes to America!”
“No,” Bunmi says indignantly. “Not Marta. Marta doesn’t go to America. You have to start from the beginning and tell it the correct way.”
“Well, you tell it then,” Chika says.
Not far from where we sit, swaying by the grove of orange and mango trees, is a makeshift swing: two thick ropes connected to a flat wooden board. I imagine swinging now. The sun still hangs bright in the sky, but I imagine that it has already gone down, that we have finished with our work, that the fireflies are roaming and I am chasing them with my eyes.
Bunmi smiles. She clears her throat and begins the story again. “Story, story?” she says.
“Story,” everyone responds.
“Once upon a time?”
“Time, time.”
“There was once a young girl named Marta who was the most beautiful across the seven rivers.”
“Did she live in the river like Mami Wata?” Tobechukwu asks, laughing at his own joke. As if he doesn’t make this same joke every time Bunmi mentions “across the seven rivers.”
Ayo turns to Tobechukwu and gives him a high five. We girls sigh loudly, roll our eyes at the boys.
“Okay, okay,” Tobechukwu says finally. He adjusts his oversized baseball hat. “We’re sorry. Please continue,” he says.
Book details
- An Imperfect Blessing by Nadia Davids
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EAN: 9781415207154
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- Penumbra by Songeziwe Mahlangu
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EAN: 9780795704680
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- Happiness, Like Water by Chinelo Okparanta
EAN: 9781847088314
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Image courtesy of Apogee Journal