Beyond Margins Award winner Uwem Akpan reads excerpts from “My Parents’ Bedroom” and “Luxurious Hearses,” stories from Say You're One of Them, as part of Crossing Over: The 2009 Beyond Margins Celebration. Read the excerpts below.
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“My Parents’ Bedroom”
When I was younger, I used to ride into the hills on Papa’s wide shoulders. We were always visiting Maman’s family’s place, in the next valley. Papa told me that when he first met Maman she was my age, and they played together in these hills. They went to the same primary school and university.
In the hills, you can see the clouds moving away, like incense in a church. Our country is full of winds, and in the hills they blow at your eyes until tears stain your cheeks. They suck through the valleys like hungry cows. The birds rise and tumble and swing, their voices mixing with the winds. When Papa laughs his jolly-jolly laugh, the winds carry his voice too. From the top of the hills, you can see that the earth is red. You can see stands of banana and plantain trees, their middle leaves rolled up, like yellow-green swords slicing the wind. You can see fields of coffee, with farmers wading through them, piggybacking their baskets. When you climb the hills in the dry season, your feet are powdered with dust. When it rains, the red earth runs like blood under a green skin. There are tendrils everywhere, and insects come out of the soil.
“Luxurious Hearses”
Up until that last night he had been brave about it and actually walked around anticipating the event with gay abandon, a boy completely at peace with a just punishment, a sort of hero in his neighborhood. As far as he was concerned, the hand was dead. He absolutely believed that once the hand was cut off, he and others would be discouraged from stealing again. He ignored the hand and tried not to look at it and looked forward to being relieved of this source of self-hate. Jubril started using his left hand only. And just to make sure he did not mistakenly use the fingers or palm of the condemned hand, he tied a red rubber band around his right wrist as a reminder, as if to delineate a clear line between good and evil, love and hate. With this sort of clarity, he felt comfortable using his right elbow, for it was a part of the body he had not forfeited to theft. Two nights before the amputation, he had slept peacefully and even happily dreamed of the hand being cut.
But that last night, alone in the room, he lay awake. While he still accepted that his hand should be cut off and prayed loud and clear that Allah’s will be done, he found himself many times, to his embarrassment, shaking hands with himself in the dark. He performed many types of handshakes and even pretended to shake hands with another person. For the last time, he used his right hand to feel the different parts of his body. He stood up and wandered around the cell, feeling the wall and the floor. He moved the fingers among themselves like a flutist or guitarist. He said good-bye to that part of him he had already sacrificed to theft, knowing that when day broke he would be wafted away by anesthesia.
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