by Edidiong Uzoma Essien
Did your mother ever teach you how to strain pulp from soup? Mine did. And her mother taught her the same lesson she filtered down
to me, sitting on her knee of course, for what better place is there to harvest wisdom from the maternal tree? On my mother’s knee, yes, a throne fit for the child I was and am and never again will be.
I am much older now. Pushing fifty. Touch the folds encircling my waist, the pleats gathering where my smile lives. Two teeth, molars, have fallen out of my head, but age is not to blame. These things just happen from time to time. Losing flesh and teeth and hair. Can’t complain when all I’m missing is molars. And even with two less teeth, the body I exist in is full of energy. It is content, growing more satisfied by the day, because I learned to strain pulp from the stock, eventually.
+
Mother sources her stock from a different supply, a deep well of unadulterated indigeneity. I had no such well and was watered down. Packaged into a filthy metal tube with wings, shuttled across an unforgiving ocean alone, anointing oil rubbed on my nine-year-old forehead and scalp, talisman from a witch doctor sewn to my suitcase’s inner pocket. I was repotted in the alien West, a new kind of manure nurturing my bones. All that anointing for what? For a stapled tongue. For a compressed body, diluted spirit, fractured mind well into my twenties. So, you see, my stock is nothing like my mother’s, nor is it like my grandmother’s. They called it a blessing, our differences. Yankee pikin. Oyinbo adjacent. Blessing, curse. Same thing.
+
Listen, this is how the pulp makes its way into the soup. Look away for a moment and it falls right into the middle of rich stock that hasn’t reached full maturity, sinks to the bottom. It takes time to spot the pulp, years and years. The pulp is always fragrant in the beginning, drips sweetness into your stock, tastes of ambrosia, so you leave it be. I have made the same mistakes, letting impurities steep. This was before I remembered how one skims pulp and tosses it in the fire. I forgot, plain and simple.
My mother’s pulp was this: ego, an unpredictable temperament, pessimism. Fear of things that could come to pass without warning. Things I never thought about before she scattered the seeds into my mind, like the sky dripping pollution, economic collapse, burglars stealing her hard-earned money, raping us all, even grandmother. She let the pulp sit too long. Decades, she told me. And it sat, changing the taste of her atoms, souring the soup.
The man who put me in my mother fled a month after my birth. His pulp? Fear of the woman and her neuroses, indifference where paternal duty was concerned. He would never have survived pitting his flimsy ego against mother’s. We met right before I was uprooted from Lagos. I remember: my father’s sloping stature, flatness behind his eyes, liver-spotted hands. He lived with his cousin’s family at the time, and might still be there, disintegrating in a bungalow that smelled like mosquito coils and stagnancy, one with his threadbare armchair. I’m not sure how he’s been keeping since the first and last time I saw him. We didn’t stay in touch. It is hard to forge attachments with a man that frail.
And what about grandmother’s pulp? A heavier burden than my mother’s. Fanaticism. I remember: Sundays and Wednesdays sweating in a windowless chapel, seven years old maybe, or six. Sandwiched between mother and grandmother, a veil draped over her rapturous face. Mother’s agitated fingers caressing my ichafu, my earlobes, the fatty part of my arms. Thumbnail-sized communion wafers. Hoarse zealots collapsing between pews. Candle wax and velvet tithe bags. Grandmother’s favorite minister decrying immorality, singing of divine judgment, his baritone voice angelic.
I remember the acrid bite of concern in my mouth after every service, destabilizing me but not grandmother. She consumed that terror, licked her lips clean too, was intoxicated by the idea of global destruction, and would pray for everlasting renewal, for the world to melt off its axis. My poor grandmother. She had a full pot to strain so late in life.
+
Straining the pulp is necessary, painful as the process is. Better if the impurities never existed, but they do. Mother’s straining happened in stages, grandmother’s as well, with love at the center of it. Love for me, the direct and indirect fruit of their wombs.
They witnessed: my cool detachment, too peculiar for a child under the age of ten, my disordered eating (banana chips, yogurts, and cold eggs only, please and thank you), my constant weeping beneath the canopy of their soft arms, the best place possible to experience such catharsis. Under the trees that bore me directly and indirectly. I would hear them discuss me, my mother and her mother, baffled at my unsteady nature.
“It’s her pulp rising up, like yours did. Same age, too,” grandmother would say, trying to whisper so I wouldn’t hear, but I heard it all, the trouble I was heaping on them.
“Help me, then. Help her sift it out. Can you not? Did you never learn how?” my mother, desperate, imploring.
Didn’t she know, indeed? Did my grandmother’s mother never teach her these things? How to fake soundness of mind, how to err on the side of normalcy? She did not, so grandmother learned the lessons herself, fifty-five years old, new fervor taking over her. She realized, in the pursuit of that knowledge, that she was full of it. Not born that way but simmered into a soup of pulp by the parents she never liked to talk about. Violent father, violent mother, a pair of joy-draining lunatics.
She was adrift, emancipated at nineteen, a child swimming against the current. Forced into the waiting arms of clergymen who wanted her blind devotion, the contents of her wallet too. All that pulp, heavy in grandmother’s ribs, changing the taste of her atoms, souring the soup. She created my mother with a man weaker than even my father, one of her venerated clergymen, left him and raised their child alone, breastfed my mother poison without really knowing she was doing it at all. Yes, she really was full of it. How to sift it out, then? Patience. She taught my mother this, pinned her down and force-fed new knowledge into her daughter.
“Be patient, confront the unresolved things swimming in the soup that you are. Clarify yourself. For the child.”
And it was my turn, at eight and a half years old, to sit on my mother’s lap, to play with the beads weighing down her braids, and inhale the perfume oil she’d sprinkled on her earlobes. I remember being told I would be reborn abroad, repotted in different soil, fertilized properly beyond the reach of the off-putting pulp she inherited from her mother.
My mother had a friend in Wales, a girl she went to boarding school with, years before my conception. They shared a bunk in the same dorm, mother at the top, the friend at the bottom. Mother and this friend, peas in an adolescent pod, pricked their thumbs, squeezed spilled blood into each other’s mouths, shared clothes, sweets from the school’s tuck shop, textbooks and men, too. Mother spoke of her teenage frivolity wistfully.
The friend in Wales, an unknown woman with my mother’s blood inside her, would take me, keep me safe from all the poisons in Lagos desperately trying to destroy me: weak father, mother recovering from malignant pessimism, grandmother in recovery as well. Western climate, Western medicine, the proposed cure for my willful starvation and incomprehensible placidity.
“My fault that you are this way. But it isn’t too late to sift it out. Confront the unresolved or it will multiply. Clarify yourself, i ghtara?” mother said.
I was eight and a half, clinging to my mother’s neck, learning things about her and my grandmother, some of which I already knew. My belly ached, and I did not understand everything she was saying, did not grasp the concept of pulp that could supposedly change the taste of me and my atoms, but stored the knowledge for when I would need it.
+
I deserted Swansea and my mother’s friend who’d been keeping me fed, housed, clothed, decided to try America on for size, to my mother’s dismay. The country worried her. Too vast, too easy to slip out of notice, she warned, as if that was a bad thing. I booked a one-way ticket to fabled New York. Rochester, not the unconquerable city and its headstrong boroughs. My eternal gap year, I would call the decades I spent on yet another continent. Twenty years old, anchored painfully to a bachelor’s degree in economics, sedated by antidepressants and muscle relaxers on a filthy metal tube with wings, lugging an oversized carry-on and heavy pulp in my breast.
I had my first proper relationship that year. Loved a man so painfully I forgot to sift the pulp, couldn’t embark on long-overdue self-rehabilitation. He was a transplant like me, but from Grenada. The same age as my mother, brilliant in the ways I wished I was, beautiful as well, and aware of his ineffable attractiveness. He taught comparative literature at the local university, and I worked at a café affiliated with the same school, wiping sticky tables down, picking up after hungover college students, brewing abysmal pitchers of unsweet tea. That is how we met. Our romance was a taut thing, much push and pull from both ends. Was he weak, like the person who’d impregnated my mother? Was I completely stupid, or worse, too lazy to put my economics degree to good use? It didn’t matter after all. He was fated to heap more pulp into the soup.
The man I loved moved me into his apartment shortly after we started dating. He gave me ulcers from his constant scrutiny, literally atrophied my stomach, and was the first person to extract feeble orgasms from my body. I worshipped him for it, was dazzled by mediocrity wearing sophistication’s flashy veneer. He’d introduce me to his friends, five months in, men and women predisposed to snobbery. Middle-aged, middle-class with one-percenter aspirations. They mocked me, ridiculed my name, the skin encasing my unhealthy organs, my hodgepodge accent (partly Nigerian, heavily Welsh, clunky Americanisms floating somewhere in there) and he enabled the mockery, partook in it.
A mistake, I understand now, to love a person who disliked what I was, hated things I could not control. My age in comparison to his. My lack of wisdom, the resultant codependency. He would end the relationship. A mercy, although I couldn’t see it that way. Not immediately. I fought for the indignity of being his, but the professor wouldn’t budge. He had already moved on, wanted something more challenging than what we’d been doing, wanted to pursue seniors in the university’s humanities department, shimmering young women without ulcer sores or generational pulp.
Twenty-one, aimless again. I moved out of his townhouse and into cramped accommodations for seasonal workers and underappreciated university staff the rest of that year. My pulp carried on simmering in the soup, multiplying like my mother said it would.
+
Twenty-nine years old, back in Lagos.
“Come home osiso, your grandmother fades,” my mother said.
And so I went, the exiled daughter, older and a little wiser, anchored to my economics degree and a job in auditing I didn’t enjoy but tolerated. Things had shifted. My grandmother was no longer the unshakable behemoth I remembered. She’d edged closer to senility. Slack-jawed, dazed look on her face when I tried speaking to her, reams of papery skin falling off the bone. My mother cared for our ailing matriarch in their new house, a three bedroom with Pepto-Bismol pink walls and too many windows.
Mother was the age I am now, forty-nine. Looser limbed, less nihilistic. She had taken up oil painting and played badminton on Friday evenings. Homecoming, she labeled my return. Temporary homecoming, I warned her, and it was true. Living with them was dangerously sentimental. I allowed myself to luxuriate in nostalgia, at first. Slow mornings frying dense yam slices on a kerosene stove until the kitchen’s ceiling darkened with soot. Reading uncomplicated novels on their veranda when the power cut out. Siestas underneath the bougainvillea mother transplanted from our old house. Keeping my bedridden grandmother company; trimming her brittle fingernails, gently combing knots out of her sparse hair. But there was persistent unhappiness clogging my throat, phlegm I could not clear with something easy as coughing. I remembered: humid churches, mother screaming into the abyss, the weak man who put me in her, more affectionate with his armchair than he was with me, my hollow belly eating itself, forced exile to Europe at nine years old.
My grandmother passed. She expelled her final breath holding mother’s hand and my own, squinting at the ceiling fan spinning passively above our heads. Grandmother babbled curses at her long-dead parents, and the man she’d procreated with. Bastard, she called him. And she was gone, the word scarcely uttered. We buried her, me and mother alone in a nameless cemetery on the mainland. Alone yes, because grandmother had lost all her friends after she sifted the pulp out of her own soup—excommunicating herself from the church she used to attend. I returned to New York the following month and carried my weighty pulp with me. I wanted to chuck it all overboard, but how could I? Who would I be without my burdens?
+
Who would I be without my burdens? I asked this question often to the woman I’d been paying to oversee my “straining of the pulp” bimonthly, a psychotherapist younger than I was. Shimmering young woman, blinding glow of contentment inside her. But she wouldn’t tell me or couldn’t.
“For you to find out,” she’d always say, shrugging her exquisite shoulders, broad like a lifelong swimmer’s.
I didn’t want to know, not yet. Too soon. Thirty-five years old, hoarding my heavy pulp, even as it was closing my airways and constricting my lungs. Thirty-five years old, and still. A child. I didn’t like being a child, not at all. I hated it. I wanted weightlessness. Pleasant freedom from the inheritance forced on me via lineage. Who would I be? Without my burdens, I could be just a woman, anchored to a convenient job. Not the child with the memory of an elephant, deathly afraid of the sky vomiting pollution, economic collapse, being burgled. Where better to strain pulp than at the bed of its creation?
Back to Lagos again, thirty-five years old, slightly sedated on a metal tube with wings, stuffing bland canapés down my throat, drinking flat champagne from plastic cups. Back to my mother’s house and its Pepto-Bismol walls, amateur oil paintings, and inconsistent power supply. Back to my misguided mother, who had exiled me to Europe, because. Because she loved me and wanted the pulp to dissolve into nothing the moment I set foot on foreign soil. Western climate, Western medicine.
“Help me,” I told my mother, my first night in the house. She’d already fed me dates, a bowl of abacha and had washed my feet in the guest bathroom. She scooped warm water over my toes and calves, scrubbed my heels with a pumice stone until I felt less grimy. I waited till we retired to her bedroom at midnight, clamped down on her wrist with my fingers, so she wouldn’t wriggle out of maternal duty. Dropped the question in her lap.
“I thought I did, didn’t I? I tried to,” mother said, referring tentatively to my exile.
“Didn’t work. Not at all.”
Mother’s tongue clicked behind her teeth. Her fingers caressed my earlobes, my untidy braids that stank of cross-continental travel.
“Watch over me, while I confront this fucking thing. Please. I want it out of me, I need it gone,” I said, sleepily. “You should have kept me with you. Back then. But do it now.”
I remember: the ceiling fan spinning above our heads, squeaking rhythmically as it circulated air, salt water trickling from my eyes to the corners of my mouth, inchoate anger simmering, mother’s nod of consent, her skin a familiar comfort next to mine, the pulp agitated in my bones, knowing it would be strained soon, that it was no longer welcome.
Edidiong Uzoma Essien is a writer and digital marketing professional living on the U.S. East Coast. She has been previously published in Strange Horizons, Thimble Literary Magazine, and Brittle Paper. Essien enjoys reading, video game escapism, and surrendering herself to the whims of her three-year-old cat.
GRACE AND GRAVITY 