Daughters Who Walk This Path

Don’t you women say that what a man can do, a woman can do better?”
I rolled my eyes. “Kachi Nwosu, you really need to move along with the times. That was back in the 1970s. This is 2002. The proper saying is, What a man can do, why should a woman bother?”

promise that for you, there will be fewer secrets. I promise to talk about whatever causes you pain. To talk about shame. I promise to listen even when I do not understand. I promise because you are worth it.”

“You know how you cry when cutting onions?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“It’s because the vapours from the onions make you cry, even though you’re not sad. Those feelings in your body were just like that: mere physical reactions. It does not mean that you wanted him to do what he did.”

Aunty Morenike often said, with that enigmatic smile of hers, that one should always take care of one’s own. Even a strong sieve cannot sift yam flour by itself. It needs a hand to hold it up.

Morenike did not know how to tell her grandmother that sometimes she prayed that the baby would die in her stomach so that she could be free. Every time the child moved, she remembered the father and the hatred in her heart grew. She could not bear to think of raising such a child. But what choice did she have?

Start with loving that part. Perhaps one day, your love for your child will grow stronger than your hatred for the father.”

Morayo, also remember that we do not abandon the business of living life because of what people do to us.

do not abandon the business of living life just because of what people will say about us. Do people not even talk about the dead?”

One of my students asked me why we should bother to read old books, and I told her it is for the same reason that we study history. To know and learn from the past.”

But no one told us that sometimes evil is found much closer to home, and that those who want to harm us can have the most soothing and familiar of voices.