Sitting with hands neatly folded below her breast, the right foot tapping on the ground in harmony with thousands of thoughts racing through her mind and a teary eye staring into the space as though seeking the last traces of hope and fear, Somkene’s mother mutters words couched with anguish. God, please don’t let my daughter die in the hands of this man. I cannot afford to lose her now.
Her husband seems to have made up her mind in giving Somkene out in marriage. He has summoned few elders from his kindred to sit around the table dense with kola and palm wine for the ceremony of the ịkụ aka n’ụzọ. Amidst laughter and drinks, he peremptorily nudges his wife on the shoulder, gently whispering to her ears. “Ịdịọgọ Nwaanyị, Get more alligator pepper for my in-laws”. She stood with low zest, went inside, brought them and reluctantly dropped them on the fanciful wooden table set in front of the guest. For her, it was all melancholy cloaked in mirth.
Somkene is my cousin, a ten-year old girl coming immediately after a boy of eleven. With her, the creator took special care in moulding a rare mortal beauty. With a halo of grace in her round face, a soft voice and a dark skin glinting under the rays of the sun; some men of low virtue in the village have been wagging their tongues with obscene talks behind her back.
At her age, Somkene is too callow to understand the language of marital love or sensuality. She barely understands what the traditional nuptial rites performed on her behalf at that moment really means. Her consent simply does not matter. She is just young, more comfortable enjoying the cool breeze of her childhood world; a period marked with wild exuberance and endless explorations. The whole marriage thing does not make any sense to her. Hence, when asked by her father to come out and meet with “in-law”, she sauntered with unsure steps, making her way through the human wedges on both sides while avoiding any eye contact with the supposed males-in-law.
It is my own mother who helped me make sense of the scenario. Somkene’s sin is being born into a poor family. “They feed from hand to mouth” were the words that repeatedly rang in my head. She is the first daughter. And with no much financial strength to train her in school, her father has thought that the most rational thing to do was give her out in marriage. He is weighed down by the economic difficulties in the country and now deserves some relief.
“Hardship is rife and things are not getting any better”. He has told his wife that this is a rich in-law who has many assets to his name. I believe our daughter would find a happy home with no pain. “Her husband has promised to assist me financially because we have given him our precious jewel”. Though she never consented to this unholy union, Somkene’s mother had no much option. It is the men’s world. Feeling though gritty and unyielding, their poor condition seems to have silenced her voice to speak for her dear daughter throughout the course. “There is no merit to this madness”, she thought. Wealth and royalty can never take the place of the communication of right values to children.
And she is right. Family is the first government. It is the basic platform for the whole of human formation and integration. A child cries for its mother’s arms not just because it wants to be carried in her warming palms but because it is the only safe place where it feels secured in his vulnerability. At such a tender age, the child feels a love that is all-embracing, trusting as well as convincing. The parents become everything to it. They represent the world. The child doesn’t have the perspective to see that other parents are different and frequently better. Consequently, the ‘reality’ that children come up with is ‘I can trust my parents’ but ‘I can’t trust other people’. Not trusting people, therefore, becomes the map with which children enter adolescence and adulthood. All of what they know starts from the family.
Therefore, parenting is more than a part-time job. It is rather a full commitment to the developmental processes taking place in the life of children. Parents, I believe should be able to closely look at their children to see their pain and joys, form them with patience and courage, and listen to them while daring to be taught by them. They only discover the players at work when they enter into their lives and listen to their respective musings.
Crimes that bear directly on the lives and growth of any child wound the humanity of that child and subsequently render the child powerless in an environment it is supposed to grow with confidence. Does humankind even get to think of the risk set for young children hawking on open streets? What of children exposed to the harsh tropical weather by the roadside instigated by their parents to go around with plates begging? These kids are simply in an abusive relationship. What of the many innocent young children who are transported on daily basis abroad as victims of child trafficking malaise and thousands of girls between age ten to twelve who are given out to unwarranted marriages, exploited, emotionally wrecked and afterwards labelled as social misfits? The trauma of the child who is also a victim of rape and other sexually related abuses is what should hit humankind with a force of a personal touch. Making room for all these social misgivings is only creating a vicious circle that will impede the growth and humanity of children.
For Somkene, growing up in such a family where she was given to an early marriage is only making her recognize her marginal identity. After all, she has an elder brother, yet unmarried. She couldn’t just grasp her place in the family. She can no longer play with her age mates at the neighbourhood. Being a wife at ten is just rushing into an experience that will hurt her childhood and innocence.
After few months, Somkene comes back deeply wounded. Her face is imbued with sorrow, her cry set against the background of suffering. She is despaired and can’t talk because grief and tragedy have suffocated her voice. Her eyes are cold with tears, those pair of downcast windows to the world now shaded in misfortune. She now suffers the unbearable wounds of an obstetric fistula. She roams the streets battered with watery droppings uncontrollably running down in between her thighs. She is both homeless and hopeless.
This is her gift from the commercial marriage. And to think it is the husband who sent her packing because of the odour that is now oozing out from her body. Even her father’s house could not contain her. A place she once called home is now housing the father’s ego.
