Zikora: A Short Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Author:Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [Ngozi Adichie, Chimamanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

I pushed out a baby boy. Wrinkled and silent, scaly skinned, wet black curls plastered on his head. He came out with his mouth full of shit, and the bigger nurse, chuckling, said, “Not the best first meal,” while somebody swiftly took him away to suction the feces from his mouth.

Now here he was wrapped like a tidy sausage roll and placed on my chest. He was warm and so very small. I held him with stiff hands. I was suspended in a place of no feeling, waiting to feel. I could not separate this moment from the stories of this moment—years of stories and films and books about this scene, mother and child, mother meeting child, child in mother’s arms. I knew how I was supposed to feel, but I did not know how I felt. It was not transcendental. There was a festering red pain between my legs. Somewhere in my consciousness, a mild triumph hovered, because it was over, finally it was over, and I had pushed out the baby. So animalistic, so violent—the push and pressure, the blood, the doctor urging me, the cranking and stretching of flesh and organ and bone. At the final push, I thought that here in this delivery room we are reduced, briefly and brutishly, to the animals we truly are.

“Beautiful boy,” my mother said, smiling down at him.

To me she said, “Congratulations,” and it stung of the perfunctory. I reached for my phone. There was no response from Kwame. In a surge of disbelief and desperation, I sent another message: It’s a boy. Now that he knew it was no longer just about me, he might respond. Or appear at the hospital, holding a balloon and flowers, limp flowers from the supermarket because he wouldn’t have had time to go to a florist. I felt pathetic.

“You’ve had a tear,” my doctor said, needle in hand. Did it never end? Nature must not want humans to reproduce, otherwise birthing would be easy, even enjoyable: babies would easily slip out, and mothers would remain unmarked and whole, merely blessed by having bestowed life.

At the needle’s pierce of tender raw skin, I cried out.

“Shouldn’t the epidural still be working?” I asked.

My mother glanced at me with eloquent eyes. Get yourself together and stop making noise.

Then she looked away and asked the doctor a question. “Will it be possible to have his circumcision today?”

“Not until he has urinated,” the doctor said. “And I don’t do circumcisions. It’ll be done by another doctor.”

“And when can we expect him to urinate?” my mother asked.

“I won’t circumcise him,” I said. How could they be having a conversation while he slid needle and thread in and out of my flesh?

“Of course you will circumcise him,” my mother said coolly.

“I won’t!” I said, my voice raised, and for a moment I felt an intense desire to pass out and escape my life.

“Done,” my doctor said, still holding the needle. “It should heal nicely.”

My mother was asking about the circumcision consent forms.

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