Children belong to the father...or do they?

Note: The following is a short story I'll deliver in a couple of short posts. It needs no special foreword only that I'm interested in your comments and your opinion on who children belong to should it come to picking one parent over the other. How is this matter decided in your culture? Stay tuned!

"I'm prepared to leave but I need my son," Hawah murmured.
"Who? Your son? Sedi is going nowhere," Bakoro, her mother-in-law cried out.
"But I can't leave him behind."
"Oh, you sure will. You're being divorced. Sedi is staying with his family."
"But I'm his mother, Bakoro."
"My son is his father." Bakaro's words fell, blunt like the open palm she raised and dropped down like a hatchet.
Hawah's eyes puddled with tears. From the wooden stool she crouched on, she had a profile view of her husband, Manda, languid as always. Never spoken up for himself since she'd known him. He sat there without a word even at his own divorce hearing. He was the epitome of the submissive child, now submissive man. He grew up in his parents shadow, especially his mother's. He toed the line even when she blinked. She decided what he needed and obeyed. He was debilitated by his self abandon to her that most people thought he was mentally handicapped. So when his parents found him a wife, he went along. Hawah showed up, tall, light skinned with a finely sculpted facial structure, freshly pull out of school by parents who believed that the dignity of a woman was in marriage. He was so intimidated that he always acted clumsily with her but somehow he managed to have a son by her, throwing one more being under Bakoro's rule. His hunched back remained of stone as his mother ranted on.
"My grandson isn't budging. Did you bring a child with you when you came?"
"Bakaro, please, calm down." The man who spoke was one of three elders who came to settle the divorce. They shared the divan with Hawah's uncle. Across from them, sitting beside his father on a bench, Manda still gawked at the ground beneath his feet. "Ndeh, my daughter, everything has an end but Almighty God's reign. It is the conclusion of this assembly that it is the end of your marriage to Manda. You'll have to return to your parents' house. The boy will stay here," the man added, caressing his short salt-and-pepper beard. His words were calm and serious.
"Eh, Bah, please beg them not to do this to me," Hawah wailed.
"Ndeh, children belong to their father. That's our custom," he said - his voice slightly cracking in the face of her pain.
Hawah slid to the ground. She moaned the sound of a wounded soul. Her pleading eyes ran to Bakaro sitting by the living room exit. This woman she had cooked and cleaned for day and night sat, lips curved in despise. Beyond her, she could see other women in the midst of their usual conjectures by the well outside in the courtyard. Her world was crumbling around her. She crawled toward her mother-in-law.
"Ndeh, there is no point in this. God's will is greater. You need to accept it," another one of the elders said. "Get ready, a taxi will transport you to the bus station."

Strength

Being strong is having one's feet firmly planted in the soil beneath us, our values, mores and customs. Hence, the sky becomes the limit.

AT THE OTHER END OF THE STREET

The above was the prompt in our class a few weeks ago. My piece went like this:

At the end of the street was a narrow alleyway. We were not allowed there as children. Most adults didn't go there and none wanted to be seen in the vicinities. Some did venture behind the formerly white cement wall now rendered ochre by the flying dust from the unpaved road nearby.

They were men. Oftentimes, they went there at night but sometimes they did in bright daylight. They all acted the same way. They'd appear to wander past the compound, with no mind to the dusty walls and what bellies behind it. But you could always tell by the way they casted furtive glances to their surroundings. Then they'd suddenly turn into the gateless courtyard through a small entrance.

I knew it. I saw them. Like most children I watched the comings and goings of those men and I giggled. My mom hated them. She said that they needed to learn to control their pants. I wasn't sure what she meant but I think I knew. The mini skirts behind the mysterious dusty wall were telling.

Male Ear Piercing in Africa

A woman without ear piercing doesn't exist in my culture. Perhaps I need to be less categorical. Members of my ethnic group, the Soninke, have spread to far reaching corners of the world. I have cousins in Szechuan China, Sydney Australia and God knows where. I heard of a relative in Norway. I wonder how he survives; our roots are in the sweltering Sahel Desert and it's hard enough for me to survive the "play-winter" in North Carolina.

Back to our subject, ear piercing is a must for women in my culture. By their seventh day of life, every little girl takes a trip to the mean lady who runs needles through their fleshy lobes  and the ones of rare little boys too.

So yes, I lied to fend off repeated request from one of my sons. I told him piercings are forbidden for boys in our culture. He knows the truth now and understands it. Boys' piercings have special meanings and are generally a single hole to one ear. They do not wear a ring in it.

The only pierced man in my family was my father's oldest brother. Sometime during early childhood, he was said to have been struck by a deadly disease. His ear was pierced as a ritual to cast maleficent spirits away. He lived well into his eighties sporting a pierced right lobe envied by the males in our family's younger generations.

Male piercing for most ethnic groups in West Africa is a sort of talisman performed only in critical situations to avert evil and sometimes to attract good fortune. It's never for looks!!!

On The Other Side

On the other side was my writing prompt from yesterday. I had arrived late to class and had no option but to write something brief and hopefully make sense. Here is what my pen laid on paper.


ON THE OTHER SIDE, freedom. She was married off at age thirteen. Her first baby showed up sixteen months later. Not even forty days after that, he tore through her and laid his seeds; two this time. Nine months later, twin boys arrived. She didn't love them, neither did she love the daughter before them, all fruits of his loins.

For seven painfull years, she squirmed under his sweaty body every night. Early on, she'd learned to retrieve behind the curtains of her mind from the first thrust up her belly. She would go the market, cook and clean, all in her head to forget his panting visage over hers. For her, he had remained a stranger, a stranger her parents had shacked her to, till death and death was were she was headed, for freedom on the other side.

The Boss

The Boss was a prompt I was given in one of my writing classes. Here is what I came up with.

He's not the boss of me. He thinks he is. Parading his beer belly in the usual overstretched Saharan shirt, the buttons of which threatened to fly off with every chuckle, he patted a space beside him on the sofa.
"Sit down," he said. His breathing menaced to choke him.
He had money from here to Monaco and back, and two beautiful wives at home but still chased after countless young women like me. I know it but I don't care.
God has created only one of my dad's kind of men. The rest is an ignominious bunch of pigs. The neighbor who tucked his hand under my pretty flowered shirt when I was five, maybe six.
My uncle who once tried to wrestle me to his bed when I was just giving him a peck on the cheek. What about my father's own friend who lured us to his house when his berry trees bent under the weigh of their ripened fruits. And oh, my fourth grade teacher who touched my nascent breasts. They all must pay.

DUST TO DUST

I walked into my writting class a couple of Mondays ago where my instructor handed out the following prompt: Legitimate Praise
When I put pen to paper, I instantly free fell into the pain I felt for a long time after my father's passing. Needless to say, I never got to the "praise" part of the assignment but here is what I penned that day.

Just fresh dirt, a mound of dark red, pebble riddled dirt. Underneath my father. No headstone, not flowers, nothing. There he was shrouded from my eyes forever. My father, the man who unknowingly gave me the best gift in the world. He gave me the the gift of education, in a culture where the white men's school was taboo, the way straight to hell even for a male child, left alone a girl.

I wanted to be here. My mothers had attempted to dissuade me.
"Women don't got to grave sites," they said.
"I'm going," I responded. It was the first time I had ever raised my voice to them. They took notice.
"Well, then wear a pair of pants under your Jelbab. The deads should not see under your clothes when you step over their graves."

This is where the timer stopped the fifteen minute prompt writing. It was painful for me and still is, as I'm copying my work to this post. Too painful to edit, too painful to finish. I will someday but for now here it is. To a father who was really one...