I’m certain Yaya and Big Papa heard us the night of our wedding, excited as we were to lie side by side on our marital bed with no child yet in sight. Our clothes were on the floor even before the women from my village left, the ones who had carried my belongings on their heads and, with my mother leading the procession, sung and danced from my aunt’s hut to my new family’s hut, where they placed everything I owned in the parlor and pushed Malabo and me into our bedroom and closed the door, laughing and shouting from outside that we’d better not step out until I was pregnant. How happy were we to oblige? At least once I said to Malabo, in between sessions, that we needed to do a better job of being quiet, because we didn’t want to disturb Big Papa’s and Yaya’s sleep, but Malabo laughed and said that Big Papa and Yaya were probably not sleeping, they were most likely doing the same thing we were doing, and that the only reason why we weren’t hearing them was because they’d learned how to do it quietly, after decades of experience. I found it hard to believe this, considering the looks Big Papa gave me in the morning, an acknowledgment that he’d heard me, coupled with something I couldn’t decipher. I wished he hadn’t given me those looks, but it didn’t stop us the following night. Nothing stopped us until I was huge with Thula, and Yaya, one day in the kitchen, said to me that there were certain things a woman had to stop doing for the sake of her child. Nodding, I told her I understood. Malabo protested. He said that his friends had told him that it was not true, that their children had all come out fine, and that the important thing was to know how to maneuver around the fetus, but I told him we needed to do it for Yaya, and he agreed; it hadn’t been easy for us, but we’d done it, though when I was pregnant with Juba I was insatiable, which thoroughly thrilled Malabo.
My desire was, and remains, its own beast, rabid and untamable.
In those early days of our love, it was no punishment. It was a gift to my husband, this wanting and more wanting, every night. Cocody and Lulu laughed at me whenever I yawned in the middle of the day and told them that we couldn’t stop, it was too hard to stop. They said no woman should have an appetite like mine, that their husbands would send them to Sakani to be given whatever I’d drunk if they somehow discovered that it was possible for a woman to be as desirous as a man. “I hope Malabo isn’t telling Bissau any of these things you guys are doing and giving him ideas,” Cocody said. “I don’t want any trouble with him coming to me in the middle of the night and asking me to open my pot so he can cook some crazy meal in it.” At which Lulu sighed, pressed her tongue against her gap tooth, and said, “My own pot, for two months now, I haven’t felt like taking off the lid. I don’t even want to think about how many cobwebs have accumulated inside it.” Lulu swore that most of my insides had to be male. She said I probably had invisible hair on my chin and a lump on my throat that nobody could see. Cocody had agreed and laughed, ka ka ka oh, and they’d slammed their palms together. In those days I’d laughed with them, because Malabo was around to honor me and my voraciousness, but after he left and never came back, what was there to laugh about?
—
In the first year after his disappearance, I cried many different kinds of tears. The tears I cried in the morning were different from the ones I cried at night. At night, I thought of our nights together. I thought of my palm on his cheek, his on mine. I thought of how much he loved my breasts. I cried with longing, alone under my sheets. I cried because no one had touched me since the day he last touched me, and to this day, no one has touched me.
Like every woman who has lost a husband before me, like every woman who will lose a husband after me, I am doomed to aloneness. My days of being cuddled and fondled have come and gone. I hear my mother’s voice in my head from back when I was a child. Like me, she lost a husband, though she was much older than the twenty-nine I was when Malabo left. I hear her say to her friends: I lost the one husband life gave me, I have no right to ask for another one, not when there are other women waiting their turn. I see her friends nodding sadly: what is the point in questioning a broken heart?
I was eight when my father died and, with my five older sisters married, it was just my mother and me in our hut. It was clear to me that she did not resent her fate—she never complained—but I prayed the Spirit that I would never become like her. Malabo promised never to leave me husbandless. Why would I want to leave this body? he said.
—
There is an abundance of women like me in Kosawa and throughout the sibling-villages—wives with dead husbands. Men marry us young and die before us, taken away by nature or disobedience to our wisdom. At their deaths, we cry, we dry our eyes, we prepare to spend the rest of our lives taking care of the very young, the sick, and the very old. Desire becomes of the past. We’ll never be afforded the same privilege given to husbands with dead wives. For these men,
