Mummy Tinuke

Rafal Kulik

Sarah Utomhin

When the white ceramic plate Tinuke had received as a wedding gift crashes to the ground, it is her mother that shouts, ‘Jésu!’ All the way from the living room.

Mummy Tinuke is a middle-aged burly woman with a tongue usually coated heavily with sarcasm and prayers. Her hair is graying around the temples and she just wears braided cornrows without any attachments because her scalp stings when she uses weave-on. Her naked feet pad along the carpet, taking her from the living room to the kitchen in less than fifteen rushed steps.

Her wrapper is tied firmly around her waist, but she loosens it and ties it again when she sees her Tinuke bent over the broken plate. ‘What are you doing?!’ she says as she rushes and pulls the girl away, grasping her fingers for a thorough and panicked inspection. ‘Tinuke? Tinuke? You’re already married, must you worry me like this?’ she’s relieved that there are no cuts, but more than two decades’ worth of habit forces her still to scold the younger woman who just smiles mischievously.

‘Mummy, if I don’t worry you, who will?’

‘Nobody. Nobody should worry me. Ah, haven’t I tried? Raising you and your big head with all the trouble you caused. I’m already fifty, allow me to enjoy the rest of my life without worry.’

Tinuke laughs as if her mother has said a joke, playfully pushing her out of the kitchen. ‘Oya, go and rest, Madame Queen. I will bring the food to you when I’m done.’

Mummy Tinuke scoffs. ‘…as if there’ll be any plates left.’ She’s alone in the living room again, the space is grand and white, accentuated with black furniture and brown décor. Somehow it adds to the sense of unrest she has been feeling since she managed to get out of bed earlier in the morning.

Opposite the living room is the study. A room with darker walls than the rest of the house and a warmer friendlier feel. Mummy Tinuke loves this room the most, besides her own bedroom of course—books are wonderful, but not more than a bed. Her favourite thing to do when her soap operas have shown and the television is no longer capable of showing her anything interesting is to wander about the study.

The room is not as grand as the living room, but it is rather long and filled with its own wonders. At the nearest end of the room, lined along the wall that separates the study from the entrance to the house is a barricade of shelves. High enough that it stretches from the ceiling to the ground, each line filled to bursting with books. Many of the books are of an academic

nature, books about law and medicine and economics. Many serious books a scholar might pick up in research.

Mummy Tinuke is no scholar, she’d barely made it through primary school, had forced herself to get a secondary school certificate after she’d stopped halfway because of her marriage. Her late husband had been a firm believer in the doctrine that women belonged in the kitchen taking care of their families rather than in schools. It’d been pure horror when she’d decided that Tinuke would get an education regardless of what every other person in her family had to say.

The world is simply not a safer place for an uneducated woman. It took one erratic trip to a catholic church for that realization to sink in. That the world never favoured the ignorant, nor did it favour women. An ignorant woman was all the less lucky, as Mummy Tinuke had been. That day, when she’d visited the Catholic Church, had been the first time she’d ever spoken to a very educated woman without feeling inferior or inadequate.

The reverend sister’s name had been…Esther, and she’d been a Hausa woman. That had been the most shocking thing. An educated Hausa reverend sister. Mummy Tinuke had asked how it’d been possible to become educated as a Hausa woman of a lower class, and even more, not just become a Christian, but a reverend sister. Esther had laughed. A beautiful sound, or maybe just a normal sound that had been made more comely because of the beauty of the woman that had made it. Nothing is impossible through Christ that strengthens us, she’d replied. It was difficult, several times she was almost killed, but she had achieved it and was very much still alive.

Mummy Tinuke, rocking the crying child on her back had been filled with awe and respect and envy towards the woman. That was not an answer. How had she done it? Mummy Tinuke had demanded to know. Why had she done it? Surely it must have been a terribly difficult thing to do.

Under the warming sun of that harmattan morning, Sister Esther had pulled aside Mummy Tinuke and had shown her the gruesome scar that lined her neck. From one side to the other. She’d seen a book lying abandoned on a street one time when she was ten and already married. She’d picked the book to show it to her husband and have him explain what it was. She’d been eager, as a new wife, to have his attention always. But the result had been a thorough beating and a near decapitation with a sickle. It only made her realise that perhaps living in ignorance was how people wanted to be able to control others. She’d said that if you knew for yourself what was right or wrong it would be hard for somebody to convince you that wrong was right or right was wrong.

It was why most people preferred to not have others know. Awareness is not easy to manipulate, and education fostered it.

Sister Esther had said, at the end of it all, ‘I decided to study because I was stubborn. Hard-headed. I was nearly killed and was very afraid, but I still wanted to know why. If my husband was not going to tell me, I was going to find out on my own. That stubbornness led me here…somehow. I followed a dream that was not entirely my own, and now I live my life to help other people.

‘It’s not a sad thing. I don’t regret anything, but if I had known the things I know now at that time, my life would have been… different. I might have had a plan of my own all along. I might have still ended up here, but I think I would have come here with a bit less scars.’

Those words are with Mummy Tinuke now as she trails her fingers along the spines of the academic books. She remembers the nights her husband had beaten her, the nights he’d tried to beat her Tinuke, the nights he would throw her out to the streets and how the doors of all her friends and families would somehow also be locked to her on those nights.

How different would her life be if she’d been a bit less stubborn? How different would Tinuke’s life be?

Suddenly, melancholy and tiredness overcome Mummy Tinuke. Her back is aching and her knees are beginning to creak. She goes and seats on the dark leather chair behind the expensive desk. It is at the other end of the study, a short, uncomfortable stroll away from the shelves, but from that seat the entire room is visible. From that seat future generations are visible. Mummy Tinuke sees them. Children born into steady, privileged lives. They would have struggles of their own, everybody has struggles of their own, but those struggles would not be as crippling or as scarring as the ones she had faced. It might be because she’d chosen to fight that they would not have to, it might be just because of their luck.

Mummy Tinuke sinks further into the chair, it’s comfortable the way only expensive chairs can be. She yawns and smiles when she smells the aroma of egusi soup. If she could, she would have bet all the money she had that her Tinuke would serve the soup with fufu even though her husband absolutely detests it.

She laughs. Her daughter favouring her over the husband is an enjoyable weakness of hers. The idea that somebody in the world, the only person in the world, in fact, loves her the most is relieving. Mummy Tinuke has wished many times that she’d gotten a proper education, perhaps then she might have had a dream of her own. Perhaps then she might have understood how it felt to be a driven person.

But if personal dreams will cost her Tinuke, she knows she will never trade it. She would fight a hundred husbands, sleep in a thousand gutters, and weep silently for a million years than live a life where Tinuke was not her own.

Mummy Tinuke falls asleep to the memory of her sitting by a gutter in the rain, her upper body covered with a large nylon. Her husband has kicked her out again, but this time she’s made sure to leave with her baby girl. The girl is safe and dry and fast asleep on her lap. The wind is biting, but the girl is warm because she’s wrapped in Mummy Tinuke’s wrapper. The older woman smiles and sings and shivers because she’s naked in the rain.

The memory is such a sweet one that Mummy Tinuke smiles, and sleeps, and never wakes up.

Going by her penname Sabrina Anati, the author is a 20-year-old university student in Nigeria. She is starting to engage in freelance writing. She has yet to be published on an online platform besides Wattpad and Anystories.