---

Nnome

by Audrey Obuobisa-Darko

Onyankopɔn is a woman. And a man. And everything above and in-between. Akuba says Onyankopɔn kissed the tips of His fingers on the sixth day, and sculpted these bodies as worldly vessels for our spirits. Why do we call Onyankopɔn just ‘He,’ when Akuba says that all of us were made in the image of God; all the men, all the boys, all the women, all the girls, all those people who don’t quite look like either men or women but rather cut-and-paste versions of each thrown together?

Why do we reduce Onyankopɔn to only ‘He,’ when I see God in that video of my mother, with her full body that flows like emerald water, and silvery-black locs that cascade down her arched back till they kiss the point where her buttocks greet her waist? You should see the part where she wields her tumi, when she closes her eyes, and her locs dance and rise about her like living, breathing things, when they weave themselves together to form the shape of a stool, when the stool appears in the sky above, when her hair wraps around it and sets it down on the ground. I see Onyankopɔn in Asante from my class; his body glows like the sun on God’s happy day when he Fades from one place and Reappears at another. Onyankopɔn also looks like the man-woman person Da warned me to stay away from, with their body that can bend, and shift into different forms of being other than human. But when Onyankopɔn made me, They did not make me well.

“You should have never been born.” My father’s words are pressed down into the crevices of my brain. I see them on the walls, I see them in my dreams, I see them each time I lift my cursed hands to wield my tumi and nothing happens.

A familiar mechanical sound licks my ear as small voxels bind to one another above me. The strong beams burn my sleepy eyes. The hologram forms, and my virtual assistant, Akuba, squeaks to life. “Good morning, Nnome. It’s 13 a.m. Friday the 42nd. Your first class begins in fifty-two solar minutes, after which you–”

“I’m not going.”

The map to school appears on the hologram, and Akuba calls out the coordinates of the trajectory. She issues a command to portal spawn device, and the portal begins piecing itself together. “Simulating your father’s Create in ten, nine, eight–”

“I said I’m not going! You’ve forgotten what today is?” My voice cracks. Horror washes over me in a thousand solid waves. I run my fingers through my hair and down my face, my hands quivering, my body weak. Tears pour down my face.

“Today is Friday the 42nd,” Akuba repeats.

The sound of heavy footsteps grows louder. My door swings open. “Nnome.” My father stands at the door, his voice heavy, his eyes empty.

“Da.”

“Get out of your bed.”

He walks toward my workshop table, which is cluttered by the workings of a struggling inventor, and sets a colourful paper bag on it. It has ‘happy birthday’ written across it in bright pink. He notices the hologram suspended in the air and wrinkles his nose. I stand beside the partly-built portal. The Adinkra symbols carved in its mahogany frame gleam against the holographic lights; dɛnkyɛm, the crocodile, for adaptability, aya, the fern, for endurance. My portals look good, but they’ll never be as good as those made by my father’s tumi.

“What is this nonsense?” He points a large, hirsute hand at the portal.

“It’s- it’s one of my inventions, Da. I made it… like the gateways you make. I’ve been- I’ve been working really hard, and now I can simulate your tumi with techno-”

“No matter what you do with these toys of yours, Onyankopɔn denied you tumi, and you can never be like any of us.” He walks towards me and stops short when my face is only a few inches away from his chest. I raise my eyes to meet his. They glisten; he’s been crying too. His lips stretch into a smile, one that does not reach his eyes, and he says, “Happy birthday, my dear.”

“Tha- thank you, Da.”

He picks a confetti blower from the paper bag. “Tell your talking thing to play a birthday song.” I issue a command to Akuba, and Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday fills the room. Mirth fills Da’s eyes as he breaks into dance around me, spraying confetti on my head.

“Whose birthday is it?” He shouts over the music, dancing.

My voice does not know me anymore. “Mine…”

Da cups a hand over his ear. “Hm?”

“Mine.” Guilt sits heavier, and heavier, on my shoulders, pushing me into the ground where wastrels like me belong.

Something flashes in his eyes. “And whose death day is it?” He continues in his jolly dance, capering and frolicking as if Happy Birthday is the most melodious song in the universe. His movements are more frantic, more exaggerated.

I open my mouth to respond, but I cannot speak. Thoughts spin in my head till everything in my vision spins. I open my mouth to speak, but my words meld into one another, one wave of a wail.

Da stops dancing and looks at me. He steps closer to me, the mirth lost in his eyes, and lowers his voice. “Whose death day is it?”

I take in a deep breath. “Ma.”

“And who killed her?” His face is even closer to mine now, his breathing long, and hard, and hot against my face. His eyes bore into mine, mocking, provoking.

I bow my head. “Me.”

“That’s right! If it weren’t for you..?”

“She would be alive,” I continue, my voice barely a whisper.

He takes a cake out of the paper bag. He rubs his palms together until blood begins to flow from his fingertips and onto the floor. I’ve watched Da many times when he Creates – weapons, cooking pans, jewellery, portals – but I can never get used to the sight of his blood. He closes his eyes and draws the shape of a knife in the air with his finger, and the blood moves at his command, hardening till it becomes a knife.

I pick it up without question, and cut a slice and put it in his hand. I tip my head back and open my mouth. He stuffs the cake in my mouth, and I lick his fingers, sugar and blood interlaced, like I know how after all these years. He steps back and watches me, a satisfied smile on his face as he admires the work of his hands; a trembling, frightened, guilty me.

“Happy birthday, my darling,” he says, and walks out of the room.

---

“I want to see the dead,” I said to Mrs. Sankara, my teacher, six solar months ago.

She batted her eyelids. “Hm?”

“No, not like that,” I laughed. “My project. For applying to the Academy. I want to develop something to help me see into a dead person’s past life. My mother’s past life.”

I told her about Ma, how I knew nothing about her beyond that video card I stole from Da. I did not add that the next thing Da told me was that she killed herself when she saw she made me, that she chewed the umbilical cord cut and strangled herself with it, that Da walked in with a smile on his face, and when he saw her, and he saw me, he lifted me and slammed me against the wall, that I refused to die. I told her about Da, how he never said much about who she was, how he shut down whenever I asked, how I want to help him cope with his grief somehow.

“Nyansa Academy is the place for brilliant minds like yours, Nnome. That’s where all the greatest inventions you can think of were made by our ancestors, Kobi, Ansah, Diaka, and sent out into other universes beyond Alkebulan,” Mrs. Sankara said when I was eleven solar years old, and, pausing to look at me with tender eyes, added, “where there are more people like you without tumi.”

She sparked a determination in my heart that day grew more and more afire six years forward, with each page I turned, each machine I made, functional or faulty, every birthday I endured the taste of sugar and of blood on Da’s hands till the year came when I was old enough to apply to Nyansa. “If I can get in, Akuba, I can leave this godforsaken house, Akuba. I can change all the worlds, Akuba. Especially for people out there like me, Akuba! And I can see Ma.”

My room is a riot. My bed, the floor, the tables, the shelves, they’re riddled with old textbooks with dog ears and tired pages, metres and metres of conducting wire, metal scraps, batteries, glass, laser monitors, screws, acoustic modulators, analog amplifiers, and heaps of crumpled paper thrown across the room in utter frustration. It’s been like this for many solar months, yet, with each iteration, I feel farther and farther away from getting the chip right, the application deadline to the Academy closer and closer.

“Nothing is working!” I slam my fists on the workshop table, sending screws crashing to the floor. They roll around in circles. The terminal on my screen is filled with endless lines of error messages in an ominous red.

“Kafra, Nnome. You’ve made significant progress. Just keep trying, you’re almost there,” Akuba says.

Akuba and I have come a long way; from the moment she was only an idea in my head, to the moment she said her first word. In between those moments were the days of studying fuzzy logic and neural networks till my brain folded into itself, when Mrs. Sankara shouted “Eureka!” as the natural language program ran with no bugs, and she asked Akuba the time, and Akuba said the time, when I smiled for the first time in forever after integrating her into all my machines, when I gave my hologram device to Da to try Akuba out, and he Created a boulder and smashed it into it over and over and over again till Akuba’s voice glitched and disappeared into the shards, when I made a new hologram device and brought her back to life.

“Akuba, run a diagnosis. What again do I need?”

“So far, everything looks good. The surgical droid for the implant procedure is ready, good job. The chip is better, the electrode wires for the transmission are thirty microns wide now, so that’s perfect. The program is syntactically correct, but the data you have on your mother is simply not enough to satisfy the conditions in the brain interface functions. You need more–”

“Shhhh, Akuba.” I slap my thigh, a little harder than I mean to. I turn to face the small, round hologram device, as if I’m seated face to face with a real person. Akuba is nearly a real person to me. “Right now we only have Da’s video card, right?”

“Right.”

“And everything else we know, Da told me, right?”

“Right.”

My face breaks into a smile. It feels unusual, but I let it linger. “And surely, Da has some of Ma’s belongings kept somewhere, right? Even her clothes? We can use anything of hers for something?”

“I believe remnants of her spirit could be somewhere. If we can find any part of her, or anything she might have worn, we should be able to translate her biotic composition data into something useful for your program. I have been trying to suggest this to you, but–”

“What’s the time?”

“26 p.m.”

I smile wider. “It’s almost time to clean his room anyway.”

“Nnome!” Da’s voice rings through the walls from across his side of the house. Disgust strokes the wrinkles on his face when he sees my cleaning droids hovering behind me as I walk into his room. “What is this?”

“I- I designed them not so long ago, just to make cleaning easier.”

He groans and waves a dismissive hand at me and walks out. I quickly press the buttons on the cleaning gadgets to start work as I think of where to begin my search. The machines scurry about, wiping dust off shelves, pulling sheets taut. Da never allowed me into his room until recently, and I never asked. I wasn’t sure what to think of it, when I first saw his room; the grey paint on the walls, the low lighting, the floor drowning in scraps and scraps of unfinished Creations. There were no pictures on the wall, no humanly warmth in the air that sat in it.

The hover broom gets stuck trying to sweep under the large bed. It makes a loud whirring sound as it keeps knocking against something in its way. I go down on my knees to dislodge it, and I see a dark brown box obstructing it. My heart knocks hard and fast with iron fists against my chest as I drag it out, looking over my shoulder every couple splits of a second.

The box is heavier than it looks. There’s no lock, and it has the eerie feel of having just been touched. My fingers rummage through it with hunger. There’s nothing much of note; old, dusty books, unfinished iron carvings, wooden handles broken off of knives he Created. I pick everything out until there’s only a piece of cloth spread out on the bottom. It’s only when I lift it, and the vile smell of something dead and rotten slaps my face, that I realise I’ve been holding my breath. Bile crawls up into my mouth and I jump back. My heart stops hammering against my chest. Before me, wrapped in a strange, protective sheath, beside a knife covered in old, darkened blood, lies an umbilical cord.

---

“Once upon a time-”

“Time time.”

“There was a woman-”

“Woman woman.”

“And she had a baby in her womb. When the baby came out, its face did not shine. What does that mean?”

“Onyankopɔn did not bless it with tumi.”

“Good. So the woman was sad when she found out what she had made. And she chewed the umbilical cord and ended her life. Riddle riddle-”

“Riddle.”

“Why did the woman die?”

“Because of the child whose face did not shine.”

“And what is that child?”

“A curse.”

“And how do we say that in our language?”

“Nnome.”

“Fantastic. Open your mouth for your cake now. Happy eighth birthday, Nnome.”

---

I used to beg Onyankopɔn to sever me from my body, this hundred pound cage of girl, to put my spirit in another vessel whose face shone at birth, or leave me to wander in the realms where none of these mattered.

Surely, this isn’t the image of you? Not these hands that bring forth nothing? Not this tongue that tastes the maleficence of a father? Not this being that kills a mother? Not this godforsaken excuse of a human being?

Every night before my birthday, Onyankopɔn and I warred on my bathroom floor, when I slit my wrists to cut ties with my body, when They shut the gates to the realms above and shoved me back inside this vessel of flesh and bone, of strife and woe.

Why did you allow Ma to do it, then?

I stopped fighting when I turned ten, when Mrs. Sankara said she saw something in me, something better than tumi.

“Nnome, it’s your turn,” Mrs. Sankara says. She’s seated next to the other members of the school board. They wear bored looks on their faces, except for Mrs. Sankara whose eyes are illuminated as I walk onto the proscenium, my hologram device in hand.

“For my Academy application, I’ve invented chip technology that can help one see into life of a dead loved one, and have a closely simulated experience like they were really there with them. My mother died very early on in my life, and I never got the chance to know who she was, so this is a project inspired by that.” I instruct Akuba to switch through the presentation on the hologram.

The teachers look on with blank expressions. I clear my throat and proceed. “Data about the person whose life you wish to simulate is collected and encoded onto the chip. The input machine reads the sample placed on it, and I have developed an algorithm that analyses these inputs and encrypts them onto the chip. The sample could be anything, videos of them, audio tapes they recorded, clothes they wore, even bio samples, like their hair or nails.”

Or umbilical cords.

“And what happens after that?” Mrs. Sankara asks, her eyes wide, her body on the edge of her seat.

I smile faintly. “The implant procedure will be done by a surgical bot, which I have also built. The probes of the chip are connected to pathways that control your vision, emotion, and hearing. You may begin or end the simulation just by thinking it.”

“Is your work ready for a demo session tomorrow?” That’s Mr. Bansah, the talent scout from Nyansa Academy. The others remain disinterested, slumped in their chairs.

“Yes,” I tap the back of my head, “the implant procedure has already been done on my brain, and I’ve run a few unit and system tests.”

“Good job. See you in the final stage.” He turns to Mrs. Sankara and gives her a nod, and she squeals and leaps from her chair.

Da is in my room when I arrive home, his broad back hunched over my workshop table. Dread wraps its fingers around my heart, ripping my heartstrings. He turns to me when I step into the room, his eyes filled with an emotion I have never seen before. The umbilical cord dangles from his hand.

“Da I-”

“Are you mad?” Sweat washes down his face and soaks his shirt. His hands tremble as clenches them into fists and releases them, clenches and releases. His eyes are bloodshot. Tears well up inside them and flow into the river of perspiration running along the folds of his face. He paces back and forth, past my workshop table, running his hands through his hair in a frenzy. “You always ruin everything, you always ruin everything, you always ruin everything.”

My voice takes its leave like it knows how when Da arrives. Words scrape my tongue, questions, but nothing comes out. Tears stream down my face, and I put the back of my right hand in my left hand, pleading.

“I’m sorry for touching your things, Da. I just- I’m making something. For the Academy… Remember Nyansa? I want to go there. And- And, look!” I rush towards the table to show him my work. I lift the scanner with trembling hands. “This will help us experience Ma again, Da. I’ve already tested it. I’ve already seen some things. Oh, no wonder you loved her so! But the umbilical cord… why do you- why did you keep it?”

Da’s eyes turn vacant as I ramble. He stands frozen and stares at me, tears still coursing down his face, his chest heaving like an animal on its own. His lips come apart slowly. His voice is soft. “You’ve seen what? You’ve seen what?”

“I…” My legs are stuffed with droves of fear, riveting me to the ground.

He lunges towards me. “You’ve seen what?!” He rubs his hands together faster than I’ve ever seen him do. Blood gushes out of his fingers with the might of a million waterfalls. The crimson fluid forms a great pool around our feet, but he doesn’t stop. His palms grate into each other till they’re a canvas of black and blue. The bloods seeps under everything on my bedroom floor. He swoops his arms in large motions in the air, drawing a shape I cannot read. As the blood comes together, hardening up, my spirit falls apart, melting down.

The thing he Creates is ugly, a large mass of spikes and hammers bound together. He lifts it with immense strength, screaming, and drops it on my table. The desk caves in down the middle, swallowing everything on it; my coding devices, the implant droid, the scan machine, all my life’s work, the testimonials of my self-worth.

“Please stop… please stop…” My knees give away and I fall to the ground. Akuba’s voice glitches inside the hologram device on the bed, panicking. Da dives towards it and flings the weapon. I leap onto the bed to shield her, but it’s too late. The weapon strikes my head, the impact tossing me against the wall, where I strike my head again. As my consciousness drifts away from my body, I see my father sitting on the floor, his body rocking back and forth like a baby as he cries into the umbilical cord in his hands.

---

I don’t know where I am. This body isn’t mine. It’s small, too small for me. A sharp pain burns through my head as I pry my eyes open. This place is strange – the white walls, the small bed, the bookshelves – yet there’s something familiar about it. There’s a broken table to my left, all sorts of things crushed and broken under it. I hear the sound of heavy footsteps coming towards the door. It swings open.

My heartbeat stops. “Ababio?”

My husband freezes in his step. Confusion clouds his face. His wrinkles are numerous now, his hair gray. “Nnome, what did you say?”

“Who’s Nnome?” I try to get off the floor, but these small legs, they fail me. “Ababio, is that you?”

He takes a step back. “Whatever games you’re playing–”

“Ababio?!” Shock gives way to fear, and then to rage. Memories flash before my eyes. The first cry of a baby, the hatred in his eyes, the rough hands on my neck, the heavy blows on my face, the gleam of a new knife, the slam of something against the wall, the gnashing of the umbilical cord under his teeth, the chill of a blade against my neck, the heat of my spirit fizzling into the afterlife.

“Why did you do this to me?” I step forward. He steps back again. “What did I ever do to you, Ababio?”

His face drips with sweat, his eyes wide, scared. “Adowa, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to.” He falls to the floor and puts his hands on his head, trembling, like a frightened little boy.

A sharp pain sears through my head again. I feel pulled away from my body, and a heavy blanket of darkness falls over me as my consciousness drifts.

---

“How long have I been unconscious, Akuba?” My head throbs with a wild pain. I touch the back of my head, where the chip was implanted. A large scab of dried blood falls on my fingers.

“There’s something I need to show you,” Akuba says, a humanly concern in her voice. The hologram device hums as it launches a screen. She plays back the incidents from the moment I arrived home and saw Da in my room.

“What’s happening?” I stand up and point at the hologram. On the screen, Da cowers on the floor, and I tower over him, yelling. “What was that?”

“The chip. Something is wrong.” Akuba pauses the video. “When your father struck your head, the impact dislodged the wall.”

I cannot breathe. “What wall?”

“The firewall that prevents your mother’s core biotic data from taking control over your body. So this,” she plays the video, “this is your mother taking over. We had all the data we needed from the umbilical cord to reactivate…”

Akuba’s voice drifts farther away until it’s only a faint echo in the distance. I feel removed from myself again, like I’m somewhere far away. I observe my body move, but I do not have control. All of a sudden, I sense myself flung forward.

I yawn. “What just happened?”

“You dissociated again.”

“So my mother..?”

“Yes, she came to the fore.” Akuba rolls the rest of the video. My mother, screaming through me at her killer. My father, sinking into his gorge of lies, and deceit, of evil, and evil, and evil.

I grab my hair and tug it till my scalp burns. Akuba is saying something about calming down, but I can’t hear her clearly as my screams reverberate around the room. I’m drowning in a pit inside me, an abyss in the shape of my father.

I carry my broken inventions and run out of the house. Past the children in their compounds marveling at their new found tumi, past the homes that never let me in, past the man-woman who always tried to tell me something, but whom I ran away from because Da said so, I run, and run, and run towards the school.

A scream cuts through the air, stopping me in my tracks. It’s coming from the town square. The gong-gong floats in the sky, calling everyone out of their homes. The streets fill up with people rushing towards the square from all directions. I follow them, my heartbeat a metronome to the rhythm of my running feet.

The people crowd around the centre of the square. Some put their hands on their heads and wail. Some shout “Tufiakwa!” and spit on the ground. As I approach, everyone steps back and makes way for me. I fall to my knees when I see what they see.

“Da!”

I switch.

“Ababio!”

I switch.

In the heart of the square, on a stake that gleams like the sun on God’s happy day, hangs the lifeless body of my father by an umbilical cord. Blood surges from the tips of his fingers with the might of a billion waterfalls, but it doesn’t harden.

---

Host Commentary

Cultural and family expectations are hard enough when you’re in a position to meet them. In this setting, a child born without their expected magic has a very real struggle for acceptance.  There’s a very clear metaphor for queerness in the real world here, and the degree to which it is either embraced, tolerated or despised. This story also shows how a society’s lack of tolerance can encourage acts of dehumanisation. Nnome’s father justifies his actions through social mores that support his hatred, twists what should be love into abuse and violence.  This story also shows us Nnome’s strength, creativity and resilience.  They don’t have access to magic, but they find other ways to create wonders, driven by willpower and love that they’ve somehow sustained through years of trauma.  The umbilical cord, the tether connecting child with mother, might also represent the bonds between individual to society. It provides the means for a mother to enact justice, to show that obligations run both ways. After all, families and societies form for the purpose of safekeeping, nurturing and love – and a society or family that fails us is not one we have any obligation to sustain. Many of Nnome’s creations work to bridge those social gaps – including, hopefully, a route to healing the scars of their childhood and finding comfort in their own self worth.  It’s a story about justice, but also one of self-forgiveness, where the shames that others make us carry can finally be set aside.