“bloodlesson”
bloodlesson
‘Orisa bi Iya, ko si laiye’
A god like a mother?
There is none.
(Yoruba Proverb)
*
The first time I dream of a woman torn open, it is myself in a river of blood. My body is swollen with life, eager to burst forth, refusing to stay inside. The force of a thing that does not return once it has decided to appear. Labour does not end until something descends, be it a boy or girl, neither or both, still or bouncing, crying or silent. Something must be delivered; a body does not break open for nothing.
*
Ten to twelve days after conception, a woman will bleed. Implantation bleeding, usually light pink or brown, is never enough to stain but there nevertheless. This bleeding is evidence that the newly fertilized fetus has embedded itself into the walls of its mother’s uterus. In the beginning was the blood.
*
Morenike is the last of Abebi’s four daughters. Born in a sleepy hillside in Ibadan on a Sunday morning in ‘69 to a woman whose body is well acquitted in the making of wonders: Olubukola, Ibironke, Olanrewaju and now, Morenike; brown and bursting with heat from between her mother’s legs. Thirty years later, on another Sunday morning in Ebute Metta Lagos, hours before the sun will reveal itself, Morenike is doing the same thing her mother did all those years ago: alchemising, birthing, bleeding. A girl, brown like her mother, round like her mother, breathing like her mother is ushered into this realm. Mofiyinfoluwa—fruit of the fruit of Abebi’s womb. These three women, bloodbound now and forever.
*
Whenever we talk about my grandmother, we almost, always start with her death.
*
I have always wanted children. Whether by indoctrination or by design, some part of my psyche had always taken childbirth as certainty, as right of passage, as destiny. And so when I turned twenty-two and my body began to undo itself with its own blood, my terror was two fold. A ball of blood—the scan called it a hemorrhagic cyst—nestled itself tight and deep in the curve of my left ovary, rippling pain across my body in waves, sharp and unrelenting. Endometriosis at its core is what happens when blood misses its way. A disease of displacement. Blood tissue that belongs in the uterus slithers into ovaries, fallopian tubes, bladders - and in the very worst cases - lungs, choking life out of the women whose blood does not know where to go. The pain, the sickness, the scarring; that was my first terror.
*
My grandmother was a tall woman. I know this because I have studied pictures of her like scripture: stared long and hard at her slender legs with ankles encircled in gold, her wrists stacked with bangles, her eyes framed with the most exquisite glasses. As my body bloomed into the bigness of womanhood, I became hungry to know the woman who forged my own mother—and thereby me—into being. It was Toni Morrison who told me that all water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was; just like my blood was searching for its origin. I ran my fingers along the lace in her photographs, visited her grave—canopied by a sprawling mango tree—and asked everybody I could about her. Some days I wake up and I am overcome with a desire to run my fingers along the hands that rocked my mother to sleep, to look into the face I inherited, to witness the blood that created me.
*
I descend from women well versed in the art of alchemy. Abebi knew the exact formula to make piping hot bread that had people from all corners of Ibadan running to her bakery day in, day out. She knew the exact ratios of flour, sugar, salt, a dash of margarine and an oven so finely tuned, the loaves came out the perfect shade every single time; never too light, never too dark and never, ever burnt. My mother, Morenike, alchemizes food; orange-red cauldrons of jollof rice bubbling like the surface of the sun, efo-riro simmering under hot red charcoal, chunks of yam pounded into smooth, seductive morsels. Morenike has a tongue that can single out a missing ingredient with the accuracy of a skilled marksman. I come from women who make things, women who shatter emptiness and fill it with fruit. I am desperate in my desire to do the same.
*
The Yoruba word for a barren woman is only two syllables yet the word is heavy as stone. ÀGÀN. It is the very worst thing that could happen to a woman in my place: to be bereft of children. What I am trying to say is that in my culture, blood is a covering and to be without is to be naked, to be unmoored and to be forgotten. This was my second terror. I knew that blood carries within it the current of memory, the marking of remembrance and the potential for immortality. I do not want to be forgotten.
*
The second time I dream of a woman torn open, I am covered in sweat, delivering a child standing on my two feet with someone beneath me, waiting to catch the baby. My belly is ballooned almost cartoonishly as I wail and wail and wail. Still, if you look closely in my face, there is a quiet pride tattooed in the set of my mouth. After my endometriosis diagnosis, my children began to appear to me in dreams. In lucid musings, in sharp graphic renderings, in moments of unbridled tenderness. It was almost as if something woke up in my body and began to demand its regeneration, to demand that eggs fertilize, that bellies swell, that breasts begin to produce milk. As though compelled by a force strong as gravity, I began to yearn for the heaviness of pregnancy, for the chance to become more than what I already was, for the chance to partake in the ancient rite of my foremothers, to feel myself stretch to the edges of creation and become entirely undone.
*
Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved understood that to be a mother is to know the ugliness of blood, even in the pursuit of salvation. As the slave catchers returned to drag her and her children back to the captivity she risked her life to flee, she fed the ground their blood remaining only the one still suckling; the one whose mouth now knows that the purest milk comes from a nipple stained with blood.
*
In Yorubaland, (and in Nigeria more generally), when a woman has been married for a certain number of years without bringing forth children, there is a weight the people place on her neck. They will say of the woman: ‘O n wa omo’ meaning she is ‘looking’ for children. Infertility therefore is a state of searching, of head buried in corners, hands constantly tilling the soil, unresting and unrested until they unearth the treasure of children. For such a woman, blood becomes mocking, becomes taunting, becomes evidence of her failure. Every month, as bright red flows from beneath her, her mother-in-law’s gaze becomes a beacon of retribution. We knew a woman who looked for a child for seventeen years. When she eventually bore a son she named him Omosegun: the child has won the war. And what is a war if not a dealing in the currency of blood?
*
In her poem, “Between Grace and Mercy,” I.S Jones writes ‘blood is the body’s first covenant’ and as soon as I read that line I understood the look in my mother’s eyes when she was told my womb may not bring forth children. The covenant she made with me, the agreement her body made with mine was about to be truncated. Her terror became mine, just like her curved spinal cord, just like her flat feet, just like her perfectly round face: all things that she passed unto me with the assurance that I would pass them on as well. A covenant. An agreement. A promise that must not be broken.
*
Whenever we speak of my grandmother, we almost always begin with her death because ultimately, it was blood that killed her. One day in my tiny flat in Coralville, I am sorting through some papers when I happen upon a copy of my grandmother’s death certificate. In a season of my life where I hunger deeply to know her, it feels so intimate to have this piece of her life’s story, even if it was the end. The death certificate states her cause of death as: CARDIOPULMONARY FAILURE FROM DEEP VEIN THROMBOSIS. A clot of blood, not too dissimilar from what settled itself in my left ovary, settled itself in my grandmother’s leg and slowly and steadily meandered until it placed itself in her heart and caused her blood to stop flowing. She had just been alive: wearing gold and lace and laughing with her children. And then she was not. The abruptness of her leaving marked my mother forever. That her mother never saw her children haunts her till this day, so I know intimately the heft of her desire to see the fruit of her own womb be fruitful. How essential it is to her, to stand where her own mother could not. To do for me what was never done for her.
*
When a Yoruba mother wants to speak over her child a blessing or curse with a heft nobody can shift, she will place both hands on her stomach and say:
‘Emi ni mo dęję le ę lori’
meaning
I am the one who spilled my blood on your head.
I am the one who broke my body open to give you life.
I am the one who risked my life to ensure yours.
It is my blood that made you possible.
All of which means:
We are forever joined in a language that can never die.
MOFIYINFOLUWA O. is a Nigerian writer living between Lagos and Iowa City. Her work is concerned with emotional interiority as experienced by women alongside body, memory, and desire. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Black Warrior Review, Lolwe, AFREADA, and has been selected as a 2023 Best American Essay Notable Entry. She is a final year nonfiction MFA student at The University of Iowa where she is currently at work on her debut memoir interrogating the body and its relationship with desire.
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