Butter Honey Pig Bread. Francesca Ekwuyasi

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       BUTTER HONEY PIG BREAD

       BUTTER HONEY PIG BREAD

       FRANCESCA EKWUYASI

      A NOVEL

      BUTTER HONEY PIG BREAD

      Copyright © 2020 by Francesca Ekwuyasi

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

      ARSENAL PULP PRESS

      Suite 202 – 211 East Georgia St.

      Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6

      Canada

       arsenalpulp.com

      The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada, and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program), for its publishing activities.

      Arsenal Pulp Press acknowledges the x^wməθk^wəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, custodians of the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories where our office is located. We pay respect to their histories, traditions, and continuous living cultures and commit to accountability, respectful relations, and friendship.

      This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.

      “Ships,” words and music by Ikon Ekwuyasi, from the album Hungry to Live: An Audio Documentary, copyright © 2018 Syndik8/Freespirit/Notjustok Distro, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission of the artist

      Cover art by Brianna McCarthy

      Cover and text design by Jazmin Welch

      Edited by Shirarose Wilensky

      Copy edited by Doretta Lau

      Proofread by Alison Strobel

      Printed and bound in Canada

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

      Title: Butter honey pig bread : a novel / Francesca Ekwuyasi.

      Names: Ekwuyasi, Francesca, 1990– author.

      Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020020646X | Canadiana (ebook) 20200206478 | ISBN 9781551528236 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551528243 (HTML)

      Classification: LCC PR9387.9.E355 B88 2020 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

      For my grandmother,

      my brothers,

      my family by blood and by choice.

       Pain-eater fast today; starve yourself a while

       Prologue

      WE ARE KIN.

      Here at the in-between place, we are one being, eternal, moving in rotation to the flesh realm only because we must. As sure as the tides, as sure as the sunrise, bound to the rhythm of its particular dominion—we must.

      “I” is only a temporary and necessary aberration. “I,” “Me,”—such a lonely journey! We separate, single out to “I”s and “Me”s, only when we traverse between realms, when we take breath and body. Only because we must.

      But we always return to We, you see? Because we must.

      We sing reminders to the “I”s. We sing them back home in time. We sing them to a doorway.

      Death is only a doorway.

      We are Ọgbanje.

       Contents

       1 Butter

       2 Honey

       3 Pig

       4 Bread

       Acknowledgments

      1

       Butter

       Kambirinachi

      IF YOU ASK KAMBIRINACHI, THIS IS HOW SHE’LL TELL IT:

      There was a spirit, a child, whose reluctance to be born, and subsequent boredom with life, caused her to come and go between realms as she pleased. Succumbing to the messy ordeal of being birthed, she would traverse to the flesh realm, only to carelessly, suddenly, let go of living like it was an inconvenient load. Death is only a doorway, and her dying was always a simple event; she would merely stop breathing. It was her nature. The dark tales of malevolent spirit children, Ọgbanjes, are twisted and untrue. It was never her intention to cause her mother misery; she was just restless. It was just the way.

      The time before her final birth, in an attempt to make her stay, her mother marked her with a red-hot razor blade, just as the Babalawo instructed. Three deep lines at the nape of her neck, below the hairline, smeared with a pungent brown paste that burned and burned. All this so the Ọgbanje would stay bound to its body, and if not, at the very least, she would recognize it should the child choose to be born again.

      The child died, of course.

      She returned again. And maybe she took pity on the woman, or perhaps she was bored with the foreseeable rhythm of her existence, but this time she chose to stay. And the three horizontal welts on the back of her neck signified to the woman, her mother, that this was the same child. It might have been a coincidence; perhaps the woman’s mother-in-law (she’d never liked the woman, found her haughty) marked the child in secret to torment her.

      Nevertheless, for Kambirinachi, living was a tumultuous cascade between the unbearable misery of being in this alive body indefinitely and an utter intoxication with the substance, the very matter, of life. When there was peace, life was near blissful, but otherwise, Kambirinachi’s childhood was nightmarish for her mother. Ikenna was an exhausted woman, a woman made hard by nearly two decades during which her body betrayed her. Or, as some might put it: almost two decades of being plagued by an Ọgbanje that caused her three late-term miscarriages, one stillbirth, two dead infants, and a dead toddler. She used to be much sweeter, softer, kinder, but it’s impossible to go through that particular brand of hell and stay untouched. She couldn’t help it; she hated the child a good portion of the time. And the child, too, must have hated her, after making her wait and suffer, only to wail the way she did—unprovoked, inconsolable, and seemingly interminable. To preserve her sanity and, frankly, the child’s well-being, Ikenna retreated inside herself, saving all tenderness for her husband, and leaving only a barely concealed indifference for Kambirinachi.

      KAMBIRINACHI WAS ELUSIVE. Even if she was sitting right before you, her absence would be palpable. As an eleven-year-old, her attention was always elsewhere.

      “Where is Kambirinachi today?” her father often teased, childlike, a broad smile stretched across his bearded face to reveal crooked and tobaccostained teeth.

      Kambirinachi chose that smile to be her anchor when the songs calling