Imagine
Imagine giving birth to a child you don’t remember conceiving.
You’re in an unfinished building that has no windows or doors.
All bricks, big and sturdy with tall grass growing around it.
Once completed, it will be a gorgeous house. You love the baby
but wonder how to break the news to your family. They’re not
aware you were pregnant. You’ve even startled your boyfriend
who now seems to be—your husband? Anyway, the baby looks
healthy and beautiful. You’re well too. Just a little tired. Your
husband expects you to start cooking potatoes so that when
his brother visits, there will be food. You’re confounded he’s
making demands, as if he’s forgotten you’ve just given birth!
Then he says he’s getting hungry as well. You let it slide
and go upstairs to take a nap which turns out to be deep
and invigorating. Meanwhile, your husband has also fallen
asleep and when he awakes, he suggests going to Red Lobster.
You grab your purse, kiss the baby, and head out to eat.
Cycles
Back home when a girl got her period, folks would say she’s seen the moon. The way it was whispered among the old men and women made me think it was a marvelous thing. Numinous. It gave me a grand vision of womanhood, and I couldn’t wait to have a conversation with my older self that would spot the moon and say, Welcome into your essential being! I’d draw back the curtains of my bedroom, unlatch the window and proclaim, Exit, Girl Child. Then I’d rush to open the door with a grin, step outside, let the woman swagger. I waited for the moon with anxious joy. I should have been warned to be careful. When I saw the moon, I hated it.
Among the beetles, lizards, and snakes, blood is expelled from the mouth, nostrils, and eyes, mostly for defense—autohaemorrhage. Imagine surprising a lizard or snake in the woods. Sensing a threat, eyes swell and flash faster than you can recall there will be blood! In my village, old men say if you drink the blood of a horned toad, you become horny. I want to tell them it takes just a kiss. A touch. A wave of desire, and sometimes, waking up at 3 a.m. to take matters into one’s own hands.
I’ve often wondered why in the Western tradition allusion to menses was the curse—demeaning and acknowledging simultaneously a power possessed by women. Perhaps, since men could not experience it, they sought to undermine it with negative association. The power to defend, conjure, and birth life turned into a conundrum.
It is said of virgin-obsessed cultures that girls who are no longer virgins will pack a vial of lizard or lamb blood to sprinkle between their thighs and sheets on their wedding night. They’ll scream and bite during lovemaking, writhe and thrash. And yes, they’ll squirt blood. The new husbands will gather them into their arms for comfort. The next day, the men will brag to their friends about being “the first.” Let’s call it a win-win predator-prey camouflage. Doubling tricksters cloaked in mystery and subversion like the biblical Rachel, who, after stealing her father’s gods and hiding them in her saddlebag, she threatened with blood and refused to dismount: Let not my lord be angry that I cannot rise before you, for the way of women is upon me. By reflex, a page was turned. In the smiling moon, Laban’s idols were obliged to adopt a new lord and home.
Mildred Kiconco Barya is a North Carolina-based writer and poet of East African descent. She teaches and lectures globally, and is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently The Animals of My Earth School published by Terrapin Books, 2023. Her prose, hybrids, and poems have appeared in New England Review, Shenandoah, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, Tin House, Forge, and elsewhere. She’s now working on a collection of creative nonfiction, and her essay, “Being Here in This Body”, won the 2020 Linda Flowers Literary Award and is published in the North Carolina Literary Review. She serves on the boards of African Writers Trust, Story Parlor, and coordinates the Poetrio Reading events at Malaprop’s Independent Bookstore/Café. She blogs here: www.mildredbarya.com