SUNDAY,  NOVEMBER 26 2006

Rabiat’s diary (i)
For the past eight months since I left Mohammed’s house with my divorce letter, no one seemed to be ‘mad enough’ to get serious with me. Mohammed had already frightened me by being one person before we got married, and turning out to be another afterwards. Then Mahmud frightened me once again by not willing to forget about my first marriage. Perhaps I should be more clear. The fact of life is that all second marriages must have to adjust to the idea that the previous marriage had existed, and in the majority an adjustment is made. The truth is: time would distance us from our past. Yes, I have believed that after second marriage, this time to Mahmud, the first one would just fade away. That was that Mahmud had failed to understand. It hadn’t been easy for him to understand that.
What a marriage my last marriage had been! I can’t stop thinking of it as I write. I remember how furious I had been those times.
No, I must stop. Its pointers worries about the past and anyway I am sure that sort of happening would turn out to belong to just that. I have had my first ray of hope to love again with the appearance of Mahmud. That had been consoling until I found out that even though I had admirers, half of the people I knew were bent on convincing me to give my last marriage another chance.
As I blossomed into a more beautiful and less burdened kind of woman, I felt mature and blessed. I even decided it was important to make a more fashionable impression. So, I had sown so many atamfas and tie-and-dye materials. “You look much better these days, Rabiat!” people complimented me. Even mother commented on my new self. Poor woman! She had seemed relieved I had stood my grounds. She actually hated squabbles. She had a quiet attitude to life. She blamed people for dragging an issue for a long time.
“Rabiat, how lovely you look,” commented Suleiman, my other admirer, when he came visiting. As a relation of my mother’s, he doesn’t have to stay in the sitting room or outside like Mohammed; he goes right into my mother’s room most times. He is no stranger in the house. In fact, I had severally spent time trying to figure out whom I ought to take more seriously between Mahmud and Suleiman. Time would tell, I used to tell myself.
I love Mohammed because he was my first love and Suleiman because I know he does care very much regardless of my past. In fact, comparing Mohammed and Suleiman to me is like comparing kalangu and goge music. They all serve as musical entertainment but appeal to the audience in different ways.
I remember the time Mahmud got angry over my being addressed as “Mrs. Mohammed.’ He had shouted, “Bloody women! Bloody hell!”
I know men and women are utterly different but sometimes the little similarities of behaviour makes me wonder if the differences are as great as everyone says they are
We soon reconciled afterwards. But only partly.
Suleiman, on the other hand, keeps asking me to consider his proposal of marriage if really in truth I do love him as he loves me.
Mama dares me to marry one of them if really I am sure of not wanting to go back to Mohammed. What she doesn’t know about my state of mind is that giving chances and getting to understand the person’s aim require more patience, that the only way I could cope with my life at present is to keep going steadily towards my goal-a less burdensome marriage, if ever there could be such thing.
There we sit, Suleiman and I, in Mama’s front-room, eating together in the same plate. I had brought him a plate but he insisted that we must share a plate in order to gather more closeness and trust. Since history has recorded many a Hausa man as being too chauvinistic to the point of not caught eating on the same plate with a woman, Mama had looked surprised.
“Suleiman is pleasant and courteous and is doing very well,” she observes after he has gone. “You wish to get married again, marry him.”
“To you he might be okay since he is your relation,” I answer, smiling.
“No Rabiat, it’s because you told me of the argument you used to have with Mahmud. I thought you would prefer a less quarrelsome marriage.”
“Yes, but arguments make relationships better, Mama.”
There is a rumour mother hasn’t heard. Rumours from Kano. Probably started by Aunty Hajara and Mohammed. It’s Mahmud who told me about it. “Your Aunty Hajara had told someone who told me that I should be careful how I go about wooing you again, that I might be disappointed once more and that your marriage has not finished because there is room for reconciliation.”
“Who told you that? Ah, it is not fair! People are spreading this rumour to get back at me. Why?” I almost shout. “Why can’t they let me dance to my own music?”
Our eyes meet. I now see how much he loves me. Yet there is fear in his eyes. Well, almost. And the fear is about nothing but disappointment. He has confessed to me severally that he is very serious about getting wedded to me, but some people have kept warning him.
“That is why I seem to be un-enthusiastic about the issue. Rabiat, I don’t want to get hurt again, especially by you,” he informs me.
“My parents didn’t tell me about all that. Where is the rumour coming from? Mahmud, just tell me if you don’t love me. I am prepared to let you go. You know I am still not healed of the pain of your last letter in which you told me that you’d found another girl that suited you.”
“I have found out that I don’t love her enough to marry her,” he answers.
“Why then did you write me so soon? Just to get back at me?” I ask accusingly.
“Not really.”
“What’s not really?”
“I think I have made a mistake, Rabiat,” he says, getting up to go. “No sensible man ever engages unprepared in a fencing match of words with a woman.”
I look into the dark, handsome face of Mahmud. I see the scared, innocent heat of the man whose loving eyes look back at me. I hang my head in silence. After he has gone this evening, I allow myself to brood for one last time on the unpalatable facts which I know I am powerless to alter: The fact that I had ever married Mohammed and that I have a daughter for him and the other fact that I could go back to his house after another engagement if I wished to. Another hard and irritating fact is that the people concerned in the marriage are not ready to let it be. My father has said if I liked I could give it a chance, but he isn’t forcing me. Mother has said she wouldn’t mind my going back for the sake of A’isha, my daughter. My parents still believe I love Mohammed, while the society believes I am just trying to make a stand and wanting to prove what a capable, rebellious woman I am.
“Prove something, sort of: women are something,” people keep telling me.
“Women can never win,” argues my cousin Labaran, whom I saw in Zaria during the Sallah celebrations last month. “Rabiat, you can’t get even with men. You would end up not having a husband at all, because there are more women than men nowadays,” he adds, as if I never heard that kind of diatribe before.
“Whether it’s true or not I don’t care. I only care about what I am and where I am going, i.e. dancing to my own music,” I tell him.
“You are selfish, then!” he shoots back mockingly.
What it really means is that I am not interested in his so-called advice.
As I write, I begin to wonder about what sort of human being people expect me to be.
I suppose I have been a good daughter and also a good relation, but what is expected of me is against my own wishes and capability as a woman first and foremost. What right have they got to order, through such insulting words, how to get on with my life? To an extent I will not miss the pleasure of being how I am to the displeasure of being what people want me to be. It is such a case of someone being made to lie on the bed that one did not make.
The weather on Saturday is beautiful, soothing with a wind and a bright sun. mama is having an afternoon nap. I have just finished reading a very interesting book, and I feel bored.
Father has taken to spending so much time in Lagos, sometimes staying there for weeks. Amina, my sister, has come for holidays, and my brother Bello is expected today, while Habu, the eldest of the boys, has finished his O-level and is expecting to start in a polytechnic to study Marketing.
As they have all gone out, I am the only one in the house. Having tidied up my room, which is next to mother’s, I pick up the pieces of lace and appliqués to sew on my gown. I have been saving them for the right occasion to wear them. Since my tailor stays just nearby, I decide to take a stroll. As I am going by a shop a few metres from the house, a man walking by rapidly stops and speaks to me. If he had not been the first to greet me I would certainly have passed him. It’s Samson, my school-mate. He has so much changed that I hardly recognized him. His face looks bogged and his manner is hurried and uncertain, his clothes old and somehow dirty looking. He used to be spick and span, confident, almost a poseur.
“Rabiat, I am surprised you didn’t recognize me,” he stutters.
“Samson, but you are changed! And I didn’t expect to see you this way.”
“That’s life, Rabiat.”
“Mhm!” I answer. I then ask him about his sister.
“She’s married.”
Samson is happy to inform me that he is a taxi driver and ask if I have married.
“Yes, and you?”
Shaking his head, he says, “Not yet.”
He asks me to meet him at the mechanic’s place on my way back from the tailors. Shortly afterwards, I come back from my short walk and say goodbye to Samson after exchanging addresses. I make my mind to phone Laraba in Lagos and tell her I saw Samson.
I get through to her minutes later. We talk about Samson and his sister, then I ask about Aminu, her husband.
“Oh, he said I should tell you he has found another husband for you,” she informs me jokingly.
“Really?”
”Oh, just joking! But he says if you don’t pick one by the end of this month, you should be forced back to Mohammed. It’s better than staying idle and unmarried.”
I trust Aminu to take life so seriously. I can see how people think of divorce, how they perceive it. Divorcing means not having a husband, and, not having a husband means irresponsibility, and that means a failure one shouldn’t endure.
I can see exactly how the situation of my divorce appears to people. My father tells me I could go back to my former marriage if I wished to. Mother says I should give it a try again because of A’isha. Other people tell me that the devil I know is better than the one I don’t know. One question stands out, though: how sure are people that I indeed know the devil they are talking about?
It’s been almost a year since my divorce but what do people do about it? They talk, they blame, they pester. I feel like running away somewhere I can be myself and have a life not of force or pretence, but a life I could live, not merely exist. What a life! I used to go to see a friend of mine. After she and her husband disagreed, unpleasant consequences followed. What happened after that? They transferred their troubles to me. Why? I wasn’t the one that made Bebi speak back to him in the way she did. Just because I am a harmless creature wearing the unmarried label, I am blamed. Poor single people!
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