By C.V.C Ozoaniamalu
I did not feel anger when the white girl at the Adidas shop on Admiralty Way, Lekki Phase 1, had called me “Wonder Woman.” She had said it with that thin smile people wear when they want their cruelty to pass as humour, her eyes lingering too long on my arms, on the muscles that sat heavily beneath my dark skin. I remember only shrugging, almost amused. Looking at myself now, at the grand age of almost thirty-two, standing before the mirror in my apartment while evening gathered itself outside the windows, I think I, too, would call this woman in front of the mirror a Wonder Woman.
Perhaps I am.
My brothers were made differently from me, as though the universe had been careful with them and careless with me.
Ozonna, my immediate younger brother, looked like my mother’s people: light-skinned, slender, with the sort of smile that entered a room before he did. Women loved him immediately. Even as a child, he carried beauty carelessly, as though unaware of its power. My mother called him “Ozonna, the Magnificent,” and on days when joy softened her voice into song, she called him “His Mother’s Father.” I never saw the resemblance between him and Papa Nnukwu, but I understood that naming in our family was often less about truth than possession. By naming him after her people, she claimed him more fully.
Nze, my elder brother, belonged entirely to my father. Dark-skinned. Broad-shouldered. Quiet in the deliberate way handsome men often are, because they know silence can also command attention. He spoke only when necessary and carried himself with the confidence of somebody whose body had always been rewarded. My father called him “Dike” whenever he lifted something heavy or fixed what none of us could fix. On ordinary evenings, he became “Ifemelumma,” said with warmth over dinner while my father recounted his achievements as though they were family scripture, in the same way my mother too often showed off Ozonna to the other Catholic women, after the ten o’clock Mass at the Church of Assumption, Falomo, while I hurried behind them in uncomfortable shoes, sweating beneath lace dresses I hated. Nobody spoke of me with pride.
My father called me “Onyeka Onwenu” or the names of other popular Igbo celebrities that I shared the same name with, and those sounded less like affection and more like instruction, as though he were reminding me of the kind of woman I ought to become.
My mother’s compliments were cautious things. “You do not look bad at all,” she would say whenever I slipped into her room, waiting, almost holding my breath, for her approval of what I was about to wear. Sometimes, instead of answering me directly, she would drift into a story, one she seemed to carry with quiet reverence from my paternal grandmother: the story of her husband’s uncle, Udenze.
He was my paternal grand-uncle, she would say, sold at Arochukwu by my great-grandfather during the slave trade in Abatete, the town that still calls itself ours. She told the story so often that it began to settle into me, to take the shape of memory rather than inheritance. In my mind, I began to build him, piece by piece, from her retellings. I imagined his face before I ever saw my own reflected in his.
He was fierce, I decided. He was not tall. His hair was full and close-cropped, stubborn in the way it grew. And his arms, she always lingered on his arms, were strong, dense with muscle, the kind that spoke of work and will. In this imagined man, I began to recognize something unsettlingly familiar. I saw his arms in mine.
At eighteen, during one of our silent drives home from Mass through the stillness of Ikoyi on a Sunday afternoon, I remember wondering why a man like Udenze had chosen to return as a woman. Worse still, why he had chosen me without permission.
It was not until my first year at Enugu State University that I began to understand him. I found a book in the library about Igbo Landing. I remember sitting there for hours beneath the stale smell of old paper, reading about the enslaved Igbo people who chose drowning over bondage. There was a line from a song they sang before entering the water:
“The waters brought us here, and the waters will take us back.”
And suddenly Udenze made sense to me.
Perhaps he had been among those men. Perhaps he had walked into the water carrying faith in reincarnation like a lantern inside his chest. Perhaps he had returned through me because unfinished lives are stubborn things.
After that, I began asking my grandmother endless questions about him. What foods did he like? Did he laugh loudly? Did he fight often? What would he have become if he had lived?
She grew tired of me eventually.
But I did not grow tired of trying to know Udenze.
So, my grandmother was not surprised when my parents announced that I had led a student protest at Babcock against the corrupt union government and earned myself a two-year suspension before my enrollment at a State University in Enugu as punishment. She merely sighed, shook her head slowly, and said, “Udenze has come again.”
Now, standing before this mirror years later, preparing to meet Ofiafuluagu, I find myself wondering whether love is ever entirely innocent.
I met him at the theatre. He had come with his younger sister for auditions for The Nights of Glory, a stage production one of my mother’s colleagues insisted I would suit. I had not wanted to go. Acting seemed frivolous to me then. But my mother persuaded me gently, saying perhaps performance could become another form of protest. “You are always fighting,” she said. “At least let them clap for this one.”
Ofiafuluagu — Fulu-Agu, as I later began calling him, was a doctor at Mea Mater Hospital on Banana Island. He had a rounded face, soft but careful eyes, and the measured movements of a man who trusted discipline. During rehearsals, he spoke little, but when he did, people listened.
At SkyBar on Victoria Island weeks later, with the lagoon shimmering below us like dark silk, I watched him speak about the future using “we” before I had fully allowed myself to imagine one with him.
“We should travel there someday.”
“We could build something together.”
The word wrapped itself around me slowly. We.
I fell in love not dramatically, but gently, like cloth lowered into water.
Two years later, I was wheeled into a hospital theatre in Connecticut with Fulu-Agu gripping my hand so tightly it almost hurt. Labour lasted for hours. Jideobi arrived first, at 11:40 in the morning on February 13. Akuabata followed thirty minutes later, entering the world just after midnight on Valentine’s Day.
When they placed Jideobi in my arms, I laughed with relief because he looked entirely like his father.
And then came Akuabata.
I had feared she would inherit my face, my heavy arms, my Udenze-ness. But she was beautiful in the easy way my mother had been beautiful in old photographs. Delicate nose. Bright eyes. Softness.
The universe, for once, had been merciful.
Then came the third child. Nwando.
He looked like me. Not exactly, but enough to make my chest tighten the first time I held him. He had my stubborn eyes, my thick limbs, my fierceness sitting quietly beneath the skin. Even as a baby, he clutched things tightly, as though unwilling to lose the world once it entered his hands.
He cried a little. Observed much.
And unlike me, he was born into a world that would reward his fierceness simply because it lived inside a boy’s body.
I loved him for that.