Free Dirty Feet by Edem Awumey Page B

dog’s name he disliked.
    He tried to get some rest. His seat would not tilt back properly. A snag in the release mechanism underneath. He forced it. Nothing. Broken. He decided to change positions, leaving his bum in the driver’s seat while dropping his upper body down on the passenger side. He ended up with his face against the glove compartment, his knees against the dashboard, and his feet underneath. An awkward position. Something nagged at his lower back. He tried to think. No use. An idea, just one, hovered in front of his eyes before rooting itself inside him: everything — the city, the blind alley, his cab — was going to blow up. It would start in the belly of the Earth; the pavement would lift up; every component of the street would be reduced to rubble and then propelled into the grey sky. It would be expertly done, with no trace left but the words on the last page: End of Story.

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    BUT THE photographer would not be put off and often repeated, “Who are you, Askia?” As if the answer to that question would somehow affect their relationship, as if a few clarifications would make him more familiar, less distant in the eyes of his friend. As if, in order to take part in the Wedding of the worlds, it was necessary to know who you were. It was necessary to be something or someone. Otherwise the king of the Wedding would reach out his hideous hand into the hall of festivities and banish you from the fete. Like the paws of that big bouncer who had shoved him away from the entrance of the discotheque where he had ventured one night when he was feeling blue. “You won’t get in if you don’t follow the dress code!” the bouncer had bellowed.
    â€œWho are you, Askia?” The question took him back such a long way it was impossible to say for sure whether any of it was real. Back to the country roads and city streets, the foursome advancing through the fog, in the sweltering days and cold nights: he, his father, his mother, and the donkey, which eventually gave up the ghost. From Nioro du Sahel they had gone down to the Atlantic coast, leaving behind the most badly parched lands, but the beast had used up its last ounce of strength. It died as they came out of a muddy ravine. Had it been able to cover a few more roads, it would have found water and grass in the north of the country where they landed one grey dawn.
    For a solid week they rested by the roadside. His mother, Kadia Saran, sold her medicinal roots and they were able to buy food. The terrible harmattan of 1967 was blowing itself out, its cutting edge growing duller on the skin. So they pushed on towards the plateaus, the centre of the new country that was to become theirs, and arrived in a village where the hospitality with which they were received surprised them. Askia thought the reason they had been shunned along the way was because those they encountered hadn’t much to offer strangers, or because the strangers to whom they had offered shelter and yams turned into outright thieves after nightfall. But he would never comprehend the reason for their exodus. Perhaps the cause was not the sparse rainfall or the swarms of locusts, as he had supposed. Instead it may have been what his mother mentioned one day. A matter of humiliation, according to the mysterious words she alone knew how to wield. She said, without elaborating, that his father, a Songhai prince, had been humiliated by his own people. Or possibly it was that he had wanted to avoid humiliation. Why? His mother, closing the chapter, said, “Such things are best forgotten, Askia.”
    In the village of the plateaus they were given shelter by Chief Gokoli. An abandoned hut at the entrance of the community, near the perimeter of an old cemetery with crumbling tombstones. An unhoped-for refuge after the Sahel and the roads of flight. They did not go out for three days, but the chief had fruit and boiled yams brought to them. Three days in the adobe