Page 24 of Death of the Author

She cocked her head. “I’m... I’m sorry,” she said. Her temples ached. The ringing in her ears wouldn’t go away. Like that day in the tree. She was falling. “Could you turn that off?” She pointed to his phone.

“Oh, sure, sure,” he said. “But... maybe just finish what you were saying, first?”

She tried to smile at him, but she knew the smile didn’t look right. He clearly saw it, too, because he leaned away from her a bit. “What more is there really to say?”

He hesitated. “Zelu, I...” He still hadn’t touched his phone.

She said nothing. They both sat there, staring at each other, the silence denser than lead.

“Ooookay,” he finally said. He leaned down to touch the Off button on his phone screen. “I think I’ve got enough.”

“Great.” Zelu quickly pushed her chair back from the coffee table, accidentally knocking against it so hard that the orange juice glass rattled and nearly tipped. He took the cue, rising from her father’s chair and shoving his notepad back into his briefcase.

Her mother must have been listening from the kitchen. She appeared from around the corner and offered to show the journalist out. Zelu didn’t follow them. Her head was pounding from the effort of controlling her emotions. After she heard the front door shut, she wheeled right to her room, locked herself in, grabbed a pillow, and pressed her face into it. That didn’t help. She threw the pillow onto her bed and just stared at the ceiling as it washed over her.What have I done?

She’d been at rock bottom when she’d started this book. And maybeit wasbecauseshe’d been so low, because she’d had nothing to lose, that she had been able to produce it. She’d let her mind soar, take her higher and higher. Now nothing was there to keep her from falling and falling, down, down, down. When she finally hit the ground, could she survive the impact?

The story came out two weeks later. It was a good article, according to others. There was no mention of Brittany Burke or the school Zelu had adjuncted at. After that horrible interview, the journalist had emailed Zelu a list of reasonable questions, which she had no problem typing answers for within a day. She’d thought that would be the last she saw of Seth Daniels.

But the one thing Seth Daniels knew was when a story was worth following. And the one thing Zelu never failed to be was a story. Eventually, she would become the defining subject of his journalistic career. He’d follow the highs and lows of her meteoric but all-too-brief rise to stardom. He’d interview most of her immediate family members and loved ones, attempting to complete the tapestry of Zelu’s inner workings and why she did what she did. And, eventually, when Zelu was gone, he’d claim to be the one who saw it coming first.

10

Interview

Amarachi

I know this interview is about Zelu, but there are certain things that pretty much every child born to Nigerian parents experiences. I only realized this after meeting other Naijamericans. When I tell them about this stuff, they always respond, “Hey, that exact same thing happened to me!”

Yes, yes, when I list these things, you will say, “But we do that, too.” I’m not saying you don’t. I’m saying that we Nigerian Americans do this because of our specific cultural experiences, because we are children of immigrants from Nigeria. I’m not talking about you.

Anyway, number one: the Cooking Moment. One thing that Naijamericans love to talk about isfood. Food is one of our most intimate connections to the culture. There’s a Nigerian proverb, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” Our mothers know and understand this. But the Naijamerican version of the proverb is “The way to Nigeria is through the stomach.” We learn to love and crave the culture by eating the food our mothers make to please our fathers.

Our mother ate Yoruba food growing up, but she also learned to cook the Igbo way for our father. This was all we ate at home growing up. And we alllovedit. Our mother made egusi soup, efo riro, moi moi, okra soup, amala, pounded yam, rice and stew, fried plantain, pepper soup, and, of course, jollof rice. Other kids might have craved McDonald’s, pizza, hamburgers. We’d go home from school fantasizing about our mother’s stew. We’d fight over the best chunks of meat. But our mom onlytaughtus to cook a few dishes. She was a registered nurse and, therefore, a busy woman. But we learned the basics—all of us can make decent jollof rice, fried plantain, and egusi soup. Well, Chinyere is different. She’s the one who can cookanything. She really got good when Zelu was in the hospital after her accident. She’s the exception, not the rule.

So, just because you move out of the house doesn’t mean you stop craving those dishes. They are part of our identities and they are soooooo good. We realized we needed to make the food we’d grown up eating. But in order to make these things, a trip to a Nigerian specialty store is often required. So, you go to the store, and when you walk in, the glorious smells hit you. Ahhhh, lovely. Sharp, colorful spices, dried and smoked fish, palm oil. You see familiar items from the kitchen at your parents’ house. Someone is usually speaking loudly in Yoruba or Igbo.

The store owner knows your mom or dad and smiles and says, “You should buy some of this, too.” You look at the foreign thing. You smell it; it smells familiar, delicious. It is a culinary treasure, but you have no idea what itis, let alone how to prepare it. And you’re too embarrassed by your Naijamerican ignorance to ask. And thus, you don’t know that even though you indeedhaveeaten that thing many times in some type of soup or rice or whatever, it requires elaborate preparation that takes hours or even days. So you buy it and bring it home, thinking you can just break it up and throw it in your egusi soup or jollof rice.

The last time I did this, it was dried fish. I remembered seeing it sold on the side of the road in Nigeria, and they were selling the same type right here in Chicago! I got so excited. Eventually I learned that this fish required soaking and cleaning and the removal of verynasty-looking innards. Mymom even told me that if I’d bought it in Nigeria, I’d have had to soak away flies and even maggots first! Never again!

Actually, I don’t know if Zelu ever had her Cooking Moment. She stayed in Chicago to get her BA and MFA. Even when she was living in her apartment, she came home for home-cooked meals often. She never had to cook a thing because of my mom.

But on to number two: the Goat Experience. Almost every Naijamerican has a story about seeing a goat die. This one I know happened to Zelu. When we visited Nigeria as kids, it happened quite often during festivals or celebrations. For special events, people don’t go to the supermarket to buy their meats; animals are killed. A bull, a goat, plenty of chickens. This is the reality in Nigeria, but we aren’t used to it.

Inevitably, some uncle or cousin will call you to come and see. I don’t know if there’s any vindictiveness involved or they just want you to have that good old Nigerian experience, but they’ll bring you as a child to see your first goat slaughtered. This happened to Zelu and Chinyere when they were eight and nine years old. I don’t know where the rest of us were; we were very small. Uzo wasn’t even born yet. We had our own experiences when we got older.

But the way Zelu told it always made me laugh. Let me see if I can do it:

The poor thing was held down with a rope by two boys. Our uncle gently pushed them back as he said, “Watch closely. We will roast afterwards.”

He had this big, sharp knife in his hand, Zelu would say. Though she tends to exaggerate. I’ll bet it wasn’t actually that big or sharp. Our uncle took the knife to the goat’s neck and—whenever Zelu tells the story, this is when she would start shouting and flailing her arms—“Blood all over the place! Just nasty and red and warm. You know how I knew it was warm? Because it hit me IN THE FACE!” Then she’d scream and make gagging noises. “VILE, VILE, VILE!” And the poor animal was shrieking like a baby. You know how goats can sound like children. Can you imagine? She and Chinyere went running to Mom, crying, while everyone laughed. Most Nigerian Americans get over their Goat Experience, but to this day, none of my siblings or I eat goat meat.

Number three is what I call Easy and Noisy. We are loud and argumentative. We argue often and honestly, which means we also make up smoothly. We don’t get offended and we don’t hold grudges. We are just loose and free. We laugh loudly. When we are all together at a restaurant, people usually tell us to quiet down. Almost all Nigerian Americans adopt this from their parents. However, Zelu was a little different.

I remember when I noticed it for the first time. It was on the way back from a road trip I took with her and Chinyere to New Orleans. We were nearly home and very tired. Chinyere wanted to listen to talk radio, whereas I wanted to listen to Beyoncé. Chinyere can be very rigid. To make a long story short, the agreement got so heated that Chinyere pulled the car over so that we could scream it out.

Eventually, Chinyere got her way and we got back on the road, listening to some dry-ass talk radio show about world news. We’d been driving for ten minutes when I heard a sniffle and thought to look at Zelu in the back seat. She was curled in on herself, cheek pressed against the window, her face puffy from tears. She’d had a panic attack because of our fight and neither of us had even noticed.

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