YAGAZIE
I remember my mother. I remember mama, just like yesterday was the last time I laid my head on her chest and listened to her endless stories. I remember how small she was and how slim, she was the type we Nigerians referred to as ‘lepa’. She had to be the most beautiful person I ever set eyes upon. She had lovely big brown eyes and very full lashes, thick well shaped brows, full, dark and thick lips with the nicest set of white teeth that I believed sparkled the very few times she smiled openly. She also had a head full of thick and dark hair. I always wanted her hair, suffice to say I always wanted to be like my mama; have her grace and all.
I remember mama telling me the story of the day I was born, she explained that she had never felt such terrible pain in her entire life and thought that she must have done something wrong to offend the gods for them to send her such pain. She told me that it was late at night, and that she had screamed so badly and endlessly that she assumed the entire village knew she was in labour. My father got the elderly women to assist mama. Some time later, I was born and mama said she laughed when I was placed in her hands for she couldn’t believe how a human so small had made her stomach swell so big. She was excited, but my father wasn’t. He came into the room after mama had been cleaned up, he checked the baby in her arms and after discovering the thing in between its both legs sighed and left the room. Mama said days and weeks and months passed and he never touched me and when she asked why, he in turn asked “what am I to do with a girl?” It was then mama gave me my name Yagazie meaning ‘may it be well with you’ or ‘it is well’, she said it was her constant prayer for me; that things be well with me. And just after the Queen of England visited Nigeria in 1956 mama said Elizabeth would be a great name for me, so that when I was to go to the White man’s land I would be treated nicely and with honour because I was the queen’s namesake. My mama called me Yagazie Elizabeth.
I was raised in a little compound in Aba, a commercial town in Abia state, Nigeria.
