SUMMER IN IGBOLAND

Suya is meat that is dried, rubbed with ground peanuts, pepper, and lots of spices, fried, roasted, and tossed with onions. I have suya three times in Nigeria. The first is in Enugu, at a market run by Hausas (northern Nigerians, who originated suya). My cousin Nkem buys me ram suya,  which we eat at a local outdoor bar called Zanzibar. I take slow pulls of malt to help me pace my suya-eating, but it's no use--I ravage an entire bag, leaving behind little more than a pile of toothpicks. The second time I have suya is in Onitsha, the city where my mom grew up, at a roadside stall my uncle Obi hypes. "Once you taste that suya," he says, "you won't go back to America again." I eat the chicken and beef suya he buys, but I am already becoming a suya snob: this suya isn’t as flavorful as the kind I had in Enugu, but it turns out that ram is rare; I'll have to make due without. My third suya is in Port Harcourt, at the most elaborate suya stand of them all. There are about a million types of suya here—chicken, beef, ram, even cartilage. My uncle buys a mix and sends me to the backseat of his car with it, encouraging me to eat as much as I want. I really do intend to be polite and leave most of the suya for him, but, uh, things don’t quite turn out that way.

I never knew my grandfather. In Abagana, the village where his daughter, my mother, was born, his house stands deserted, the compound overgrown with weeds so lush and emerald-hued that the yard looks Edenic, masking the fact of neglect. This is not paradise, though it looks like it. My grandfather died in 2008 (I hope paradise is where he is), and none of my family in Anambra can afford to come back to the village just to mow the lawn, so we stand—my uncle, my five year-old cousin, and a certain boy—just inside in the overgrown compound, watching a family friend use a machete to cut a path to Grandpa’s grave. My grandfather was buried in front of the house where he lived his whole adult life. I, displaced Nigerian-American, cannot imagine being that attached to one place. I photograph the grave, then spend a moment of silence with it, wondering about the appropriate thing to think about at a time like this, in front of the grave of someone you never knew and should have known. Minutes later, when my uncle takes pictures of us, my five year-old cousin and I giggle and flex our arms and pose as if we’re both children. I wonder whether we should be this happy in the wilderness that houses our grandfather’s death. The boy calls my name, goes to a tree, and picks two green fruits. He asks if I know what they are. I voice uncertainty, though when he says “guava,” I realize I knew. Following his lead, I bite the hard green peel, exposing beady pink pulp, like jewels, on the inside. We stand eating (I and this boy for whom something is growing, like weeds, in my American heart) fresh guava in my grandfather’s compound/my grandfather’s graveyard.