The characters in the short story collection Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda are haunted by mothers. A mother becomes terrified when her daughter is possessed by the wicked spirit of her own mother. A daughter finds out that despite being alive, her ghost is apparently haunting her mother back home. After being involved in a tragic car accident, a mother gets lost in the panic that she might lose her own daughter.
Womanhood, it seems, is a haunting and an inheritance. The woman possessed by her grandmother begins to get ugly pimples that only go away when she releases evil energy by committing chaotic, mean acts. She begins to wonder if her grandmother’s possession has made her evil, or whether there was something lurking beneath her skin all along. Women in these stories try to shake off their burdens, their backs heavy with emotional labor and guilt. One girl dedicates her every hour to finding the ghost market, in hopes of joining its seemingly woman-dominated world. Another woman turns into a bird, flies, only to crash and be attacked for her perceived witchcraft.
In “The Hollow,” architect Arit arrives at her next remodeling assignment to discover a house that doesn’t follow sense. Rooms open into a different room each time you walk through them; windows disappear; the dimensions on the inside never match the outside, and seem to be always changing. The inhabitant, Madame Oni, wants her to fix it.
But the house has its own conscience, its own mission. It turns out that the woman who built it wanted to escape her abusive husband. She infused every brick, every nail of the house with the desire to escape, to protect, so that she and her children could be safe in the new home. And when her husband chased them there, it took him—trapped him—and never let him out of whatever secret cavern he was put into.
Since then, the house has continued to take, as men have continued to hurt women. Madame Oni’s son ignored his girlfriend’s insistence that she wasn’t ready. So the house took him, too. The house is ruthless in its protections. Perhaps itself like a mother, ready to kill to fulfill its mission, protect who it was tasked with protecting. Now, Madame Oni begs Arit to help—but the architect has to decide if she wants to help, given her own history.
Mother’s love is often valorized, but in many of these stories, it becomes oppressive. In “Girlie,” a young indentured maid unhappy with her mother for signing her up to be sent away, is kidnapped by an overbearing woman from the market. “I have all this plenty love that is choking my heart, my girlie,” Iya Tomato says to her. “I will give it to you now. All of it. We will be happy.”
Sometimes, motherly love is oppressive, and other times it is not enough. Daughters feel guilt, mothers feel guilt. But what about the fathers?
In “Things Boys Do,” it is the fathers who are haunted. Three separate men discover there is something distinctly wrong with their new infants. In each case, the mothers escape in any number of ways—whether by leaving or by dying. But the fathers remain, and it seems that as a result, they must take on the burden of being haunted for once. They discover a mistake from their past, back when the three of them were cruel children, is coming back to take its revenge. The title “Things Boys Do” rings of “boys will be boys,” a classic dismissal of boys’ violence or mischief. But the story reminds us that fathers raise sons, sons inherit, and in the absence of mothers, all three of these men are forced to confront that legacy in the faces of their baby sons.
In “24, Alhaji Williams Street,” a fever is coming for the boys of the protagonist’s street. One by one, the youngest boy in each family is dying. His mother mourns, fights, bargains, trying to find a way for him to survive.
The mothers are the ones who gather, share remedies, and try to find solutions. Only one father joins the group, and that’s because the mother is absent. It is the women tasked with fixing whatever supernatural curse has fallen on them.
One family has only daughters, and so their mother considers herself lucky. But then, one day, she returns from work to find all of her daughters have been killed. The audacity of her boyless family was too much for her neighborhood to bear. She must suffer like the other mothers, must be forced to face her own helplessness in the face of her children’s suffering like the other parents did.
There is a sense, amidst the magic, that mothers are doomed to fail. The world is full of dangers, and a mother can either smother or leave, and neither will do. Daughters can escape or stay, but the world very well might blame them either way. Aguda’s rich, uncanny tales continue to send us around these knotted loops. There is no right way to move in Aguda’s world. It is a world haunted, burdened—and fascinating, for anyone brave enough to dive into her evocative, eerie stories.
FICTION
by ‘Pemi Aguda
W. W. Norton & Company
Published on May 07, 2024
