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other corners up under her armpits — a knot above her breasts.
    I’m part of her. Feel her flesh, muscles, sinews — walking, working, out in the plantation pruning trees. Feel her heart quicken and slow. I know who scares her. I know whom she loves. When my father passes she stiffens, drawing air into her nostrils — like an oribi we saw drinking at the river — and quivering beneath the stillness of her skin. We carry food to the workers at the plantation. She unwraps the pots, ladles soup on rice. Men come forward. Pa Foday, he comes close.
‘Momo’
, he says. Thankyou. Feel the creak of the cloth against her ribs as she catches her breath.
    Evening time we slip away. Slip away to the secret bush. Walking quickly. Past houses, past gardens. Into the groves. She walks like a queen. Or like a woman on her way to meet a lover. Where the path from the rice fields meets the path from the stream, see the gap in the trees? See the cotton tree high above the rest? That’s where we’re headed. We follow an invisible path. No one can follow us.
    Women are already here. So many women. Talking. Talking women’s business, they call it. We don’t care to talk. Not so very much. We wait to dance. When the talk is finished the drums start, the singing. And the dancing. We dance for the elders and the younger women, too. Whirling, whirling. Round and around. Round and around we go.
    We dance until the light comes up and dances too, across a horizon flat and empty as a stage. And then we walk quickly back to the village, collecting sticks of firewood as we go.
    Then I learned to talk. She stopped taking me with her. I might repeat secrets told, women’s special secrets. Wait, she said, until your turn comes. That was one time.
    Then there was another time. The time when the dancing stopped. And when I said her name, a space opened up that I could fall into. Silence. Silence after her name. Silence where the music used to be. Once women bound their hands to drum all night. Afterwards they met in secret, real secret. Silent secret. Away from the eyes of men. Away from Haidera. But when they tried to dance, they couldn’t. The steps were gone. They had followed my mother when she went away.
    I used to read the things written about us. These weren’t the books the nuns approved of. One book was by a Very Famous Author. Oh, all the writing on the back said how good this book was. This famous man lived in our country for a short time and then he wrote a story that would make sure nobody ever wanted to come here. A story about a man who arrived on these shores and lost his faith.Many years later I read another book by the same writer, about a woman who has to choose between her god and the man she loves. When I read that book I felt a pain, like I had been stabbed in my side. I felt this woman’s terrible choice as if it was my own. Because I remembered my mother and how she was forced to deny her own faith.
    A woman has no religion. Have you heard people say that here? A woman has no religion. And maybe it’s true. We change our faith to marry and worship to please our husbands. But it was not always so.
    In those days they were always coming to convert us. The Muslims from the North, the Christians from the South. We deserted our gods. But nobody wrote stories about that. Instead they congratulated themselves on how many souls they had saved. My own soul was saved twice. But my mother. My mother would not yield. And to this day nobody has ever come to me and said she was noble and righteous to do so.
    We did not have a house of our own. No. We slept in a back room of my father’s house. Small, not so light, one window. It looked out on to the alleyway where old men came to smoke. The tobacco smelled like burning flowers. Not such a quiet room either. There was the women’s cooking circle behind us, too. Odours of simmering
plasass
, the scent of tobacco and talking, old