The day I was born in Mwana hospital in Libreville, Mother realized that I was born to become a ghost. When I emerged swathed in amniotic mush, waste, and blood, Mother, the doctor, and nurses stared at the cobwebs enmeshed in my musty hair. The hospital staff remembered whispers that my father was some seaweed or eel living in the rill across my mother’s house. Mother left the cobwebs as proof that I had already started my journey by haunting her womb. It is embedded in ancient traditions that a child can become a ghost and protect family members from misfortune and rivals, but it’s very rare. Still, there I was, attached to a transparent future; at least, that’s what my mother told me.
When I wailed, my cavernous howl made everyone in the room shudder. My mother closed my mouth so I wouldn’t scare the entire hospital. Also, she figured that a young ghost should either whisper, or stay silent altogether. Mother had already embraced my fate: a child that barely ate and could stay quiet and alone seemed easier to raise. Ghost-borns eat food offerings or green mangoes, sprinkled with salt. Other food makes their feeble stomachs turn. Whereas a real girl could become rambunctious and free-spirited. Some parents send their kids to work, but the indolent way I moved inside my mother told her that I wouldn’t make a good house girl, much less a market girl.
To become a proper apparition, first I had to disappear. My little form wrapped in a white sheet was driven to Siami: a village mostly populated by elders and spirits at the time. “The perfect environment to raise a ghost,” my mother had heard Patrick Ngema Ndong say on his popular show The Mysterious Adventure, on Africa Numéro 1 radio. As a flight attendant, Mother could be gone for days, so elders took care of me.
Siami is a small hilly village in the Ogooué province: giant evergreen trees tower over roads, small houses, and shops, making it look like a jewelry box. For hours, elders bathed me in a cool lake lapped by a thin layer of mist to soften the density of my body. For hours, they laid me under a tree to familiarize me with a life of stillness. In time, I became a blurry toddler. I hardly appear in the only Polaroid picture taken of me by a curious uncle. In the picture, through my body, you can see the lake bordered by pebbles. My knees bend to each side as if they were too soft to hold me. At that time, I had already learned to fly by puffing my cheeks.
After my time in the village, family members gathered money to send me across oceans to Ireland, a land of ghosts, according to Patrick Ngema Ndong. There, from age five to seven, kids learn more ghostly strategies, such as passing through thick walls made of rocks. I remember hiding behind reeds at the passing of trains; the iron clunk of the wheels on the track echoed in my inconsistent body like a church bell. My time in Ireland is a blur, but this is when I started to have my own memories.
I remember my return from my paranormal grand tour to my family’s land at age six; I had no one to haunt yet. My mother was already visited by an ancestor who performed random paranormal acts for protection. So, she had me practice in the yard by haunting various animals: hens fated to be eaten, stray dogs, and a talkative gray Congolese parrot. She also let me haunt a little school down a small dirt road behind the house, as I couldn’t stay ignorant. By then, I knew how to make myself invisible by passing through door frames with an empty head. One time, however, I passed through the classroom doorframe, daydreaming. One kid saw me and pointed at me, screaming. Before the other kids looked up, I quickly went out before coming back in, head empty. Luckily, I’d stay invisible for a few hours. During class, the tattletale kept rubbing his eyes while all the others giggled and whispered, throwing glances at him.
When I didn’t go to school or practice haunting, I stayed home. Most days, the house remained quiet. The silence was disturbed by fowls dawdling about the glistening green and brown vegetation. My training in the village had accustomed me to near silence, contemplation, and detachment. Intense feelings don’t come easy for ghost-borns for having experienced so little aside from training and travels. Those days, I felt calm, save for a little twinge I couldn’t read into very well.
One rainy season, the water rose and swallowed the main road above the bridge leading to the house. My mother and I sat in the living room watching the news. Houses had been swept away during the flood, and on TV, some portly politician complained about “unruly citizens building their shacks everywhere without a permit.” I felt like eating the man alive and vomiting him, then eating him again and vomiting him. My body felt like one of Mother’s pots full of boiled water: I discovered that I could feel anger and indignation.
Mother turned off the TV and put on the radio: her “favorite show” was on. For the first time, I heard The Mysterious Adventure show and was hooked. I discovered something that I enjoyed: listening to the radio, listening in school because teachers talked and talked. I enjoyed hearing voices. The host of The Mysterious Adventure voicedall the characters. At the end of the story, he said, “I can help spirits, give them what they need the most. But much like humans, spirits are confused about what they want at times.” What I wanted seemed as transparent as my body: to haunt a host and follow my vocation. What else? Yet, what about that stir as vivid as the salt sprinkled on my mango dish? Still, what a discovery in the house with submerged roads.
Dry and rainy seasons passed until a wealthy relative contacted my mother to acquire me for his only daughter; the girl suffered from frequent bouts of malaria and ennui. Thus, my host beyond the womb was a proud-looking, skinny little cousin named Sana who lived on a huge estate. She was my age: eight. Her dad, my uncle, was a mustachioed man who spent time driving his luxury cars or practicing kung fu in his gym whose walls were covered with pictures of Bruce Lee. The mother had a chauffeur who drove her to shops to buy clothes and jewelry. The clank of her jewels always announced her approach.
The estate had a central house with a marbled patio surrounded by fruit trees, mainly guava and mango. Surrounding the main habitation were the watchmen’s cubicle house near the gates, the garage, the kitchen, the pantry, the gym, the staff quarters, a pool, and a bungalow whose big aquarium would glow at night. In the garden among the patch of tall lemongrass, there were fireflies.
My most vivid memories of those early haunting days were standing on the bedstead hovering over the child delirious with malaria, gently turning the water in a glass and eerily moving the mosquito net. The whoosh of the air conditioner would accompany my howls, while the bedridden girl’s symptoms would slightly decrease. When I made myself seen, she would ask me to turn on the AC or blow away mosquitoes. I could do many things, but bugs turned out to be unshakable.
All the babysitters quickly left out of fear, especially the ones imported from France or Spain. But one, Fanta, stayed the longest in the house. I remember Sunday-braid day; Fanta, sat in the bungalow and created a nest where Sana would burrow while she redid her hairdo for the school week. Fanta’s face was brown, yet as if orange soda flowed in her veins, her legs had an orange undertone. When Sana had asked her, Fanta had said, “I never uncover my legs, so, they are the same color as the day I was born.” I didn’t believe it was true, one had to expose one’s legs at one point or another in life. I remembered that I couldn’t feel the warmth of the sun rays on my skin. Still, sunless legs were more believable than the orange drink running through Fanta’s veins. In that school I haunted, I had learned that blood flowed in our veins, not sodas. Fanta started tales while drawing lines on Sana’s overly tender scalp with a big afro pick. And I listened and listened and listened to tale, after tale, after tale.
Some afternoons, when my cousin had after-school activities, I would wait in her room listening to The Mysterious Adventure. I wondered if my mother was flowing in the sky or sitting in her house listening to The Mysterious Adventure at the exact same time as me. In this populated estate, life sometimes felt lonelier. Yet, living in a beautiful home, with a host my own age, friendly governess, and listening to Fanta’s stories seemed like a ghost’s dream life.
However, it was only the appearance of a ghost’s dream existence, for the mother did not want any natural or supernatural being living in her glorious mansion free of charge. No amount of balsam rubbed on her child’s ennui, fragrance distilled in some rancid corner of the house, or whir summoned in the garden as the child played outside, would abate her hatred. The only time I neglected my duty was when I tuned in on my host’s radio to The Mysterious Adventure. The clang of her bracelets at the mother’s approach sounded like a death knell.
One morning, I didn’t hear the knell as I looked at the fluorescent dawn, framed by the parlor’s glass sliding door—I had forgotten to pass through it. Though I didn’t feel cold, I tightened the sheets around my body, imagining the wind passing through my hair decked with cobwebs. Then, I heard the mother whisper behind me “… rid my property of that deadbeat ghost,” before sucking her teeth. To some people, ghosts-born shouldn’t be. They revered ghosts only attached to some tangible gain. Although the woman was not officially a witch, she was cunning and rich enough to find ways to torment me. After all, she was fully alive while I was only subliving.
Spiritual healers came to the house, looked around, read cowrie shells, wobbled incense sticks, and opened their palms to receive wads of money. I stayed the same. However, one day, the mother came back with a bottle containing an opaque liquid in which floated greyish cotton balls. She would regularly spray droplets around the main house. This marked the beginning of my downfall. I lost my balance and started floating around the mansion like a boat trying to settle at a harbor with no anchor. Here, I would start howling above the sick girl’s bedstead, before sliding out the window to end up entangled in the branches of a mango tree or in the antenna above the watchmen’s cubicle. And how is a ghost supposed to haunt if it cannot steady itself from time to time?
Years passed wasted, although time feels different to a ghost. At twelve, I realized that the mother never called any priest to free me, for tormenting me seemed to briefly alleviate some hidden tension and agitation, so I tried to cling to every piece of furniture to fulfill my duty and haunt the girl. My howl became louder and louder and more eerie. By this time, I had become weary of hearing people talking as if I wasn’t there, trying to stay afloat. “Hou hou, listen to me! Listen to me!” I’d howl, forgetting years of training in silence and opportune howling. The father tried to reason with his wife. He tried to make her understand that she was turning me into a malicious ghost, when he had summoned me to protect their little girl. “I didn’t marry you for your family ghosts,” she’d say between her teeth.
However, the liquid the mother used to vex me seemed to affect everyone in the house; they grew gloomy as if sips of hollowness were bleeding into their existence. Particularly, the girl became a shadow; yet it started with fits of laughter that agitated her body like a fever resembling those she had fighting malaria. She dressed in black, hid her face behind long braids, and walked wearing a thick sweater shipped from France even during the rainy season. She would play loud music: a lot of Prince. Gradually, she lost her spirit, then her essence.
The absent father, the obsessed mother, and the oblivious child became the revenants of their beautiful compound. Meanwhile, I wondered day after day how I could at least regain some consistency and become something other than a ghost. It came to my mind that I should call Patrick Ngema Ndong, the famous radio host. The heavy phonebook stood on the little glass table near the sliding glass door in the living room. Shaking, I turned the pages after several tries and looked. Ngema Ndong was a celebrity. I couldn’t find his number. I decided to call the radio. The operator laughed until I howled on the phone, “Give me his number, mortal!” A dramatic statement, yet it worked.
When I heard Patrick Ngema Ndong’s voice, my tongue felt numb. “Hello? What do you want? Peace?” he said.
“Maybe. No, just to leave this house …” I whispered. “Or maybe, maybe become a human.”
