Seeing Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s book sitting on that shelf,
yellow, black and with other colours, I was drawn to it. It was a sealed deal
that I had to buy this book that had a title that touched my heart (I get
sentimental that way). Like a Mule
Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun. I knew if I did not get the book, I would be
doomed to creating versions of the story in my head. Yes, mules worked so hard.
They did. But not even a mule deserved to take ice cream to the sun.
Wait, why would a mule take icecream to the sun? A love
offering. It wants to make his love offering with the icecream but is doomed to
a Sisyphean task. And we know the ice cream would keep melting off. What makes
this mule keep returning to get ice cream for the sun anyway? Will it ever
succeed? Even mules, beasts of burden that they are, do not deserve to work
this hard. Maybe this mule would succeed. Maybe it would get such a heap load
of icecream. It would melt and melt but it would be large enough for it to have
a little to present to the sun...
Enough of my rambling. I had to see what was in this book.
My mule did not make an appearance in this book. What I found within the pages
was an encounter with the soon to be 75 years old Morayo Da Silva. She is not
your typical 74 year-old. Morayo, a retired professor of English is feisty. She
has toe rings and stuns her younger friend when she announces she wants to get
a tattoo on her back:
You want a
tattoo?
I do.
You mean that while I’ve been trying to convince Zach
that tattoos aren’t cool, you, his honorary grandmother, are about to get one?
(69)
Morayo, on the brink of her 75th birthday is
sensuous. She loves flowers. She fantasises about sex, about being touched and
she carries the memory of a beautiful affair with the Brazilian photographer,
Antonio.
She currently lives in San Francisco but has lived
everywhere: New Delhi, Lagos, Jos, San Francisco. She has dined at the
Buckingham Palace, dined with Mrs Gandhi. She has been everywhere. Through the
hundreds of books she has read, she has even been to more places. She currently
lives alone, lonely sometimes and very eager to reach out to people,
particularly the younger generations.
Her body is in top shape. Her eyes are aging fast and she
has occasional lapses of memory like when she forgets to lock the door.
I read the book for the second time this week and what did I
find most fascinating about it? Just like the first time, it is the beautiful
and bare way an aging woman is depicted. It is a remarkable portrait of a woman
as woman, not as a mother, not as an embittered lover. Morayo Da Silva is a
woman who has been through it all but is really hardly defined by it all. I
remember being on the cusp of puberty and seeing an elderly woman seated,
topless, her nipples resting on her stomach. She was in her sixties and did not
appear to be bothered about anything anymore. It was a jarring image and I wondered
if that was what old age did to everyone. Remember Enitan’s scary grandmother
in Everything Good will Come? Old
people are not supposed to bother about many things, except maybe find
religion.
Morayo wins the battle against her aging body, even when she
has the fall and arrives to a strangely orderly house from the recuperation
center. When her eyes fail her and it appears she will lose her driving license
as a result, she still has the final word by driving her Porsche the way only a
woman with her spirit can: “This will be a great drive. I can just feel it in
my bones. ‘Come on now, Buttercup, let’s make this next light! Let’s overtake
this slow poke in front of us. Come on baby, gimme what you got.’ I rev the
engine, sit up tall, and roaring, we go” (118)
This novella gives you the gift of Morayo Da Silva in the
sophisticated-without-trying narrative style of Sarah Ladipo Manyika. Manyika’s
narrative style is so beautiful that you feel like reading portions aloud to
yourself. It is not an angry book. It feels fresh, different. You are almost
guaranteed to fall in love with the protagonist, that is, if you do not overdo
it like her young acquaintance, Sage: “... I almost wanna ask her if she’d be
my grandmother, like my spiritual grandmother cos she has this calm about her
and just talking to her makes me feel better. And then she wants to know about
my tattoos” (115).
Yes, I can picture Morayo Da Silva, a la The Pussy Cat
Dolls, going: “Don’t cha wish your grandma was cool like me?”, except she is
too cool to brag about being cool.
