Abecedarian by H. B. Asari
An abecedarian, an ancient poetic form, usually begins with the first letter of the alphabet—A—and continues in order with each stanza or line thereafter, letter by letter. In her short story “Abecedarian,” H. B. Asari opts for reverse alphabetical order instead, beginning with Z: “Zones of your brain affected: frontal, temporal, parietal. The doctor points at them in turn on the scan of your brain. Those traitorous parts….” Even though Asari clearly identifies the known poetic form as the story’s title, the approach in the text remains wondrously subtle: the form recedes into the background, providing a lyrical framework for a granddaughter to examine her relationship with her declining grandmother as they switch roles—the child suddenly the caretaker, the caretaker suddenly the child. In her author’s note, Asari writes, “I knew the form had to be inextricable from the story, not just function as a pretty gimmick.” True to her word, readers never encounter a moment in which form and narrative are separate. In this story about the loss of language, Asari draws upon the most basic elements of language itself—the letters of the alphabet—to guide both characters and readers toward a final diagnosis: we know the story must end with A.
Just as form and narrative work in tandem, so should form and style. Asari’s carefully crafted, stylized imagery evokes emotion without unwarranted sentimentality. Heartbreaking moments are balanced with clinical detail, allowing for much-needed distance and perspective while also creating momentum and tension. With Asari’s scope trained on the two main characters, readers are granted direct access to the intimate dynamics of this ever-evolving relationship: “You tell people you’re a tourist from Côte d’Ivoire so they do not question your strained, pockmarked English. Even when we are alone you pretend, pull me into this fantasy where your diagnosis is the faraway problem of a different woman….” In “Abecedarian,” H. B. Asari shows us how familial love can overcome the loss of language in order to speak for itself, even when we cannot. —CRAFT
Zones of your brain affected: frontal, temporal, parietal. The doctor points at them in turn on the scan of your brain. Those traitorous parts, shrivelling out of existence, threatening to take pieces of you with them. I look from the glutinous, ghostly image of your insides to you. You are staring straight ahead at nothing in particular as the doctor speaks of the difficult road ahead, your wrinkled face, flat and impassive. No inkling of what is going on beneath, but for your hand, squeezed like a vice around mine. I squeeze back like you used to when, as a child, I would run into your room plagued by nightmares of my parents’ deaths.
You say nothing until the end of the appointment when the doctor hands you a stack of flash cards with illustrated images of foods, household items, and commonplace phrases. ‘You may come to find these helpful, Mrs. Ijele,’ he says. You stand. ‘No, I am not a….’ You struggle for a moment to come up with the word, your hand tight as a tourniquet around mine. ‘I am not a kitten,’ you finish and storm out of the room, dragging me with you.
X-ray images invade my dreams. In them, we are alone in the darkened doctor’s office. Next to your head is the image of your brain lit up like clusters of nova, and then, as all stars will someday, spots begin to wink out of existence and with every vanishing, every growing bit of darkness, a portion of you is eaten by shadow.
War is brewing behind the cage of your teeth. Words compete to be the first to lift off the lever of your tongue. At breakfast, you call the cereal rice, and your green tea water leaf. I smile as my brain works to decipher your meaning, trying not to upset you by drawing attention to what is happening, ignoring the shadows creeping at the corners of our house.
Vim is the lens through which you have always viewed the world. All the world’s problems can be traced back to it – the loss of it, the theft of it, the denial of it. ‘Above all, Ada, we must maintain our vim,’ you said when the government burnt down your village, when your daughter – my mother – was killed by a pipeline explosion, and now, whenever I try to bring up the diagnosis. ‘Or we might as well be dead.’
Unlimited words, that’s the promise. Unlimited ways in which to fit those words into sentences, fill them with meaning and nuance with our tone and voice. Each word out of your mouth now is a precious resource. It comes like a newly born calf falling ungainly out of its mother, wobbling with confusion at its newfound weight.
Travelling the world, beholding its beauties becomes your mission. Limited only by the length of our purse strings. I take time off work to accompany you. We wander the pines in Ngwo, cup the brackish water as a pirogue glides through the mangrove forest, coo over the artistry of ancient Nok sculptures from archaeological sites. As soon as we return home you are planning our next trip. You tell people you’re a tourist from Côte d’Ivoire so they do not question your strained, pockmarked English. Even when we are alone you pretend, pull me into this fantasy where your diagnosis is the faraway problem of a different woman, the woman you shut in our apartment to gather dust with the rest of the furniture. When I try to bring her and your illness up, your face falls and you say, with force behind each word, ‘We…on…happy times.’ I respond, ‘Oui, oui, grand-mère,’ and all is fine and fictitious once more. On one such trip, I lose you in a market.
Safe, that is all I can think as I barrel through the market stalls. Oh God, please let her be safe. We were separated by a sea of bodies and by the time they dissipated, you were gone as well. I ask the vendors at every stall twice if they’ve seen you. I rush through the market and yell for you, accost strangers and describe you to them. My heart hammers at the base of my throat, behind my eyes, at my temples. I find you, after an eternity that I will later learn was thirty minutes, at the market’s entrance.
Reaching out to passersby to ask for their help. The words that come out of your mouth are not help or find or granddaughter. They are save, eyes, give, goat, and sounds unrecognisable as words. The people dive away from your touch, muttering madwoman under their breaths. One even spits at your feet and swears, ‘Tufiakwa.’
Quiet smothers our house like a heavy blanket for weeks after we return. You lock your voice away. Parry my efforts to coax it out with handwaves and firm headshakes.
Prayers find their way back into my life after an extended hiatus. I fumble over prayer beads in the dark. I pray to earth and sea and stars and moon, to every god I shut the door on after my parents died. I sit in darkness and wait for a response. The silence is deafening.
Ownership, what a comical concept. What are we owed? What do we own? When even our words, the quintessential magic of our tongues and hearts and brains, can be stolen, stripped sliver by sliver.
No remains steadfast in your vocabulary. ‘Do you want to visit the botanical garden?’ ‘Do you want to play a game of Whot?’ ‘Do you want to take a walk?’ I ask. They all receive the same response. Your mouth rounds around its contours, homing it.
Mired in the morass of your mind, you sink into the murky depths. I strain over the edge of a pirogue, unable to see past the sludge and shadows. I am half submerged myself, hand grasping for yours, reaching, waiting for you to take it.
Lines surrounding your eyes and mouth deepen into gouges, even if you never smile anymore, never use your mouth anymore. You have aged swiftly, sudden as the transition of twilight to morning.
Knifelike, the diagnosis entered our lives. Cruel and sharp. Now it has split us down the middle, exposing our raw, runny insides to the sun’s excoriating gaze. I scramble like a crab without its shell, looking for ways to put us back together.
Jupiter is 714 million kilometres away, but you feel farther. I lie awake at night and listen, through the wall that separates our rooms, for the sound of your breathing. Most times, it is too irregular for you to be asleep. One night I listen hard and hear nothing. I jolt up and rush to your room to be sure you are still breathing. It is empty.
I throw open every door in the apartment, my steps quickening with each one you are not behind. I find you on the balcony staring down, and all my taut muscles relax. I pause at the door, shadowed in the darkness of the house, so I can look at you. It is the hushed moment before dawn and your face is framed by the fluorescence of the streetlight. Your profile has softened over the years, but there is still a hint of sharpness at the apex of your chin, down the slope of your nose. For a moment, I recognize the inviolable woman who raised me.
Herbal tea has always been your favourite. I go into the kitchen, fish a pack of chamomile out of the cupboard, and put some water in a kettle. Then I make two cups and take them to the balcony. You turn when you hear the cups and saucers rattling on the tray. I set it down on the peeled wooden table flanked by two seats. I take one and invite you to take the other. Your face is drawn and dour. I wait for you to walk past me and into the house but maybe it is the sweet scent of the chamomile or the whisper of the wind – you sit, take a cup, lift it to your face and blow. We sip our tea and watch the sky brighten in silence. The clouds splashed with baby blues and pinks, the sun peeking through like a thing being birthed.
Gazing at the sunrise becomes our ritual. Some days I find you waiting for me on the balcony. Others, you come down to find two cups of tea already made.
Fingers intertwined, we sit silently. Our hands clasped so tight I can feel the murmur of your pulse against mine. A vital language that can never be stolen, needs no translation.
Egress is slow. You swim up from the depths of the swamp, become again the woman who raised me. The fearless, glorious sprite who taught me all I know.
Dance has always been your thing. Whenever I was lost in my teenage blues, you’d put a CD in, turn up the speaker, and pull me reluctantly to my feet. ‘You have to move your body, baby,’ you’d always say. ‘How else will you shake it out?’ Now when you put on music, I stand without prompting and, even after all this time and all the years between us, your limbs speak the lingo of Lagbaja and Fela more fluently than I could ever dream.
Caesuras interrupt the flow of your speech, truncate it with pauses like a bated breath. Still, I am thankful for the return of your voice. There are slipups and gaps, but we bound over them together undeterred by the fear twinging in the clamorous corners of our hearts.
Babel was set asunder. But after God had struck them unintelligible to each other, I believe that people sought out their loved ones in the confusion, relying only on the simple language of love, the unbreakable tenor of it that bonded them, and built a new life.
Aphasia. As the diagnosis promised, the clock winds backwards. Your tongue unlearns the lyrics to your favourite songs, the names of all the places on the map you hoped your finger would guide you to, the words learnt from The Queen Primer you were given as a child, mama, dada. Gone. But there are sunrises and sunsets, there is music bringing life to our limbs, there is the poetry of our hearts beating together.
H. B. ASARI is a Niger Deltan prose and poetry writer. Her work explores current and possible future climate realities, complicated familial bonds, and the nuances of queer coming-of-age experiences. Her work was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2023 and the Climate Change Poetry Prize in 2022, nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023, and won the Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize in 2024. She has been published in adda, Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Consequence Forum, and more. She is working on a novel that seamlessly integrates all her interests. Find her on Instagram @draft_oroguitas.
Featured image by Jorge Garcia, courtesy of Unsplash.
