lines around his mouth, the tiny blobs of light in his irises, the crease
at the part where his ear joined his temple. I could even see the thick
line of sweat and oil on his shirt collar, the little brown veins that
broke off from the main stream of dirt and ran down on their own. I
could see all these things, yet no matter what I did, his head refused to
appear within the borders of the paper. I started off with his feet and
worked my way up and in the end my father’s head popped out of the
edges of the paper and onto scuffed linoleum and plastic magnolias
and the wet soles of bathroom slippers.I showed Bwibo some of the
drawings. Bwibo was the cook at the old people’s home, with whom I
had formed an easy camaraderie. “My God!” Bwibo muttered,
flipping through them. “Simbi, this is abnormal.” The word
‘abnormal’ came out crumbly, and it broke over the sharp edge of the
table and became clods of loam on the plastic floor covering. Bwibo
rested her head on her palm, and the bell sleeves of her creamcoloured caftan swelled as though there were pumpkins stacked inside
them. I told her what I had started to believe, that perhaps my father
had had a face but no head at all. And even if my father had had a
head, I would not have seen it: people’s heads were not a thing that
one often saw. One looked at a person, and what one saw was their
face: a regular face-shaped face, that shrouded a regular head-shaped
head. If the face was remarkable, one looked twice. But what was
there to draw one’s eyes to the banalities of another’s head? Most
times when one looked at a person, one did not even see their head
there at all.Bwibo stood over the waist-high jiko, poured cassava flour
into a pot of bubbling water and stirred it with a cooking oar.“Child,”
she said, “how do you know that the man in those drawings is your
father? He has no head at all, no face.”“I recognize his clothes. The
red corduroys that he always paired with yellow shirts.”Bwibo shook
her head. “It is only with a light bask