Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Nnedi Okorafor’s “Dark Home,” first published 2023 in Jordan Peele’s Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror. Spoilers ahead!
“I couldn’t let go.”
Nwokolo has returned to Isiekenesi, Nigeria, transporting her father’s corpse. He was well-loved by the African diaspora in Phoenix, Arizona, where he owned the Chief Jollof restaurant. In Isiekenesi, he was a Big Man. His relations have made him a worthy homegoing with dancers, music, food, and drink. All Isiekenesi has turned out for the occasion.
The display of respect doesn’t comfort Nwokolo. Her mother died in a freak car accident when she was nine, leaving her father her confidant and best friend; kneeling beside his flower-strewn coffin, she mourns him with tears that taste of blood and salt. Her eyes fall on the bronze ring he always wore, cast with an eagle’s face. An auntie draws her into the house where people mutter about the unseasonably gray sky. Surely it’s a strange omen.
Nwokolo’s auntie tells her she must see her father home, then keep the legacy of his restaurant alive. Meanwhile a Simon and Garfunkel song plays in her head, as it’s been doing for days: “Hello, darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.” That night, the wake is a party her father would’ve loved, but Nwokolo stands alone, thinking of his body outside in the night.
Undistracted by the Igbo conversations she understands only partially, Nwokolo is first to hear the approach of clacking sticks, drums and a flute. The men move to the door and windows, while the women retreat deeper into the room. Only Nwokolo goes outside, ignoring her uncle’s shout to come back. No one follows her to the coffin, beside which she kneels.
A candle-lit procession of thirty identically dressed men fills the family compound. One stabs the dirt before the coffin with a black staff tipped by clanging cowbells. The drummer and flutist station themselves nearby. When they cease playing, Nwokolo sees why: A figure ten feet high, wide as a van, is shimmying towards her. It’s a “great mound of black palm tree raffia,” belted with rotting animal hides, hung with cowrie shells and crowned with eagle feathers.
Ajofia has arrived, the flutist announces. Nwokolo knows it for a “big spirit,” part of “deep Igbo culture,” come to see her father off. Great honor though its presence is, she can’t let Ajofia take him. She shouts “He’s my father! This is his land!” and pulls the brass ring from his finger. A harsh voice comes at her from all directions, demanding in Igbo that she give back the ring – it’s not hers! The words “slapped her soul,” and she flees indoors.
When Nwokolo finally flies home, her boyfriend Tony picks her up. Though they’ve only been together two months, he’s been supportive. Unfortunately he’s got a business trip the next day. Her corgi Biko-nu (her father’s gift) welcomes her enthusiastically. Her house is equipped with many security and surveillance devices, including a household management robot. Despite her defensive tech, Nwokolo always checks the front door camera before bed.
Tonight she’s too exhausted – but ends up checking the camera later, after she wakes up freezing – somehow the AC has reset itself to sixty. The security light reveals nothing. She checks the front door and thinks she sees a shadow on the entrance path.
Morning brings a call from an unfamiliar Nigerian number. She’s too late picking up. The security system announces a visitor at the front door; the cam shows nothing. This “glitch” will continue to plague her, as do memories of her father and the Ajofia masquerade. The Nigerian number calls again. She ignores it.
Getting back to work cheers Nwokolo up, but the sympathy of restaurant staff wears on her. She retreats to her father’s office. Her manager Okigbo finds her there. When she shows him her father’s ring, he’s alarmed. It’s the emblem of the secret society he belonged to! She must return it at once, and in person! Nwokolo rejects his “traditional Igbo man crap.” Leaving, Okigbo says she’s “very American – selfish and individualistic.” He’s telling her: “Take. It. Back.”
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Out There Screaming
A ten minute drive home stretches to eternity when a dust storm forces Nwokolo to pull over. She checks her house. Power’s still on. All’s normal upstairs. In the storm-darkened downstairs, however, Biko-Nu cowers from something she can’t see. Home, she charges inside with a baseball bat to find the dog unhurt. A whole-house search turns up no sign of an intruder beyond a cowrie shell on the living room rug. But Nwokolo keeps cowries everywhere, her “own ritual.”
She crushes this one.
Tony calls; they talk into the night. At 3:48 am, security announces another front-door visitor. This time something is visible, a tree-high presence that shimmies and sheds dust clouds as the house speakers blast “Hello, darkness, my old friend.” Fury drives Nwokolo to confront the “visitor.” She also realizes that when you hang on to things, “sometimes things hang on to you.”
Her parents stand between her and Ajofia. Deliberately, they walk to the big spirit and vanish. This time Nwokolo lets them go, even though it leaves her alone.
Outraged neighbors emerge. They can see the hulking Ajofia but think it’s some ill-timed “performance art.” When Ajofia bounces and puffs out smoke, they run in terror. Nwokolo faces down the spirit but finally throws her father’s ring at it. Ajofia catches the ring in one extruded tendril. Another it shoots at Nwokolo, leaving a penny-sized wound in her arm. Then it bounces off, disintegrating until all that’s left are eagle feathers.
Nwokolo is about to take one feather indoors, then thinks better: What am I doing? She casts it away, shuts the door, and activates all her alarms and security lights.
What’s Cyclopean: Ajofia smells “sweet and camphoraceous like cedar.”
The Degenerate Dutch: Kolo’s uncle likes to complain about “stupid, stupid women,” usually for stupid reasons. Kolo’s neighbors assume that the only Black woman in their subdivision must be deliberately responsible for anything weird that shows up.
Anne’s Commentary
Nwokolo prefaces her story with a confession in which the determination to be brutally self-honest tussles with the urge to find excuses for what she did on “that day.” She couldn’t let go (of her recently deceased father, as we’ll learn in the next scene.) Wait, no, she didn’t want to let go. She wasn’t thinking straight. Wait, how could she have been thinking straight? She did something foolish. Wait, something deeply selfish. Simply foolish or deeply selfish. The moral remains the same: Hang on like that, sometimes things hang on to you.
Later her boyfriend Tony drops a variation on this idea: He advises Nwokolo to rest on her first day back from Nigeria, because “like my grandma would say, ‘Who knows what you brought home with you. That needs to settle in, too.’” Later still, Nwokolo will realize there “never had been a time when I went to Nigeria, to my parents’ ancestral lands, and returned the same person as I had been when I left.”
This time she returns having violated a core cultural and psychological ritual: That of letting one’s dead go home. Holding on too long has consequences. For Nwokolo, the consequence is that she doesn’t go home alone.
Maybe Nwokolo is being honest both when she claims she couldn’t let go and when she claims she didn’t want to let go. Maybe the two states of mind, of volition, aren’t mutually exclusive. Maybe they lie on a spectrum where the more one doesn’t want, the closer one approaches can’t. What would lie at the point of perfect balance? In Nwokolo’s case, it could be when she still longs to cling to her father but has accepted the harsh/hopeful reality that he must pass on, for everyone’s good.
We know from our weird studies that no good can come from defying death, whether you’re trying for personal immortality or attempting to bring back your beloved dead – or simply the useful dead, say a zombie army or choice informants (as in Joseph Curwen’s case.) Nwokolo’s Igbo heritage has taught her that death isn’t the end of life but passage into a spirit world or “ancestry,” from which the deceased retain a connection with the material world and their descendants. Reincarnation is possible, even into the deceased’s immediate or extended family, if the proper funeral traditions are followed. One does not interfere with the dead person’s “homegoing.” One must “step away… let go.”
One must relinquish control. That’s Nwokolo’s problem. The defining event of her childhood was her mother’s death in an accident so freakish that the “microburst” flipping her car—hers, out of all the cars caught in that thunderstorm—could seem like supernatural intervention, the descending fist of some god or demon. With one thunderclap, Nwokolo’s comfortable worldview was splintered, letting in uncertainty, insecurity.
Nwokolo’s a born fighter, however. To fight uncertainty, you have to be prepared, guarded. Let that make you “all wrong” to most Nigerians: unmarried at forty, childless, with your own business, your own home. No ordinary home, either, but a technological stronghold, equipped with security cams, spotlights, alarms, and even a robot with a touchscreen “head” to receive all your commands. Add strategically placed baseball bats, and intruders be damned. Darkness be damned, too, via remotely controlled lights.
All that tech only gives an illusion of control. After her father’s unexpected death, Nwokolo’s haunted by Paul Simon’s lyrics – lyrics which shouldn’t apply to her, a keeper of clean, well-lighted places: “Hello, darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.”
The darkness she talks to, first in Isiekenesi, then at her house, is Ajofia. He’s one of the Mmuo, spirits who inhabit all nature. His name means “evil forest,” so it’s not surprising he’s considered the most terrifying Mmuo; at the same time, he’s an agent of justice who protects the living community, a bringer of good fortune, and an intermediary between the ancestors and the living. Women aren’t permitted to see him. So what does Nwokolo do? She not only looks at Ajofia, she screams defiance: This is her father, this is his land! For all Ajofia wears eagle feathers and an eagle’s head medallion, she claims her father’s eagle-faced ring.
Proving Ajofia is no man in Mmuo masquerade, his voice sounds all around her, and she understands his Igbo perfectly. In her suburban cul-de-sac, Ajofia stands tree-high and extrudes tendrils from his coverings. Nwokolo lets her parents return to him; she saves defiance for the “Fuck you!” with which she throws the ring at his bulk. Does Ajofia shoot a tendril into Nwokolo’s arm as punishment for her disrespect? Does he mean to mark her as one of his chastened? One of his worthies?
Nwokolo has gained a sadder but wiser view of the worlds. She resists her impulse to hang on to one of Ajofia’s feathers, but she remains Nwokolo. She locks her front door, then activates all her alarms and security lights. That way she’ll be prepared if her neighbors have called the police on her disturbing-the-peace self.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
I fell in love with Nnedi Okorafor’s work when Lagoon’s tale of alien invasion kicked off from the perspective of a shark. “Dark Home” is a slightly more straightforward story of grief and mystery and assimilation, but brings that same sense that modernity is no protection from the numinous, and that on the streets of Nigeria you might meet just about anyone—or anything.
I’ve mentioned previously my college gamemaster’s multi-year conviction that cell phones were inimical to scariness. Kolo’s obsession with smart-home security gadgets tests this idea to the breaking point. If said gamemaster hadn’t already changed his mind, I would give him this story to point out the error of his ways. The technology both embodies Kolo’s anxiety and gives it room to play. You can always worry about what’s happening at your house – but how much worse to have the supposedly reassuring check-in provide conflicting information, to be able to see (but not protect) a dog terrified of an invisible menace, to have batteries go dead at just the wrong time and robots play ominous Simon and Garfunkel ditties?
Humans are natural cyborgs, our tools extensions of our bodies. When they misbehave, it can feel like a violation of the laws of physics, or having one of your limbs possessed by an alien force. For Kolo, tools are not only self but home. They’re a nest of safety amid the demands of family and restaurant, in a neighborhood where she can’t expect safety or welcome from her neighbors. It seems meaningful that she turns on lights and music from outside, before even disabling the alarm—not for her the creepy in-between minute of fumbling with your keys in the dark, or wandering around physically resetting thermostats after a trip. Predictability and control are what she’s after, and not having to see the familiar looking strange.
Death is the most disorienting thing. The death of a parent breaks time, breaks predictability and control and safety. Kolo thinks she stood up to Ajofia because of a moment of selfishness, and wanting a token of her father. Those all make sense, but I wonder if she wasn’t also pushing into the chaos and disorientation of his death, putting herself where she could see something strange and unfamiliar enough to overwhelm even the strangeness of her father’s death.
The rest of her mourning family respects both the mystery of death and the mystery of Ajofia. Sometimes in the wake of death, following the rules can be a comfort. But following the rules seems to be what Kolo does most of the time; it’s no surprise that she chooses this moment to break them—even if she doesn’t understand the full import of what she’s doing. How could she?
And she never does get that understanding, either. She learns that her father balanced his life as an American restauranteur with membership in an old Nigerian tradition, but this isn’t an opportunity to add more than a tidbit to the close understanding she already had. It tells her more about how much she doesn’t know, and the mystery abides. She’s not going to find out the meaning of the ring or the details of any Ajofian rituals or the role her father played in them. She’s just going to know that there’s something she doesn’t understand.
“Who knows what you brought home with you,” her boyfriend says, quoting a grandmother he’s never talked about before. “That needs to settle in, too.” The ring doesn’t get to settle in—but the unsettling mystery of it, that’s going to stick around. The trappings of Kolo’s smarthouse are always going to carry the reminder of their possession. And grief… that’s come home to stay as well.
Next week, join us for Chapters 11-15 of Pet Sematary, in which we suspect that “everyone gets therapy and calms down” is not the next step.
