Writer in Residence

The following is an excerpt from “The Woman Who Brings Home The Ghost of Her Son,” the book Tega Oghenechovwen is working on during his George Bennett Fellowship year at the Academy. The story follows a woman dealing with repeated trauma centered on human loss. It was inspired by a 2020 massacre in which young Nigerians protesting peacefully against police brutality were killed by soldiers in Lagos.

Amaka thumbs through the books on Ikemefuna’s reading table — books by Steve Biko, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and many other thinkers and revolutionaries — as if searching for her son in their pages. She selects Fela’s 1976 Zombie vinyl from the stack by the corner, turns on Ikemefuna’s record player — a gift he had bought himself for his 18th birthday — and places the vinyl on the turntable. She sits behind Ikemefuna’s study desk and listens as Fela sings about how Nigerian soldiers are zombies quickened by the government and turned against innocent, ordinary citizens; how they take orders from above without processing the morality or human consequence of those orders. Amaka feels something — the bold beating of her heart. She listens again. This time with Ikemefuna’s ears, with Ikemefuna’s consciousness, strangely coming to the awareness that her quiet will not serve her.

***

Three months after the massacre, Amaka still cannot trust herself to drive. Instead, she haunts inquisition hearings — where once, to her shock, she’d watched men and women who claimed to have lost loved ones at the Lekki toll gate grow suddenly desperate as soon as a group of important-looking officials she was sure were acting on the government’s behalf started writing and distributing cheques. She haunts morgues and temples of justice, searching for the last trace of Ikemefuna. She rides the bright yellow danfo minibuses and walks the remainder, her body grilled by the sun, her skin coated in dust. If she has learned anything during this period, it is that the government is not only skilled at killing and lying but also in the hiding of dead bodies.

Today, at the gate of Bonny Garrison — the post from which the soldiers responsible for the massacre were deployed — rainwater hangs in the trenches of Amaka’s clavicles. Pouches of flesh, filled with all the sleep she has missed since Ikemefuna died, hang from her eyes. She stares at the giant pit bulls slamming against the other side of the wrought-iron gate, their loud, ugly barks promising her terror. Amaka stands like the Eiffel Tower, feet planted wide, holding up a laminated placard with an enlarged photo of Ikemefuna’s face. She has come this way a few times — with Kola, with Chinwe and Chuks — and their friends, who showed up in T-shirts reading #JusticeForIkem, and Tolani and her boys, who brought their own boys and made videos and the good type of noise. Most of the time, she stays till dusk and attracts, like everywhere else, the crooked eyes of the press and the temporary solidarity of strangers.

A soldier with thin limbs in crisp camo khaki and shiny black boots clatters out from the garrison, stomping towards her. “You this useless woman!” He stares her down with bloodshot eyes before yanking the placard from her. “Your son pikin for toll gate. And so bloody what?” He grabs her wrist.

“Where are you taking me?”

“You want to see your pikin. Right? Move it!”

The pit bulls leap at Amaka and hang at the end of their leashes — suffocating in idiotic fury — as the soldier pulls her into the garrison. He marches her down the length of a sterile archway, into the vast interior of an office where a man, squat and round like a rice cooker, sits behind a mahogany table, eating a meal of reddish-brown beans and well-done steak. The colonel grunts, motioning the soldier to step out.

“You have killed my son.” Amaka clenches her fist and toes. “Why play hide and seek with his body?”

The colonel’s bulk does not permit talking, breathing, and eating simultaneously. He takes his time until he is done stomaching his food.

“I am truly sorry for your loss, madam.” He winces and, to Amaka’s disgust, releases a bubbling, brown fart that increases the temperature of the room and ferments the saliva in her mouth. “But … you can’t keep on like this. Our enemies at Amnesty International have started running their mouths. Because of people like you.” He lumbers to the tea machine and brews two cups of tea, offering her one. In another world, she would have gladly accepted the cup, having exposed herself to the weather, but in this world of the garrison — now reeking of excrement — all Amaka sees in the cup, when she leans over, is her son’s blood. She shakes her head.

“Are you scared of me?”

“Scared?” Her voice wavers. “Why should I be scared?”

He casts her a viperous gaze, flaring his nostrils.

“What of now, madam?”

She drills into the gaze, carefully — daringly — without blinking. He flicks his wrist, gesturing for her dismissal.

As she turns to the door, he commands, “I don’t want to see you around here again! If not —”

Something lurches in her stomach, rising fast through her throat. It bursts past her clenched jaw, loud and jagged, before she can stop it: “Tell me! Was that my son’s corpse you were eating? What more can you do? You beast! You zombie!” She hears herself screaming, blinded by rage. She belts out the opening lines of Fela’s Zombie in a frenzy. She doesn’t notice the colonel hurtle toward her but feels his hard, leathery palm as it crashes on her cheek, shifting her jaw. Paap!

“You are stupid!” he yells.

Paap!

“How dare you call me zombie.”

Paap!

Amaka doesn’t feel the paaps. What wracks her body isn’t the pain but the memory — the anguish, the shame — of the first time she’d slapped Ikemefuna five years ago.

***

They had been vacationing in Jos. Amaka was behind the wheel of a small, rented car, seated in the tight traffic around Gada Biyu, with Ikemefuna in the front passenger seat. They were on their way to climb Shere Hills where they could wholly capture Jos with all its breathtaking wonders and get lost while touching the twilight sky. She monitored the progress of a black Prado jeep, three cars behind theirs, from the rear mirror as its siren blared rudely and shoved its way between the vehicles in front of it. Soon it got right behind her car and whoever was driving began to honk non-stop at her to pull off the road into an adjoining bush.

Amaka refused to budge at first, choosing to crank up the music on the stereo and roll up the windows of the car. The Prado managed to force its way to her side. The front window slowly sank to reveal a man with pencil-thick scars drawn over his paper-thin face. He was impatiently pointing a buckshot gun at her. So, she gave in. She gave in because she was scared for her life; because she was trying to protect Ikemefuna; and because she had a flashback to a moment many, many years earlier when she was pregnant and someone had pointed a gun at his father. Ikemefuna looked at her with fiercely berating eyes, like she had done the unthinkable.

“Why did you yield to those brutes?” he said. “You had the right of way. It wasn’t even an emergency.”

“Well —”

“It was just some politicians, maybe a senator who wanted to —”

“But Ikem, you saw —”

“Just because they have sirens and a stupid- looking security man …”

It had been a ridiculously hot day. Her brain was recoiling from Ikemefuna’s loudening voice. It dawned on her that he was getting beyond reasoning with, beyond the basic sense of self-preservation just like his father had been. And so, she lifted her right hand and struck his face — as if to say, I will not lose you like I lost your father. Ikemefuna squirmed, holding the welt forming on his cheek, his flowing eyes squinting bitterly at the Prado jeep already ahead.

Later that night, she went into his hotel room, put her fingers into his hair, and said, “Ọ dị m n’obi. Dike m. My small husband.” And rather than apologizing for hitting him, she said, “You know what? I bought you suya. I told them to cut in all the delicious parts you like. Fix your face. Follow me.” Ikemefuna got up from his bed and followed her out to the yard. There was not only suya but a brand-new PS2 ready to be unboxed. The sky was vast and lit in a way that encouraged truth-telling. Her heart faltered. She could not tell him; could not warn him that he was eyeing the same tunnel his father had entered — a tunnel whose exit had, sadly, led to his father’s demise. She felt that doing so would only fuel his resentment toward the government and its forces and lead to him taking actions that would consume him. So, she told him that he did not always have to question everything, did not always have to fight; that it was never wise to struggle with a mad person, especially when that mad person was holding a gun; that in the country power was everything. And that if he loved and respected her, he would listen to her, especially when she was calling for caution.

“Ikem, a na m aghota?” She threw her arms around him and placed his head on her bosom.

“Anurum gi, mama.” He nodded. “I understand. Thank you.”

— Tega Oghenechovwen is the 56th Bennett Fellow. His work exploring psychological trauma, social justice, displacement and communal grief has appeared in The Caine Prize for African Writing anthology, The Kenyon Review, Joyland, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Oghenechovwen has an M.F.A. in creative writing (fiction) from the University of Maryland.

About the Fellowship

The George Bennett Fellowship is one of the country’s most sought-after post- graduate writing fellowships. It is awarded annually to a promising author who has not yet published a book and includes a stipend for one academic year, as well as housing and meals for the author and their family.

In addition to working on personal writing, the fellow is asked to be available to students, including members of English classes and student literary organizations. The fellowship was established by Elias B.M. Kulukundis ’55 in honor of his teacher, George E. Bennett ’23. Bennett taught in the English Department for 37 years.

Editors Note: This article was first published in the spring 2026 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.