I lay within the body of the woman who was called Amina

and I listened to the silences between the beats of hearts that

beat no more and the wind in breaths that no longer breathed.

I saw with eyes that were only sockets in skulls. Though I was

no larger than the twinkle of a star, I already knew that lives

did not consist only of what happened during one’s brief span of

years. No. Each person is the sum of the generations that went

before, generations of people whose names have been forgotten,

whose faces have sunk below where memory can go. Yet those

generations live within everyone, pulsating with each heartbeat

and each breath.

I listened to the blood roaring through her body, and within the

cacophony I found the memories of her brief sixteen years, the

memories of her mother and father, their mother and father,

and their mother and father, and on back to unnumbered time

when no one counted the risings and settings of the sun and

there were no months or years but only Time as broad and

without end as the universe.

But as intently as I listened, as arduously as I searched, I could

not find the reason why I had been conceived. Neither did her

blood tell me where we were being taken nor what I was to do

when I got there.

When Amma, the creator god and master of life and death,

had Amina’s father place me inside the woman, he told me my

name was Ekundayo, Sorrow Becomes Joy. Surrounded by

sorrow deeper than any sea and wider than any sky, I thought

I had been misnamed.