Titan Arum

by Elina Kumra

My mother is a corpse flower. She reeks of decay. Day by day it collects in me—the heady scent of spoilage—until I’m fetid with it. The corm is buried in the soil of my heart, its swollen stem base soaking up each sweeping cruelty. For the longest time, I’ve found that stench intoxicating. I’ve even come to depend upon it—unable to imagine a life beyond its reach.

Today, the South African sun blazes long into the late afternoon. Out in the backyard, at home among the towering weeds, Mama roots for her pack of Black & Mild, then digs into it for the last cigarette, hidden under a flap of silver foil. Cross-legged on a square of jute, she strikes a match and holds the flaming head to her cigarette. Taking a long drag, she narrows her eyes and turns to look at me as the shredded tobacco flares blood-orange.

It’s a withering look—her specialty. Under her glare, for seventeen years of my life, every last hope I’ve clung to has been scoured away. Each time I thought my spirits couldn’t deflate any further, she found a way to exert more pressure. Like the wheels of our trailer, sunken deep in the rusty mud, I had more caving in to do.

“Why don’t you just wander off and die? I fail to see what’s keeping you here.”

There’s a strange blandness to her cutting remarks, despite their shocking nature. Like all her other flippant barbarities, they hang in the air between us, an article of malice, emblematic of Mama’s inexhaustible supply. No answer is expected from me, let alone a protest. I know better than to take issue with her scorn. All that does is excite it further. Instead, I retreat into silence, which I imagine as a small box-like space, as much as I can presently lay claim to. My meager silence is not even a reproach, although Mama treats it as such—as if I were seeking to cast it over her, to smother her latest, rancid attack.

“You think that works on me?” She sneers. “The silent treatment?”

When I fail to reply, she grabs my wrist and twists its bony ridges until a mottled stretch of forearm is turned upward. Then she brands my flesh with her cigarette—adding a thirty-third black star. Together they dot my skin like a constellation of birthmarks. When the first dark mark seared my skin, I looked upon it with revulsion. Now, I endow these scars with untold meaning and locate redemption within them. Beneath their sprouting shadows, I sense my future pulsing, making for the light.

One winter afternoon, the sun wheeled around the room. I held my scarred forearm up and tilted it as if turning a globe, teasing the sun’s flare while surveying the blasted territories. Pop! Pop! Pop! They’d nova—one by one—like a string of firecrackers. The act—the budding eternity of it—threw me into such a different space that, for all practical purposes, I was already dead.

I no longer ask myself why this is happening—the endless cycle of abuse. I quit trying after the eighteenth black star singed my flesh in December of last year. That scar, in concert with the others, struck me as a binding promise. The longer I looked at it, the more it suggested a singularity in the making. A wormhole that bridged to the future. The question of ‘Why?’ disappeared into the horizon I saw there. I fed it to the silence and felt its gravity grow around me, expanding my zone of protection inch by inch.

I know there will come a day when it swallows me whole.

For decades, Mama battled mental illness. It frustrated everyone’s best efforts to cure her—family, friends, priests, seers, palmists, crystal healers, and holy fools alike. Her temples were rubbed with eucalyptus balm, steamed with herbal infusions. They girded her with garnet amulets to ward off evil and adorned her fingers with auspicious stones. All to no effect. Nothing lifted the wretched burden. Neither blistering mustard poultices nor pleading prayers could put an end to her ravings. She would wake in the dead of night, energized by grisly dreams, compelled to reenact them. Instead of fleeing their clutches, Mama gave the terrors a constant voice.

Finally, her father took her to the nearest polyclinic, where she was subjected to a battery of tests that proved no more effective than folk medicine. The exasperated doctor, conceding defeat, suggested marriage as a palliative. Maybe a husband could keep the worst of her madness in check, even if he lacked the wherewithal to root it out.

Her father placed a one-line advertisement in the village newspaper to solicit a groom: ‘GIRL, EDO TRIBE, DARK-SKINNED, HEIGHT 140 CENTIMETRES, SEEKS HUSBAND.’

For months, no one responded. Meanwhile, Mama jumped ahead on her matrimonial duties. One morning, her mother found her lying on a coir cot, turned away from the pile of sick she had heaved up in the night. Her distended belly, no longer bound with muslin wraps, confirmed the source of the nausea. She would never reveal the man’s identity, or even admit to sexual congress, but there was no doubting the end result.

Now that Mama’s star had dimmed again, her father was forced to sweeten the original offer. The word ‘DOWRY’ was added to the text, widening the net of potential spouses to include the nakedly opportunistic. Who else—under the circumstances—would accept such damaged goods?

The groom fled before I was born—seduced a white woman in Lagos and left before my mother could curse his fleeing footsteps. He took with him the gems she’d kept wrapped in a clamshell purse, the last assets still to be gambled away as if awarding himself another dowry to burn through.

Estranged from the rest of her family, Mama found employment as a stairwell sweeper, sleeping at the base of a rundown apartment building on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam, known as “Death’s District.” There, she curled on newsprint bedding, her quilt riddled with mites. Every morning, she shook it out at the adjacent alley as the crows feasted on vegetable peel flung from the kitchens of the next-door restaurant. Then, with a bucket and reed broom braced under one arm, she began to dispense her lowly duties: hobbling up and down the stairwells, sweeping all before her, even as the pain chewed through her arthritic left knee.

By 9 a.m., perspiration had already left black moons beneath her armpits. Not that she lost herself in these exhaustive tasks. It was a way of reclaiming her bitter grievances, keeping them on a constant simmer. Under her breath—or, just as often, above it—Mama enumerated her countless indignities, pausing only to readjust the skeleton keys tied to her sari; her mawkish soliloquies, riddled with maudlin sentiments, echoing from floor to floor.

In time, the building got upgrades, with porcelain sinks installed in each apartment. The workmen hammered, shouted, spat, and cursed as they worked. By then, Mama was used to the building’s residents looking through her as if she no longer existed. Still, it came as a shock when these day laborers followed suit in failing to offer her the slightest acknowledgment, though she occupied the building night and day.

On the final day of her employment, Mama wandered up to the roof, resting where the light spilled into the stairwell. There, she set her lunch to boil on her bucket of coals and monitored the flame with a plaited palm fan. While cooking egusi soup, she felt something tugging on the free end of her sari. When she looked down, her skeleton keys had vanished, and the dregs of her life savings with them. She raced down the stairs, retracing her steps, knocking over the coal bucket snagged to her sari, setting the building on fire.

Mama placed a premium on love in marrying my father—staking everything on that brittle idea. Little wonder that a smoldering hatred replaced it in the wake of her abandonment, growing ever more intense and all-encompassing. It was inevitable, then, that her hatred would encompass me too. I became the avatar of her failures. Born six months after the dissolution of her marriage, I symbolized all of its enduring humiliations. It’s only a wonder she didn’t pack me off to the nearest orphanage. Although, by then she was addicted to these raging sorrows—forever raking over the coals of the past—and I could always help her in this all-important respect.

My child. That’s what she called me. It’s the first form of address I can remember, along with the damning intonation. I was doused in sarcasm from the very beginning. She made it sound like an accusation, as if I wasn’t her child, but only professed as such. When I heard other mothers use the same two words, it shocked me—the difference in register. They poured their hearts into them, conjuring a powerful endearment. My mother would smother the words with vitriol until they amounted to a slap in the face.

It was the same with the rest of her lexicon. Language served one function—to denigrate the whole of existence. While other parents taught their daughters the alphabet with songs and goofy faces, I was treated to scowls and damning indictments: bitch, baggage, burden.

I learned which words to look out for. The most faithful precursors to violence. It’s how I became a shrinking child, just shy of a vanishing act, always ready to disappear from view.

At the tail end of spring, the burn marks number 43 and the silence resulting from them is expansive, almost sensual. I reside at my silence’s center, breathing it in—a rich, loamy odor that keeps the corpse flower at bay and buffers her many cruelties. Mama can sense it too, my growing imperviousness, which is why her anger flares more regularly. She can sense her powers waning. She has never been more impotent, despite her redoubled efforts. Every time she ramps up her sadism, my silence rises to meet the challenge.

Her wrath, for all its terrible stamina, is on the verge of bleeding out.

By April’s end, she takes to burning my flesh every other day. The molten stars coalesce, forming a single jagged outline. It doesn’t look like a black hole, but that’s how I think of it—a great devourer. Everything within its orbit is destined to be absorbed; nullified. I don’t know what it augurs exactly, but I’m thrilled by its enveloping presence. Inside its ever-darkening folds, I’ve learned to smoke my fears out.

On the first Thursday in May, as I study my forearm in bed, Mama bursts into my room unannounced and stares at me triumphantly.

“I knew it!” she says. “You’ve started worshipping them! You think they’re a mark of distinction.”

I look at her, arm still raised, feeling nothing—yet that nothingness has a fertile quality. It’s the opposite of deadened. Something wild will grow from the depths of it. All I need to do is honor it first. Let it absorb the last of Mama’s ire.

“Let me tell you something—you are a black dot,” she thunders. “Don’t ever forget that. Your life is a stain on the records.”

My heart beats steady as I hear her out. She can no longer whip it into a frenzy. It feels like an enchantment, that slow, unchecked rhythm of mine.

Mama takes three steps forward, halving the distance between us. “Have you ever asked yourself why I punish you so?”

“Yes. Once. Not now.”

She balks at the reply. The whites of her eyes flash. Her worst fears have been realized. I decline to play along. I watch this dawn on her—my resignation from our decades-long drama. Her mouth hangs open to search for a savage barb that will return me to my former station, but nothing can drag me back. At a loss, she rushes over to the wardrobe in the corner and seizes my few possessions, tossing them into the canvas bag hanging on the back of the door.

I see the logic at once. I have exhausted my use for her. This has been true ever since I stopped trying to make sense of Mama’s actions. Unless I continue to wrestle with my anguish, she is ready to show me the door.

“I want you gone from here,” she says, throwing the bag at the foot of the bed. “You’re old enough to fend for yourself. It’s long past time you started.”

It’s the only card she has left to play, yet I barely register it. I simply turn back the bed sheet, rise from the mattress, and start to dress.

“You have nowhere to go,” she says.

I smile. I can’t help myself. The way she says nowhere makes it sound like everywhere. Mama has lost her hold on language as well.

After dressing, I collect the bag and place it over my shoulder. I owe it to the silence to say nothing more. It’s what divides us. I need to keep it that way—upholding the separation. No parting words for Mama to feast on or dissect in the coming months.

Some people have mothers, I have a Titan arum. I walk past the full skirt of her spathe, through the front room, and turn the handle on the door. Then I’m outside in the humid darkness, cutting through the tall weeds, heading for the gate that borders the back roads. The night is clear, and a three-quarter moon hangs high in the firmament. I open the gate and close it behind me, joining with Mother Night.

---

Elina Kumra is a BIPOC writer, editor, and mental health advocate dedicated to promoting equity and accessibility in education. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of VelvetPoets and the nonprofit A Brush on Recovery, which supports opiate recovery through art and poetry. Elina’s work spans poetry, fiction, and essay, and she is widely recognized for her literary accomplishments and youth advocacy.