The Women Who Buried Hope — Dammy Ojikutu (Fiction)

Ojikutu that opens in the raw aftermath of a child's death. The narrator describes physically attacking the man she holds responsible—she bites and digs her nails into him—while explaining that her anger is directed less at death itself and more at how her child, Daberechi, was taken through another person's actions.

The narrator speaks in the first person, combining immediate violence with extended memory. She recalls a long family history: a mother who cursed her, a father described as an enemy in household lore, and neighbors who alternately admire and resent her mother. These memories shape why the narrator sees her loss as part of a pattern rather than an isolated tragedy.

A central motif in the story is the curse the narrator's mother pronounced when the narrator refused an arranged match. The curse — "You will never raise a child to adulthood" — haunts the narrator's account, even as she notes that Olódùmarè (God) later gave her the daughter she briefly loved. The curse functions as a way to frame misfortune: the mother's words are delivered with ritual certainty and become part of how the narrator interprets fate.

Grief and displacement: The narrator links the physical loss of a child to an ongoing sense that she was never meant to be a stable mother.

Blame and retribution: Her immediate, visceral violence toward the man who ''became her daughter's pathway'' is driven by a need for someone to hold responsible.

Lineage and speech: Curses, stories about the past, and gossip act as inherited structures that shape how characters understand present suffering.

Beauty and resentment: The narrator's memories suggest that Morewa's beauty conferred privileges that also spawned envy, complicating how women negotiate status and survival.

The excerpt ends while situating the narrator's anger in family and communal narratives. It does not provide closure for the conflict with the man she attacks nor full resolution of how the narrator will live after the loss. The focus remains on motive and memory rather than aftermath.

The story compresses personal grief into a wider social field: rituals, curses, and neighborhood reputations shape how the narrator experiences motherhood and loss. The writing ties an intimate moment of violence to a lifetime of inherited speech and expectation, making the emotional case without offering simple answers.