When I was seven, my grandmother told me the earth could speak.She said it murmured through roots, whispered in fire, and roared when disrespected. She would crouch near the red soil behind our compound, her head tied in a deep indigo ichafu, and press her palm flat to the ground.

"Nwa m," she would whisper to me, “listen. The earth is a living mouth.”

Her name was Adaora, and to me, she was the boundary between heaven and clay. People called her Nwanyi Ani, Earth’s Woman. Her hut was always scented with herbs, wood smoke, and something older something sacred. She was a midwife, a healer, a keeper of forgotten names.

When a child refused to breathe, they brought them to my grandmother. When the rain delayed its coming, they offered her kola and silence. She was not worshipped, but she was not ignored.

I was her shadow, trailing her with eyes too wide and questions too many. One day she turned to me and said, “Obianuju, you have the gift. The sight.”

I didn’t know what that meant. Only that she gave me a name different from what my schoolteachers used: Nkemakonam “May what is mine not be lost.”

I was twelve when the first sign came.

During Iri Ji Ohu, as the village danced and broke yam, I collapsed mid-circle. They thought it was sunstroke until I began muttering in an ancient tongue even Adaora hadn’t heard since she was a girl.

She didn’t panic.

She smiled.

“You are not sick,” she said. “You are being answered.”

The years that followed were luminous.

I was trained in silence and symbols. I learned to read the tremble in a goat’s leg, the curl of smoke from palm fronds, the dreams that arrived thrice. I bathed in seven rivers. I fasted in the sacred grove, beneath the Iroko tree where the wind changed direction without warning.

I was named Nwada Ani, Daughter of the Earth.

People began to visit me too. I laid hands. I sang over barren wombs. I pressed soil into poultices and called back wandering spirits.

They didn’t call it magic. They called it mercy.

But time, like a termite, hollowed the sacred from within. One by one, altars crumbled beneath neon lights. The church arrived with drums louder than ours, scriptures with words bigger than our stories. They called our ways idolatry. Fetishism, backward.

Young men once healed in the grove now knelt before megaphone pastors. My own mother stopped leaving offerings at the ọfọ. She wanted me to apply to university. “You can’t marry a god,” she told me. “You need a profession.”

Then one dry season, my grandmother fell ill. No leaf responded. No chant soothed. She refused the hospital.

“This is not a sickness to cure,” she whispered, her eyes fading like dusk. “It is time.”

I sat by her until her last breath. Before she left, she placed her wrinkled hand in mine and said, “Do not forget.”

I buried her with her ọfọ beside her, and with her went the language of wind, the recipes of rain, the patience of silence.

I went to university.

I studied Pharmacy. Memorized compounds and conversions. Wore a lab coat. Paid taxes. I work now in a sleek clinic where the floor is tiled and antiseptic masks every smell.

People call me “Pharm Obianuju.” I give them pills, injections, prescriptions printed in English.

But one time a woman stared too long into my eyes and said, “You remind me of someone...”

Last week, a woman came in bleeding after childbirth. The lights went out. No generator. Her breathing slowed. Her baby didn’t cry.

The nurse panicked. But I didn’t. I pressed my palm to the floor.

Whispered, “Ani, biko.”

And then, a cry.

The child gasped awake. The woman’s blood slowed. The nurse clapped. “Sister, your training is complete!” she said.

I nodded.

But deep inside, I wept.

Not for joy but for what had been forgotten in celebration, it only waits, in soil, in silence, in daughters who remember. I am one of them 

My name is Obianuju Nkemakonam.

And I still walk barefoot into the garden at dawn.

Not to pray.

But to listen.