HIYAAM (Tsakanin Mafarki da Ƙaddara) By Tajmahar Mamaa Latest Hausa Novel

Description

A woman stands at the gate of a palace where only men are allowed to work, her heart pounding, and the guard in front of her says “Cire rigarka”: take off your shirt. For a long time she has answered to a man’s name, “Terseer”, and worn a numbered uniform among some 150 workers who are searched every evening. Tonight the search ends her disguise. HIYAAM opens with that moment, inside the Tajmahar, and what follows is stranger than any theft charge. The guards recoil, and the chief throws down his staff and kneels. He calls her “Mamaa” and “uwata”, and says they have waited for her for years. She cries that she is not the one they are looking for.

The excerpt is careful to show why this matters. The Tajmahar keeps women out because, before they were born, its people were told that a woman would divide them. Now they say she is the one the prophecy named. They announce a test to prove it, and it is a cruel one. She is carried off to the chief’s chamber for a ritual trial of her purity while a crowd waits outside the door for a sign, either a cry or silence and black smoke. She cannot even say Allah’s name. The scene ends with the crowd hoping she is their Mamaa. The text does not say what happens next.

The story then turns to a very different place. Ayshatul-Haleeym, called Ana, sits under a tree in Kankarofi, Kano Municipal, with a notebook she cannot fill. For thirty days she has written only one word, HIYAAM, a word she met in dreams and cannot explain. She wonders whether she can be a writer at all, then starts to write about herself. She is one of a pair of twins, with Iftihal (Ifti), and her mother is Innti and her father Daada. Babban Yaya is the eldest brother, and twin brothers Yaa Jaheed and Yaa Jadid follow him. She says plainly that her family is poor. She is comic, vain about her hair, restless and quick-tongued, and the opening pages let the reader enjoy her before they worry about her.

Her dream breaks in. Ana wakes the household by screaming the names Anum and Jarumi, begging someone not to leave them in a pit. Innti watches her, Jaheed cannot rouse her, and in the end a bucket of water from the well does what shaking could not. The grumbling that follows is domestic and funny. She complains that she was just getting to watch a film in her sleep. Her family teases her, and it is clear that nobody in the house takes the dream seriously. The reader has by then been given the dream’s content in full.

That content is a family history. A grandfather in 1500 to 1700, travelling with the Ikur and Imande lines, dies on the road. His funeral rite makes the corpse stand and walk to its grave, and at its edge black smoke leaves its eyes and he speaks. He says they have broken the law of Akombo and that the suffering will not end until Uwa Mamaa appears, carrying Tsav. He warns that she must not be given to a man, and describes a test of her purity. A later scene in 1976 shows Grandfather Kaka, Dooshima, Haan and a girl named Anum, as soldiers surround the household. Dooshima hides Anum and the child Jarumi in an earth pit under a stone and goes out to fight. Kaka repeats that nothing will change until Mamaa comes. The excerpt names Akombo and Tsav as Tiv beliefs, with Tsav explained as a feared power of speech and harm, and it never states how these people connect to Ana.

The excerpt includes other scenes whose links are not explained. A radio bulletin on an American airstrike on militants in Sokoto, dated December 2025, is read by a young reporter named Ahlam, whose brother Engineer and sister-in-law Jiddah listen proudly at home. Ahlam then rushes to a crowd where a co-wife is said to have thrown a baby into hot water. Another young woman, Batty, is stoned in a village as a “witch” and dragged to the chief’s house, while her accusers show no sign of listening to her. The story closes on Ifti, who gives her father two thousand naira from braiding hair and finds him gambling with friends. There, a wealthy older man named Alhaji Baita proposes adding Ifti to the stakes of a bet. Daada, who treats his daughters as a source of money, asks for time to think. The scene is told from the men’s side and is deeply unsettling, which seems intended.

What makes HIYAAM distinctive in these pages is how many registers it uses. Hausa, English, folklore, newspaper reports and a very modern teenager’s voice all sit side by side, and the author states in the notes that parts of the history are based on research. The Tiv, with their ancestors, the Jukun attack and the call for a mother-figure, are not a background decoration. They are the dream that drives the plot. The tone is dark and urgent, with moments of humour, closer to a mystery with family drama and mythic elements than to a simple romance. It suits readers who like layered stories and slow reveals.

Because of the subjects it touches (a forced ritual, accusations of witchcraft, and the idea of staking a schoolgirl in a bet), the excerpt may not suit every reader. It describes none of these in explicit detail, but a content note is sensible.

The excerpt leaves many questions open. Who is the woman at the Tajmahar gate, and is she Mamaa? What is the link between Ana, Anum and Jarumi? Why does Ana dream of a story that seems to be real? What is HIYAAM? Who are Ahlam and Batty to the rest of the story? And what will Daada decide?

A girl who cannot write a single page is being written into someone else’s history.

Ana’s story is available to read on Wikinovels.com. If the dream is a memory, whose is it? [INSERT VERIFIED NOVEL PAGE URL]