The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  Muhidin’s Lamu chest.

  Minutes later, Ayaana had destroyed the padlock. Inside, assorted items, ship logs, ship tools. She found the dark brown book. Inside, the ephemeral yellow-brown memory parchment tucked in its middle pages. A parchment oozing marashi: scent of moon, promise of destinations. Her hands could not rip it.

  Thresholds of hauntedness.

  Then she saw it. Through tears. The memory of a storm-filled evening. A vision of fire lit up the parchment, and she read it now as a promise. There was music. There was music. And it was a feeling. Her tears dried up and the light and song on the page faded. Yet the hope remained. She tore a scrap of paper to craft a ransom note to Muhidin, which she left inside the chest. She left the house with the book and its parchment. She also knew what she had to do.

  * * *

  The next day, Ayaana raced across the island to the fence that delineated the boundaries of her old school. She waited all day under the tree for Mwalimu Juma to emerge. In the evening, he locked the single large classroom. He was crossing the compound before he saw her. She got up.

  “You!” he exclaimed.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Teacher,” she said, “I need to do my form-four exams.”

  Mwalimu Juma considered her for a minute. “Exams save you from foolishness?”

  Tears ran down Ayaana’s face.

  “Answer. Can exams save you?”

  No reply.

  “Today you look for Mwalimu Juma? Today he is clever?”

  Ayaana’s body heaved, every hidden hope carried in a word. “P-please, teacher.”

  Mwalimu Juma cleared his throat. Wretchedness irritated him. He was curt. “Listen, can’t ready you myself. But you are intelligent. Will get you some past papers. Practice, practice.”

  She sobbed. He conceded some more. “You have—what?—five, six months? Quick. Go register in Lamu as a private candidate. How many subjects?” Ayaana rubbed her face. “Number of subjects?” He recited, keeping time by knocking on the door, “English, Kiswahili, mathematics…”

  Ayaana continued: “Biology, chemistry, geography, art and design, business studies.”

  “Not art and design; do agriculture. What you want is to pass well. Eight subjects, five thousand shillings. You have it?”

  An image of money tumbling to the floor. She studied the ground, saying nothing. Mwalimu Juma’s voice was softer. “Find that money, girl. Then come back. Quick. Quick.”

  * * *

  —

  That evening, Ayaana approached Munira. “I need five thousand shillings.”

  Munira did not ask why. She went into her room to count out seven thousand.

  * * *

  —

  Five months later, over the course of two weeks, Ayaana took her exams along with twelve other candidates, including a sixty-five-year-old widow, inside the Lamu Museum building. Ayaana could have gone on writing and drawing cell membranes and filling in the details of the human eyes and calculating angles and writing even more compositions for examiners. The following February, when the national exam results were announced, Ayaana huddled in her bed as she heard the announcement repeated in the morning news. Four hours later, Ayaana’s taped-together cell phone, her mother’s old one, burred.

  The results.

  Munira would not ask Ayaana about her results; she had lost the strength to endure another disappointment.

  * * *

  —

  Later that evening, Ayaana carried the phone to the cove close to Mehdi’s shipyard. Under the shelter of sea and wind and humid air, she pressed the “open” button. A light revealed her results: Two A’s, three A–’s, two B+’s, and one B–. Ayaana lifted her arms and gave a sound-emptied scream. Then she whirled and whirled and fell to the ground, staring at the stars and laughing at last. Nobody saw her. Nobody heard her. Because the district education officer, located a distance away, at Faza, was on leave, no one in Kenya ever asked who the third-in-her-district “Ayaana Abeerah Mlingoti” was.

  * * *

  —

  Munira watched the night for her daughter’s return. The dark cloud from that Thursday happening continued to pursue them. Threats muttered, promises of vengeance. The bark of drunkards, but she had gone to the sheikh for advice. He had counseled prayer. She had suggested that she might have to appeal to the government for help. The man had counseled patience and told her that other protective eyes watched over them. Still, Munira waited for her daughter’s return. Munira saw a slender figure skipping along the path. It took her several moments to realize it was her child. So she covered her mouth, hiding both her fear and her hope. She retreated into her bedroom, where she huddled amid the lingering scent of unanswered prayers. She peeped through her door to watch her daughter bounce into the house. Munira almost allowed herself a smile.

  * * *

  —

  At dawn the next day, Ayaana sat among the herbs and flowers in her mother’s garden. She dug around the jasmine bower close to the shadow of a pawpaw tree. She whispered her news to the ghost of her kitten. On top of stones from ruined shelters, bright-eyed, hungry crows watched her. They cawed. A donkey brayed. The ringing of a bicycle bell, the muezzin’s summons. A man carrying a fishing net approached the area. He had paused at the tombs of ancient compatriots, as he did every morning and evening. He saw the morning light shroud Ayaana, who in that moment looked like a transplant from Zhaoqing.

  Lipunguze omo tanga, kuna kusi la hatari.

  Lower the sails; the fierce southeasterly blows.

  [ 29 ]

  The kusi bombarded the shoreline before easing up to reveal eleven new arrivals, visitors who beamed and bowed as they landed on Pate Island. They had traveled to the southwest coast, to Pate Town, where they stretched out hands in overeager friendship. Mzee Kitwana Kipifit, sun-browned and nervous lest his actions be interpreted as dishonorable by the island to which his fate was bound, shifted as he waited for the visitors. Mzee Kitwana prepared to present the guests to the local member of Parliament, the district administrator, the tall, attenuated, and eternally lugubrious police inspector, and select imams and sheikhs from Faza, Siyu, and Pate Town. A tinge of pride, because he could play host, extend the Pate codes of hospitality as if he were a mwenyeji, a person who belonged. He even introduced himself to these guests as “Mzee Kitwana Kipifit,” much to their bemusement. He replied to their queries in the florid Kipate he had acquired from the island’s epics he studied.

  * * *

  —

  The visitors crossed thresholds and the full force of the island’s hospitality codes came into effect. They shared family meals. Slept in family homes. They were listened to. They laughed in the right places. They had brought with them so many red-wrapped gifts. They spoke often of their desire to harmonize the past; they spoke of a debt of gratitude. It was not clear whose burden the debt was; guest or host. They stood by the domed graves, where they shed a few polite tears. They listened keenly to Mzee Kitwana’s explanations in Mandarin. They spoke often of Haji Mahmud Shamsuddin, the one they also called Zheng He.

  * * *

  —

  One of the retired Pate civil servants spoke as if the admiral were alive and the events outlined were of recent memory: “Was he not a military man whose role was to grow an empire? Was he not in our waters for the purpose of extracting tribute? Did he not threaten our people? Were not our people forced to deliver what he demanded, or risk war? Is this the one to whom you refer?” A fly buzzed in the ensuing silence. One of the visitors, blushing because he had to deviate from a whitewashed official script, ventured, “A different age, a different way.” His companions then resumed their spiel to speak of ports like Taicang, of navigation and cartographers, of ancestral sailors, currents, trade winds, and memories.

  Later, they would ask t
o be allowed to see inherited pots, pans, plates, and cups in some of the island homes. In the evenings, they sat down with the men to hear faltering recitations of genealogical epics, listening for the sound of familiar names. Days later, four of the men went out fishing with morning fishermen, arranged by their hosts. They startled these by stripping off their clothes. On board, they watched fishing styles, helped haul nets in, wondered about the preparation and cooking of fish, and distributed more small red-wrapped gifts. If there was any disappointment in the quality and character of the gifts bestowed, the hosts did not say. Two of the visitors had joined the island’s men for prayers at the mosque. Even there, given an opportunity to speak of themselves, they spoke only of Haji Mahmud Shamsuddin. The guests photographed everything. Then, one day, just when Pate had become accustomed to their ways, the guests announced their departure.

  * * *

  —

  Three months later, six of these visitors returned to Pate ahead of the matlai season and its birds and dragonflies. They were in the company of the staff of the Kenya National Museum, an upcountry woman who drank bottled water all the time and three men—one of whom spoke in full paragraphs. Heritage experts. These came to explain “DNA” to islanders, and why they had come to collect it.

  * * *

  —

  The past. After a giant ocean storm, six hundred years ago, capsized an admiral’s junks and drowned at least six thousand of his men, some of the survivors floated onto Pate’s mangroves and dark sand beach, crossing thresholds. Years later, a few boarded kusi-powered vessels to return to China. However, most stayed on, having pronounced Shahada and taken the purgative bath. They had re-emerged in white garments under new names, with new wives and a covenanted allegiance to Pate alone. It is said they conceded to the past by naming their living zone “Shanghai,” their place of memory and ghosts. Time, decay, and Pate abbreviated this to “Shanga,” a necklace or a yoke; unrequited memory can be an adornment or a prison.

  [ 30 ]

  On Pate Island, wind flurries and news carriers brought word of odd happenings in Arab lands: the smell of revolution. People clustered around battery-driven television sets and radios, picking out tales, not so much to be inspired as to understand. Elsewhere, DNA test results confirmed some of the intimate “lines” of connection that linked Pate to China. The visitors announced that they were looking for someone to walk the space between the past and the present, so that the future could be shared. They sought someone to bring home the spirit of those who had “entered the dark room” far from home, these xunnan, these kesi who had waited six hundred years for this day. At the mosque, one of the men spoke. He said they sought a houyi, a “Descendant.”

  * * *

  A quartet converged on Munira and Ayaana’s house. They bore gifts—a porcelain set, two cell phones, silk fabric, a large sealed red envelope, and a long rectangular wooden box containing twenty-six herbal blends and sandalwood essences in slender glass pipettes, the one item that told Munira that these strangers, like those others, had scoured something of her life to know it. Munira held her tongue. They were two men and a woman from China, and a man from Nairobi—a Ministry of Foreign Affairs person who had never before ventured closer than Mtito Andei, more than five hundred kilometers away, who, finding himself on Pate, was pop-eyed at the idea that this, too, was Kenya.

  Elaborate pleasantries were exchanged.

  “You honor us…”

  “…an honor for us.”

  Much was made of Munira, the mother. She was wary. What did they want? But she urged them to sit as she retreated to prepare and serve her rose-water-infused tea. She would listen to them. Again, at some point in the encounter, the quartet, in a chorus led by a round, bespectacled, solemn-faced Beijing bureaucrat, intoned as if rehearsed:

  “You honor us…”

  “…an honor for us.”

  “Yes.”

  “We honor you…”

  “We do.”

  “We have a favor to ask…”

  “…a favor…”

  “A gesture…”

  “Yes, a gesture.”

  “…a fragrant flower of Kenya…”

  “An emissary to China…”

  “…a bridge…”

  “Our friend…”

  “We desire her presence…”

  “…a Descendant…”

  “Yes.”

  “…our Descendant…”

  “An ambassador…”

  “From the good-willed people of Kenya…”

  “To the good-willed people of China.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bearing the treasure of a neglected past.”

  “Yes.”

  “She’ll find friendship…”

  “Yes.”

  “…and kindness.”

  “Kindness.”

  “An eternal sea unites our people,” concluded the intoning man. “Because of the water, we are one destiny. The string of destiny binds our feet.”

  “Yes,” echoed the Nairobi man.

  “ ‘String of destiny’?” Munira frowned.

  The woman spoke slowly: “China is in your blood.” And she looked at Munira as if she were a dear relative.

  Munira waved her hand, wondering what this meant. What did these people want from her? “Thank you. As you can see on this island all the world’s blood flows. It is Pate.”

  The man from Beijing leaned forward. “Yet fate has chosen this moment to invite us…and you…into a duty to history.” His Nairobi counterpart blinked, his face and expression not dissimilar to that of a happy sheep. “Fate,” repeated the man from Beijing.

  “Fate,” echoed the Nairobi man.

  Munira faced the Kenyan, gaze intent. She spoke in rapid Kiswahili: “Who are these people? What do they want?”

  The man replied in kind, “Take what they offer. It is free.”

  “Nothing is free,” Munira retorted.

  The Kenyan official said, “Just listen to them.”

  “Your daughter,” said the Beijing man.

  “Yes?” Munira said, ready to attack.

  “China. To travel. To study. To share the memory.”

  Her daughter? Again?

  And when she might have launched a physical attack, she saw clearly how she would escape Wa Mashriq’s pollution. Deflating, she cupped her chin; her face was burning. Unseasoned hope.

  “Ayaana?” she asked.

  “Ayaana,” the four intoned.

  And then she laughed. “This fate of yours, it seems, must take from me all my people.”

  Munira started to cry.

  The quartet waited.

  * * *

  Ayaana had run to Fundi Mehdi’s workshop the moment whispers had touched her. From her mangrove hideout, she had seen the quartet disembark at the jetty. She had seen them wander, get lost, and then seek a way to her mother’s house. “Munira-Ayaana-Munira-Ayaana!” Whispers spread across the town. Ayaana had fled. In the shipyard, she glanced about her. Fearful, push-pull emotions. Like her peers, she looked seaward for a larger, truer, fuller self—for life. Could this be their escape from the stench of that Thursday that was a burn mark on her inner thigh, escape from waiting for Ziriyab and Muhidin and a father who had never shown up, escape from herself?

  * * *

  When Mama Suleiman discovered that it was Ayaana who had been chosen to travel to China as “the Descendant,” her body twitched, her skin itched, and her face was blotched with fury. She wept until her eyes turned red. If her son Suleiman had been here, he would have benefited from this honor. He was “the Descendant.” In a snit, she hurried to complain to Hudhaifa. “No more! I refuse to even look at ‘Made in China’ anything. You may not stock or show me any low-grade, cheap, and bandia things. Do you understand?”

  News of
the selection spread. Mama Suleiman returned to Hudhaifa. “It’s not as if she’s better than us.” Her pointing finger wagged in all directions. “Mamake ni mchawi”—Her mother’s a witch. “ ‘Angenda juu kipungu hafikilii mbinguni.’ Even me. I have Chinese blood—you see my eyes? Can you see?” She pulled at her eyelids.

  Hudhaifa leaned forward to look.

  The surprise of the Arab Spring lost out to Pate’s wonder over “the Descendant.”

  “Food!” Mama Suleiman exploded to Hudhaifa on another of her comfort-shopping missions. “I’d be going myself if it weren’t for their food. Did you know they make rice from plastic?”

  “Tell me…” urged Hudhaifa.

  “And vegetables from tinted paper and plastic. Disgusting!” Bi Amina Mahmoud grunted.

  The island rumor mills now churned with Mama Suleiman’s insights. Ayaana would have to eat dogs, cats, donkeys; pig and pork; pig balls and feet; sow ears and sharks; cow and goat udders; rabbit heads. Things that move and things that should not move: stones, scorpions, rats, foxes, snakes, spiders, and crickets.

  “Frogs!”

  “Roasted giant roaches that chirp.”

  Mama Suleiman expanded her wishlist for Ayaana. Ayaana, she announced, would be sullied by a people who worshipped rhinoceros horns, elephant tusks, and leopard gall, consulted astrologers, and built shrines for their cars. And they would sell Ayaana for her body parts. “Aliye juu, mgoje chini”—Whoever climbs must come down—Mama Suleiman concluded, and she felt much better. She remembered something else: “That girl will also eat cats and gnaw on tiger bones.” She then ordered a freshly made juice blend of avocado, lemon, and ginger from the fruit vendor next door.