I guess the worst thing the kidnappers did to me was make me lose the ability to feel comfortable around my fragile roots, and cast me back into the realm of people who don’t fully belong anywhere.
Ah, well. Never mind. Loss is part of human existence and Africa was never my main gig, to be truthful. I do, at least, still have good ole London . . . which represents about seventy per cent of who I really am; and makes me feel safe.
1 October 2018
Andrea Levy
Born in London to a father who sailed from Jamaica to England on the Empire Windrush and a mother who followed him soon after, she grew up Black in what was still a very white England. This experience gave her a complex perspective on the country of her birth. In her mid-thirties she began writing the novels she had always wanted to read, that reflected the experiences of Black Britons. She has been a recipient of an Arts Council Award and her second novel, Never Far from Nowhere (1996), was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Small Island (2004) was the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, and of the Whitbread Novel Award, the Whitbread Book of the Year award, the Orange Best of the Best, and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. The Long Song (2010) was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and was awarded the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. She has written short stories that have been read on radio, published in newspapers, and anthologised. She has been a judge for the Orange Prize for Fiction, Orange Futures and the Saga Prize. She still lives and works in London.
From Small Island
Let me ask you to imagine this. Living far from you is a beloved relation whom you have never met. Yet this relation is so dear a kin she is known as Mother. Your own mummy talks of Mother all the time. “Oh, Mother is a beautiful woman, refined, mannerly and cultured.” Your daddy tells you, “Mother thinks of you as her children; like the Lord above she takes care of you from afar.” There are many valorous stories told of her, which enthral grown men as well as children. Her photographs are cherished, pinned in your own family album to be admired over and over. Your finest, your best, everything you have that is worthy is sent to Mother as gifts. And on her birthday you sing-song and party.
Then one day you hear Mother calling—she is troubled, she needs your help. Your mummy, your daddy say go. Leave home, leave familiar, leave love. Travel seas with waves that swell about you as substantial as concrete buildings. Shiver, tire, hunger—for no sacrifice is too much to see you at Mother’s needy side. This surely is adventure. After all you have heard, can you imagine, can you believe, soon, soon you will meet Mother?
The filthy tramp that eventually greets you is she. Ragged, old and dusty as the long dead. Mother has blackened eye, bad breath and one lone tooth that waves in her head when she speaks. Can this be that fabled relation you heard so much of? This twisted-crooked weary woman. This stinging cantankerous hag. She offers you no comfort after your journey. No smile. No welcome. Yet she looks down at you through lordly eyes and says, “Who the bloody hell are you?”
“Okay, Gilbert, you have gone too far,” I can hear you say. You know I am talking of England—you know I am speaking of the Mother Country. But Britain was at war, you might want to tell me, of course she would not be at her best.
Some of the boys shook their heads, sucking their teeth with their first long look at England. Not disappointment—it was the squalid shambles that made them frown so. There was a pained gasp at every broken-down scene they encountered. The wreckage of this bombed and ruined place stumbled along streets like a devil’s windfall. Other boys looking to the gloomy, sunless sky, their teeth chattering uncontrolled, gooseflesh rising on their naked arms, questioned if this was the only warmth to be felt from an English summer. Small islanders gaped like simpletons at white women who worked hard on the railway swinging their hammers and picks like the strongest man. Women who sent as much cheek back to those whistling boys as they received themselves. While even smaller islanders—boys unused to polite association with white people—lowered their eyes, bit their lips and looked round them for confirmation when first confronted with a white woman serving them. “What can I get you, young man?” Yes, serving them with a cup of tea and bun. A college-educated Lenval wanted to know how so many white people come to speak so bad—low class and coarse as cane cutters. While Hubert perusing the countryside with a gentle smile said, “but look, man, it just like home,” to boys who yearned to see the comparison—green hills that might resemble the verdant Cockpit country, flowers that might delight as much as a dainty crowd of pink hibiscus, rivers that could fall with the same astounding spectacle of Dunn’s river. And let me not forget James, perplexed as a new born, standing with military bearing surrounded by English children—white urchin faces blackened with dried snot flaking on their mouths—who yelled up at him, “Oi, darkie, show us yer tail.”
But for me I had just one question—let me ask the Mother Country just this one simple question: how come England did not know me?
On our first day in England, as our train puffed and grunted us through countryside and city, we played a game, us colony troops. Look to a hoarding and be the first to tell everyone where in England the product is made. Apart from a little argument over whether Ford made their cars at Oxford or Dagenham, we knew.
See me now—a small boy, dressed in a uniform of navy blue, a white shirt, a tie, short trousers and long white socks. I am standing up in my classroom; the bright sunlight through the shutters draws lines across the room. My classmates, my teacher all look to me, waiting. My chest is puffed like a major on parade, chin high, arms low. Hear me now—a loud clear voice that pronounces every p and q and all the letters in between. I begin to recite the canals of England: the Bridgewater canal, the Manchaster-to-Liverpool canal, the Grand Trunk canal used by the china firms of Stoke-on-Trent. I could have been telling you of the railways, the roadways, the ports or the docks. I might have been exclaiming on the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster—her two Chambers, the Commons and the Lords. If I was given a date I could stand even taller to tell you some of the greatest laws that were debated and passed there. And not just me. Ask any of us West Indian RAF volunteers—ask any of us colony troops where in Britain are ships built, where is cotton woven, steel forged, cars made, jam boiled, cups shaped, lace knotted, glass blown, tin mined, whisky distilled? Ask. Then sit back and learn your lesson.
Now see this. An English soldier, a Tommy called Tommy Atkins. Skin as pale as soap, hair slicked with oil and shinier than his boots. See him sitting in a pub sipping a glass of warming rum and rolling a cigarette from a tin. Ask him, “Tommy, tell me nah, where is Jamaica?”
And hear him reply, “Well, dunno. Africa, ain’t it?”
See that woman in a green cotton frock standing by her kitchen table with two children looking up at her with lip-licking anticipation. Look how carefully she spoons the rationed sugar into the cups of chocolate drink. Ask her what she knows of Jamaica. “Jam- where? What did you say it was called again. Jam- what?”
And here is Lady Havealot, living in her big house with her ancestors’ pictures crowding the walls. See her having a coffee morning with her friends. Ask her to tell you about the people of Jamaica. Does she see that small boy standing tall in a classroom where sunlight draws lines across the room, speaking of England—of canals, of Parliament and the greatest laws ever passed? Or might she, with some authority, from a friend she knew or a book she’d read, tell you of savages, jungles and swinging through trees?
It was inconceivable that we Jamaicans, we West Indians, we members of the British Empire would not fly to the Mother Country’s defence when there was threat. But, tell me, if Jamaica was in trouble, is there any major, any general, any sergeant who would have been able to find that dear island? Give me a map, let me see if Tommy Atkins or Lady Havealot can point to Jamaica. Let us watch them turning the page round, screwing up their eyes to look, turning it over to see if perhaps the region was lost on the back, before shrugging defeat. But give me that map, blindfold me
, spin me round three times and I, dizzy and dazed, would still place my finger squarely on the Mother Country.
Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi
A Cameroonian-American who was born and raised in Cameroon, she earned doctorates from the University of Yaoundé, Cameroon, and McGill University, Canada. She is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Assistant Dean for Diversity in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University. She is the author of four books and many other publications, writing fiction under the pen name Makuchi. “Woman of the Lake”, her short story about the 1986 Lake Nyos disaster that wiped out entire communities in Cameroon, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In 2016, she became president of the African Literature Association.
Home is where you mend the roof
SUNDAY, 2 A.M.
I’m jolted out of sleep. I do not recognize the number. “Hello.” Silence. I hang up.
My home phone rings again. I say, “Hello.” Twice. I hang up again. Who’s calling me from Africa? I know it’s not a Cameroon number. The 242 country code looks familiar but the number my caller ID displays isn’t my brother’s. My iPhone interrupts my thoughts. “Hello.” The connection holds. Still no answer on the other end. I hang up. My son opens my bedroom door. Who is it? he asks, standing in the doorway. He has that look on his face. Many an African immigrant to the United States would recognize that look. That dreaded 2 a.m.-phone-call-look; the albatross around our necks. I don’t know. I don’t recognize the number, I say. Why don’t you call them back? he says. I shrug, slowly pulling the sheets up to my shoulders. Whoever it is will call back, I say. Are you sure? Maybe you should call them, Maku. He gives me one last glance and gently shuts the door. Someone’s about to ruin my spring break, I mumble, pulling the sheets over my head.
I want to go back to sleep. Five minutes later I grab the home phone and hit redial. “We’re sorry your call cannot be completed as dialed.” I slam the phone down on the nightstand; grab my cell phone and hit redial. “Hello.” My brother’s voice; crystal clear. Relief.
“My brother! How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you back from South Africa?”
“Yes.”
“How was the trip? How was Cape Town?”
“Everything went well . . . but I’m calling because I have bad news . . .”
“Someone’s dead.”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Fr. Sylvester.”
“When?”
“This morning. I just got off the phone with Timothy. Timothy called me yesterday. Not long after I got back. He told me Fr. Sylvester was sick. I called and talked to Fr. Sylvester for twenty minutes . . .”
My forty-one-year-old brother, Rev. Sylvester Nsemelah Nfah, died in his bed, sometime before dawn on Sunday March 3, 2013, in Bamenda, in the North-West Region of Cameroon.
That 2 a.m. call brought anguish to my bed in Raleigh, NC, as people in Bamenda were rising to a new dawn and getting ready for mass.
News of the death of a loved one unsettles even the most laid-back immigrant once it reaches its destination somewhere in America. It is the one thing that has the power to disrupt the structured sense of place that African immigrants cultivate, whether as permanent resident aliens or as naturalized citizens. When one is thousands of miles away from what used to be home, one expects, one day or another, to hear about a sudden death, for it is said that no one in Africa dies of natural causes.
This is of course the psychological mask one dons in the pretence that a loss in the family is one more occasion for celebrating life, no matter. I wear this shield in the hope it would protect me from the heartache; from that invisible accusing finger that blames faraway calamities at home on my abandonment; to my quest for personal fulfillment.
One brother dies, then a second, then a third, and now a fourth brother joins the group of siblings departed. And my shield endures yet another crack. It is as if I have to begin all over again.
I moved to Raleigh, NC in June 2006. I have slowly, in the last seven years, been making Raleigh home. I was even becoming blasé about the success of this project. And all it takes is a phone call, this one in the dead of night while I am ensconced in the warmth of my comfortable bed, to shatter any illusion of that neat separation between home there and home here.
Feelings not of loss but of helplessness abound. You wish you were a character on Star Trek. You yearn to say “Beam me up, Scotty!” In the blink of an eye, I’d be right there in Bamenda, standing side by side with my dad and siblings, crying in each other’s arms, dashing from neighborhood to neighborhood making preparations, having heated arguments—sometimes calmly, sometimes screaming, sometimes laughing—over who has done what, and who was supposed to do what and who hasn’t done what and who needs to do what.
Twenty-first-century globalization lulls us into believing one can simply reach out and touch someone else; someone in America can reach out and touch someone in Bangladesh; someone in China can reach out and touch someone in Cape Verde, so the experts quip. News of Sylvester’s death tells me otherwise. Scotty’s Enterprise cannot come to my rescue; I can’t reach out and touch my brother. The global village is only a theory; at this moment it is exposed as a lie.
And I find myself forgetting, even resenting, all the good things I like about Raleigh; those things that have made Raleigh home. The State Farmers Market, for one. A place that gives me intense joy; that stirs warm feelings in me akin to the kiss one hurriedly steals from a new lover before rushing off. Seven years on, and I still can’t believe this market is open every day of the year! Driving to the State Farmers Market on Saturdays always fills me with anticipation of what I might find, besides fresh fruits and vegetables, once I get there.
I have no illusions I’d find ethnic African foods. For such items, I go to specialty grocery stores or visit the summer produce stands at the flea market on Capital Boulevard. These alternative food outlets are far from my mind as anticipation grows once I turn left from Nazareth onto Centennial Parkway. As I drive closer to the market, I imagine throngs of people already busy shopping; people from all walks of life strolling from one stall to the next, some in pointless banter, some lingering to chat with the farmers about their produce even as other buyers wait patiently for their turn.
I always smile when I turn left onto Centennial for the simple fact that were I in Cameroon, once I made that turn, I would have heard the market come alive, if not before. West African markets are boisterous venues where people interact with such emotional abandon you can hear the market from miles away. One hears African markets before seeing and experiencing their pulsating intoxication. You can hear it beckoning, calling out to you, calling your name, inviting you to partake, even for a brief moment, in the joy of living on this planet. A cacophony of voices ignites a rush and propels one’s steps to this theater of human drama.
That is why I am always drawn to Building 4, the Truckers Building, tucked away at the far end of the Farmers Market, where produce is sold in bulk; where one can split a box of tomatoes with a total stranger. “Want to split?” “Sure.” Nothing’s more fun.
Building 4 is also the go-to place for brown skins and immigrant faces. These faces lure me even when I don’t need to buy in bulk. On Saturdays, as I make my way through a crowd of brown people from many walks of life, I secretly fixate on those faces from home. It is a common practice among immigrants to play this silent game. The blank stare that says you can pretend to be American all you want but I can tell you are an African: your clothes, your hair, your walk, your bearing, that bone structure, those facial marks, the way you rotate that mango on the tips of your fingers, the way you squeeze that pineapple with your thumb, index and middle fingers . . . they all betray you.
My ears reach for their voices; for the tone and the pitch. Voice. Language. Two things that give it away, arousing competing thoughts in my head. That Pidgin English is definit
ely West African, probably Liberian. That one is obviously Nigerian. Those francophones over there are definitely sub-Saharan Africa; they’re probably Congolese. Those two are without a doubt Senegalese. I walk closer. Sometimes, I say, Hi. Sometimes I get a cheerful response; sometimes not. Sometimes I am engaged in a spirited conversation in which we compare notes about what country we are originally from and what the political climate is like back there. We chat about how long we’ve been here; we skillfully avoid the taboo question, What do you do here?
But when one person volunteers they’re here just biding their time, planning for when they’ll return home, For Good, we burst into hysterical laughter, recognizing we’ve heard the same bullshit many many times before. You know that ten, twenty, thirty years later, you will bump into this going-home-for-good talker and you’ll likely hear them say it all over again. We recognize this as our acknowledgment that despite the envy of all those we left back home; despite it all, immigration is experienced as a form of impoverishment. It is a state of mind that frames and defines an immigrant’s relationship with their sense of place, their sense of belonging in America . . .
I realized while writing this piece that I cannot write about Raleigh, North Carolina, without recalling Hattiesburg, Mississippi. My first semester in a full-time tenure-track position at the University of Southern Mississippi ended with the news of the death of my sibling, the fifth of ten children, in Yaoundé, Cameroon. A first. Unfamiliar territory. I was so traumatized by the death of my brother, Ezekiel Takumberh Nfah, that I locked myself in my apartment for an entire week, never stepping foot outside. I wrote “Mourning . . . in distant lands”, a poem, that captured my raw emotions; that poked holes in my belief that I had made the right decision to come to America. I later used the poem to dedicate my book of short fiction, Your Madness, Not Mine: Stories of Cameroon, to my younger brother, Ezekiel . . .
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