I asked her, later as I lay on the couch, if she had invited her other friends. Which ones? she asked. I understood her. Her quiet manner sprang from her. This other persona, the one who cooked for strangers, invited them to her house, was simply a symptom of America. She did not visit clubs, but she longed for home.
This occurred to me at the exact time I realized the throwing-up had been going on for over a month. And then it occurred to me. Another Ted was on the way. Clearly my dreams would have to wait.
Ketty Nivyabandi
A poet, human rights defender and social justice activist from Burundi, she has had poems published in several anthologies worldwide. She is an outspoken voice for justice in her country, and became a refugee in 2015, after she led women’s protests in her capital city. She currently lives in Canada. In 2012 she was chosen to represent Burundi at Poetry Parnassus, the cultural programme accompanying the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
Home
I once lived in a yellow little house.
Each morning, birds convened and sang at my bedroom window. The gate was indigo and inside the garden all kinds of flowers rose to kiss the sunny walls. The yellow nest was filled with cherished books, colorful art and sweet peace.
There was a little kitchen, with cherry-red cabinets made by the most business-savvy street artisan I have ever met. In the little kitchen, my daughters and I baked, giggled, danced and let our free-range souls be. Looking down on us was a Gael Faye poster, cooking books from the across the globe (including delicious Caribbean recipes by Maya Angelou), my daughters’ early drawings, vintage photographs. And music.
Always music.
On the yellow porch sat a white high table where I would often pretend to write. Most of the time I simply soaked in the silence. And beside it, a long lounge chair, always tilted in the same, exact position: the only place in the house where one could spot the glistening, silvery lake Tanganyika. Between the neighbor’s blue tin roof and two tall mango trees. On some mornings, after the skies had cried all night, I would witness the mighty mountains of Congo rise from the fog. And everything inside me would fall into place.
It is where I enjoyed the most joyful evenings with rowdy, tipsy relatives who sometimes popped in with red wine, some cheese, and impromptu dance moves. It’s also where I often lay alone, by candlelight and let my heart breathe. Just above me hung a chalkboard, where my daughter once wrote: “Welcome home, where the sun is always free”.
It was home, in every sense of the word.
Where one softens.
Where one belongs.
It was home until one sudden morning, when danger came banging at the indigo gate. Prompted me to drop the book in my hand, grab the closest bag and lock up the sunny nest. ‘It’s just for a couple of days’ I thought. A couple of days later, danger spat me out of my city, out of the hills, out of the lake, out of the drums, out of the homeland I adore. Danger chased as I drove at the highest speed, through the coiled bowels of my beloved land, running away from the only place I had ever wanted to be. Running away from the yellow, the indigo, the cherry red, the morning birds, the splendid silvery lake, the scent of rain, the loud relatives, the red wine and impromptu dance moves, the sweet peace, the emerald hills, the sound of my daughters laughing in between two nap dreams, the escapades to my aunt’s rural home, the smell of cow dung, of eucalyptus leaves, of freedom, the taste of isombe, the sight of bougainvillea on every street, the sound of church bells on Sundays and the muezzin at dawn, the scent of Arabica coffee beans, the voices of dear friends, the red soil, the green, the green, the green . . .
It was home until I crossed the border, looked back at the green sliding into red, and felt everything inside me falling apart.
( . . .)
“Thank God you are safe” they tell you. Not knowing that your heart was never more at risk, never more a wound, never more famished.
“You are so lucky you got out. Now you can rebuild your life.” And you want to say that you don’t want to rebuild, not here, not in this concrete greyness which leaves you out of breath. Not in these superstore alleys where bananas exude sadness, and remind you of the haunting look in the old lion’s eyes, at the city zoo. The look of the displaced.
Not in this place where bananas refuse to grow, where parenting involves a strategic plan, where time is an investment, where couples debate what to have for dinner like a constitutional reform. Where a crowded commute ride screams with loneliness.
“You’ll see, it will be great for the children.” And you want to tell them that what is good for your children is napping with the scent of the rain falling on dusty ground, running barefoot in the grass with ten cousins, the taste of small and sweet bananas (how does one explain this?), the sun teasing the melanin in their skins, and the tender love and care they receive everywhere they go . . .
But you remain quiet, because there are no words to explain these mutterings in your veins. Because you should be grateful for being alive, even when your whole life burns. Because there is a certain indecency in not being grateful. In not acknowledging your fortune, the misery and fear of those who stayed behind, the kindness of your host country. Because you must, after all, reinvent (not rebuild, please, no) your life. Because your surroundings should not determine the state of your heart. Of course not.
And so you carry on, in a refugee camp, fetching wood with strangers who soon become your world, rising early to beat the maize distribution line, cutting deals to feed your babies, looking at this country within a country, not knowing when you will ever get out. Or in the homeless shelter, receiving food stamps, and explanations of how to proceed being given as if you were a five-year-old and wherever you came from requires things to be explained s.l.o.w.l.y.
You smile when kindness offers you used clothes and a cooking pan, you are overwhelmed by this warmth, these random acts of goodness but hold yourself from rupturing into a river. Because you are someone, you were someone, because you once had your own new clothes and plenty of cooking pans, thank you very much, and somehow this beautiful kindness also feels terribly unkind, unkind to your being, to your inside, to your life, and just makes you want to cry.
You overcome being called a refugee. A small, wounding word in which the world tries to squeeze you every day. As your vastness cries out.
You overcome the weight and inexplicable shame that comes with that word. The feeling of not belonging. As you desperately try to catch your dignity, flying away in the autumn wind.
You overcome becoming part of the diaspora, this warm, wide sea of people whom you now begin to resemble; always a little too distant, or too close to home. Never in balance. Almost like, but never quite “home”.
You put one foot in front of the other, without thinking, forget thinking, forget any logic you ever had, because what kind of logic shatters a life into pieces in one single morning? You create normal out of the abnormal. For months, for years, until one day you surprise yourself laughing out loud. Find new blossoms in your heart. You learn to live with the scars of exile. To conceal them. Especially from yourself. You learn to “adapt”. And when you finally receive your immigration papers, your new friends, your lawyer, your colleagues at the store, all rejoice: “All is well now!” As though a home, a country, a life could be replaced so easily, by paperwork.
You learn to oil the stretch marks that criss-cross your heart, to walk fast, not to smile to strangers, to do ten things at once, “to plan”. You learn not to hear the voids in this wealth, the heavy silence on the crowded morning commute, the wails in the teenager’s menacing eyes, the unraveling in the soccer mom’s high-pitched voice, the insecurity in the suited man’s walk. You learn to wear dark colors in winter, and not to miss the happy, organized chaos that is your hometown. You learn to unlearn yourself. To unlearn the organic joy, the carefree in you. And not see the dangers of this place where everything has a limit. Where your being feels tamed. Where life feels like a trap, and you don’t understand why beca
use everything “is well now”. You learn because the alternative is too painful. Because to remember—to truly remember—is to hurt, and your stretch-marked heart can only stretch so far.
( . . .)
I still hear the yellow nest and the emerald hills, calling my name everyday. Sometimes on a merciful night, the moon will rise just as it used to, under my porch.
On such nights I close my eyes, and I am home.
Nana Oforiatta Ayim
A Ghanaian writer, filmmaker and art historian, she has contributed to publications such as frieze, ArtNews, Petunia and Accra Noir, and her debut novel will be The God Child (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020). She speaks to international audiences on cultural narratives and institution-building in Africa, and her films have been shown at museums including The New Museum, Tate Modern and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She founded the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, through which she has pioneered a Pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia, and a Mobile Museums project that travels into communities. She received the 2015 Art and Technology Award from LACMA, the 2016 AIR Award, and the inaugural 2018 Soros Arts Fellowship. She has been named one of the Apollo “40 under 40”; one of 50 African Trailblazers by The Africa Report; one of 12 African women making history by Okayafrica; and a Quartz Africa Innovator; and is a 2019 Global South Visiting Fellow at Oxford University.
Abele, from The God Child
Abele, my mother sang at the dressing mirror, as I lay on the satin quilted cover on the bed behind her, watching.
Abele, she danced in her chair, the ends of her mouth turned half downwards in appreciation. It’s a pity my child did not take my beauty, she told her reflection, putting cream on her face, caressing it into the softness, surveying the escarpment of cheekbones, the glow trapped in the amber recesses of her skin. She turned to me as if remembering, you must always look more than perfect. Not just good enough, but perfect. You must always be better than them in everything you do, otherwise they will think you are lower.
My mother came out, the smell of her powdery luxury encased me, watering my eyes. I opened them. She walked sideways down the stairs, her shoes clacking against the heels of her feet.
Would it arrive overnight, the desire for perfection, like the ability to smell expensive and wear fitted petticoats?
Maya, what is wrong with you, this girl? Do you want your father to come home and trouble my life? Ah.
I walked down the stairs, slowly, sideways, towards my mother, far like the rest of the world. When I reached her, she buttoned on my coat. My arms stuck out to both sides. I looked past her at my reflection in the mirror, half there, half in another place.
She was stepping back to look at me, edging towards the open box by the front door.
I closed my eyes, not wanting to see her fall.
Aich, she shouted.
I opened my eyes.
She was not sitting on top of the large new television, but suspended above it, her arms stemmed behind her against the wall, her legs spread out, skirt hiked up.
I began to laugh.
Ah! This time, her harshness came through her laughter. Kwasiaa! Come and help me.
I pulled her up, her weight threatening to knock me over.
She looked down into the box, turning the corners of her mouth down. Hm, she said, her skirt still hiked up around her thighs, they shall see.
I walked next to her, through the more than perfect neighbourhood of semi-detached red-bricked houses, made only less so by the African family camouflaged within one of them. Less than perfect, but not jarringly so, because he was a doctor and his wife was beautiful and his daughter perfectly groomed. Less than perfect, because they hung their washing out in the garden until the neighbour told them not to. Less than perfect, because their television was propped up with books and not a stand. Less than perfect, because the father deemed the new television with stand the mother bought with his credit card too expensive, and was having it returned. But still, separate from the men that stood huddled outside the Bahnhof and MacDonald’s reeking of illegality; the women that sat in the Afroshops chatting in mismatched syncopated chorus as the hairdressers braided hair and the cloth sellers took out dotted, striped, stamped lengths of Dutch wax, like multi-coloured species of exotic animals.
I looked up at my mother talking too loud in her unperfected accent. People looked at her as she walked past, but she did not notice, because even if I had not taken her beauty, she did not understand that to be better than them, you had to be like them so completely that they no longer noticed your difference.
I do not know whether it was there from the beginning this knowledge that I was never just I, myself, but an I that was in me and also outside and that watched and witnessed all I did and everything around. When I later heard in words about the ancestors, I already knew, and when my father gave me the name—3no, grandmother—whilst almost still a baby, it was because he too could see, that what I saw and understood was not mine alone.
It began to rain. She wrapped me close to her, her pea green silk raincoat giving shelter to us both as we ran.
We reached the department store and rode on the escalator up past the electronics, the cosmetics, the household goods, and underwear, to the women’s designer section. It was almost empty. Outside it was getting dark and the Germans were sitting down to their Abendbrod.
The sales lady looked us up and down as we passed, still dripping. My mother was weaving in and out of the racks, like a person drunk, her hands scanning silks, polyesters, sequins and feathers, taking down one after the other, until her arms were full, clothes trailing behind her on the floor.
The sales woman stood behind us now, but my mother still did not notice.
Kann Ich helfen? She asked in a thoroughly unhelpful tone.
My mother turned around now and laughed. Ich will Alles kaufen, she said, Alles. Hier hilf mir, she addressed the woman in the familiar Du, not the formal Sie, and handed her the clothes. She looked, vaguely left then vaguely right, brow furrowed as if concentrating, but her body movements betrayed no focus at all. She dropped her scarf behind her.
I looked at it on the floor, looked at the woman’s frowning face as she bent to pick it up and followed my mother like a lady’s maid. I turned towards the children’s section. I ran my hands through the clothes like my mother, stopping at velvets and soft dark cords. I closed my eyes and saw myself in the cords, a perfect German girl, a young Romy Schneider running through the forest, arms outstretched towards a fenced-in deer, smiling like the girl on the Rotbäckchen 6-fruit juice bottle, cheeks apple red to match the kerchief on her head.
Guck mal! Guck mal der Neger!
It was a little girl’s voice behind me. My hand stopped on the wine red velvet dress. I looked up to see who she meant, then turned towards her. She was pointing at me. She had mistaken me for a boy. Her mother looked at me angrily, took the girl’s hand and walked away. I stopped to look in the small full-length mirror on my left. My hair was in four large plaits. It was true I was wearing trousers, but how could she mistake me for a boy? My father always told me to wear earrings and I did not. I touched my ears.
Beautiful, I heard behind me. Yes.
My mother was picking up the red velvet dress and another, peach with white lace ruches and a satin band. She was picking out white shoes and a white dress with strawberries on the left breast. She was picking cord dungarees and a matching shirt.
Ich bin Prinzessin, wissen Sie? She was saying to the sales woman, Prinzessin Yaa. She was telling her that where she came from her clothes were made of lace and gold and that she had servants and grew up in a palace.
The woman was looking a little frightened now.
My mother went into the changing room and I followed to be turned into a little princess-in-the-making, beauty’s heir.
When we left with five plastic bags, there were four sales women tending to my mother. She paid with my father’s credit card. They walked with us. They patted my hair. They help
ed my mother onto the escalator, Tschüss Prinzessin Yaa. Tschüss.
She did not look back. Her eyes were fixed downwards. I followed them and saw what she saw, a large commode full of plates of all sizes and depths, white plates with solid ink blue borders and swirls of gold that nestled inside the borders like gold-tipped swans at the side of a lake, bewitched.
We reached the floor and she headed towards them, not straight, but walking in a kind of zigzag. I looked around. No one was watching. She stood in front of the commode, and this time a man came to her side.
Ja? He said, his eyebrows raised.
Wie viel? She asked.
Wie viele Teller? He asked the eccentric woman wanting to know the number of plates.
Wie viel kostet Sie? She pointed at the plates.
The man looked confused. Did she want to know the price of one plate?
Sie will wissen wie viel alles zusammen kostet, I offered.
Ah, the man said, and went to the counter and opened a book. He came back with it and showed my mother, silently, looking up.
Ich kaufe, she said.
His eyebrows moved up higher. He closed the book and led us to the counter.
My mother handed over the card and told the salesman that the plates must be delivered in the day before six and not at weekends. She did not want my father to see.
Natürlich, the man said, smiling tightly. He handed her the receipt and looked down at me, Du sprichts aber gut Deutsch, he said, not a compliment so much as a statement of fact.
It always surprised them that my German was fluent.
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