Sweetness in the Belly

by Camilla Gibb

  “Now no one will inflict you with the evil eye because they are jealous of the sight of your skin!” Gishta shrieked once I’d pulled them on, nodding wildly with approval.

  So the trousers were not simply a fashion statement. I had been gently chastised; conformity is induced through gifts. Through flattery. And gossip. Once I was wearing these trousers, the remaining rumors seemed to subside. I was now fully dressed. And thus began another sort of apprenticeship, becoming a young woman of Harar—Gish, self-appointed as my guide.

  I’d never given much thought to my appearance until meeting Sadia and her friends. At the Moroccan shrine our rituals concerned cleanliness, not appearance per se. After I lost my mother, I’d simply let my hair grow because she wasn’t around to chop it off with a blunt pair of scissors anymore. My nails grew and broke of their own accord. And my clothes? In the past, I’d had to rely on the gifts of others and now I wore one of the dresses that Nouria and I had had made.

  Clothes had always served a utilitarian purpose, and shoes hadn’t even been necessary. Until recently. Until the growing insecurity that Aziz, who was so neat and smartly dressed in his white pressed shirts, must think me a gypsy. Until these past few Saturdays of listening to Sadia and her friends, Warda and Titune, the two other girls who came to the berchas, admiring each other’s nails and calling this and that helwa (sweet) and fashinn gidir (big fashion).

  Perhaps the reason Sadia disliked me had something to do with the lack of concern I showed for my appearance. They compared forearms and agreed it was time to strip them with honey, and they favored something called Roxy rather than henna for coloring their hair. It came from a fashinn gidir boutique in Mecca, brought back by relatives returning from the hajj. It turned their hair an alarming shade of orange. Sometimes they even dyed their eyebrows to match.

  I thought of the Ka’bah when I thought of Mecca, not clothes shops. I was not like Sadia and her friends. What I did best, perhaps, was pray, recite Qur’an, teach. There were a few other women in the city who had made religion their profession: teachers at madrasas, Sufis, religious scholars or disciples of saints, but the thing was, all of these women were old.

  I was shocked when Sadia told me she didn’t even fast during Ramadan; she even seemed proud of the fact. And when the subject of marriage came up one Saturday, she shrugged: “Not yet.” She nodded coyly in Munir’s direction. “Nineteen, even twenty, this is the best time for marriage,” she said. “Not fourteen like my mother—”

  “Or thirteen like mine,” Warda piped in.

  “After high school,” said Titune.

  The vital ingredient, they agreed, was love. Love first, then marriage, reversing the order of generations before.

  Gishta applied a thick henna paste to my hair, dying my ashen blond a deep red. She combed my hair with oil, flattening it against my scalp, and draped a loose, lime-green chiffon scarf over my head. She trimmed my nails and painted them with henna as well. Nouria boiled honey in the kitchen, and she and Gishta applied it hot to my arms and legs. They ripped every single hair off my limbs with deft painful swipes. It tingled and itched and turned my skin bright pink, which sent them into hysterics.

  Another afternoon, Gishta brought a woman with a leather pouch full of different-sized needles to Nouria’s compound. The woman did piercing and tattooing for both healing and aesthetic purposes. She could cure a sinus infection by punching two blue dots between the eyebrows; a kidney infection by tattooing a circle on the lower back.

  Quick shocks ran down my spine as the needle burst through my earlobes. The woman had surreptitiously pushed gold hoops through before I’d even had a chance to recover. Then, much more painful, she did the same through the cartilage at the tops of my ears, which yielded with a distinctive pop.

  She pulled out a third needle, a small stone and a pot of black ink.

  “What’s that for?”

  All three women pulled their lips away from their teeth to show off their bluish-black gums.

  I cringed. “No way.”

  “You don’t think it’s beautiful?” asked Gishta with an exaggerated pout.

  “On you, yes,” I tried diplomatically. “I just don’t think it’s for me.”

  Nouria tsked-tsked. “But it will make your teeth look so white.”

  Long, long ago I’d used toothpaste. I knew there were gentler alternatives.

  When I asked Sadia about it later, she waved her hand dismissively. “It was fashinn gidir maybe until twenty years ago. The mothers still think it is beautiful, but it is just fashinn qadim now.” And then she cocked her head and commented that my hair looked very pretty.

  As my apprenticeship advanced, Gishta told me it was time that I had a special dress of pink and purple silk made to wear to weddings, a fuchsia veil woven through with gold threads to match. A traditional Harari dress. The dress was deliberately cumbersome, ostentatious. And it was, of course, expensive, made from silk imported from India, sewn by one local tailor and embroidered by another. I could not possibly afford it, but Gishta generously assumed the cost. Conveniently, the dress was reversible so that I might turn it inside out to reveal black should I need to attend a funeral. No matter that I had never been invited to either event.

  “You will be sick of weddings in one year from now,” Gishta assured me. “You will say: I cannot possibly eat any more stomach lining and sausages. Insha’Allah, you will become fat!”

  There were also skills for me to develop, primarily domestic: special foods to prepare, rituals to enact, techniques to perfect. At one of Nouria’s wealthier neighbor’s houses one afternoon, Gishta pushed some colored straw into my hands. The back wall of the room was adorned with baskets, each with a specific name and purpose—some large and flat, designed to hold injera, others neat packages with lids to hold jewelery, veils or incense. All were tightly woven pieces made with dyed straw, rimmed with leather and adorned with cowrie shells from the distant Red Sea.

  “After a girl’s beauty and virtuousness, it is this skill that makes her attractive as a bride,” Nouria said with a giggle.

  Gishta laughed. “Yes, even an ugly girl can become beautiful if she makes baskets well enough!”

  “Are you suggesting I’m ugly, Gish?” I asked, eyebrows raised.

  “No, no, Lilly, you are okay. I mean, for a skinny farenji with pink gums.”

  “Not to worry,” Nouria said, “you will be sure to attract a wonderful man once we’ve taught you this!”

  I blushed. I could not help but wonder if Aziz was looking for a girl who could weave baskets and embroider pillowcases, if he was looking for someone who could make pumpkin stew and knew how to carve up a cow with a knife between her feet and not waste a single piece, even cleaning out its intestines with ashes so she could make sausages. If he was looking at all.

  It was politics that seemed to concern him most. While the girls increasingly included me in their conversations during Saturday berchas, I kept one ear tuned to the men. Their conversations were often heated—fierce debates about the war in Eritrea and even fiercer debates about corruption in Saudi Arabia—and didn’t leave a lot of room for me to interrupt as much as I might have. When I did, they tended to dismiss it if I raised the spiritual side of an argument.

  “Even if the Saudis see the hajj primarily as a money-making venture, this is irrelevant to a pilgrim in a spiritual sense,” I argued. “He has accomplished his duty by fulfilling this pillar of faith, whether he has been gouged along the way or not. It’s not the money that matters.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t see me making the hajj,” said Munir.

  I sank back against the pillows in shock.

  Aziz leaned back beside me, his arm touching mine and my skin glowed red.

  “I see the point about corruption,” I said quietly. “But I think you are only harming yourself if you choose not to fulfill your religious duties because you think someone else is taking advantage of you. You end up denying yourself the chance to have what
could be rightfully yours—the rewards of the afterlife.”

  “I admire your conviction,” said Aziz. “I suppose we are just as much concerned with this life as the one after.” He took my hand then and squeezed it. He kept my hand in his and began drawing circles with his thumb. I don’t know which shocked me more, what Munir had said or what Aziz was now doing, but where I could argue with Munir’s comment, I couldn’t refute the feeling of Aziz’s touch. It was too seductive. I stared straight ahead without breathing. The room was totally silent and I glanced around to see whether anyone had noticed Aziz take my hand. I suddenly felt slow and heavy. Mud filled my mouth. Munir and Sadia were also holding hands. And so were Warda and Tawfiq and Tajuddin and Titune. How haram it was. And how naive I had been.

  part three

  london, england

  1986-1987

  encounters with the jinn

  More rain falls in a winter here than in two decades in Ethiopia. How quickly the novelty wears off. It’s been pissing down for months. “Greedy,” Amina calls England. The greedy green English earth.

  The summer of 1986 brings not just rain but a thick and continuous stream of refugees. People camp out on the doorstep of our office, shivering with a cold they have never known before, awaiting our arrival on Saturday mornings. Those who are Muslim kiss our hands and pepper their speech with religious phrases, asking the time because they haven’t a watch and kneeling down on the brown acrylic carpet to pray. Those who are Christian kiss our cheeks and bow as low as they can in gratitude. Those Oromo who have managed to resist all the proselytizers thank Waqaa, their traditional God.

  Amina and I thank God the Harari way. Once a month, we burn crystals of incense over coals in a flowerpot in her kitchen garden. We raise our palms to the English sky and offer special prayers in honor of Bilal al Habash, which the smoke carries heavenward.

  This month Amina declines to accompany me outside on the grounds that it’s too wet. Last month she declared it too cold. For all her conviction that her children should know where they come from, she seems increasingly less interested in maintaining the rituals of the past. It’s more than weather: she is impressed by the words of the imams at the mosque and the teachers at Ahmed’s madrasa who preach what they call the official, the orthodox, the only version of Islam. In this version, saints are called false gods, and to honor them is to commit the crime of shirk: association, elevation, worshipping something other than God.

  For the second month in a row, I make my way out to the garden without her. Sitta lingers in the open doorway, observing as always. “Do you want to throw in the incense?” I ask, holding out my hand.

  She immediately throws the handful of dusty crystals in her palm into the air. They scatter like chicken feed on the ground.

  “Come closer,” I gesture, and she thumps down the peeling steps in Ahmed’s big yellow rubber boots. She huddles beside me under the umbrella, one hand between my legs, gripping my inner thigh. I pull the paper bag out of my coat pocket again, sprinkle incense into her other hand and tell her to drop it this time, pour it gently over the dying coals, do it with intention, as the Great Abdal taught me.

  Sitta laughs and jumps back as the smoke rises.

  “Bismillah al-rahman, al-rahim,” I begin singing, before invoking the name of the saint and asking him to protect the people of Harar and their descendants. “Do you know who Bilal is?” I ask Sitta.

  She shakes her head, though I’ve repeated the story a thousand times. In a couple of months Sitta will begin taking Saturday classes at the madrasa like her brother, at which point I fear she’ll also abandon me in the kitchen garden for a more orthodox education where the only history is that of the Arabs and traditions like this become heresy.

  “Do you remember how I told you that nobody believed the prophet Muhammed when he began spreading the message of God?” I ask. “Well, Bilal was this poor Ethiopian man who had been sold as a slave to an Arabian family. He had no power, no influence, but when he heard the man who claimed to be a prophet speak, he was so convinced of the purity of the message that he was willing to risk his life by standing up and telling people they must listen. He believed that the Prophet’s word was as he claimed—the word of God.

  “Of course, Bilal’s owner punished him severely, but when the Prophet learned of this, he sent one of his companions to pay whatever was required to set the poor slave free. The Prophet rewarded him for his courage and devotion, and Bilal, in turn, became one of the Prophet’s most trusted companions. He continued to work loyally in the face of opposition, walking through the streets of Mecca and calling the believers to come to prayer.”

  “The muezzin,” says Sitta.

  “Absolutely right,” I smile. Alhamdullilah. It’s finally sinking in. “Islam’s first muezzin.”

  Amina asks me if I wouldn’t mind looking after the children. She doesn’t tell me where she’s going. I’m dreading a day when Amina gets knocked about by one of those lager louts standing outside the tube station. Those men standing there for the sole purpose of menace in their skin-tight jeans and boots and leather vests, arms bare in winter, exposing their aging tattoos, shouting, “Oi! Nig nog!”

  She dons a heavier, darker veil, and even though she says she feels more protected, I fear it also draws more attention. She kisses the children goodnight, leaving lipstick on their foreheads and a trail of Chanel No. 5.

  Later, Ahmed and I are working with bristol board on my kitchen floor, trying to outline the countries of Western Europe without aid of an atlas.

  I could draw North and East Africa without a map. I could show him Tuareg caravan routes across the Sahara, the route I followed, the paths of pilgrims, and draw the dotted lines of shifting sands and contested borders, but when it comes to Western Europe, it’s admittedly a bit of a white blur.

  “Did Ayo tell you where she was going?” I attempt casually.

  “Just visiting.” Ahmed traces over the penciled outline of the British Isles with black marker. We’ve managed to get this far courtesy of a map in the telephone directory, but beyond this, I fear we’re in trouble.

  Sitta is concentrating hard throughout all this, biting her bottom lip while she adds rows of numbers. The pencil looks as big and dangerous as a bread knife, poised in her tiny hand. She has a tiny face too, like a doll’s, topped by a halo of loose ringlets, and she’s dressed in her pink fuzzy pajamas, ready for bed.

  “Finished!” she announces triumphantly.

  “That’s a good girl. Maybe you can help Ahmed and me finish Europe,” I joke.

  She pouts. “But it’s story time.”

  Ahmed looks helplessly at the bristol board.

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll take you by Mr. Jahangir’s shop on the way to school tomorrow. He’ll be able to help us. Like he always says, he’s a very educated man. All right? Now, teeth-brushing, both of you, then story time.”

  Tonight’s story will be the story of every night when we crawl into bed together: that of Hussein, the Sufi crippled by spiritual failure, and Lilly, the orphaned girl who relights the fire in his ailing heart.

  Lilly?” I hear Amina whispering.

  Sitta is curled against me, her head nestled under my arm, drooling on my shirt, and Ahmed is clinging to the edge of the narrow bed. Amina gently shakes my thigh, waking me up.

  “Is everything all right?” I ask.

  “Mmm-hmm.” She stands at the foot of the bed, fingering the bedspread.

  “What is it, Amina?”

  She puts her finger to her lips, gestures for me to disentangle myself from the children and follow her into the kitchen.

  She puts the kettle on and liberates herself from her veil, coat and cardigan. The wind rattles against the thin windowpane. I open it up a crack and light a cigarette.

  “Where were you?” I ask.

  “Just shir shir,” she says—visiting.

  “Oh,” I say.

  She shrugs. “I just went to see someone, but it was use
less. Why should I tell you something that is nothing?”

  I’ve been known to make a great deal of something out of nothing. About a year ago we had a visit from an Oromo man whose wife had encouraged him to come and see us because he was desperate to find his brother. The man and his brother had been imprisoned together in barracks in southwestern Ethiopia, where even the guards were starving. Once a day, the guards and those prisoners who were lucky were given a cup of stew made from onion skins. Those less fortunate were forced to eat the rubber soles of their shoes and dirt from the prison yard once the patches of grass were all gone.

  But those who weren’t dying of starvation were dying of some disease that was spreading through the prison. “Finally, they brought in a doctor with some pills to save us,” the Oromo man told us. “He had only maybe one hundred pills and there were more than six hundred of us. So the guards said to him, forget the ones who are starving and pick out the few of them who although sick are still standing.

  “The doctor put the pill on my tongue and truly, thanks to God, it saved my life. Bedri, my brother, was lucky too. We who had swallowed the medicine became better, and to prevent us from catching the sickness again, the doctor convinced the guards that we had to be moved to another prison.

  “They blindfolded us and threw us like potatoes into the back of a truck. And there was an ambush on the second day and suddenly we are staggering into the night and there is shooting all around and I fall to the ground and crawl as far as I can. When I stopped from exhaustion, I heard breathing near me in the dark and I was so terrified I tried not to make a sound. But I hear breathing on the right and on the left and behind me. There were people like me crawling and no one would speak because the night was so dark and we did not know if we were surrounded by enemies or friends. Finally, this one takes the risk and speaks. It is my brother Bedri, alhamdullilah. He tells us that the Harari doctor told him it is only about twelve miles south to the Kenyan border. And when the sun rises in the morning? Alhamdullilah, we know the direction to go.”