by Imbolo Mbue
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We were talking about such things one evening in early 1988, on the veranda of one of our huts, when Thula came to tell us, with her very own mouth, that she would be going to America in a few months’ time. If anyone else in the eight villages had said it, we would have laughed—Go to America to do what? we would have said—but because it was Thula, and because her countenance did not change after she said it, we did not doubt that it was true, that Thula was going to America, to read even more books. We hooted and hugged her and asked her if she would come back to us with a new skin color. She chuckled, and said that would be impossible.
We sent the news to our friends who had left Kosawa.
They were all there, three days before her departure, when Sonni gathered everyone in the village square, just after sunset, to rejoice for Thula Nangi, our Thula, who was going to America. We roasted three porcupines in an open fire, the women brought trays of fried ripe plantains, the men brought palm wine. All evening long we sang and danced. One of us was going to soar, and someday we’d all soar because of her.
Our fathers and grandfathers took turns pulling Thula aside to tell her what she needed to know about life in America, intelligence that we had no idea how they came upon. Thula listened to all of them, nodding—“Yes, Papa,” “Of course, Big Papa.” When one of them told her never to look directly at the moon in America, for it contained a magic that could shrink her nose and make it hard for her to breathe, she bowed her head and nodded, saying, “I won’t look, Big Papa; I don’t want to ever have a small nose.”
* * *
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We couldn’t all get on the bus to Bézam with her—there were not enough seats—but two nights before her departure, we went into her bedroom, the back room of her family’s hut, which used to be her uncle Bongo’s. All of us age-mates who were still alive were there—girls who had become wives and mothers, some with second babies growing inside them; boys on the verge of becoming men who would one day lead Kosawa.
We sat on the bed and the floor and remembered the times we had lived through. We talked about our lives before Wambi died, those days when we used to bathe naked in the rain, when there wasn’t much worth fearing. We mourned Wambi, and all of the others now gone, the latest the month before in childbirth. We went through the list, name by name, story by story, and we dabbed at our tears. Then we laughed about the morning we’d put a dead rat on Teacher Penda’s chair. And all the mischief we’d done. We took turns hugging each other, and hugging Thula as she cried—we’d never seen her so happy and sad at the same time. We sang to her, and she promised us that she would never forget us, though we told her that we didn’t need her to say it, we knew in our hearts that she would take us with her wherever she went. At the night’s end we shared one long hug, as we prayed that we’d someday be together again in Kosawa.
* * *
Her first letter to us arrived three months later. In it, she told us about her flight, how the airplane was much louder and bouncier than our textbooks had suggested. She talked about how the people in the Restoration Movement office had made a welcome meeting for her, in their office—they all wanted to hug her, and she’d hugged them. She said that though the food they’d served had little flavor, she’d been happy to eat with them, to be among people who knew her through the story of her people.
About Great City, she wrote:
I find it hard to imagine that New York City and Kosawa exist on the same earth and that I’ve been in both of them and lived such different lives. If it weren’t for my memories, I’d swear that the previous days of my life were a dream, as there is nothing around me to confirm that I am who I think I am. The cold is enough to make me forget that I’ve ever been warm. What can I compare it to? Imagine being so cold that the hearth in your mother’s kitchen, a bowl of vegetable soup with cubes of smoked meat thrown in, and the laughter of your family are not enough to give you warmth. Every time, before I step outside, I brace myself. One breath and all warmth is gone. I long to run back to Kosawa, but I didn’t come here to flee. I take in the air slowly. I tell myself that, one day, I’ll be warm again.
It’s not only the cold that baffles me. This is a place where people stand in lines for everything, those who arrived first standing at the front, no one paying attention to who is oldest or neediest. The faces are of so many colors; sometimes, when I look past the colors, I swear I see a young man who looks like one of you, and it makes me happy. Yesterday, I saw this woman—she had the same smooth, skinny legs with feet pointed in opposite directions as Old Bata. Seeing such things brings me great joy. I wish it happened more often. There are afternoons when I remain in my room for hours because the thought of the distance between here and home is more than I can bear. In my bed, with my eyes closed, there is no distance. But then I rise and I remind myself that I did not come here to wish for what I’d left behind. I came here to find what I’m searching for, and I get it every day, in my classes, and in the books I’m reading, and in a meeting of students who believe they must do something about the things they cannot accept. It is there I’ve made some friends. Together we talk about what we must do for our peoples.
Some of my friends come from far away too and are as lost in this city as I am, even though they’ve been here for three, four years. Some of them are from America. They left their towns and came here to be lost and to be found, because there’s no better place to feel as if you belong, and yet feel terribly alone, than New York. It’s a sad feeling, wanting to be part of a strange, new world, while looking at it from a distance, watching those who’ve conquered it walk with high shoulders. Sometimes I take a bus from school to see what the rest of the city looks like. I look out the bus window at happy children and trash cans stuffed with the wastes of people with little time to spare. There’s a great deal of speed over here; everyone seems to need to be somewhere sooner than is possible.
The roads here all have names, and the houses have numbers. I laughed when I first saw it—I couldn’t imagine why we would ever need to put numbers on our huts. The names of streets are written on green boards, perhaps for the benefit of newcomers like me, those who need signs to help them navigate the city so that they may one day find their way out of it. The people around me seem to have no appreciation for this distinct orderliness of their world. I’ve never yearned for such order, since we have no need of it, but now that I see it—houses built in straight lines, streets as parallel as bamboo poles, everything with a name, days structured from sunrise to sunset—I recognize it as beautiful in its own way.
There’s also a river here, running along the city’s east side and past its southern tip. On the riverbanks are tree-shaded benches on which sit men lacking homes and women hoping for husbands, and people like me, gazing at the water. It is to this river that I go when I long for the quietude one can only get from the place of one’s birth. It is where I’m sitting as I write this to you.
I must go back to my room now. The schoolwork here is harder than we had in Lokunja, but it’s good for me. In a class I’m taking we’re studying one of my uncle’s books that I loved, the one called The Wretched of the Earth. I’m rereading my old copy and finally understanding it, thanks to all the lectures and class discussions. What this man has to say about what people in our situation ought to do, I’m in awe of it—my friends and I spend hours dissecting his ideas. I hope all Kosawa children will one day read this book; it’s a whole new way of thinking. Tomorrow a friend is taking me to a meeting. It’s in a part of the city called the Village, but my friend says that this Village is nothing like Kosawa. I’m fine with that—to be in a place named for the sort of place I’m from is enough.
Thank you for continuing to take care of my mother and Juba and Yaya. I know you do it not for me but from the goodness of your hearts, but I thank you still. When you reply to this letter, please ask my mother if there’s anything s
he would like to say to me that she wouldn’t be comfortable dictating for the Cute One to write down. I don’t think she has anything to say to me that she can’t say to him, but I don’t want her to ever worry that she can’t tell me certain things. I know that you will relay to me honestly, and completely, all the news that I need to know.
Have there been any births since I left? Marriages? My welcome in this place has been good, and while I won’t stay here a day longer than I need to, I’m glad I’m here now. Every day I learn new things. I don’t know how, but I’m convinced this knowledge I’m acquiring will do something for our people.
I’ll always be one of us,
Thula
What gladness her letter brought us. We could see, even on paper, that America was changing her. She was using more words, allowing us into what was going on behind her eyes. Perhaps being surrounded by friends who were like her in ways we weren’t had set her free to talk about things she couldn’t in Kosawa. Perhaps living alone had created in her a longing to talk more. Whatever the case, she could no longer be the inscrutable Thula we knew if she hoped to survive the life of an outsider. No matter the cost, the time had come for her to let in the world if she hoped to return home with what she sought.
* * *
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We didn’t have much to tell her in our response; little had changed for us.
We were still the seven of us, waiting for the rains to come and go, hunting antelopes and porcupines and taking them to the big market. We still got together in the village square and we attended death celebrations and birth celebrations and marriage celebrations, keeping our eyes on the girls we’d decided to marry, making sure they were still proving themselves worthy of our love and protection. The father of one of us had recently died, and we knew it wouldn’t be long before all of our fathers left to meet the ancestors and we’d have to bear children to fill up our huts, and then become our fathers, and someday our grandfathers, though the thought of that did not delight us.
The village still met with the Sweet One and the Cute One. They rarely had much to report except for the fact that things were moving, slowly but certainly. They claimed that as soon as discussions between the Restoration Movement and Pexton were completed, the pipelines would be fixed and the waste swept off the river and the gas flares reduced. For now, though, they said, it would be best if we focused on the fact that children were dying less often, thanks to the bottled water, and buses were taking boys to Lokunja to acquire knowledge. Before we knew it, Kosawa would be Kosawa again.
When we had asked them, at the last meeting, when they thought Pexton would leave, would it be years or decades, they had replied that, well, that was a tough question to answer. Our best option for now, they said, was to learn how to be good neighbors with the corporation. We told them that Pexton could never be our neighbor because the land wasn’t theirs. The land was our land. It would never be theirs, no matter how often they said so. The Sweet One responded that he understood and completely agreed with us, but the ownership of the land was now a matter of law, only the government could determine who owned what land. He told us that, the previous week, His Excellency had declared that just because our ancestors claimed the entire valley as theirs did not mean the valley was theirs and ours as a result. Which meant that the land belonged to all the people of the country; the government, as the servant of the people, had the authority to give some of the people’s land to Pexton so Pexton could use it to better the lives of all citizens.
At this revelation, we stood up, our voices raised in pained incredulity, this being the first time we’d ever heard such a thing. The Cute One begged us to calm down. He said the entire world agreed with us: no government had the right to make such claims. But until the day His Excellency agreed with us, he added, Pexton would not be leaving.
We told Thula this in our letter.
We told her that, based on the Sweet One’s statement, we did not believe Pexton would ever clean up or leave our land; our children and their children would in all certainty live forever amid their poison. We told her we did not understand why the Restoration Movement was regurgitating such nonsense to us—the fact that they were doing so made us wonder how much our suffering pained them. How hard could we trust them to fight for us, considering that their most powerful weapon was words? Wasn’t it time we stopped using words and tried something else, something altogether new?
We did not receive a response from Thula for several months.
The day we finally did was a rainy day when we’d all stayed home. She told us, in her letter, that the cold season had left the city and it was now close to warm, though not as hot as she wished. She’d done better in her classes than she had hoped. Then she said:
Remember that meeting I told you I was going to attend in my last letter? The one in the place called the Village? My friend was right, nothing about the place reminded me of Kosawa, but I cannot tell you how much the meeting energized me. The moment I left there I began writing this letter in my head, eager to tell you everything I’d witnessed. The people at this meeting were there to talk about what we could do about corporations like Pexton. These people were not like the ones at the Restoration Movement, talking about how we can peacefully bring about change with dialogue, negotiation, common ground, more dialogue. No, these people were angry. One man stood up and spoke of a place many days’ travel by car from New York, this place has pipelines too. The pipelines are not spilling like ours, but the people there do not want them crossing their land, they say pipelines are a calamity waiting to happen. Their government disagrees, so these people have to live with the pipelines just as we have to. Pipelines, in America—can you believe such a thing? The pipelines here run under the ground, but the people say it doesn’t matter—simply having them deprives their land of its sanctity. But their government is not concerned about the sanctity of their land. In this country, governments and corporations are friends too. Over here, governments also sit back and do nothing while corporations chain people up and throw them in bondage.
And there’s another place, on the other side of the country, where children are drinking poisoned water. The government knew the water was poisoned and did nothing about it. Listening to this, I thought I was in some bizarre dream in which America had revealed itself to be Kosawa. The stories were endless. There’s also an area south of here, where land is disappearing into the sea. Every day land the size of a small village is lost, all because oil corporations have the liberty to do as they please and the government chooses to do little while its citizens watch helplessly. I could hardly breathe as I listened to these stories about small corporations and big corporations, about government offices that said one thing when something else was the case, about representatives who told people nothing was wrong though they knew disaster was approaching. We knew we were not the only ones in our country, but could you have ever imagined that such things are happening to people in great countries too?
I’d long thought that our problem was that we were weak, lack of knowledge our greatest incapacity. My father, my uncle, all those who stood up for Kosawa and lost their lives, I thought they failed because they were unschooled in the ways of the world. I promised myself after the massacre that I would acquire knowledge and turn it into a machete that would destroy all those who treat us like vermin. I badly wanted to grow up so that I could protect Kosawa and ensure that children of the future never suffer like we did. Knowledge, I believed, would give Kosawa power. But these Americans, with their abundance of knowledge, how could they be powerless too? How is it that their government, which is supposed to be their servant, is acting as their master? From the books I read in our last years at Lokunja, I’d come to believe that if we could design a democratic government, just as is the case in America, our country would be a wonderful place to live in. But now that I live here I’m realizing that something far more complex is going on all over the world, somet
hing that binds us to these beset Americans and others like us in villages and town and cities in nations big and small. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it all out, and nothing will be the same after we do.
I wanted to stand up during the meeting to tell our story too, but I didn’t know if my voice would hold steady, and I wanted nothing of putting myself up for pity, this being my first time speaking in a room full of strangers. It was while I was urging myself to stand that I saw a slim man get up to join the line that had formed for those who wanted to speak. I saw that stringy hair moving toward the front, and I knew it was him. Austin.
He greeted the crowd good evening when his turn came. He said it was only his second time coming to this meeting; he’d lived for several years overseas and had attended dozens of meetings of this nature, and from them he had learned a great deal. He didn’t know what he would do if such meetings didn’t exist, opportunities for solidarity with the likes of us. If not for them, what would we do with all our anger? Put it in a bottle and light a fire in it and turn it into a good bomb, someone shouted. The room roared in laughter. Austin chuckled. He’d been to many places and seen the extent of human depravity, he said, but he still didn’t know what he could attribute it to—greed seemed too trite a reason. All he knew was that there was much that we still needed to understand about ourselves before we could find solutions. There was one village he’d been to, he went on, he didn’t know what the solution for the people there might be. He wanted to share their story still, because it was a story some people in the room might have read in the newspapers, but none had likely been to that place, except for him.