by Imbolo Mbue
Nightly, we contemplated this in the village square, shaking our heads at the wonder of it all. Not even bullets had been able to end their lives. We talked about the time in the not-too-far future when people from other villages would start arriving on the bus in search of wisdom and healing from the best medium and medicine man in the area. Aware of the truth that Kosawa could one day become a beacon of light in the darkness of our nation, we affirmed our resolve to stay in it even if everyone else fled.
* * *
We told Thula of the twin’s return in a letter. We told her of how their hands had never been separated, not even at the moment they re-entered the world. They’d died hand in hand, thus returned hand in hand, and it appeared they would live out this return hand in hand, for they slept as such, and crawled as such, and when guests arrived to visit them, they had to carry both of them at once, careful not to separate their hands, because everyone had agreed that their hands should never be separated until they decided to separate the hands themselves.
In her reply, Thula told us that she’d shared the good news with her friends in New York City and they’d been confused: they couldn’t understand how Jakani and Sakani could return after being buried. She had lacked words to explain it to them, she said; unless people had lived in our world and seen the things we had seen with their very own eyes, they could never understand how weak the laws of nature truly were.
* * *
—
For the next several years, with nothing to do regarding Pexton except wait and hope, our letters to Thula were mostly about ordinary happenings in the village—births, the size of harvests, deaths, spills and cleanups, relocations, silly gossip that our wives insisted we pass on to her—and her letters to us were about new experiences she was having, protest movements that she was involved in, the progression of her studies. In her eighth year away, she informed us that she had started making plans to return home in 1998.
She had finished one level of schooling by then, worked for a couple years, and was in the process of completing the most advanced level of education in her field of study, thanks to a scholarship that allowed her to study and teach. With the date of the completion of her education set, she had started turning her mind even more toward Kosawa, eager to continue the dialogue we’d started with Pexton. She was hopeful she and Mr. Fish would find common ground that would benefit Pexton and us. She was confident, also, that the coming years would be an auspicious time for us to negotiate with Pexton. Apparently, Pexton had had other stains on its reputation in the years since the massacre, one of which happened when an American newspaper exposed maneuvers Pexton was using to avoid paying taxes to the American government. Though Pexton had defended itself against all accusations, they’d realized that their future profits would depend on showing the world more of their moral side. Based on what we’d told Thula about Mr. Fish, she believed that moral side was already revealing itself.
It heartened us to know that eight years had done nothing to diminish her love for her birthplace. In her first year away, we had fretted that America might do something to make her forget Kosawa, perhaps by offering her things we couldn’t. In her second year away, despite her letters and the money she sent, we worried still, for we could see Austin had entered her heart and altered it. In one of her earlier letters, she’d written:
The other night he and I went to a party at one of his friends’ apartments. He knows dancing is not my thing but he still led me to the dance floor, saying I needed to learn how to dance my way through life. Before I knew it, I was dancing, and enjoying it. I can see the shock on your faces as you read this. Thula, dancing? Turns out in this country, unlike in Kosawa, dancing does not have to be done a particular way. You can move your body any ugly way, even the way I do, and nobody’s going to tell you to please sit down lest you hurt yourself. Even though I did have that thought while looking at one man at the party. He was a heavy man, but his size was of no matter—he was banging his head and spinning and smiling as if the world were boundless with bliss. When I pointed him out to Austin, Austin chuckled and said everyone alive should be that uninhibited. He said the man reminded him of a colleague of his uncle’s who was just as fat; the colleague was one of the best dancers he’d ever seen—any party this man was invited to was destined to be unforgettable; the man was full of jokes and crazy stories; people like him were what he missed the most about Bézam….He would have gone on reminiscing if I hadn’t told him that I did not care to know any more about this person, certainly not in the midst of my fun. He stopped talking and spun me around, laughing hard as I shook and twirled in all the worst possible ways.
I never dreamed that I’d become one of those people who count down to when next they’ll see their beloved’s face, but here I am, Austin makes sure of it. He’s perfect for me. Every day with him is as if the world has conspired to make me happy. He sings to me. He takes me to try all kinds of foods across the city. Last weekend the weather was warm, so we laid a blanket on the grass in a park and spent the day reading to each other. After that we bought and ate food on the street, then strolled hand in hand to a river to watch the sun set. The next day, he took me to see the ocean for the first time. I’d love to tell you about it, but I would need a whole book to describe its beauty and majesty, how it felt when the waves crashed against my feet.
In every way our spirits are one, except when it comes to Kosawa; he has no sense of loving a place the way we love our village. He doesn’t understand how Kosawa is the beginning and end of everything we’ve ever had. I try to explain to him that I cannot give up on the struggle for which Papa and Bongo gave their lives, and he says he understands, we should never forget our people, but when he begs me not to leave him, I know he doesn’t understand. How could he, when he didn’t live our brand of fragile innocence? When his childhood didn’t end with friends dying in succession? When he never went to sleep wondering if he’d live to see the next day, wondering if soldiers or drinking water would be his demise? How can he appreciate our resolve to give to the children what Pexton stole from us?
He says he doesn’t need to have experienced what we went through to see our viewpoint, but I don’t believe him—no one who had a childhood like ours could ever be at home in another man’s land. Even those who, unlike me, cannot physically return home, do so with their spirits—their sanity demands it. No matter where they go, they carry their birthplace, never apart from all that it gave and took away from them. They seek its warm air on cold days, imagine its sunshine when clouds cannot be subdued. They see long-lost faces in a sea of strangers. They hear a voice and remember a story from a distant evening. A love song breaks their heart, for they yearn for their motherland to hold them, caress them, whisper in their ears. It will never be so again; those days are far gone. But the nostalgia, it makes crybabies out of grown men on the darkest of nights—many of them will never be whole again. They’ll be forever poorly patched and existing in a world that has little time to ask them to tell their stories—who cares for their stories? I don’t want such a life for myself. I want my spirit and body to dwell for all the years to come in the place where my ancestors once proudly strode.
Sometimes I fantasize that Austin will return with me. He speaks often of how his years spent in our country were his happiest after his mother died and before he met me—his uncle was good to him, he made great friends in Bézam, he loved writing about our country. But it’s unlikely he’ll ever come back. After he dug up his uncle in Kosawa, and once his uncle had been reburied and his uncle’s wife had accused him of being complicit in his death and some of his cousins had stopped speaking to him, he began packing his things to fly to New York for a few months to take a break, only to have His Excellency’s soldiers show up to deport him to America and make his trip permanent. All these years later, though, he finds no comfort in his homeland.
* * *
—
Much as we hop
ed Thula wouldn’t give too much of her heart to Austin, we wished him well. If a man couldn’t find solace in his own birthplace, what chance did he have at happiness? When we asked Thula the source of Austin’s unrootedness, she wrote:
I think being born to parents from two different parts of the world made him a man from somewhere and elsewhere but sadly from nowhere. Worse still for him, the parent he most loved as a child, the one who molded him into who he is today, was the one from elsewhere, who died young and left him to navigate a life of perplexity alone. He speaks often of how beautiful and wonderful his mother was. The only woman I’ve ever met in her league is you, he’s said to me. From the stories his mother told him before her death, her marriage to his father was one of life’s funniest jokes. She loved her life in her village, not far from Bézam; she never aspired to leave it. Austin’s father was in our country simply to preach about salvation, not to find a wife. But when his father saw his mother’s beauty, and later heard her say she believed his message of one eternal glorious morning, he swore he wouldn’t return to America without her. She always laughed when she got to this part, he told me in his recounting, and his father laughed with her.
His mother’s parents did not need much convincing to give their daughter in marriage to an American missionary—his mother was the ninth of fifteen children and the preferred child of neither parent, so the parents had taken the bride price Austin’s father gave, thrown a small wedding, and made the groom promise he would keep their daughter safe. A week later, the couple was married again in an office in Bézam, and they left for America not long after. He said his mother never loved America, but his birth, ten months after her arrival, meant she only had time to think of her love for him. They did everything together, from cooking to singing songs from her village to sharing a bed when his father traveled for his new job as a medical device salesperson. When she was killed in a car crash one afternoon while he was in school, he thought he would die of grief.
It appears that little about his childhood after that was worth being nostalgic about. He and his father moved to a new town, where he attended a school for boys from rich families during the day and spent his evenings with a woman his father had hired to take care of him, since his father’s job took him away for most of the week. The other boys in his school found him odd, his skin too dark, his hair too high. In the silence of his father’s house, in a town in the middle of America, he read books that questioned the purpose of life, the futility of it all. He began writing, and it was in writing that he found the joy he feared he’d lost with his mother’s death. When it came time for him to further his studies, he told his father that all he wanted was to study the essence of existence, identify the reason for his birth. His father gave his encouragement—acceptance was the least the man could do to atone for all the things he couldn’t give his son.
When he was twenty, while living alone in an apartment his father had taken a loan to buy for him in Brooklyn, he decided to become a newspaperman, hoping to find a measure of purpose in writing about the lives of others. Wouldn’t his days brim with resolve if he were to spend them making known the stories of the deliberately unheard? Words written by others had shaped his world; why wouldn’t his shape the world? He laughs now when he thinks about it, but in his first years of being a newspaperman he loved it. He enjoyed chasing stories he believed the world needed to know, writing them, rewriting them, beseeching his supervisors if they weren’t keen on his ideas. Now, though he travels to different parts of the country to unearth specifics, though he holds on to scraps of hope that a story he’s written may entice his countrymen to reconsider their ways of thinking and being, he can’t dismiss his weariness with it all, what little difference his work makes, what a longing for the moon to come down it is.
He regrets writing the story about Kosawa. He says Bongo would be alive today if he hadn’t been so determined to expose Pexton. Was it worthwhile? I know it was worthwhile, we all know that, but it’s not my place to force him to believe so. I tell him that the Four, even if they hadn’t been hanged, would have died either way, and he agrees—we can escape the hangman for only so long, the noose is coming for us all. Still, he’s not certain much is worth fighting for anymore. Certainly not a battle like ours against Pexton, given its lopsidedness. He wants us to win, of course. He says if we defeat Pexton we’ll be the rare story he’s written to get a happy ending. Did he once truly believe that newspapermen could right the wrongs of the world? He scoffs at the memory. Folks read the stories he and his fellow newspapermen write, he says, and they sigh. They carry on with their days, leaving the words soggy and lonely at the bottom of trash cans. Sometimes readers write letters to groups that might change the situation. Other times they march. Or stop buying from a corporation. Or they change governments. But too much remains the same. They carry on—what else can they do? Change may come when it’s ready to come, he says, or it may never.
* * *
—
We found it hard to understand how Thula, with her zeal, could be so bonded to Austin and his sense of resignation. The hearts of women are fickle and easily altered by love, which is why we prayed often for the Spirit to grant our friend wisdom. Before she left, she had promised us that she would write in her letters all there was to write so that we could keep her accountable; thus we were compelled to ask her, after recognizing that Austin was making her into a new creation, if, when the time came, she would leave Austin for Kosawa. If she were to decide to remain in America for the sake of love, we told her, we would accept it. We would rejoice and wish her well. To that she responded:
How could you ever doubt me? If I’m telling you about Austin, it’s not to make you wonder if I’ll return. I tell you so that you may know why I must return even though my heart cries out in protest. Yes, I want to be with him up to the moment when I have just one breath left. I want to lie next to him and cry about Papa and Bongo and a world gone so thoroughly mad I want to rip it apart and free the universe from humans. He wants the world re-created too, but not in the way we seek to do it. He believes in dialogue, in people sharing their stories, hearing others’ stories, enemies gaining new perspectives on each other. I’m tempted to laugh at his naïveté in thinking stories alone can do that. When I told him about your first attack at Gardens, he was aghast that we’d gone in that direction. He and I had a quarrel about it; we didn’t speak for days. I find it hard to discuss anything about the struggle with him. Still, I do, he’s my best friend. But if he doesn’t understand my vision, how can I let him stand by me in the years to come?
Over and over he tells me that what we need is patience. He says His Excellency and his government will sooner or later crumble under the weight of their reckless greed and Pexton will flee with them. It infuriates me when he says it. Patience, be patient. What we need isn’t patience. What we need to do is fight. But he doesn’t believe in hostility; he says every single conflict in the world can be resolved by dialogue. I told him ours hasn’t been—that’s why we’ll fight on.
* * *
—
But how were we to fight on when we’d put down our weapons? we asked her.
By the time of that letter, it had been four years since our agreement with Mr. Fish, and still no percentages were forthcoming. We were not eager to pick up our machetes again, but we could not let them take us for imbeciles. We told Thula that perhaps the time had come for us to revive our late-night visits to Gardens. We needed to remind them that our farms were still producing shriveled crops, our well was still full of toxic water, our children were still breathing poisonous air.
Thula agreed. “It appears keeping a promise means nothing to them,” she wrote.
She did not, however, want us to resume our attacks immediately. She wanted us to wait until after her return, which she was in the process of planning. She wanted to sit down with Sonni and the elders and convince them that while she was determined to e
ngage in dialogue with Pexton, she also believed that we should not wait for Pexton indefinitely—it was important to her that the elders and we were in accord that if Pexton failed to meet our demands, we would reinstate our former tactics. She wanted to explain to the elders that the Restoration Movement would likely at some point move on from Kosawa to another place, and that wouldn’t be unkind of them, it was how these things worked; we had to start planning for the day when we would have little outside support.
We agreed with everything she said. We told her we would wait for her return before reigniting the battle, for we knew that, with her back, our tenacity would grow.
In her next letter, she told us about another idea she had been pondering.