by Imbolo Mbue
Our first night in the city, after my new papa had hugged us and fed us and given us water with ice cubes in it, he asked us to tell him everything about our trip. Then he said to us: This is your home, now and forever. Mama nodded. She told me to thank my new papa, yet she whispered to me before I went to sleep, “Never forget your old papa.” I said, “Yes, Mama.” I swore to her that I’d keep Papa in my heart always. I was ashamed to tell her that I’d already begun to forget Papa, Bongo too. My memories of them were waning, much as I wanted them never to.
One week after my arrival, my new papa held my hand and walked me to my new school. He guided me around cars green, red, and yellow; bought me sweet things to eat along the way. He gave me money for lunch and wiped the sweat off my face with his handkerchief. He’d never had a child; his heart was full of love he was desperate to share.
* * *
—
Years came, years flew. The faces of Kosawa faded away, my old papa’s among them. My new friends, when they came over to play, could see that Mama still lived in Kosawa, dressing as if she’d never left. She couldn’t speak English, unlike their parents, most of whom worked for the government. Mama thought often of her former life, asking me if I remembered this or that person, or the day such and such happened, making up songs about the hut in which we once lived with my old papa, sad songs that ended whenever my new papa returned from the office. When she heard my new papa’s footsteps, Mama’s melody abruptly turned joyful. Her voice rose as she set his food on the table. She did to him as she used to do to my old papa—she pulled out a dining chair for him and watched, smiling, as he ate and said a more delicious meal had never coated a man’s plate. She brought him water to clean his hands at the table, and helped him settle on the couch after his meals, so he could be as relaxed and content as a man ought to be.
Papa made sure Mama’s purse was never light. He gave her all she would need to keep the house clean, the food abundant, and retain for herself enough cash to travel to other parts of the city and laugh with women from her area, women she had overheard chatting in the market not in any of the lingua francas of our country but in the language unique to Kosawa and its sibling-villages. That sufficed as a basis for friendships.
After her visits to friends, Mama got off buses stuffed with brash city people to find Papa waiting for her, his trophy, in the living room. He stood up every time to kiss her, his eyes aglow. Even though his hair was gray, he could still lift her, which made her giggle as he carried her to the bedroom, telling me to go to sleep as he shut their door.
* * *
Alone in my bedroom, I thought about the night I had returned from the dead. I lost something that night; I don’t know what. I gained something; I don’t know what. I remember everything about the journey except what I lost and gained. My old papa handed me to Mama after my eyes opened. He needed to hurry to the back of the hut to hide his tears—he couldn’t contain his pain. Mama held me as she cried from relief. Yaya cried. Thula cried. They caressed me, asked me how I was feeling. I gave them no response as I looked around the parlor, searching for the thing I’d brought back from the forest yonder. I wanted to tell Mama about another thing, the thing I’d left behind, but I couldn’t recall dropping anything before jumping over the river everlasting. It seemed plausible that I’d traveled with nothing but my body and returned with nothing but my body. Yet even now, decades after that day, I twitch and sweat in my sleep, searching. During the day, I’m overcome with worry, a suffocating urge to look for it, this thing I brought back. It has to be somewhere, the thing I lost, what was it? How could I live without it? I’ve accepted, after years of pondering, that I’ll always be dead and alive, both and neither.
I wanted to ask my old papa to help me understand what happened that day, how Jakani managed to find me and guide me back home—Papa had a way of making the inexplicable logical—but he left for Bézam soon after I returned. I honor his sacrifice, dying so I might live long, but I wish I’d told him before he left that if Jakani hadn’t called me back I would have gladly continued walking toward the ancestors. I’d beheld their hilltop city, glimmering in the distance, and I was eager to get there.
* * *
—
As a child with few friends, a burdened mother, an oft-distant sister, a broken grandmother, I watched life carry on around me after Papa and Bongo died. In a corner of the parlor, I sat and filled notebooks with drawings. The urge to draw came upon me not long after I returned to life. I’d never drawn before, but one evening I picked up Thula’s pencil and a piece of paper. Images took form as my hand moved over the page. After the massacre, I felt no urge to cry, only to draw what I’d seen.
I wish I could spend my life drawing and painting the world around me.
Were it not for the duties love has placed upon me, I would find a way to move to Europe, where my favorite artists are from, and see what sort of life would avail itself to me. Only when I sit down to draw do I find answers to my questions, answers language cannot relay. Only in my illustrations does it make sense to me, what happened in Kosawa, the absurdities of humanity. It is my sole escape from the senselessness of existence, rendering the world as I see it. A world where real turns surreal before my eyes—that is how I began experiencing life the day I returned. At work, a colleague’s head morphs into glass while we’re chatting. A book flies off my shelf and burns in the air. A crown descends on Mama’s head. My beloved’s skin turns translucent, I see her blood flowing. None of it frightens me, though I developed a fever the first time it happened, when Woja Beki was speaking at a village meeting and his tongue turned into a dog’s tail. These days it happens at random, but when I close my eyes and attend to my breath, all is real again. I can tell no one, not even Mama and Papa, not even the woman I love—they might consider me deluded. I accept it as the price I have to pay for two lives.
* * *
—
My best nights of sleep in my adult life were the four nights before my sister returned from America. I was finally ready to tell someone about my affliction, and it could only be Thula, the one who had fed and bathed me after our father vanished and our mother could do nothing but mourn for him and the baby who had died in her womb.
I imagined Thula would laugh at my confession and tell me that my condition was ordinary, all humans lived in a land between life and death, the world was just too chaotic for most people to notice. Perhaps she wouldn’t say anything. It wouldn’t matter. I just wanted to sit beside her again at the dining table and finish her leftovers. I wanted her to recount to me the conversations she used to have with our old papa about the whys of the world. I wanted to walk next to her, in awe of her singularity, like I used to in Kosawa.
I still remember our embrace at the airport the day she returned.
She looked at my bearded face, laughed, and said: Hey, what happened to my handsome little brother? It was for Mama and me that she left Austin and America. For Kosawa, yes, but for her family too. It was for us she took the job teaching at the government leadership school, though she had rejected their offer time after time, wanting nothing to do with people she deemed soulless. The government persisted, promising her she would have the freedom to teach whatever classes she wished—brains like hers were rare, and the sciences she’d studied would be vital to the well-being of the future children of the republic. They offered her a car and a driver and more money than she would ever need, money Kosawa needed, money her movement would need.
So, just as Papa joined forces with Woja Beki and went to Bézam though he hated Woja Beki and Gono, just as Papa did what he did not care to do, my sister shook hands with the government and went to work for them after she returned from America.
* * *
—
We lived and worked in different parts of the city, but we were together on many evenings, especially in those first years after her return, when she needed me to i
ntroduce her to the city. She had stopped eating animal products in America because Austin did not eat them, but in Bézam she began eating fish again. On some evenings, she and I would drive around the city in my car, searching for women roasting fish on street corners. My sister enjoyed our evening visits with Mama and Papa in their house—she loved how they fawned over her and asked her please to eat more, a mighty wind would be the end of her with so little flesh stuck on her bones—but she also relished Bézam street food. She loved the roadside banter with the other roasted-fish customers, conversations about the heat, the proliferation of stray dogs on the streets, the country’s football team, which had just won a match—finally, something to be proud of about our country. Sometimes, if the roasted-fish lady had a boombox, my sister stood up and danced to the music with other patrons, her moves as unsightly as they were in Kosawa, her spirit unburdened, if only for a few minutes. Once, as I was dropping her off, she said that she hadn’t thought she’d ever say this, but she loved living in Bézam.
Just not enough to forget Kosawa.
In the months after Carlos filed the lawsuit, she talked about the struggle daily.
I listened to her and tried, as gently as I could, to tell her that she’d done her part to save our village, no one would blame her if she decided to step back and just await the verdict from America. She did not agree with me: fighting for Kosawa was her birthright.
* * *
—
Fighting for Kosawa was not my birthright. Which is why I made up my mind, after Liberation Day, to start disentangling myself from my sister’s dreams. I was weary of it all, the traveling, the waiting, being away from my beloved, my sister’s constant agonizing over strategy, the seesawing of hopefulness and despair. I’d done everything I could for Kosawa. I’d done everything I could to help her. I could not make my life one of service to another human’s cause, not even if that human was my sister. I never explicitly said anything to her—we still went to eat roasted fish, I still visited her in her office, she was my sister—but I knew I couldn’t be part of her revolution anymore. I wasn’t her; I would never be like her; I had to go my own way. I found solace in the fact that she had the Five, and her devotees from her Village Meeting, which I never attended. Looking at her on days when she couldn’t get off her couch from exhaustion, I wished she’d chosen another way of life. I wished she’d chosen Austin over Kosawa. I wished she wasn’t sacrificing so much for others, not after what our family had endured.
* * *
In a letter I sent her months before her return from America, I told her how happy I was that she was coming home. We would get to be a complete family again—she and I, Mama and our new papa. I told her I was certain she and my girlfriend, Nubia, would love each other. She was enthralled by the prospect of loving my girlfriend, the idea that she would have someone akin to a sister. She enjoyed the story I’d told her about the day Nubia and I met, how I’d said to Nubia, “Is your name really Nubia? Unbelievable, my uncle and my sister, when I was young, they used to read a book about Nubia, they showed me pictures in it.” Thula had sent Nubia a card thanking her for loving her brother. Just before Thula returned, she wrote Nubia saying how eager she was for their meeting. When they finally met in person, though, and saw the full extent of each other, it was clear a friendship would never be—they were as alike as a mountain and a valley.
It did not change what I felt for Nubia.
I’d made up my mind to travel the remainder of my life with her the day she said to me, by way of telling me her story, “Fathers—doesn’t our pain begin and end with them?”
Nubia’s father had a dream for our country and he named her after that dream, so her name would serve as a reminder to him, to everyone, that, as surely as the ocean’s waves are born and reborn, gentle and mighty, everything that once existed would return to take its rightful place, be it where it was before, or wherever it finds suitable upon return. By naming her Nubia, he declared his belief that no ends exist, only new beginnings, like the seeds that fall and bear trees that drop seeds that bear new trees, like the water that falls from above only to be pulled up from below and sent back whence it came. Nubia was, Nubia would return.
When she was a child, her father told her of the land of Nubia, and a time too long ago for her to comprehend. He said the women of Nubia rode black panthers on streets covered with rose petals, and men there walked with high shoulders. He told her these stories sitting by her bed, on nights when she couldn’t sleep. He spoke to her in English—the only language they spoke at home, so she and her brothers and sisters would be ready when the time came for them to go to America. “Why did our people leave Nubia, Dad?” she asked him. “They were men of zeal,” he said. “They wanted to create a new Nubia, spread wide our greatness.” “Why did they fail?” “They never failed,” he told her, “they forge on through us.”
One day, when you wake up, he said, we’ll be back in Nubia. You’ll be a Nubian princess. You’ll live in a kingdom.
He was gone by the time she woke up, to work in the presidential palace. He was one of a dozen men tasked with guarding the life of His Excellency under the leadership of the Captain. It was from the Captain that he had learned about Nubia; it was for the Captain’s vision that he would lose his life. Did her father ever ponder how ridiculous that tale was? She doubts it. On the night when the Captain stormed the palace to kill His Excellency, take his place, and rename our country Nubia, her dad was there, a guard turned traitor. He killed two men as he searched for His Excellency alongside the Captain, a man who, having seen enough madness in the palace, had decided to rewrite our nation’s story and free us from our abductor. Nubia’s father and the other five guards wanted the same thing. For a new country named Nubia, they were willing to lay down their lives. Lay them down they did, all seven of them. They were captured and executed by the palace gates, their bodies left for crows to feast on, for His Excellency to smirk upon during his comings and goings. The bodies remained on display for days, so that every soul in the nation could see the folly of coups. Nubia saw her father’s body, though not with her eyes—her family shut themselves up in their house. She sees her father’s body still, in her mind. She hears his voice every time His Excellency appears on television to speak.
It all ended that day, their lives as America-bound children with skins glowing from wealth. Their lives as a family hanging in the highest circles of Bézam, lounging by swimming pools. Her dad’s relatives arrived from the village with a message: her mother had to leave the house, which now belonged to her father’s eldest brother, the head of the family. Her mom did not beg. She did not tell them that His Excellency had taken all of her husband’s money, so they had nothing, only the house. Her mom packed her children’s things, hiding her tears. She took them to a friend’s house and listened as the friend explained why she couldn’t let them stay. The friend said everything but the truth about why she could no longer associate with them, the family of an enemy of the republic; she couldn’t say she had privileges to safeguard, a husband’s job to protect, children whose bright futures she had to ensure. To the next friend they went, and the next, until they had no one, until Nubia learned that the world abounded in women who were afraid to be bitches. She promised herself she’d never be like them.
The only woman who offered her family a pot to lick was a woman her mother once met at a party. She saw them waiting at a bus stop as she was driving by and stopped. Since she was in need of a new servant, she offered them her servant’s room, a shed at the back of her house, one room for them to share, a mother and five children. Their food would be free, but her mother would have to cook for the household—husband, wife, a daughter Nubia’s age. Nubia’s mother would have to go to the market, clean the house, hand-wash clothes, serve meals, wash and dry dishes, do what servants once did for her. Her mom said yes. In the shed they lived. They slept on a single bed, lying horizontally to fit on it. That is
what her father condemned them to the day he gave his life for a dream.
She told me, crying, of the night when she was seventeen and the wife and daughter of the house had traveled to visit relatives and the husband was alone at home. How she entered the husband’s bedroom and shut the door behind her, took off her clothing as the man’s eyes bulged. How she did to him things she’d read about in steamy novels. He grunted so loud she feared his wife would hear in the next district. She returned for three more nights. They did it again when he found a reason to send his wife and child away for two weeks, during which time she went to him after school, telling her mom she had to study. In his ecstasy, he promised to do anything and everything to help her and her mom and her siblings. He kept his promise and got her into the leadership school, where I was waiting for her to walk beside me on my climb to the top of the government.
When she was done telling me her story, she swore that when she had children she would burn down cities to give them everything and rip out the hearts of anyone who dared try to take anything that belonged to them. I knew then that she would one day become the rock upon which I would build the next generation of the Nangi family.
* * *
—
Mama began telling me when I was a boy that the Nangi family name was mine to carry forward; she said I had to do all I could to extend our bloodline. Yaya reminded me often too that I would have to one day marry and have children, and that I would need to tell my children about those who came before me. For nodding at everything Yaya said, she blessed me with good fortune.