Bakhita

by Veronique Olmi

  * * *

  —

  They are chained to each other. Men in front. Three of them. With chains around their necks, linked to the other two men’s necks. Women behind. Three of them. With chains around their necks. Linked to the other two women’s necks. They are all naked, like her. There is also a little girl, scarcely older than she is. The girl is not chained, and the two children are put side by side, between two guards, bringing up the rear. She watches this procession, the guards have whips and rifles, the chained walk on, uncomplaining, they have not looked at her, will not look at her. And yet all through her life she will seek out eye contact with those who have been mistreated, by life, work or their masters. She is stepping into the world of organized violence and obedience, she is seven years old and, despite her fear, she watches attentively. She did not know people could walk in chains under the lash of whips. Did not know this was done to humans. And does not know what this is called. So she asks the other child what this is.

  “Shhh…” the girl replies.

  “Who are they?” she says again, more quietly. But the child indicates that she doesn’t understand. Doesn’t speak her dialect.

  “Them!” she says, pointing to the young men walking ahead of them. “Who?”

  The other girl screws up her eyes, trying to understand. “Abid,” she says suddenly, then points to her. “You: abda.”

  A feeling of dread strikes her like a physical blow. Abda. Her sister. That’s what this is. What happened to her. Abda, slave, it’s the worst that could happen, it’s Kishmet and it’s Bakhita herself. And all of a sudden it is real, it comes to life in front of her, right there, before her eyes, and for the first time she wonders: “Is Kishmet here?” She will never stop asking herself this question.

  * * *

  —

  She can remember being lost in the smoke in her village, calling to her mother who could not hear her. She looks at these young girls in chains, can still hear her mother screaming, Tell me what you saw! And now she is the one her mother orders to see. So she looks, young bodies already stooped, scars on their backs, their feet torn to shreds, and the word “slave,” that word full of terror walking ahead of her. The child next to her points to her own chest and says very quietly, “Binah. Bi-nah.” Then points to her and asks a question she does not understand but guesses. She would like to reply but does not know how to. It is a long time since anyone has spoken to her, and every language is now foreign to her. She hesitates. Looks at the slaves. Then rubs her tear-filled eyes with her fingers, wipes the mucus from her face with her filthy arm, and utters the word for the first time, points to herself and says, “Bakhita.”

  * * *

  —

  In the days after that she feels she is crossing the whole world. Plains and deserts, forests, dry riverbeds, stinking swamps. They step over crevasses, furrows in wearied soil. They climb mountains. With burning hot stones that shift underfoot and bring down men laden like donkeys, stones hiding snakes that rear up their heads and hiss. She repeats her name to herself, this name she loathes. Tries to get to know herself: “Bakhita doesn’t scream when she sees the snake’s dancing tongue,” “Bakhita doesn’t grasp Binah’s hand when she falls on the stones…” With this new name, she is afraid the sun and moon will not recognize her. She tries to find her bearings in this new life, but she has no idea where she is going or what will happen. She knows her village is getting farther and farther away, does not recognize this landscape, everything she sees, she sees for the first time. The wind is hot, it whips her legs with fistfuls of sand, and its sting stays on her skin a long time, like the bites of the mosquitoes she never sees. There are days when the sky fills with water, a huge gray belly overhead, but no one talks of rain, no one says prayers or sings the songs that make the rains come, and so they stay there with their thirst, separated from the sky.

  * * *

  —

  She is no longer in prison but is in the vast ever-changing world, and she watches, exhausted but avid too. She sees birds with red-and-blue wings, they call to one another across great distances, then suddenly disappear, as if wiped from the sky in an instant. Will these birds fly to where her mother is? Can they both see the same things? Can she send her thoughts to her? She looks for her in everything she sees. Very early one morning she sees a falcon gliding in the sky, its wings open like a hand at rest, and the calm of it makes her weep. It is so like her mother, before the great sorrow. She sees flowers that nod in the wind, and wonders what their dance is trying to tell her but cannot make it out. Her mother would know. Her mother can read the landscape. She sees a fallen tree, knocked down by wild animals, its branches driven into the earth like claws, and remembers the trunk of the fallen baobab on which children play in her village, and where her mother sits to watch the morning sun rise. She hears animals running, hears them but does not see them, their footfalls rumble beneath her feet, she thinks of her mother dancing, she never leaves her, but over and above all her thoughts are exhaustion and pain. Thirst tormenting her. And her tears when she looks at the chained women, who are not her older sister. They make a watery sound in their throats, coughs kept inside. They groan and trip, their hands constantly on the move, their fingers quivering on outstretched arms. Their necks are cut and swollen, sometimes they try to ease the chains off their wounds, an endlessly repeated hand gesture, it has no effect, so they stop. And then they start again. This makes the guards laugh. Irritates them too, they say the women are lucky their hands are free, it won’t always be like that, and then they use their whips, their sticks, or their daggers, brandish their rifles. The women are frightened, and when one of them falls, it brings down the others, and everything is in disarray, the chains strangle them a little tighter, there are screams and sobs, they have to think about the others chained to them all the time, but she, no, she thinks of her older sister. Was this done to her?

  * * *

  —

  She realizes she has traveled a long way since being captured, she has walked very far and no longer even tries to remember landmarks: the hills, mountains, dunes, plains, and forests, she can’t learn all of it. This is the world, she is discovering it, the dialects change along with the landscape, the shape of the huts, the animals kept in pens and those on the plains, the people’s faces, the marks on their skin, the black of their skin, some are tattooed, others scarified, she has never seen this before, it is beautiful and terrifying. Some are as tall and narrow as grass stalks, others short like aged children, and all are accustomed to passing caravans. Their villages are on the slave route, which runs from zareba to zareba, centers scattered all over the land, places where slaves are gathered, guarded, and selected for the important traders to whom they belong, traders in ivory and captives. Later they will be taken to large markets. In the villages through which they pass, impromptu deals are sometimes struck. Those who have no slaves to offer sell someone they have stolen or a member of their own family. Bakhita saw this once, in a village ravaged by famine, a skeletal young man offering a little girl disfigured by starvation. The guards spat on the ground, who did he think they were? They lashed the girl with a whip and she collapsed instantly, proof she was worthless. Bakhita did not realize she was the boy’s sister, Binah explained this to her, insisting she must believe it. Bakhita blocked her ears. Sometimes knowledge of the world is terribly wearying. And then a moment later it is the very opposite. She wants to see everything, hear everything. Even what she does not understand. She wants to remember words in Arabic, remember what she sees, what hunger and poverty can do to people. She sees fear that gives rise to anger, and despair that gives rise to hatred. She acknowledges all of this but cannot put a name to it. The spectacle of humankind. The battle destroying them all.

  * * *

  —

  She learns that everyone buys and sells slaves, it is the most abject penury not to own just one or two. She sees slaves in the fields and in houses, blacksmi
ths, militiamen, farmhands, they are everywhere, an epidemic of slaves. When her guards buy more, and they always choose the young, they go through the same process every time: Before buying them, they check their teeth, eyes, skin, inside, outside, their muscles and bones, they throw the stick, make them turn around, jump, raise their arms, and talk too, occasionally. They beat any women who weep. Who wail when they are separated from their children, or stop wailing. The women open their mouths and their voices are hunkered deep in their stomachs, in icy silence. Bakhita watches them and thinks about Kishmet’s baby, was it a girl or a boy? She is dazed, giddy with so much heartbreak. She is part of this story, abda, and cannot escape it, cannot escape this terrifying story. She keeps going. And is frightened too. Because the trader not only buys, he also abandons. Abandons those too tired to continue, those who cough or limp, those who bleed or fall, but he keeps Binah and her. She wants him to keep them. Because it would be worse without him, she knows. Being abandoned by the guards does not mean being free, quite the opposite. Ever since she was captured she has known that other men could take her, keep her, and sell her. So she is afraid of being injured. Being ill. Showing that she is tired or thirsty. She follows the caravan, men in front, women behind, Binah and herself between the two guards. A long line of despairing naked figures, traveling across a supremely indifferent world. She whose father presented her before the moon, she who knew herself to be a guest of this world, now finds the universe no longer protects her. Slaves pass by and live nowhere. Their people do not exist. They are a part of this dispersal, this martyrdom, men and women far from their own lands, who keep walking and often die along the way.

  * * *

  —

  At night, before it is time to sleep, the guards remove the chains and padlocks from around the men and women’s necks, and put them on their feet. Two by two they are chained. The same is done to Bakhita and Binah. They are chained together, by their feet, and they do everything together. Filled with shame. At first they dare not look at each other and barely speak. One evening their embarrassment makes them laugh, so they hold on to this laughter and on subsequent evenings they laugh in anticipation of what they must do together, in the ground, and even if their laughter is more forced than heartfelt, it lends a little dignity to their shame. Bakhita learns this and will keep it her whole life, an enduring nicety: humor, a way of indicating her presence, and her tenderness too.

  * * *

  —

  She and Binah try to blend their dialects, and it is hard. They add in some words of Arabic, but the few Arabic words they know are harsh and coarse, unfit for what they want to say to each other. They want to describe their lives before. Tell each other what it was like then, when they were young (or even younger), and in so doing stay connected to those lives, to their own stories, to their living and their dead. Bakhita learns that Binah was taken shortly before she was. She too wants to find her mother. She says that her older sister was not taken by slave traders but died bringing a baby boy into the world. To explain her words, she mimes childbirth, the baby, and dying. Bakhita does not understand all of it. She looks at her little friend and remembers the children who once listened to her stories, there is the same expectation in Binah’s eyes. She decides against telling Binah about her twin, her father, the herd of cows she took down to the stream, and her brother who drew snake trails in the sand. And when Binah asks what her real name is, her mouth twists out of shape and she pinches her arm to stop herself from crying. Binah on the other hand knows her name. Her name is Awadir. She says it to Bakhita, like a secret she must never pass on, ever. The following night, they sleep holding hands. And Bakhita feels an unexpected strength, a powerful current, and this too is new: sharing feelings of love with a stranger when they can no longer be given to someone who is not there.

  * * *

  —

  One day, under the violent onslaught of a white sun, the caravan reaches Taweisha. This caravan is no longer quite what it was—some slaves have been bought and others have died—and all along the way it has been followed by hyenas and vultures waiting to feed on slaves. The sick whom the guards unchained and left to die under the sky. Those who simply stopped breathing and suddenly collapsed. Those who begged for respite, and whom the guards struck to the ground with their sticks, then left there. The route taken by the caravan is marked by broken skeletons like bundles of wood, picked clean and bleached white. Bakhita has come to know a death with no rituals or grave, a death that goes beyond death, associated not with people dying but a system living. She is afraid of the hyenas’ cries and the vultures’ flight, and does not know that on routes traveled by larger caravans, these animals, overfed, no longer hover. Slaves die and simply stay there in the vast silence of those roads that are like mass graves.

  * * *

  —

  Taweisha, the central station they finally reach after walking for thirty days, is the last frontier town between Darfur and Kordofan. This zareba is where the slave drivers bring captives they do not intend to take to the coast themselves. A town for every kind of trade and contraband. Trade in eunuchs. Trade in slaves who are exchanged or sold to middlemen. Contraband such as ivory, lead, mirrors, perfumes. Caravans large and small come together here, powerful dealers and small-time crooks, and everything is appraised, gauged, given a price.

  * * *

  —

  Straw huts and stone shacks cling to the hillside, in the area where the locals live. For the slaves there are large windowless sheds at the foot of the hill. When Bakhita reaches Taweisha, she does not know that she is now entering the implacable machinery of slavery. Her caravan is immediately inspected by two faroucs, as black as ebony, as black as she is, as black as her captors, but also slaves themselves. They run the camp, military men without whom nothing happens. They are envied and protected, they have farms in Taweisha, and wives and children, and slaves of their own, very young boys who were captured or volunteered to serve them and whose gratitude is unbounded, child soldiers, saved from destitution. The faroucs talk to Bakhita’s guards, they know them well, everything is based on trust, organization, and hierarchy. A few of the locals come down the hillside to have a look at them and to make comments in a language Bakhita does not understand, children gaze at them, unsurprised because this happens all the time, slaves that need grading before heading off to the big market. And all at once there is silence, people straighten and then bow, the Muslim cleric, the faki, has just arrived. Bakhita is meant to look humbly at the ground but she does not, she is suddenly drawn to a tiny baby sleeping in its mother’s arms, a local woman’s arms. She wants to touch the baby’s feet. In her mind’s eye, she steps out from the rows of slaves, leaves behind everything sordid, and makes for the newest, most fragile life. She hardly notices the faki, this feared, venerated man, dressed entirely in black, his long beard hanging down his chest, this man who has come for little boys. In the rows of slaves there are cries and sobs, whip cracks and pleas, fear travels through them like a breath of wind. Bakhita loses herself in contemplating the baby’s feet, they are so small, she had forgotten how beautiful a foot could be, with its tiny toes and almost transparent nails, its creases, the curve of it, the fine skin, she had forgotten a child’s foot, a foot that has never walked. The faki continues with his selection, he knows that of the twenty little boys he chooses, only two will survive emasculation. It is precisely this rarity that confers their value, and nothing fetches a higher price than a eunuch. The air is heavy, the breeze lifts the dry soil sluggishly, lazily. Bakhita reaches her hand toward the baby’s feet, the mother recoils, screaming, a guard strikes Bakhita with a whip, there is a brief silence before she cries, and the baby cries too, woken by its mother’s scream. Bakhita is not crying about the whipping alone, the searing shock of it, she is crying for the babies in her village, for Kishmet’s baby, and for the baby she once was but who is now lost. It is an inconsolable distress. The mother walks away with her child. The twenty
little boys follow the faki, he will castrate them himself, a distinction in which he takes pride, because this procedure that no Muslim is meant to undertake is usually entrusted to the Jews, but eunuchs are growing scarce and Darfur’s fakis do their bit. Darfur, to the west of Sudan, is the new location for human trafficking, an asylum for all wrongdoers, for brutality in brutality, and inhumanity in inhumanity.