I looked at Joyce’s hairy arms and gangly legs and thought of her telling me that her parents loved her sister more than they loved her. I thought of her saying that she hated her sister and how I had thought at the time I would never say that about my sisters and then I remembered that stifled giggle on the telephone extension and was immensely sad because it was all suddenly very clear that Joyce had betrayed me long before Shelley showed up and so I just shook my head and said, ‘It’s okay,’ and I stood up and walked away.
Joyce had her own reasons for agreeing to be the executioner. No doubt these were tied up in her not wanting to be seen as the nerd with the braces and the ageing parents, but I didn’t care about that. As far as I was concerned she was Brutus and I was Caesar lying prone on the playground.
* * *
For weeks before this final message was delivered, Shelley had greeted my every word with a sneer. Every story I told led to eye-rolls and unexplained titters. Candy and Joyce had often joined in, albeit uncomfortably. They never seemed to know what they were laughing at, but they needed to signal their support to Shelley.
The jibes had begun on a sludgy March afternoon as we walked home through melting snow. I mused about the Loch Ness monster, which we had been studying for the last few days. ‘Imagine if there was one in the Rideau Canal?’ I said out loud. I had been seized with the creature since I was seven, when Baba brought home a book about it. The idea that something ancient and secret had somehow survived modernity and was trapped in a lake in Scotland intrigued me. Here was a mystery that should be easy to solve, a riddle just beyond reach. Shelley fired back insolently, ‘The only monster swimming around here is from Africa.’
She wasn’t as clever as me, so she wasn’t very good at sarcasm. Her slow-wittedness meant statements like this were easy to shred. You could always see her coming. I read so many books and had memorised so many scenes of witty repartee that comebacks were easy for me. But with Shelley I felt frozen like Piggy in Lord of the Flies. I had been reading it at night when Mummy was busy with doing tax files and it had got into my head. I was certain that soon Shelley would be leading the mob, yelling, ‘Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!’
I had even scribbled her name into the margin when I first encountered Jack. And when Simon made his entrance, I had written ‘Joyce. Definitely Joyce.’
I could feel that I was about to be kicked out and there was nothing I could do about it. Dread had made its home in my veins.
The others looked down. In ordinary times I would have retorted, ‘Oh big words, Shelley. Can you spell “monster”? I’ll give you extra points if you can.’ Given how abysmally she was doing in school, I knew this would sting, but I held my tongue. I had learnt to deal with playground bullies, but this was different. Shelley was supposed to be my friend. Hurt trapped me and swallowed my tongue. ‘Ha ha!’ I said sarcastically, wanting to move on to another topic. I put my head down and kept walking. Shelley smirked; she had tasted blood.
Two days before, Shelley had come to our house after school. She had never come over before so I was surprised and pleased, if a little nervous. Mummy was at work and I hadn’t asked her permission to have a visitor after school because Shelley’s visit was impromptu. That day, instead of waving us goodbye and going into her house, Shelley had offered to walk me all the way to our housing units. Mandla and Zeng lagged, aware that when I was with my friends their job was to disappear and to act like we only vaguely knew each other.
When we got to our house I unlocked the door and let her in. She dropped her bag at the entrance and didn’t bother to take off her boots. She walked straight to the small sitting room where we never played, trailing in mud and dirty snow.
She ignored Mandla and Zeng as they dutifully started to carry out our after-school routine, set out in elaborate detail by Mummy. As usual, we washed our hands because the world was dirty and home was clean. Mandla turned on the heater in the kitchen, swirling the thermostat to twenty-eight to warm the place up like Mummy had shown us, then reducing it to twenty-four after a few minutes. Normally this was my task.
Usually we fixed ourselves sandwiches before going down to the basement to watch TV. Mandla and Zeng went down and I stayed upstairs, watching Shelley’s back warily, wondering whether I should disturb Mummy at work to tell her that Shelley had invited herself over and was it okay for her to be here? I decided not to and then thought about how quickly I might get the dirt out of the light-grey carpet Mummy had warned us only to walk on in stockinged feet.
I could see that Shelley didn’t care how we did things in our house and I could tell that she was here to discover something, I just didn’t know what. I stood in the hallway and watched as – with her back to me – she traced her fingers over Mummy’s framed Heidi Lange batik. It had come all the way from Nairobi with us and it hung in a similar position here as it had in our house in Nairobi: just above the couch, facing the television. The hooded eyes and dangling hoops of the jet-black woman in the frame surveyed us haughtily.
Shelley turned her attention to our mantelpiece. It was crammed full of photos of yellow-eyed grannies who had paid a great deal of money to have themselves posed and well-fed black men (Mummy’s and Baba’s fathers) whose eyes spoke of hard times despite their tight waistcoats and spotless white shirts. Next to them Lindi and Dumi kept straight faces in their school uniforms. And then there were the informal ones: a light-brown woman (Mummy’s sister Aunt Thandi) standing in a garden somewhere in Botswana holding a flower close to her face. And my favourite, taken at a picnic at Munda Wanga Gardens in Lusaka – a picture of Uncle Stan and Aunty Angela and Aunt Pulane and Uncle Zola and Mummy and Baba and Kholi and Yoli and Khaya and Vuyo and my sisters and me. We were all laughing and looking into the camera. But now I saw us through her eyes. We were just a group of long-limbed Africans sprawled out on a lawn somewhere foreign.
She turned to me and wrinkled her nose as though she had encountered something noxious: ‘Don’t you like even know anyone who isn’t from Africa?’ she had asked. The question was dangerous, each word a missile trained at my heart. I had never even thought about it, but now, looking at the house, at our art and our photos, through her eyes, we were different. We didn’t know very many people who weren’t Africans.
Shelley looked as though she had just discovered a dirty secret. I was an African, a girl who came from a faraway place filled with black people. I was not a solitary, affable exception: I had a tribe.
In the context of Shelley’s small but grand plan of middle-school domination, my difference was a problem. It was cruel and simple and completely within the logic of vanilla-white adolescent girlhood in mid-1980s Ottawa.
What it boiled down to was that we were almost twelve and soon we would be playing spin the bottle and obsessing about boys and in this context it was no longer enough for me to be fun, I also had to be pretty. In Shelley’s view the flatness of my nose and the breadth of my face and the Nguni heritage stamped onto my posterior meant that I wasn’t. I became a liability.
* * *
When Shelley and Joyce and Candy discarded the dark girl, they were playing out a ritual that is as old as contact between native women and the masters and mistresses who had conquered them. Much more was at stake than a little fight among girls.
The fight was existential. Their very own identities were on the line, forged as they had been in opposition to everything that I represented. White femininity is constructed as the polar opposite of a femininity which itself revolves around concepts that aren’t very feminine at all. Shelley’s knight in shining armour would also be fair of skin and hair and he would not be interested in her if she was hanging out with a bunch of other girls who were too hairy, or too large or too dark or God forbid in a wheelchair or fat. If Shelley herself stopped being the epitome of white-blonde petite beauty, the knight in shining armour might keep riding past her. Worse, he might decide to poke her with his bayonet or get his posse and come back and
burn down the village of misfits.
That long-ago spring all this was just under the surface so I couldn’t see it. All I knew was that I was in trouble and that this situation was not of my own making but that nonetheless it would impact me deeply, perhaps forever, if I allowed it to. I saw it but did not yet know what to do about it. I was strong though. I kept my head up and held my tears back and I saw out the last two weeks of school without friends. I survived, you see, because Mandla played with me at break and ate lunch with me every day and – finally – I let her.
* * *
The immigrant child knows that the key to survival is in the inflection points. It is in the way the head is cocked or the ease with which the foot pushes off the pavement before the first pedal on your bike. The key to survival is in blending in first, in learning how to be just like everyone else as a first step to freedom. You have to know how the inside works before you can stand outside and make everybody laugh.
My sisters and I learnt that we could only be individuals, that we could only make jokes and be funny – which was the key to popularity and social success – once we understood the rules. Until then, like all immigrant children we were quiet and observant.
The immigrant child doesn’t make any noise. She watches closely and sometimes she smiles to herself not because she is without humour – she is only keeping to herself so that she may one day be the one who dances on the table and tells the stories. She is preparing for the day when she will have mastered the art of being normal so that she can stand out.
We could have worn our hair in short natural Afros like Mummy did, but with the sensitivity of immigrant children we soon realised that this only highlighted the fact that we were different. We knew that being different signalled inferiority, so minimising the parts of ourselves that stuck out took on outsized meaning. Being like everyone else is important to all children. But to immigrant children, the words ‘the other kids don’t do that’ becomes a mantra. The immigrant child learns to understand that danger lurks in everyday interactions.
Until we went to Canada we had never given a second thought to what we looked like. We were as brown and braided as the next children. We had spent our childhoods flaunting our idiosyncrasies, revelling in a community that embraced peculiarity because it was premised on the rejection of the totalitarian society we were fighting in South Africa. To be yourself was to be free. The adults would watch us streak past them in Nairobi and remark, ‘Oh these children are so free.’
So, we were marinated in this milieu, and it was intoxicating. We had been indulged not in the usual way that one spoils a child, but in the way that only a community of exiles can do. We weren’t just children – we were representatives of ideals. We were a clean slate and a fair go and a new breed and everything our parents wished for in South Africa. And now, here we were – far away for the sake of freedom, but no more special than anyone else. We learnt quickly that here we would survive by being not peacocks, but turtles. Heads down, we moved forward, one foot slowly in front of the other.
When the snows came and the ice froze, we joined the neighbourhood kids, running to the tops of hills and sliding down on our magic carpets. We gobbled up BeaverTails pastries and learnt how to cross-country ski and on weekends we skated on the Rideau Canal and Mummy pretended that she did not hate all of it – the cold and the ice and the absent husband and the patronising Canadians who didn’t quite believe that he was off in Ethiopia fighting famine – what kind of an African was that? – and the aching anonymity of being nobody special in a large and flat society.
In the midst of it all Mandla and Zeng became my friends. I learnt to need them. In our old life in Nairobi they had just been in the background, two lumpy pieces of furniture I occasionally bumped into as I ran around with my friends doing big-girl things. In Canada they were suddenly old enough to have personalities and, in the face of so much change, they finally felt solid and important. Their eyes were intelligent and their noses weren’t just replicas of mine – Mandla’s looked like Baba’s and Zeng’s was just her own. They were differentiated beings, no longer babies. With its glorious whites – from its winter snow to its pale inhabitants – Canada made us sisters.
* * *
One Friday Mummy met us at the school gates. It was late spring and she was standing next to the second-hand gold-coloured car she and Baba had bought just before he left for Ethiopia at the end of last summer. Baba was an aid worker – one of very few black people in a management role in a humanitarian mission. He had been gone for six long months working in a camp in Dire Dawa in Ethiopia and some days I didn’t even miss him any more. Mummy said we should be grateful and not complain because yes, work took him away, but it also put food on the table and clothes on our backs, so unless we wanted to be hungry and walk naked on the streets we should keep quiet and accept the life we had been given.
We hopped into the car and she said in a voice that was far too soft to be happy, ‘Surprise. We’re going camping.’ Mummy was intrepid in many ways, but she was not a camper. I was old enough to have asked her why she wasn’t at work but for some reason I didn’t. Maybe I sensed that her voice might disappear altogether if we asked any questions. Or maybe I was just too taken by the surprise; by the gift of her, sitting there holding time on her lap like a blanket.
Giddy with excitement, we buckled up and hit the road. She had packed a bag with our things. She had bought a tent. She had consulted a map. We drove for two hours and did not get lost. All of us were surprised by this, not least Mummy. Eventually we saw the sign after a wooded area that said WELCOME TO CAMP GATINEAU: CAMPING SITE.
We had sung and wriggled and fought in the back seat the whole way up without thinking much about what this all meant. But as we neared the site it occurred to all of us – and not least Mummy – that this may not be as simple as it seemed. How would we pitch the tent on our own? Where exactly would we put it? What would happen if wild animals were prowling about?
Mummy parked and we got out of the car. Zeng was too small to be worried, but Mandla and I knew better. We found a spot and began a farcical attempt at pitching the tent. There were a few other small groups around – within shouting distance – but everyone left well enough alone. In Canada nobody pries. Still, we must have been quite a sight: Mummy in her smart jeans and inappropriate shoes, ordering us about in her oddly posh and low voice. Mummy had no idea what she was doing, but, fortified by African pride and the immigrant’s commitment to blending in, she wasn’t going to go ask for help.
Twenty minutes into our surprise adventure it started to rain. It was a heavy downpour and soon our faces were slick with the curl activator we sprayed on our hair so prodigiously every morning to maintain our Jheri curls.
Mummy looked up at the sky and then she looked at the un-erected tent. Then she looked at us with our oily faces and our eyes that were starting to sting and she started to laugh. We did too. We were getting soaked. She raised her voice over the sound of the rain and said, ‘This isn’t going to work, is it?’ We shook our heads. ‘Should we try camping another day, girls?’ We nodded quickly and started to gather our stuff.
We collected the metal bits and bobs we had strewn across the ground, and unscrewed the poles we had just managed to sandwich together. We lifted the tent’s tarpaulin carcass and, as lightning started, we made a dash for the car.
We were not disappointed. Driving back we were little chatterboxes, full of stories of school we would not ordinarily tell Mummy because by the time she got home they would have lost their urgency. That Friday was different. We were with Mummy and the sun was setting and the rain was pouring and the world felt right. Camping had been a glorious failure but it had given us a chance to be with Mummy outside the structure of all the rules that made life easier for her and safer for us. That trip was an unexpected affirmation we hadn’t known we’d needed. It reminded us that Mummy loved us and it told us that we weren’t simply a burden – three mouths to feed and three growi
ng bodies to clothe. She loved us enough to leave work early to try something new; something Canadian. We were strangers in a strange land and somehow Mummy understood that we needed to belong not simply to her, but to the world as well.
The bike
Mummy wants us to learn how to be responsible, so every month she gives us five dollars and takes us to the bank to deposit it ourselves. Mandla and I are very neat, our handwriting steady and firm on the page. Zeng is only six so she has to write and rewrite and we sigh and sigh because the bank is quiet and boring and no other kids are ever there except us with our little books that have rainbows across them at the top saying ‘Future Account’.
When I decide to save up for a bike Mummy is proud and says, ‘This is exactly what your savings account is for.’
I complain to her that Canadian kids all have bikes, but she does not see a bike as a basic need – she sees it as a luxury. I disagree: a bike is a necessity like food and water. Canadian parents don’t tell their children to save up for basics. Mummy says no: ‘A bike is a nice-to-have, not a must-have.’ This is a cultural gap that we will not breach.
All my friends have ten-speeds and ride their bikes to school but I walk even though, as Mummy says, I have a ‘perfectly good bike at home’. Mummy and Baba purchased it when we arrived in Canada, so I have had it since I was ten. Its brakes squeak, it has handlebars that turn up on either side and worst of all it has a banana seat. I am thirteen years old and my mother sees no problem with me riding around the neighbourhood looking like Fat Albert’s broke little sister.
I zip up my disappointment and focus on earning money so I can buy myself a new bike. I put up signs at the supermarket offering babysitting services with our house number on it and calling myself Sissy so that people aren’t put off by the name. I volunteer to do odd jobs around the house and needle Mummy into paying for them. I even charge Mandla for helping her with her homework but Mummy finds out and makes me give it back. I am desperate for this new bike.
Always Another Country Page 9