Always Another Country

by Sisonke Msimang

  Never mind that he should be the one saying sorry to me. It’s okay though because I have a team now and our legs are young and strong and we are walking away and in two strides we disappear into the stairwell.

  The Vikings look over their shoulders as the door closes behind us and one of them puts an arm around me then drops it as we hit the first step once it is clear that he isn’t following us. We walk in an awkward silence and in the absence of danger we are no longer sisters and I am aware that I am not as lithe and chiselled as them and we are unlikely to ever be friends, so that when we reach the third floor and they offer to keep me company, I say, ‘No, I’ll be fine.’

  They deposit me at my door and after they leave and I am firmly inside I bolt it and sit on the bed, and cry stupidly. The story I am going to tell Mandla and Zeng about the masturbator and then the guy from Miami Vice isn’t so funny any more so I curl up under the Ethiopian shawl that Mummy gave me at the airport in Addis two long days before, and I worry myself into a jumbled sleep.

  * * *

  I am woken up by the sound of a fist banging on a door.

  A man is yelling, ‘Open up. Open the fuck up!’ It isn’t my door but it is somewhere on the floor – too close for comfort.

  One by one, door by door, the banging and the yelling continue. He is making his way down the hall, pounding and screaming. ‘Hey, I know you in there, College Girl!’

  It is Trouble and he is outraged. I am not even sure I am fully awake, but it doesn’t stop and soon I start to worry that his anger might knock the door down. I wonder if I will survive. I wonder if he will rape me or kill me or both. I wonder – if I live – how I will cope with four years of studying in America.

  I am the sort of eighteen-year-old who has always known better than to adore America, but underneath the irony I was as convinced as everyone else that it was the greatest country on Earth, because actually I am only eighteen and even when you pretend you don’t believe something like that, all you really want to do is believe.

  When he reaches my door I freeze on the bed and I breathe in as slowly and quietly as possible. I am sure he knows this is my room. ‘Open. The. Fuck. Up!’ Bang. Bang. Bang.

  I start to pray as he hits the door the way the three little pigs must have prayed when the big bad wolf was huffing and puffing and getting ready to blow their house down. My lips move and I throw some panic-stricken words at God and I do a side prayer asking Him/Her to forgive me for not believing in Him/Her before and by the time the prayer is done Trouble has moved on. He is banging on the next door and then the next and I exhale and I can’t believe it and I say, ‘Thank you,’ out loud looking up at the ceiling towards the place I think God might be, then I think, ‘Oh shit, that was too loud.’

  He hasn’t heard me though. He keeps on banging and when he is finished with the left side of the hall he pounds on the doors on the other side of the corridor then he stands in the foyer and yells, ‘I will fucking see you again, College Girl. You hear me? I’m gonna get that number.’ Then he is gone. I do not sleep for a long, long time. Instead, I lie on the sheetless bed clutching the shawl and smelling Mummy and hoping he does not come back.

  In the morning I make a mental note to remember that just because one crazy thing has already happened to you it doesn’t mean another won’t come your way on the same day. The Universe was supposed to know that I had just seen an unwanted penis so it shouldn’t have given me a whole separate other person hell-bent on raping me just minutes later.

  I sit up in bed and think about how I really need to go to the bank first and then get to Target, but before everything I need to get a phone card so everyone at home will know that I got in okay, which makes me wonder what I will say to Mandla and Zeng when they ask me what America is like in their ironic but still expectant voices.

  Mandla will say, ‘Like dude, is it like totally excellent party time?’ and we will keep the Wayne’s World references going for a little while, but then she’ll still be waiting for an answer and I am not sure I can tell her the truth which is that America is just like Kenya which is just like Canada which is just like Zambia which means there is nowhere in the world any of us can go to be safe because America – the home of the brave and the land of the free – has just proven to me that, when you are a girl, Trouble is always just around the corner and you never know what he is going to look like. I am not sure how to explain to my sisters on a scratchy telephone line that they shouldn’t worry about me, they should just keep their guards up and their fists ready.

  Black girl in America

  America gives me anonymity and, also, it gives me love. In that order. The two are intertwined forever in my heart and both belong in that place inside me that belongs to America.

  Anonymity comes first and then – in the terrain of the unknown, in this landscape where I am nobody special, in the crevices and dark shadows of places where I have no birthright – I find love.

  Until now, I have always been at the centre of the universe. I was born into an Africa that was waiting for me and into a movement that needed children as emblems of the future. We were totems, all of us – grand experiments who were testament not just to our parents’ love, but to the ability of the struggle to regenerate, to sustain itself. It wasn’t just us, the ANC kids. All across the continent, we were Africa’s promise, middle-class children who were birthed with the sole purpose of walking away from the past with determination and absolute confidence. The post-colonial children of the elite – those whose parents’ hearts were filled with dreams – we carried the vision of a decolonised future in our smiles.

  In America I am given a new meaning. I am not the centre of any universe. I am just a black girl.

  In America I learn quickly that to be black is to be both unknown and unknowable. As an outsider I see almost immediately that this society deliberately misrecognises black people and the effect of this is to diminish them individually and as a group.

  At first I marvel at the stories of mistaken identity. My friends were the best and brightest in their schools. That’s why they got plucked – pulled up into a private four-year college. They are shining stars – known and seen by everyone in their communities. The minute they step beyond their shattered drooping blocks into the cities that gleam and glitter grandly, they become invisible.

  It’s like a superpower they didn’t ask for but know how to use to their advantage. Sometimes their luck runs out. They’ll be there, doing very little – just walking, just shooting the breeze – and suddenly they attract attention, like glow-in-the-dark figures.

  They learn to creep, to walk close to walls, to put their hoodies up and keep their heads slouched; to shrink so they aren’t noticed. Attention aimed at ghetto children is rarely positive.

  In my first year I am assigned a room with a girl named Katie. She is half-white, half-Sri Lankan. Everyone hangs out in our room a lot. We party in Darius’s room and he raps. Rob and the football guys dominate the TV at Cultural House – the space designated as safe for Hispanic and black students. We watch Martin Lawrence and crack up. After he goes on Arsenio, everyone agrees Bill Clinton will be the first black president.

  Someone says, ‘They thought my cousin was a guy on America’s Most Wanted so they shot at him.’

  Someone else says, ‘The clerk said I looked like a lady who had been in the store last week and stolen a watch so she kicked me out.’

  And another one: ‘That landlady said she forgot what I looked like. I just met you last week and you supposed to be tryin’ to rent me an apartment! How are you gonna forget what a client looks like? My money’s the same colour as everyone else’s money.’

  I learn very quickly that to be black in America is to be looked through, passed over, ignored or locked away. It is to be constantly misrecognised.

  Everyone has a story about the police frisking them. Everyone has a strategy. No one questions it. This is not a matter for political intervention. When I volunteer at the Minneapolis
Urban League the project I work on focuses on training teenagers to know their rights and respond politely and respectfully when the cops stop them. Every lesson begins and ends with, ‘Put your hands up and don’t run or you will get shot.’

  None of these experiences would be new to my compatriots who grew up in South Africa. They are not entirely new to me either. The years in Canada took their toll. Still, I have not grown up in the belly of the beast. When your individuality is denied, when you are constantly thought to be someone other than who you are, you either die or you blossom. America shows me how this feels. I am grateful that it’s already too late for my soul to be killed by my encounter with American racism. I am even more grateful that, by the time I go back to South Africa, its worst edges will have been blunted.

  So, because I am already almost grown up, and have been raised to believe I am the centre of the universe, America does not threaten who I am. I meet it with a sort of gratitude. It makes me a soldier in a way I may not otherwise have been. And it creates for me the sort of kinship with African-Americans that is only possible when you have struggled with another human being.

  * * *

  Before I went to America I was as politically aware as a high school student can be. I was enrolled at the International School of Kenya and I was on the student council and I wrote for the school paper. My favourite classes were Social Studies and English and French because we read real books and grappled with ideas and our French teacher was a renegade and he plucked his eyebrows and we didn’t know yet what gay was but he wore kikoi pants and was anti-authoritarian. And the carefully crafted multinational bubble made us feel as though we were special and loved and also part of the politics of the country, even though we weren’t.

  In the last semester of our studies, my friends and I decided one day to skip school. CNN was reporting that Kenya’s one-party state would soon end and the students would be the ones who would bring Moi to his knees after decades of corruption and violent clampdowns on those who dared to dissent. And so we went downtown to watch. We wanted to see the students throwing stones at the police. We felt we were expressing solidarity doing this, and we even believed that we were part of history knowing we had been there. We were scared though and we just hung around the edges of the crowd, worried. We were never in any danger and, had anything happened, we would have been too precious to hurt. The embassies with which we were all registered would have intervened or someone would have called someone who knew someone and everything would have been fixed. But it never even came close to that because we watched from far away – outsiders, voyeurs, kids watching the world unfold before our eyes.

  So, it is only in America, in the fall of 1992, that I begin to understand the difference between being politically aware and being politically active. I have grown up politically aware but because Mummy and Baba allowed us to be children, I have – until now – done nothing in my own name. It is time for me to get active. I do not decide on this randomly. Living in America makes me think about myself in new ways. More importantly, it provides outlets, gives me ways to try on these new constructions of myself.

  It begins of course with being made to feel small. In the first few weeks after my arrival, I am followed wordlessly in shops in the Mall of America. One night, as I’m coming home on a bus from the University of Minnesota where there had been an event hosted by the black studies department, an old man sidles up to me as he gets off and says softly in my ear – almost lyrically – ‘Nigger bitch.’ His breath is hot and stale.

  This feeling is novel, maybe because I have spent eighteen years mainly protected from the psychological harm that comes of being looked though or past or over. Canada punctured but did not manage to deflate my self-esteem and Nairobi put the air back in my tyres, puffed me up again. So now, each time someone dismisses me, every story I hear in which, purely because of the levels of melanin in their skin, one of my friends was abused, I grow stronger. The abuse becomes a source of pride rather than shame. I am no longer that wide-eyed ten-year-old girl in Canada and I am beginning to understand, for myself, the power of having an analysis – a lens through which to interpret the world. It signals the difference between drowning and swimming to safety.

  America makes me brave because it forces me to fight for myself. It makes me brave because it makes me seek out love on my own terms, not on the basis of what is expected of me.

  Over time, I make friends. There is LaKeesha who comes from Gary, Indiana, Michael Jackson’s home town. She is short and petite and wiry and so intense – our friendship is like a love affair. We talk through long nights, we cry, we become fused to each other: an inseparable, and incongruous-looking, pair. I am tall with a big butt and a teeny chest, and she is short and petite, but with boobs enough for both of us. We laugh about sharing our assets. Physical differences aside, we occupy space in the same way – we fill every room with our preoccupations. When I am reading Sula – for the umpteenth time – everyone knows it. When we discover for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, there isn’t a table we sit down at that isn’t informed about it. We read out loud. We read together. Our sisterhood is intense and instant – kinetic. Then, there is Sharon – a year ahead of me. Sharon is from Natchez, Mississippi, but went to high school in Minneapolis. Her mother came up north, following the river, looking for freedom for her kids, like so many other black people before her. Sharon is the hope of her family – hard-working, diligent, strait-laced. Yet all Sharon wants to do is act. When she is on a stage, nothing else matters. But good college-educated black women with strong family ties don’t become actors: they become accountants or lawyers or doctors. Sharon struggles with the decision, wedded both to the joy performing brings and to her commitment to being a good daughter.

  And there is Simone. A Caribbean version of Twiggy, Simone is from St Vincent originally. She too has been raised by a single mother and, like the rest of us, she cannot afford to mess up. Si­mone isn’t prone to smiling. Hers is not a heart that is won over easily, but she is protective and loyal and as good a friend as you can ask for in a hostile environment where you need someone who has your back. There is Katie – my roommate that year. Her father is Sri Lankan, her mother white American. There is Marika whose pale skin and freckles belie her African and Native American heritage.

  The group of us become angry and eloquent spokespersons for diversity. We are intense. We spend our time together becoming new women. We read a lot. We talk a lot. We shed layers – getting rid of the parts of us we didn’t like before we came to university – and in the process we grow thick skins.

  We form a poetry troupe. At first we call ourselves Sistahs of the Rainbow. A year later we have shed the solidarity and become Sistahs ’n Struggle. Only the black members of the troupe remain. We scowl often and stage performances. Sharon and LaKeesha can really act and have talent. The rest of us are passionate but should probably not be on stage. It doesn’t matter to us, though; our politics is more important than our art. Our politics is our art. The venues where we perform are always packed. We rehearse earnestly, reciting everything from Margaret Walker to Sonia Sanchez to Ntozake Shange to Nikki Giovanni. White students both love and fear us. We care a lot what they think even as we profess not to. We say we are only speaking to black students and we believe it.

  Soon everywhere we go on campus we are recognised and applauded and this makes us even angrier because all the accolades don’t change the attrition rate for black students on campus. It doesn’t increase enrolment figures either. So, we begin to understand that good intentions are as much our enemy as the nameless suits who we are convinced are orchestrating racism from their lofty heights atop the corporate ladder or the university administration.

  We get angrier. We decide acting is not enough. We decide to take on institutional discrimination. We scrawl graffiti on campus in chalk. We put up signs saying white students should ‘Be afraid’. This avoids the formal structures – it is the easy way
into a system we can tell is designed to trick us. Joining committees and participating in processes seems like a trick. We know our history. We stage a sit-in at the president’s office, demanding that the university review its policies in relation to hiring black professors, admitting greater numbers of students of colour and addressing the high dropout rate.

  We win some concessions and we celebrate. A black professor is given tenure. A new political science hire is made and he is African. We have not yet learnt – because we are so very young – that institutional racism is a wily old beast, and that these are just superficial wins.

  We lose a lot too. The casualties of racism on campus stack up. We cry a lot. The numbers of black students who arrived at the same time as we did shrink. One friend – Andre – turns into a shell of himself. He drifts. He acts in odd ways. He was hilarious. We all loved him. Then one day he is incoherent and rambly. Then he is gone: dropped out. Our numbers are too small. Each departure, under circumstances that are unhappy and unplanned, shakes us and confirms what we already know – that certain kinds of black people are not meant to survive systems designed to ensure the progress of certain kinds of whites.

  I lose my patience. I find it hard to be friends with the other African students on campus. They titter and cluck about black Americans. They use the usual tropes – they are lazy, they are damaged. They are full of excuses about how different Africans are from African Americans. I get tired of hearing the same old lines, about how whatever happened during slavery severed the connection between blacks in America and those in Africa. At first I simply nod, or sometimes I act like I am not really listening. Like them, I knew the rigours of having a nightly homework routine and not being allowed to play or talk on the phone or watch TV night upon night until physics was mastered or essays were completed so I know what they mean. But, a few months in, their disdain makes me nervous. Intellectually I can see there is little difference between the two campus communities: the small striving African one and the striving black American one, but there is a rift. It isn’t ugly or openly antagonistic, but it is there.