News from Home

by Sefi Atta

  As for Toyosi, and this was way before she christened me Lord of the Lawless, way before we became lovers, her daughter got better, plumper than the day she arrived, and Toyosi began to write her play. Just like that. She didn’t know how the story would end, but I had a clue how it began. She claimed that she’d unblocked us and now we were unblocking her. I told her she’d invented a new form of plagiarism. As we went out to perform in homes throughout Lagos, the woman just wrote and wrote, and wrote.

  TWILIGHT TREK

  Gao. An agent hands me a fake passport—my name is not Jean-Luc, I’m not from Mali and I’m definitely no Francophone African.

  I’m fluent in English though, and luckily the agent can communicate in pidgin. He leads me through a haze of smoke to a mud hut where I will hide until nightfall. The smoke is coming from the compound where a group of old Malian women are cooking a midday meal. The women are shrouded in robes. Being such good Muslims, you’d think they would invite a stranger to eat. Anyway, I’m happy to go indoors, instead of sweltering in the heat like them. I don’t care to know the town of Gao. The further north I am in Africa, the more one place begins to resemble another.

  Like me, other travelers in Gao have come from some-where south. We will cross the Sahara to get to Morocco, and from there cross the Mediterranean to get into Spain. We are illegals. It’s not that we don’t have enough money to fly overseas; it’s just that the foreign embassies don’t grant Africans like us visas. Half my fare is hidden in my sneakers. To raise the full amount, I sold marijuana. I wasn’t making much of a cut, so I duped my boss. He threatened to send a gang to slit my throat, after they’d raped me. I knew I had to leave town immediately. Death I could live with, but I couldn’t afford to be tampered with like that, against my will.

  When I was young, my mother used to smear lipstick all over my face. “Keep still,” she would order as I struggled. “See how pretty you look.” She oiled my hair with pomade and braided it into cornrows like a girl’s. In the afternoons, after school, I’d beg her to let me play football with other boys in our neighborhood; she’d make me sit on a stool and watch her roasting groundnuts. She’d be singing that awful nursery rhyme:

  The birds have come home

  Tolongo

  One black, one red

  Tolongo

  Their tails are touching the ground

  Sho

  Instead of clapping, I’d be frowning at her huge crusty feet. Even with those feet, my mother managed to walk the streets in high heels and solicit all sorts of men: rich, married, handsome, fat—white sailors like my father. One day she introduced me to a saggy-ass Lebanese who was known for liking light-skinned boys. “He’ll only touch,” she promised. I ran away from home after that, lived on the streets, played football with a group of louts and discovered just how professional I was at the sport. In fact, for a while, before I warned them to stop understating my talent, my football friends were calling me... what’s-his-name? Pele?

  In the hut there’s a prayer mat. I fall asleep on it. In my dream, my mother’s face appears as I remember: two thick penciled-in lines for brows, a chip in her front tooth, and pink rouge on her cheeks. Her feet are the roots of a tree, with dry bark for skin. She can’t move, and yet she is able to hunt me down and find me, wherever I am, even here in Gao.

  She tells me that, all things considered, to trek overseas is reasonable. A man she knew hid himself in the wheel well of an airplane that flew overnight to London. It could have been the low temperature or high altitude that finished him. Immigration officers discovered his body two days later. By the end of the month, they’d deported him back to his family for his burial.

  She says the lesson to learn is that the world is round, which means that if I run too fast I might end up chasing the very homeland I am running from. She lectures me even in my dreams, my mother. She is the daughter of a schoolteacher, lest anyone forget.

  When it is dark enough, I come out of the hut. My stomach is so fed up with grumbling for attention it’s in a silent sulk. I buy myself bread and sardines to eat, enough to last the journey. I buy drinking water, bottles of it. I meet a pretty chick called Patience at the depot where the agent instructed me to wait with other travelers for our transportation out of Gao.

  Patience is skinny with a bit of a butt. Her trousers are too tight. Her hair is curly and greased back. She wears a silver hoop in her nostril. She claims to be from Mali, but she has been living in the capital city, Bamako. She says this as if it is some sort of achievement, as if it separates her from villagers who are happy to stay in Africa herding their cattle, hoeing their land or whatever.

  “You have a man in Bamako?” I ask her.

  “Do you know how old I am?”

  “Sweet sixteen at most?”

  “You small boy! Don’t cheek me! How old are you yourself?”

  She laughs and swings slaps at me. I’m a year older than I was on the day I left home, is all she needs to know. African chicks are proud of their ages. I bet Patience is taken by my looks. I bet she’s taken shit from men not nearly as good-looking as me. I bet she’s used to taking shit. Plenty of it. In my old neighborhood, a pretty chick like her would have been beaten up several times by her man.

  Our trucks arrive while she is still busy trying to snub me. They are small trucks with tarpaulin covers. We don’t scramble for them. We all believe we’ll get in one way or another. Our guides are Tuaregs with indigo cloths wrapped around their heads. They know the desert routes. They will drive us through Mali, Algeria, and beyond. There is talk that travelers are sometimes attacked by bearded Muslims and bandits, that trucks often break down and there is no guarantee the gendarmes on patrol will arrive in time to rescue us. This makes a few women turn around at the last moment, especially those with children. I hop into the same truck as Patience and sit by her.

  “You again?” she says.

  I wink. “I’m just here to protect you.”

  There are seven of us under the tarpaulin. I check out the others while cracking my knuckles: passenger one, tattered shoes; two, greasy skullcap; three, lopsided headscarf; four, chapped lips; five, gold chain and red eyes. Nothing new.

  How long can I bear this godforsaken place? We can only travel at night when cold winds blow. During the day, the sand—you can’t understand—it’s like needles in my eyes, ants in my nostrils, cobwebs in my chest. It’s everywhere. I eat bread and crunch on grains. I gulp down water and grit gets stuck in my throat. I cough so hard my head could detonate.

  I’m telling you, in the most crowded cities, I have ridden in taxis with wobbly wheels and no doors, hitched rides on highways in lorries that bounce from one pothole to the other. I have slept in villages where dogs won’t stop to take a piss, had bouts of diarrhea, fever, to get to Gao. I can’t understand these Tuaregs. Only camels are meant to survive in the Sahara.

  At first, Patience would say, “Mr. Protector, how now?” and I would mumble, “Cool.” Then I couldn’t be bothered to answer because my tongue started to swell. Then she stopped teasing me, perhaps because she realized that joking around might eventually exhaust her.

  Now, even she is choking away like everyone else in our truck. We spit where we crouch. We reek of fart. Our legs are cramped. The man with the skullcap says he’s suffering from piles because of the constant jolts. His wheezy wife complains that she can’t breathe. “Shut up,” I want to shout.

  Day two. We stop for a rest, finally. I fall out of the truck and roll underneath to avoid the afternoon sun. Shit, there’s sand even in my ass.

  Patience slides next to me. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry I teased you earlier.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “It’s just that, to me, you’re young. Too young to be on your own, crossing the desert.” Her breath smells of sardines.

  “I’m not that young.”

  She stretches. “You know, in Bamako, I heard that this is the same route t
he Arabs used to traffic African slaves in the olden days.”

  Who cares?

  “Do you have someone to meet you overseas?” she asks. “

  “Nope.”

  “What will you do when you get there?”

  “Play football.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yeah, and I’ll be famous, then I’ll get a white woman. I hear they’re less trouble.”

  She sucks her teeth. “You’re still very confident, aren’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  Sometimes I’m too afraid to think, especially about my mother and that Lebanese. Perhaps that’s why I am this way: braggadocios. Perhaps that’s why it’s impossible for me to worry about where I will end up. Right now, here, under the truck, I’d do it with Patience to prove my manhood, but she pulls a white Bible out of her pocket and begins to tell me about Moses who led the Israelites. It’s a good story. It puts me straight to sleep.

  Again, my mother finds me. This time, she wants to know if my little girlfriend is aware that she’s reading a testimony passed from generation to generation. She says if only we Africans took time to compile our stories in a holy book, we might just learn from our past. How many of us have sought the Promised Land and ended up driving taxi cabs, guarding buildings at night, washing dirty plates and toilet seats, sleeping in cold ghettos and on streets?

  She says she knows of African women overseas who are recruited as domestics and service their masters in bed. She says she’s heard of African men who will marry any sort of woman for the sake of being right with immigration. These men call their wives darling, eat their bland stews, father their children. Yet they can’t open their mouths to talk because their wives are liberated. Their children have rights, too, so if a father dares to raise his hand to discipline his son, he might find himself sleeping in jail. She says she hopes I will not become that kind of African man, a whitewashed African, the kind that even she will not lower herself to sleep with.

  I wake up so fast Patience says my eyes look like they’re about to pop.

  That fucking Tuareg is making us pay him extra. I can’t believe the lunatic. He beckons that he is about to drive off. He pats his palms, all dried up like beef jerky. He wants more dollars or else he’s leaving us here, stranded in the fucking desert. He is yelling in bloody Berber or whatever. The wheezy woman is pleading that she’s suffocating and can’t he take pity on us. Her husband with the piles begins to weep. I could punch him. Why do we Africans make spectacles instead of fighting for ourselves?

  Patience says, “Look here, Mama and Papa, I want to get to Morocco. I don’t want to die in the desert. Pay the man, you hear?”

  The Tuareg pipes down when we give him an extra $100 each to continue our journey. How I wish I could curse him to his face, but his eyes never seem to blink, asshole.

  As we set off, I see the sun setting through a tear in the tarpaulin. It is orange and sliced in half by the horizon. We pass two trucks almost buried under the sand, like giant carcasses. I shiver, not because of the evening wind. For the first time, I think we might not make it to Morocco after all.

  Two birds, I keep humming. One black. One red. Their tails are touching the ground. Their tails are...

  Tangier. Well, almost. The Tuareg drops us at the foot of a mountain. It is the end of his own journey. He has driven us hundreds of miles and none of us is thankful to him, the cheat. We have prayed, cursed, and crossed the border with our fake passports. Our feet are numb, and now we have to walk to a camp in a forest on the mountain where travelers stop.

  Patience says it’s unfair. Climbing up a mountain is not what she bargained for. She is meant to be in a guesthouse some-where in Tangier, overlooking the Mediterranean. “I’m not doing it,” she says, bursting into tears. “I didn’t leave Bamako to sleep in a bush like a common villager.”

  Three women surround her. The wheezy one rubs her back whispering, “Shh, is OK, is OK.” Patience gasps as if she’s expelling something bitter. “All right,” she says, wiping her tears with her thumbs. “I’m ready now.”

  Her trouser seams have burst; her hair is so covered in sand she resembles an old woman. I’m surprised she’s capable of crying. Every drop of water I’ve drunk is dried up after the desert. My brain is like fried gizzards at this point. It’s almost evening and I think I might have forgotten how to fall asleep. My legs have taken charge. If someone shows me the sea and says, “Here, walk over it,” I will. Still, I want to give Patience some assurance, so I reach for her hand.

  “No, no,” she says and eases mine away.

  She hobbles up the mountain like the rest of us.

  Honestly, it is like finding an open sewer when we reach the camp. People sure can stink whenever we’re like this: in deep shit. I fit in well, me in my shirt that hasn’t seen soap since before I got to Gao. The people here are not like any villagers; they’re like refugees on television, squatting under plastic sheets: men, women and children, mothers nursing their babies. They are coughing, scratching, and slapping their arms and legs.

  “I can’t,” Patience whispers, and collapses by the root of a tree. She begins to sob again. This time she says that fleas are biting her all over. She gets on my nerves. While she sits there with her head in her hands, I build a tent for the two of us. One good thing: the others are willing to help. They give me a plastic sheet and show me how to tie it to a tree. They tell me to be prepared for thieves, the Moroccan security forces, and to look out for con men who will take my money. Even the air we breathe may carry plagues.

  All they want to do is work. They’d work in their countries if they could; they’ll work overseas. They’ve worked in Casablanca, in Tangier. It’s easier for me to venture to the port, they say, because I’m—you know—a mulatto. No one will suspect I’m from pays-z’amis—you know—black Africa.

  I lie under my new tent and catch what conversations I can in English: who has reached Ceuta, who was caught by the Guardia Civil and sent back before they could make it to Ceuta. Before I can find out where Ceuta is, I fall asleep with my sneakers on, just in case they get stolen.

  This place is no stop, my mother says; it is the anteroom to Hell. It is where spirits wait to pass to the other world. It is the only time left for those who have stopped living and are yet to be pronounced dead; the ground between madness and reason; the Mountain of Babel, where Africans speak in foreign tongues and nothing they say makes sense, so I need not listen. How is it possible, she asks, that I can be denied asylum in Spain, when this place resembles the aftermath of a war zone?

  Patience is under the tent with me when I open my eyes. Miraculously, she has magicked a tin pot and is cooking over burning sticks.

  “What are you making?” I ask, stretching.

  “Chicken,” she murmurs.

  Four feet. They are boiling in a sort of frothy broth. My stomach groans.

  “That’s why I like my women African,” I say. “A white one would be of no use here.”

  “I’m almost old enough to have given birth to you,” she mutters.

  So much for my kindness. She brings up my mother.

  “I’m not that young,” I whine like a girl.

  “Sorry I lost my nerve earlier,” she says after a while.

  “It’s all right,” I say. “I suppose you’re used to the good life.”

  She shakes her head. “In Bamako, I was a prostitute.”

  I don’t know what to say to that. I remove my sneakers to air my blisters. She stirs the chicken feet.

  There is a Nigerian here called Obazee. I think he fancies himself some kind of a village chief. He has a university degree. He lays down the laws of the forest, he and his cronies. Patience won’t go to consult him, though. She says it’s only God that can save us now. She’s reading her Bible again.

  Nigerians are an arrogant lot. This Obazee, all I do is call his name without adding a Mr., and he comes so close to me, with his chest hairs all matted like dead flies.

  “Mr.
Obazee to you,” he says. “Who’s asking?”

  “Me, Jean-Luc.”

  “Don’t you know how to respect your elders?”

  “I’ve crossed a desert.”

  He could give me that, at least.

  There are tribal marks on his cheeks and sores have eaten up the corners of his lips. “Parlez-vous Français?” he asks, tilting his head.

  “Wee?”

  He laughs. “You’re no Jean-Luc, but whoever you are, just be careful how you mention my name next time. None of this shouting Obazee, Obazee, all over the place, or I’ll conk your little head.”

  I’ve decided. I hate him.

  “How long have you been here?” I ask.

  “Six years.”

  “Six,” I yell.

  He frowns. “What? People have been around longer, for over ten years, even. Time is not the object.”

  “Why don’t you just cross to Spain?”

  “You think it’s as easy as that?”

  “I have to cross.”

  “You think you’re the only one?”

  “Then why do you stay?”

  “Come,” he says, beckoning. “Come before the sun goes down, and see for yourself, since you think we’re all fools here.”

  Again my legs carry me, snapping twigs and stamping them into the mud. Obazee walks too fast. I follow him through the camp, past a group of people singing, “When shall I see my home? When shall I see my native land? I will never forget my home...”

  “When I first came,” he says, “I used to stay in Tangier, in a guesthouse near Petit Socco. It’s not easy like that anymore. The security forces, if they find you, they will deal with you; then they’ll send you back to Algeria. You’ll die before you ever see Gao. I moved here to avoid them. I’m trying to sneak overland into Ceuta. It’s what all of us are waiting for. They have a center there. You’ll get meals. They will decide if you deserve asylum. The trouble is, they have barbed wire around the place, and the Guardia Civil patrol it. They keep catching me. The last time they beat me up well, well.”