I wanted to disappear. I wanted to be sent back home where adults said exactly what they meant and where I knew what was expected of me.
I looked around my room, remembering how excited I’d been the first time I laid eyes on it. How cautiously I’d sat on my bed beside Claire as she unpacked my luggage, worried that the furniture might reject my body. How, as I discreetly slid my feet back and forth on the soft, brownish-yellow carpet with piles that made my bedroom floor look like a field of wheat grains, my eyes darting from the sunflowers of the thick comforter on the bed to the matching lamp, then to the painting of foaming sea waves on the wall, I’d wished that my friends from the orphanage were there to see what I was seeing. To touch what I was touching. A whole room to myself. No bunk beds that creaked like old people’s knees, no unstable dressers that threatened to collapse on you every time you opened a drawer. No cold cement floors and no holes, cracks, or stains of little dirty hands on the walls.
“Smile. Even when you have nothing to smile about,” Nurse Meron had told me before I’d left the orphanage. “And don’t forget to say thank you, sorry, and please. You do these things and you’ll be okay,” she’d said, a cloud of concern in her eyes.
But that first night, as I looked around my room, I didn’t have to pretend. I was genuinely grateful to Claire and Paul.
After my new parents left, I sat on my bed with my legs folded in front of me for a while, chewing on my nails until I drew blood. Then I kneeled down with my elbows propped on my bed and prayed. I thanked Emaye, and Jesus, Mary, and God, and all the saints my mother now lived with for having looked over me until this point. I prayed for the soul of that poor girl who was killed in America and for God to give me the strength, patience, and understanding to behave as my new parents required me to until I was old enough to take care of myself.
That night, after Josh frightened me with the worm, I dreamed I was a butterfly. I followed other butterflies higher and higher into the sky and farther and farther away from my new home. The other butterflies were as colourful as I was, and their faces were those of my friends from the orphanage. I could feel the wind in my undone hair, which was as soft and as light as Claire’s. The houses, cars, and parks below were small. I could see the orphanage, its name above the entrance gate. Farther up the road, I saw the house where I used to live with Emaye. Somehow I knew my parents were there, their eyes to the sky, waiting for me. But before I could spot them, out of nowhere, ominous grey clouds started to close in on me from all sides. My friends were quickly disappearing in the distance, and in the swelling clouds appeared the laughing faces of the children who taunted me at school. I screamed for help but no sound made it past my throat. I was alone, mute, and being tossed around by the strong wind, twirling out of control toward the ground. Right before I hit the ground, I felt someone shaking me by the shoulder. I opened my eyes and saw Claire sitting on the edge of my bed.
On Halloween day, after dinner, Claire drew dots on my cheeks and nose with makeup that matched the colours of my butterfly costume. Josh came out of his room wearing his raggedy-looking costume. I inspected my reflection in the hallway mirror. The dress was pretty and the wings were so light they fluttered when I moved. I thought about all the things Claire and Paul had bought me and how they had been smiling at me, touching me, and holding my hand with a carefulness that made me think of Mrs. Saunders’s expensive glass vases. Was I wrong to fear them? To question their intentions? Despite everything, Halloween might turn out to be even better than Enkutatash, I told myself.
“Don’t you look pretty,” Paul said to me, trying to adjust my antennae to fit straight on the braids I’d plaited myself the day before.
I backed away. “I will do it,” I said.
“Okay. Now both of you sit down and watch TV while your mom and I put our costumes on,” Paul said.
“Hurry up, Daddy,” Josh said and sat on the floor in front of the TV.
After a few tries, I decided my antennae would sit better on my head if my hair was slicked back into a ponytail, so I went to ask Claire for permission to undo my braids as I was taught to do at the orphanage.
I knocked on Claire and Paul’s bedroom door.
For a moment, I was aware of only my body freezing in place at the same time as my heart sank into my stomach. I couldn’t lift my legs off the floor or my eyes off the creature towering over me with a dagger in its hand. I let out a shrill scream and ran toward the front door.
“Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!” I cried.
“Wait … What?” I heard Paul’s voice behind me.
The creature caught up with me and grabbed my arm before I could reach the door.
“Paul, wait. I think … ,” Claire said.
“Please don’t kill me. Please,” I cried, my eyes fixed on the ground, too petrified to look up.
“Your costume,” Claire said.
I pulled and twisted my body to free my arm.
The creature let go of me and I fell to the ground, my knees hitting the wooden floors. The image of the chalk-white face, the bloody mouth, the protruding blood-soaked fangs, and the red-and-black cape raced across my eyes as if I were looking at the creature’s reflection in a cracked mirror. The truth of what I had just seen took over me like a flow of insects, instantly spreading to every corner of my mind and body. It was Satan. I clasped my hands under my chin and curled my body into a ball. With my eyes shut tight, I recited the Lord’s Prayer: “Abatachin hoy, besemay yemitinor … ” The creature didn’t look like the Satan on the picture in the prayer room at the orphanage, the one with Archangel Michael pressing down on its head. But what else could it be?
I peeked from one eye. The creature was still standing in front of me, barring my way. I felt another shiver run down my spine. I shut my eyes harder and bent my head down, my forehead almost touching the ground. I remembered the man from the dream I had at the orphanage, the one Etagegn had interpreted as a good omen. That man took on the face of the creature I’d just seen. Then I thought about the equally faceless American man who’d killed his adopted daughter.
I rocked my body as I prayed louder and louder, combating my thoughts with sound: “Simih yikedes, mengistih timta … ”
“Paul, go change,” I heard Claire say.
“Fikadih besemay endehonetch … ”
“She peed. Nebiyat peed herself,” Josh said.
I felt the wetness down my legs and feet.
“Shush, Josh,” Paul said.
“When are we going trick-or-treating?” Josh said.
“Actually, Paul, take Josh. I’ll take care of Nebiyat,” Claire said.
“What I don’t understand is … she’s ten,” Paul said. “Why would she think we’re trying to kill her?”
“How would I know, Paul?” Claire’s voice rose. “Please, just take Josh,” she sighed.
“Maybe you’re right. This is too much. We should seek help.”
“Yeah … ”
“Daddy,” Josh said.
“We’ll talk later … just go.”
“I’m sorry, Nebiyat. I didn’t mean to frighten you,” I heard Paul say, then a cold breeze grazed my naked arms before the front door closed.
“Satan is a shapeshifter. He can manifest himself in any form and anywhere,” Emaye used to say. “You have to pray to the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s your only shield against the Devil.” When I was little, I used to be scared to sleep by myself or go to the outhouse alone at night, imagining Satan waiting for me in the dark, in the middle of a great fire, ready to pounce on me, his eyes, horns, and limbs all red and black at the edges, where the fire licked them. I’d also seen Satan make people speak in tongues and contort their bodies like animals fighting slaughter at the Pentecostal church Emaye took me to once when she got mad at some people at her own church. Sometimes, instead of attacking your body, the Devil infected your soul. But Ema
ye knew how to ward off evil of all sorts. She knew all the right prayers; she had special ointments and medicine her Abba — priest — gave her for when Satan made my belly ache, and protective inscriptions bound in a leather pouch to tie around my neck against evil eye and all otherworldly dangers. I touched my naked neck. I didn’t even have a black thread, the strict minimal symbol of my Christian faith, to protect me. That’s when the permanence of Emaye’s death really hit me. I felt a rupture, a gaping bottomless hole where the certainty of her love and protection lived. I was really alone in the world, forsaken.
After Claire helped me clean up, I told her I wanted to go to bed. While she was busy doling out candies to trick-or-treaters, I picked up the winter jacket and boots she’d bought me, and jumped out of my bedroom window and into the cold night.
Two decades later, after a year of researching my father’s whereabouts, I bought a ticket to Addis Ababa to meet him. On my flight there, I had a thousand questions running through my head, but as my father and I sat on short stools forming a triangle with our translator, all the things I wanted to ask seemed too trivial or too personal to voice in front of a stranger. We sat together, tongue-tied but full of the sorrow of a broken history. We smiled and searched in each other’s faces for a thread to sew that history back together. To need a middleman into the heart of the person who gave me life, to require a roadmap into a culture and language that were mine at birth, stung at first. It then turned into a grudge that I kept hidden in a far corner of my consciousness.
“It’s good you’re not all alone over there. You have your daughters,” my father said through our translator, a picture of my family in his hands.
It suddenly dawned on me that Emaye might have disapproved of my association with the man who’d abandoned us so many years earlier.
“You have a big family. That’s nice,” I said, examining the faces of half-siblings and cousins from my father’s side assembled around us, wondering if our translator could convey the bitterness in my voice.
“I’m glad you kept your name. Your mother picked it,” my father said, taking my hand in his.
I looked at our intertwined fingers, the seamless transition between his skin tone and mine, as though our hands were two different parts of the same body.
“Yes, I kept my name,” I replied, as if I’d had any say in the matter. Then I repeated those words to myself, slowly letting this new knowledge, the root of my name, wash over me and atone for the years I’d wished, growing up in Canada, for a less conspicuous name, for a name that didn’t encourage the unwarranted curiosity and inevitable pity of transracial adoption stories, a name free of the shame and anger of unbelonging.
On Emaye’s side of the family, I noticed my cousin’s crooked pinky, an exaggerated version of my own. I thought I recognized Emaye’s smile in a distant aunt’s and her scolding words in another’s tone. I wanted to tell them it took me a long time to forgive Emaye for having deserted me. Even longer to let scar tissue take hold in the cold, hollow space inside where I’d stored my loss. But language failed me.
Going through pictures of my Canadian family with my newly found relatives, and later on, lying by myself in a hotel room with city smells and rhythms now foreign to me, I missed the ease with which I moved in that other world, the love of that other family anxiously waiting for me in Canada. I realized then that home and belonging would never be clear-cut notions for me. Like my father’s wandering eye, my heart and mind will always be vacillating between two possibilities, eyeing two realities at the same time. And I felt something like an acceptance, a new way of being in the world.
But on that Halloween night back in Canada, all those years earlier, as I walked farther and farther away from my adoptive parents’ house, cupping my ears against the needling pain of cold, I wasn’t thinking about my name or where I belonged. I was mourning Emaye’s passing, crying for the safety of her arms, the soothing feel of her fingers as she traced lines on my scalp with paraffin oil, the comfort of her laughter and the sound of her voice as she hummed songs of her own childhood to me. I was crying for that nameless girl who froze to death in America. I imagined her banging on the door to the backyard, screaming and crying until her hands hurt and her voice became hoarse, then curling up in a corner in despair. How lonely she must have felt, abandoned by those who’d promised to care for her, and so far away from all she’d ever known.
The clouds of sadness and apprehension lifted only early the next day when, still fearful for my life and full of the pain of loss, I arrived home, accompanied by police officers who’d found me coiled on a park bench about ten blocks away. It wasn’t in Paul’s worried eyes, as he waited barefoot on the front lawn, a phone to his ear, or in Claire’s cries as she stood beside him looking haggard in her bathrobe and dishevelled hair, that I finally found solace. What opened up the possibility of a new sense of kinship, what made me feel that I mattered to someone again, was when Josh ran up to me and hugged me hard, almost making me lose my balance.
not a small thing
When I heard about what happened to you, Mark and I were at Elaine’s place. We had just ordered from Pizza Hut on Yonge Street, and Elaine was trying to explain to Mark why men shouldn’t use the word bitch, ever, regardless of who they were referring to or why, the same way nigger should always be off limits for non-black people. And predictably, Mark was arguing it was not the same thing. Your mom called me.
After I hung up with her, I blurted out, “Selam was attacked.” I was just repeating your mom’s words. I hadn’t yet grasped their full meaning.
“What? Attacked how?” Elaine asked, grabbing me by the arm.
“They pulled her by her hijab. She fell … ”
“Is she okay?” Elaine said.
“Who are they?” Mark asked.
“I don’t know. Some guys,” I said.
Elaine and I reached for our cellphones.
We called you, texted you, tried to reach you on Twitter to no avail.
“Did someone intervene at least?” Mark asked.
I shook my head. I couldn’t feel my body against the wooden chair. I stared at my phone.
“Did she go to the police?” Elaine asked.
I thought about our last time together. Our fight. I felt as though I had something to do with the attack, as if I’d sent those guys to hurt you.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice cracking a little.
The doorbell rang and Mark got up to answer it.
D’Angelo’s “The Charade” played lightly on Elaine’s laptop. I thought of how you, Elaine, and I were taken by Black Messiah two years earlier. We were too young to appreciate D’Angelo’s artistry when his earlier albums were released, but Black Messiah was of our time. It spoke to us.
“Is there something we can do?” Mark said.
I shrugged.
We all stared at the unopened box of pizza Mark had placed on the table. The smell made me feel a little nauseated.
“To think this kind of shit can happen here,” Mark said.
We were all silent for a while.
“What’s crazy is that what’s happening to Muslim women here these days is what happened in Iran in the eighties, in places like Algeria in the nineties and, more recently, in Egypt but in reverse,” Elaine said.
“Why do people care so much about what others wear?” Mark said.
“The same misogyny that makes you, a Black man, think you’re entitled to use words that are demeaning to women,” Elaine said.
I wished I was alone. I didn’t want your ordeal to be on display as if you were an anonymous victim of a hate crime we were discussing in one of our political science or criminology classes. I knew how much this kind of exposure would hurt you.
“Elaine, you can’t be serious?” Mark said.
“It stems from the same urge to control women,” Elaine said. “In Algeria, women’s un
covered legs or hair were suddenly seen as a symbol of Western oppression —”
“Did the women ask the men to go back to wearing their traditional clothes too? I mean, if you’re rejecting Western influence,” Mark said, his lips stretching into a sarcastic smile.
“Yeah right,” Elaine said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Turns out, the attacks were sparked by some politician or cleric blaming working women for high unemployment rates.” She tucked strands of her straight weave behind her ear. “So basically, they wanted to frighten the women into staying home. Same way men here use words such as bitch, slut, or cunt to debase or intimidate outspoken women into silence.”
I wished they would both keep quiet. I wanted to leave but my feet wouldn’t move. I sat there staring at my phone. I thought about you, about all the years we’d been best friends, all the ways you’d shaped my life, and how I’d failed you when you needed me most.
We met in tenth grade. You didn’t wear the hijab back then. I’d transferred from another school that year. I sat beside you, not because I found you likeable, but because you were the only other Black girl — and the only Habesha kid — in the class. We were about the same height and complexion but that was where our resemblance ended. You had the slow, confident gait of someone who owned the ground they stood on while I waddled about with the gracelessness of a lost soul. Your clear, musical voice carried well while mine struggled to be heard even when I sat at the front of the class. I found you irritating and riveting at the same time. The way the sharp angles of your long face, which usually made you look tough, curved themselves into an astonishing softness when you smiled, as though you were sculpted from copper. The way you raved about Afrofuturism, from Samuel R. Delany to Nalo Hopkinson, from Sun Ra to Janelle Monáe, before any of us even knew the term. It was as if you had a secret window into a higher plane of existence.
The first time we really talked, we were in the school gym with the rest of the class, hanging posters of Harriet Tubman and Viola Desmond for Black History Month.
Things Are Good Now Page 5