by Vamba Sherif
‘Why is he here?’
‘To stop us,’ the commander said.
‘A child stopping a war?’
‘Let’s finish him,’ another said.
As I gazed into the commander’s face, I began to draw war through the expressions in my eyes – war as I perceived it. I drew without pausing until the drawing was complete in my mind, until I had drawn war as I had always dreamed of capturing on paper. When I looked around me, I found I was alone. The men had disappeared.
In their place I saw my father holding a drawing in his hand, shaking it before my face. So I had not left the room after all. I had been dreaming. The drawing was not a drawing of war. Instead of war, I had drawn the most dreaded of all our masked beings, the one with the crocodile beak, the one with the terror of the night and the power of the ancestors. The drawing was so grotesque that I could not believe it had come from my pencil. Someone else must have done it.
‘Halay, you cannot draw this masked being,’ he said.
I dropped my gaze.
‘A child should not draw these things.’
I was silent. I kept drawing with my fingers a spiral form on the surface of the table I was sitting at, sweating now, dipping my toes in the floor as though by doing so my father would vanish from the room.
‘This is an abomination. Look at this, there’s no masked being alive that looks like this. This is a desecration, Halay.’
He was shaking the drawing, his lips twitching with anger, afraid of my mother overhearing him. He tried to contain his anger but it seemed not to work. Soon he was shouting at me.
My mother heard him and came into the room. Instead of joining my father to reprimand me, she held me by the hand.
‘Let my son be,’ she said. ‘We’ve seen worse things.’
My mother pulled me away from my father. Surprised by her remark, he gazed at my mother and then began to crush the drawing and I thought he was about to throw it away.
‘Why are you saying this?’ he said.
‘Because it is the truth,’ my mother said.
‘But he is also your son,’ my father said.
‘Don’t you think I know that?’
There was a menacing edge to her voice that did not escape him, and that was why he turned to Aunt Elizabeth who, as feeble as a feather, had come into the room.
‘Elizabeth, talk to your sister. Come here, Halay, forget what your mother said. What you did is unforgivable.’
‘He’s an artist, Frederick,’ Aunt Elizabeth said.
‘Now you two are ganging up on me.’
There was a slight tremor in his voice, for he seemed aware of the vulnerability of the situation; his family was now on the other side of the river, the other side of the valley, and a harsh remark from him was bound to make everyone turn against him. In another time or place, he would have wrenched me from my mother’s grasp and whipped me.
But times had changed. We were now prisoners of an ongoing war, confined to a place we could not escape. It was a time governed by forces beyond our comprehension. Never have I seen such an expression on my mother’s face, which I found I was beginning to draw in my mind, her defiance, her stone-hard look, her ability to do anything.
‘My son has done nothing wrong,’ she said.
‘You are making a mistake,’ he said.
‘Halay will draw whatever he wants,’ she said.
My father stood there for what seemed like forever, wrestling with what he could say to right the situation, while my mother gazed into the distance, her sweaty hand clasped around mine.
She started for the door, but my father reached out to stop her and she did not move, but turned to him with tears in her eyes.
‘If we remain here any longer, there will be nothing left of our family. This war has to stop, Frederick,’ she said.
How could I pretend not to be affected by the things that challenged me to give them shape; things that bore hidden beauties and enigmas that dared me to recreate them on paper; things that were not meaningful until I captured them and put them into another perspective, like the flowers on the bushes we walk past on our way to and from school? It was like rendering nature a face and an importance that hitherto was not obvious. What was my responsibility and to whom? To society with those like my father who had forbidden me to draw the essence of such a society? Was I not responsible to no one but the subjects of my drawings? What was wrong with drawing our masked beings? Was it because of tradition or because I was still a boy without the full knowledge of my role in such a society? What if it was Mr Wilson who had drawn the masked being? How would my father and society have reacted to him? These were questions that I had no answer to.
For the first time in weeks, the sounds of war petered out. The silence that fell on the city was so deep that it took on a shape of its own, much more portentous and ominous than the gunfire. The silence crept into our houses and under our skins and kept us awake and on edge, for experience had taught us that when such silence broke it resulted in unimaginable acts. But the silence persisted into the next day as sunlight poured through chinks in the roof and windows of our home. By noon, the silence took root in our consciousness and stayed.
Later voices outside lulled us out of our house, and when I caught sight of the full sunlight and the trees in our compound I felt alive like never before. A deep fountain of creativity welled up in me and burst across my vision, and when it cleared I knew exactly how to draw war.
8
I went to my room and sat at my table. I tore a page out of my sketchbook and sharpened my pencil. I willed it to draw the perfect lines and curves, and in my hand it felt at home. I knew now that I could not draw war in the form of falling men, scorched homes, famine, dead rats, cats or dogs. Not even in the form of plagues and diseases often associated with war. Not in the form of children with guns or women humiliated or killed. And not in the form of skies that rained blood. I was certain that I could draw war only by contrasting it with love. So I drew my ancestor Halay, the man who offered his life to avert war. Human aversion to war could arise only out of love for other human beings. And Halay’s will to stop war could have arisen only out of his love for other people. So I drew him.
With confidence hitherto unknown to me, I drew Halay with a body in the shape of our land, with all its challenges and differences and with its terrible past and present. For a face, I gave him that of the dreaded masked being, paying close attention to the sharp lines of the nose, the curves of the beak, the pyramidal features of the whole face, and in the eyes I drew the terror and the longing of the commander of the fighters. Seven arrows of pain were pointed at Halay, sharp arrows that dug deep into his sides. From his eyes dropped tears that stood for the sorrow of the land. As I drew, concentrating on the stream of tears, over and over, erasing and redrawing, striving toward perfection, I imagined him coming down the hill, bearing the faces of his people with him, hoping they would remember his act, and seeing what they could be and could still become despite everything. I imagined him in the hole that was in fact a grave, alone for seven days and nights, fighting his doubts even at that moment, his heavy sighs being borne by the winds to the ears of his people.
When I felt I could add nothing to the drawing, not a stroke of the pencil, I stood up, moved a distance away from it and stared at it.
I had given life to death, a voice to the past and present and a face to the unknown.
I had resurrected Halay.
9
This is our fate. This is the life of a people with a history and a present that keep shaping the future. In my eyes burns a flame that sees how our lives have changed, a flame that sees how beauty can change even the most wretched of lives. Now, whenever I stroll through the forest, I sit by the silent river and draw Aunt Elizabeth, the professor and my parents, the mayor and the fighters who had left the city, as if they had never been, but their presence is found in bullet marks on houses, in the dead we had buried, and in the cries of a man afflicted
by a nightmare. Our lives go on as they were meant to. And I draw that life as it is and sometimes as I want it to be, and always with doubt at the edge of my confidence, egging me, holding me in check, and plunging me into a feverish burst of creativity.
VAMBA SHERIF was born in Kolahun, Liberia in 1973. In his early teens he moved to Kuwait, where he completed secondary school. The First Gulf War compelled him to leave Kuwait and settle in Damascus, Syria, and then in the Netherlands, where he read Law. Vamba is also a journalist and film critic and lives in the Netherlands. He writes in Dutch and English.
Also by Vamba Sherif
Bound to Secrecy
The Black Napoleon
The Witness
The Kingdom of Sebah
HopeRoad Publishing Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HopeRoad 2016
Original Dutch edition first published in 1999
Het land van de vaders by Vamba Sherif
Published by special arrangement with Uitgeverij De Geus in conjunction with their duly appointed agent 2 Seas Literary Agency
Copyright © 1999 Vamba Sherif
The right of Vamba Sherif to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978-1-908446-49-7
eISBN 978-1-908446-54-1
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