by Dohra Ahmad
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Célianne had a girl baby. The woman acting as a midwife is holding the baby to the moon and whispering prayers. . . . God, this child You bring into the world, please guide her as You please through all her days on this earth. The baby has not cried.
We had to throw our extra things in the sea because the water is beginning to creep in slowly. The boat needs to be lighter. My two gourdes in change had to be thrown overboard as an offering to Agwé, the spirit of the water. I heard the captain whisper to someone yesterday that they might have to do something with some of the people who never recovered from seasickness. I am afraid that soon they may ask me to throw out this notebook. We might all have to strip down to the way we were born, to keep ourselves from drowning.
Célianne’s child is a beautiful child. They are calling her Swiss, because the word Swiss was written on the small knife they used to cut her umbilical cord. If she was my daughter, I would call her soleil, sun, moon, or star, after the elements. She still hasn’t cried. There is gossip circulating about how Célianne became pregnant. Some people are saying that she had an affair with a married man and her parents threw her out. Gossip spreads here like everywhere else.
Do you remember our silly dreams? Passing the university exams and then studying hard to go until the end, the farthest of all that we can go in school. I know your father might never approve of me. I was going to try to win him over. He would have to cut out my heart to keep me from loving you. I hope you are writing like you promised. Jésus, Marie, Joseph! Everyone smells so bad. They get into arguments and they say to one another, “It is only my misfortune that would lump me together with an indigent like you.” Think of it. They are fighting about being superior when we all might drown like straw.
There is an old toothless man leaning over to see what I am writing. He is sucking on the end of an old wooden pipe that has not seen any fire for a very long time now. He looks like a painting. Seeing things simply, you could fill a museum with the sights you have here. I still feel like such a coward for running away. Have you heard anything about my parents? Last time I saw them on the beach, my mother had a kriz. She just fainted on the sand. I saw her coming to as we started sailing away. But of course I don’t know if she is doing all right.
The water is really piling into the boat. We take turns pouring bowls of it out. I don’t know what is keeping the boat from splitting in two. Swiss isn’t crying. They keep slapping her behind, but she is not crying.
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of course the old president didn’t come. they arrested a lot of people at the airport, shot a whole bunch of them down. i heard it on the radio. while we were eating tonight, i told papa that i love you. i don’t know if it will make a difference. i just want him to know that i have loved somebody in my life. in case something happens to one of us. i think he should know this about me, that i have loved someone besides only my mother and father in my life. i know you would understand. you are the one for large noble gestures. i just wanted him to know that i was capable of loving somebody. he looked me straight in the eye and said nothing to me. i love you until my hair shivers at the thought of anything happening to you. papa just turned his face away like he was rejecting my very birth. i am writing you from under the banyan tree in the yard in our new house. there are only two rooms and a tin roof that makes music when it rains, especially when there is hail, which falls like angry tears from heaven. there is a stream down the hill from the house, a stream that is too shallow for me to drown myself. manman and i spend a lot of time talking under the banyan tree. she told me today that sometimes you have to choose between your father and the man you love. her whole family did not want her to marry papa because he was a gardener from ville rose and her family was from the city and some of them had even gone to university. she whispered everything under the banyan tree in the yard so as not to hurt his feelings. i saw him looking at us hard from the house. i heard him clearing his throat like he heard us anyway, like we hurt him very deeply somehow just by being together.
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Célianne is lying with her head against the side of the boat. The baby still will not cry. They both look very peaceful in all this chaos. Célianne is holding her baby tight against her chest. She just cannot seem to let herself throw it in the ocean. I asked her about the baby’s father. She keeps repeating the story now with her eyes closed, her lips barely moving.
She was home one night with her mother and brother Lionel when some ten or twelve soldiers burst into the house. The soldiers held a gun to Lionel’s head and ordered him to lie down and become intimate with his mother. Lionel refused. Their mother told him to go ahead and obey the soldiers because she was afraid that they would kill Lionel on the spot if he put up more of a fight. Lionel did as his mother told him, crying as the soldiers laughed at him, pressing the gun barrels farther and farther into his neck.
Afterwards, the soldiers tied up Lionel and their mother, then they each took turns raping Célianne. When they were done, they arrested Lionel, accusing him of moral crimes. After that night, Célianne never heard from Lionel again.
The same night, Célianne cut her face with a razor so that no one would know who she was. Then as facial scars were healing, she started throwing up and getting rashes. Next thing she knew, she was getting big. She found out about the boat and got on. She is fifteen.
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manman told me the whole story today under the banyan tree. the bastards were coming to get me. they were going to arrest me. they were going to peg me as a member of the youth federation and then take me away. papa heard about it. he went to the post and paid them money, all the money he had. our house in port-au-prince and all the land his father had left him, he gave it all away to save my life. this is why he was so mad. tonight manman told me this under the banyan tree. i have no words to thank him for this. i don’t know how. you must love him for this, manman says, you must. it is something you can never forget, the sacrifice he has made. i cannot bring myself to say thank you, now he is more than my father. he is a man who gave everything he had to save my life. on the radio tonight, they read the list of names of people who passed the university exams. you passed.
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We got some relief from the seawater coming in. The captain used the last of his tar, and most of the water is staying out for a while. Many people have volunteered to throw Célianne’s baby overboard for her. She will not let them. They are waiting for her to go to sleep so they can do it, but she will not sleep. I never knew before that dead children looked purple. The lips are the most purple because the baby is so dark. Purple like the sea after the sun has set.
Célianne is slowly drifting off to sleep. She is very tired from the labor. I do not want to touch the child. If anybody is going to throw it in the ocean, I think it should be her. I keep thinking, they have thrown every piece of flesh that followed the child out of her body into the water. They are going to throw the dead baby in the water. Won’t these things attract sharks?
Célianne’s fingernails are buried deep in the child’s naked back. The old man with the pipe just asked. “Kompè, what are you writing?” I told him. “My will.”
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I am getting used to ville rose. there are butterflies here, tons of butterflies. so far none has landed on my hand, which means they have no news for me. i cannot always bathe in the stream near the house because the water is freezing cold. the only time it feels just right is at noon, and then there are a dozen eyes who might see me bathing. i solved that by getting a bucket of water in the morning and leaving it in the sun and then bathing myself once it is night under the banyan tree. the banyan now is my most trusted friend. they say banyans can last hundreds of years. even the branches that lean down from them become like trees themselves. a bany
an could become a forest, manman says, if it were given a chance. from the spot where i stand under the banyan, i see the mountains, and behind those are more mountains still. so many mountains that are bare like rocks. i feel like all those mountains are pushing me farther and farther away from you.
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She threw it overboard. I watched her face knot up like a thread, and then she let go. It fell in a splash, floated for a while, and then sank. And quickly after that she jumped in too. And just as the baby’s head sank, so did hers. They went together like two bottles beneath a waterfall. The shock lasts only so long. There was no time to even try and save her. There was no question of it. The sea in that spot is like the sharks that live there. It has no mercy.
They say I have to throw my notebook out. The old man has to throw out his hat and his pipe. The water is rising again and they are scooping it out. I asked for a few seconds to write this last page and then promised that I would let it go. I know you will probably never see this, but it was nice imagining that I had you here to talk to.
I hope my parents are alive. I asked the old man to tell them what happened to me, if he makes it anywhere. He asked me to write his name in “my book.” I asked him for his full name. It is Justin Moïse André Nozius Joseph Frank Osnac Maximilien. He says it all with such an air that you would think him a king. The old man says, “I know a Coast Guard ship is coming. It came to me in my dream.” He points to a spot far into the distance. I look where he is pointing. I see nothing. From here, ships must be like a mirage in the desert.
I must throw my book out now. It goes down to them, Célianne and her daughter and all those children of the sea who might soon be claiming me.
I go to them now as though it was always meant to be, as though the very day that my mother birthed me, she had chosen me to live life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea, those who have escaped the chains of slavery to form a world beneath the heavens and the blood-drenched earth where you live.
Perhaps I was chosen from the beginning of time to live there with Agwé at the bottom of the sea. Maybe this is why I dreamed of the starfish and the mermaids having the Catholic Mass under the sea. Maybe this was my invitation to go. In any case, I know that my memory of you will live even there as I too become a child of the sea.
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today i said thank you. i said thank you, papa, because you saved my life. he groaned and just touched my shoulder, moving his hand quickly away like a butterfly. and then there it was, the black butterfly floating around us. i began to run and run so it wouldn’t land on me, but it had already carried its news. i know what must have happened. tonight i listened to manman’s transistor under the banyan tree. all i hear from the radio is more killing in port-au-prince. the pigs are refusing to let up. i don’t know what’s going to happen, but i cannot see staying here forever. i am writing to you from the bottom of the banyan tree. manman says that banyan trees are holy and sometimes if we call the gods from beneath them, they will hear our voices clearer. now there are always butterflies around me, black ones that i refuse to let find my hand. i throw big rocks at them, but they are always too fast. last night on the radio, i heard that another boat sank off the coast of the bahamas. i can’t think about you being in there in the waves. my hair shivers. from here, i cannot even see the sea. behind these mountains are more mountains and more black butterflies still and a sea that is endless like my love for you.
PAULETTE RAMSAY
From
AUNT JEN
30 June 1971
Dear Aunt Jen,
Today I sat and thought about you for a long, long time. I thought about how strange it is that you’re my mother and I am your daughter and you are there and I am here and we don’t know each other and if I came to England or if you came to Jamaica we would pass each other on the streets and you would not know me and I would not know you . . . We would pass each other and not know that we are flesh and blood. That is really strange.
I tried to picture you sitting in your house in England. I can barely see a body. Maybe it’s a body like Ma’s, only a little younger. Maybe it’s a body like mine, only older. It’s very hard to see a picture of you in my mind. I can’t see a face. I tried to imagine the face of a lady who looks like Uncle Roy and Uncle Johnny but it’s not working. I tried to picture a lady who looks like me, as Uncle Eddy said, but that does not work either. It’s like trying to see my own face in a dirty mirror. I’m still hoping you will send me a photograph of yourself.
Your daughter
Your dau
Sunshine
DINAW MENGESTU
AN HONEST EXIT
Thirty-five years after my father left Ethiopia, he died in a room in a boarding house in Peoria, Illinois, that came with a partial view of the river. We had never spoken much during his lifetime, but, on a warm October morning in New York shortly after he died, I found myself having a conversation with him as I walked north on Amsterdam Avenue, toward the high school where for the past three years I had been teaching a course in Early American literature to privileged freshmen.
“That’s the Academy right there,” I told him. “You can see the top of the bell tower through the trees. I’m the only one who calls it the Academy. That’s not its real name. I stole it from a short story by Kafka that I read in college—a monkey who’s been trained to talk gives a speech to an academy. I used to wonder if that was how my students and the other teachers, even with all their liberal, cultured learning, saw me—as a monkey trying to teach their language back to them. Do you remember how you spoke? I hated it. You used those short, broken sentences that sounded as if you were spitting out the words, as if you had just learned them but already despised them, even the simplest ones. ‘Take this.’ ‘Don’t touch.’ ‘Leave now.’”
I arrived in my classroom ten minutes before the bell rang, just as the first of my students trickled in. They were the smartest, and took their seats near the center. The rest arrived in no discernible order, but I noticed that all of them, smart and stupid alike, seemed hardly to talk, or, if they talked, it was only in whispers. Most said hello as they entered, but their voices were more hesitant than usual, as if they weren’t sure that it was really me they were addressing.
“I’m sorry for having missed class the other day,” I began, and because I felt obliged to explain my absence I told them the truth. “My father passed away recently. I had to attend to his affairs.”
And yet, because I had just finished talking to him, I felt that I hadn’t said enough. So I continued. “He was sixty-seven years old when he died. He was born in a small village in northern Ethiopia. He was thirty-two when he left his home for a port town in Sudan in order to come here.”
And while I could have ended there I had no desire to. I needed a history more complete than the strangled bits that he had owned and passed on to me—a short, brutal tale of having been trapped as a stowaway on a ship. So I continued with my father’s story, knowing that I could make up the missing details as I went.
He was an engineer before he left Ethiopia, I told my students, but after spending several months in prison for attending a political rally banned by the government he was reduced to nothing. He knew that if he returned home he would eventually be arrested again, and that this time he wouldn’t survive, so he took what little he had left and followed a group of men who told him that they were heading to Sudan, because it was the only way out.
For one week he walked west. He had never been in this part of the country before. Everything was flat, from the land to the horizon, one uninterrupted stream that not even a cloud dared to break. The fields were thick with wild green grass and bursts of yellow flowers. Eventually he found a ride on the back of a pickup truck already crowded with refugees heading toward the border. Every few hours, they passed a village, each one a cluster of thatch-roofed huts with a di
rt road carved down the middle, where children eagerly waved as the refugees passed, as if the simple fact that they were travelling in a truck meant they were off to someplace better.
When he finally arrived at the port town in Sudan, he had already lost a dozen pounds. His slightly bulbous nose stood in stark contrast to the sunken cheeks and wide eyes that seemed to have been buried deep above them. His clothes fit him poorly. His hands looked larger; the bones were more visible. He thought his fingers were growing.
This was the farthest from home he had ever travelled, but he knew that he couldn’t stay there. He wanted to leave the entire continent far behind, for Europe or America, where life was rumored to be better.
It was the oldest port in Sudan and one of the oldest cities in the country. At its peak, fifty thousand people had lived there, but now only a fraction of the population was left. Several wars had been fought nearby, the last one in 1970, between a small group of rebels and the government. There were burned-out tanks on the edge of town and dozens of half-destroyed, abandoned houses. There was sand and dust everywhere, and on most days the temperature came close to a hundred degrees. The people who lived there were desperately poor. Some worked as fishermen but most spent their days by the dock, looking for work unloading crates from the dozens of small freight ships in the harbor. My father was told that he could find a job there, and that if he was patient and earned enough money he could even buy his way out of the country on one of the boats.