* * *
—
If you insist on The Facts alone, however (in the conventional sense in which I know you mean the word), what I will tell you is this: Kollie lives in Des Moines, Iowa, now and works as an insurance adjuster. After he returned from those five miserable years in Liberia, he went off to college at the University of South Dakota. He did very well there. He even played soccer. So, from my parents’ point of view, sending him away was right and justified. From my point of view, and Kollie’s, however (although we have never talked about it), it was an unmitigated disaster. (The story you were expecting after Papi left Kollie at the airport? Whatever it was you imagined? It happened too. If not to Kollie, then to someone else.) He wrote me while he was there, begging me for money, to find a way to get him back home, to appeal to the Old Ma and Papi to buy him a ticket back. He wrote that the relatives there were not feeding him regularly—not because they didn’t want to, but because like most other Liberians, they simply didn’t have the money. He said he had no clothes that were not old and ripped, and that he had to walk more than three miles every day to get to school. I still have the letter where he tried to explain how the other students treated him, gleefully bullying the strange and uppity American kid. They call me fucking “White Boy” here, Sis. White Boy! Me, darker than most of them, me, child of Bigazi. They gather round me in a circle if I’m not paying attention or if I’m not quick enough, and beat on me to try to give them American dollars that I don’t have.
I got into so many fights with my parents during this time, screaming at them over and over again about how they had abandoned their son, that he would die there, that they would never forgive themselves. At first, they tried to reason with me and explained quietly why this was the best thing for everyone involved, until, at last, they just shrugged me off and would only say in a very tired voice, “He will be back.” Once, during a particularly bad fight, my father told me: “He can be mad-menh. He can even hate us-oh. But he will be alive.”
When Kollie was almost twenty-two, they brought him back. He was bigger, bulkier, talked even less than he did as a teenager, and mostly wanted nothing to do with me, my parents, or our entire extended Liberian family. His anger was palpable, as was his grief, and with everything he’d been through, I felt compelled to respect them both. My parents just kept saying—still keep saying—“It will take time for him to adjust-oh. Give him time and space.” To which I wanted to respond, “Why would he want to readjust to the two of you? To our fucked-up family?” But I don’t.
“Time and space.” I have traveled both now in these pages. I have found many things, but nothing like peace, nothing like rest for bone-deep weariness.
* * *
—
Other facts that may be of interest to you: My father tells half stories of his great-grandfather Togar once in a while. He occasionally drops scraps about Giakpee, the small but prosperous village in Grand Bassa County, where this Togar was apparently a person of some significance in his time. Papi has said nothing about him working on the Congo people’s plantations—that was a historical phenomenon I stumbled upon in my research and found appalling. Of course, Liberians don’t really talk about it—so much of their (or is it “our”? I never know) history is not written anyway. And the last thing people who have experienced trauma want is to relive it over and over again by narrating it. I found two older gentlemen who had some experience on Congo plantations and building roads and such who would talk to me a little bit about it while I was in country two years ago, but honestly, they couldn’t tell me that much. Or maybe it was also that I couldn’t hear that much of what they were saying, my Liberian English has fallen off so.
Do I have relatives who immigrated to Liberia in the colonial period and helped build the country and colony? Who became “Congo People”? Who went from being niggers fearing the lash to white people wielding it? Maybe. Probably. I don’t know. Certainly no one in our family has stories from that far back. But I was thinking, imagining what it must have been like for those African Americans who dreamed of true freedom and equality, and who thought that they might actually get it from making a new life in Liberia. How the United States abandoned them (or is it us?) so many times throughout history, and so how, of course, they would be eager to believe any kind of fiction an organization like the American Colonization Society would feed them about starting new and being champions of their own destinies. How they ended up reproducing in many ways, the unjust and violent conditions they were fleeing in America—this time on someone else, the indigenous. How we Liberians—both indigenous and Americo-Liberians—have never really reconciled that. How I have never really reconciled that. And how that might be something for me to think about, as I am eight months away from marrying an African American and the love of my life.
There is no closure in this story. No circle. Only an ever-turning spiral—characters, themes, and questions folding in on themselves over and over again. Time passes, oceans are crossed; circumstances change, or they do not. One continent is exchanged for another, but still the spiral does not become a circle. No, spirals rise and they fall. Sometimes it’s hard to know which.
* * *
—
And yes, you read that right. A wedding. Evidently I’ve placed my bet on rising.
My mother will talk to me a little bit about Felicia, will acknowledge that we live together, and plan to make a life together. She has even helped me plan some elements of the wedding and service. It fit you so fine-oh, the Old Ma, Fanewu, said when I first tried on the dress Felicia and I eventually chose for the wedding. Even now, if I close my eyes, I can feel my mother’s damp palm on the small of my back, tugging on the zipper gently, smoothing an imperceptible wrinkle. Her fingers tidying, fussing, and quietly loving the body of the daughter she’d carried to a moment she never dreamed of. And Felicia will love you in this, she said softly, and I could see the incipient smile she was trying to hide. The joy that not even her sterile blue scrubs could blunt. Her hand finally moving to grab mine while we looked at me, all white and regal, in the dress shop’s huge mirror, big enough for both of us. My beautiful daughter. Now a beautiful bride.
I am twenty-six years old and only in these last few years have I finally come to something resembling an appreciation of my black-African-queer-woman’s body. I have seen it—in mirrors, in other people’s eyes, in this book—as a site of so many painful battles for myself and for my mother. And yet our bodies endure. More than that: They possess reserves of tenderness I didn’t think possible until that mirror showed me a flash of it.
* * *
—
Our bodies enclose the twisted threads of history—passed flesh to flesh, from parent to child, conqueror to conquered, lover to beloved.
* * *
—
But my father . . . I wonder if he will ever come around. And I don’t know—Felicia would kill me if she heard me say this—but maybe he has endured enough forced journeys on this spiral that it is unreasonable for me to expect him to take the turn that brings him face-to-face with his daughter’s love of a woman. All I know is my father is my father, he has always been opaque to me and probably always will be. We have never really understood each other. He wanted me to be a nurse and would not pay for my undergraduate degree in English. He still says I will never be able to make it as a writer, even though I got a full ride to graduate school, and several publishers have expressed interest in this manuscript. (And honestly I haven’t decided if I’m going to publish it yet—which drives both Felicia and my agent crazy—but it’s not their decision to make. I didn’t write it to get it published. I wrote it as a conjuring act. I am a magician, and my spells are words. They are not coins or even pages for other eyes to consume.)
Sociological tracts and books litter my father’s bedroom, close at hand for him, but hidden away from his few visitors. In Liberia, he had a master’s degree in sociology. Bu
t, though he is no stranger to hard, humbling work, he will not make the effort to re-earn the degree here. I feel like some part of him gave up and died in the process of leaving the refugee camps of Ghana and coming here. Like there was some vivacious, challenging, energetic part of him that Kollie and I never got. Because all that ended with the war and the violence the coup unleashed. That’s why I invented Evelyn. Because all my life, I have imagined in some shadowy part of my mind and heart that my father lost someone close to him, someone he loved deeply, and in doing so, lost his own dream too. Which is why he is so intent on the rest of us letting go of ours before they really start. At least now I know that he believes these losses are a kindness.
* * *
—
This room has that peculiar quality of two-in-the-morning-with-only-a-laptop-screen-for-illumination darkness that I’ve come to know very well. It has been too long now, so many hours I have sat here with you, typing, drawing the magic thread of story from one fragment of fact to the next. Trying to bring them all—all my people—here, into this basic studio apartment with peach walls and scarred wood floors. Trying to see the whole spiral at once. So many days, so many months. Years even.
On the other side of the room, Felicia snores softly, sleeping lightly as she always does on these nights when I can’t sleep and must write. Her chest rises and falls underneath the down comforter Papi gave me for college, her body forming an expectant hollow for mine. Though it is hard leaving her to follow the path of the spiral, she encourages me. She came to this city from Chicago for school. “I stayed in the frigid Great White North for your crazy ass,” she has said more than a few times. When this work leads me to despair and discouragement, I ask her to tell me about when she was a kid on the South Side, before she knew me. This is already a well-worn ritual in our still-young relationship, and she quickly obliges me with a story of the barber who gave her fades and made her look fly, cutting late at night or early in the morning so her mama wouldn’t stop her from tending to her maleness, and she could avoid the kids on the block who’d call her a dyke. Or, she will cajole me with a story of Uncle Nene, who told all the mamas and the papas he was taking the children to Bible study, when they ended up at Wilson’s Stop ’N Shop or the playground half the time.
“Why would you ever leave such a place to come here?” I ask. And her answer always brings me around again.
I am smiling now, my reader, my friend, as I close this file. I am done, weary after all the near misses and endless longing to be so much more than we are now, to be further around these relentless turns toward freedom. I too want a moment’s peace and quiet. But I am not resigned. I am not apathetic. I am not finished. No, I am in love. Undaunted and in love. Sliding in beside her, I slip my arm around the doughy center of her stomach, and she squeezes me, now us, back. I giggle into her neck, and she sighs in her sleep. I wish you could see us.
—Angel Yasmine Flomo
September 3, 2018
Powderhorn Park, Minneapolis
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When I stepped into the Gomoa Buduburam Refugee Camp just outside of Accra, Ghana, in 1998, I had no idea that it would change the trajectory of both my life and my writing. I was twenty-three years old, on a year-long research fellowship in West Africa, searching out connections between African Americans and continental Africans. The knowledge and history I stumbled onto talking to the Liberian refugees at Gomoa Buduburam would haunt me for years to come, and later compel me to struggle through the many drafts, voices, and narrative threads that finally became Dream Country.
The first thread I picked up was simple enough. I was befuddled when I saw what I thought was the American flag strung up on a pole in the middle of the makeshift camp. “No, that’s our flag,” my steadfast hosts informed me. “The flag of Liberia.” When I began to argue with them, they told me to look closer and then asked me why I had never heard the history of their country. They wanted to know why I didn’t know that Liberia had been colonized by “your own people,” freed American slaves. I remember a feeling of pressure in my skull at this revelation, which I still fought them on, impossible to my steeped-in-mainstream-American-narratives brain as it was. I truly could not fathom how it was that I had missed this story completely, as central as it was to the ongoing African–African American encounter. That it was also a quintessentially American story of reinvention, re-creation, and colonization did not escape me either.
What did it mean that African Americans who had known bondage set out to fashion a more perfect union across the sea, not where they had come from, but where their ancestors had called home? How had they managed to shape a country with the indigenous who already lived there? And how and why had it all fallen apart so completely? How was Liberia, the dream of those formerly enslaved people and the land that native Africans had loved and nurtured for generations, ruined by the spilt blood of its people, a country cleaved and utterly broken by civil war?
I sat down with a woman who told me she had given birth to three children, although she only carried the smallest, her baby, on her back. The rebels had killed the other two, after they raped her and burned down her house. Then they went next door, raped her mother, killed her father, and burned down their house too. I did not know what to do with the numbness I felt while hearing this story, the way the woman who told it both recalled it as banal fact and then recoiled in horror at the memory.
When I returned to the States from my trip, I searched out every piece of information I could find about Liberia—in books, articles, and people. I was incredulous and dismayed to discover that, for the most part, the freed blacks who came to Liberia in the nineteenth century re-created the very conditions of oppression they fled in America. Indeed, these “Americo-Liberians” as they came to be called by some, and “Congo people” by others, really did create a colony in Liberia, in every sense of the word. The government they established recognized their class as citizens at the expense of the indigenous Africans on whose land they settled, and funneled almost all of the resources of the interior to the capital. In this way, 95 percent of Liberia languished for generations, fomenting the resentment that catalyzed the violent uprisings and coup of 1980. I could not understand how people who by all indications should have known better, didn’t. The role of the American Colonization Society as the anti-black colonization vehicle in all of this certainly complicated matters, as did European and American imperial meddling on the continent throughout the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but those facts didn’t absolve Americo-Liberians for their role in more than 130 years of indigenous domination.
For years I struggled with the relationship of those black American settlers to the indigenous Africans they oppressed in Liberia. How might I explore it in fiction? Did I even have the writing chops to do so? More important, did I have the right to represent this subject matter in a novel, given my black Americanness? In the meantime, I wrote a whole other book, called See No Color, that began to address my own complicated place in the context of American blackness. The fact is, however, that some stories you choose, and others choose you. Dream Country was surely the latter—it wouldn’t let me go, hard as I tried. So, in 2008, ten years after my first trip to West Africa, I decided to return. This time I would venture to Liberia and interview everyday people, politicians, community leaders, professors, and everyone in between about the run up to the 1980 coup that plunged the country into its disastrous fifteen-year civil war.
A young Liberian college student I met in Monrovia introduced me to numerous contacts while I was there, and helped me navigate the nation’s institutions and broken infrastructure. And in so doing, we also fell in love. Eventually we had kids, married, and later divorced. Our children, Boisey and Marwein, embody all the promise and contradictions of their shared black American–Liberian heritage, growing up here in America but part-time in their dad’s house, which is distinctly Liberian. So Dream Country is for them, so that they
may see their cross-cultural identities as enmeshed in the larger, ongoing, spiraling history of the African–African American encounter. And so that they may come to see that in many important ways, the African American story cannot be told without also telling the Liberian one. And that, in key ways, Liberians are forever connected to African Americans, for better and worse.
Dream Country is for all those Liberian and Somali boys in Minnesota and elsewhere, who, like Kollie, get “sent back home,” because their immigrant parents believe this to be the only way to save their lives in an educational system that at best cannot accommodate them, at worst destroys them. It is for all those disaffected, forgotten, powerful young men whose stories have not yet been told. And for those like Angel, who love them, but don’t know what to do.
Dream Country is for all those on the continent and in the diaspora who feel they have no home, due to the relentless violence of colonialism and enduring systems of white supremacy. It is for women of African descent who still, to this day, are not fully seen, included, or valued in their families or communities as the black diamonds they are. It is for anyone anywhere who has tried to make themselves whole through small pieces of a larger story they could cobble together. It is for everything we have forgotten, and what we dream.
Dream Country Page 23