AWOL

by Jennifer Barclay

  The hearing the next morning was in a splashy downtown law office, replete with antique furniture and oriental carpets. Four lawyers, each with a million-dollar education, had read my book and seemed prepared to make me dance. But their questions were as dull as dishwater and sometimes downright silly. Did I have “a degree” in writing? Had I ever seen an elephant with a venereal infection?

  I sat there thinking about Bob, who had left the farm in Missouri at the age of eleven for a career in the circus. And about Rosa, whose father, a circus clown, had, like the victim in Timmins, been stomped to death by an elephant when she was six years old. Her widowed mother had raised eight children on the proceeds from an “iron jaw” act, in which she did spins and acrobatics while hanging by her teeth in the top of the circus tent. By the age of twelve, Rosa herself was doing “iron jaw” and, by sixteen, had gained passage to America as a trapeze flyer with a troupe called the Flying Padillas.

  A pretty, dark-haired court stenographer, tastefully dressed and with spectacular Texas frontage, sat within four feet of me, in such splendid secretarial posture that I could hardly stop glancing at her. When the session ended at noon, she recommended that I spend the hours until my flight at four P.M. visiting Dealey Plaza, site of the Kennedy assassination, where the famed Texas School Book Depository had been made into a tourist museum.

  I did so, poring over the surrounding streets and sidewalks, the concourse, the “grassy knoll” and the famous picket fence. I went up into the book depository and stared out the window from where Lee Harvey Oswald—or somebody from some vantage point—had exploded the president’s skull with what I was informed was a twelve-dollar rifle and a pair of dumdum bullets.

  My cab to the airport cost me sixty dollars and was driven by an ex-Chilean freedom fighter, whose family had been slaughtered by brutes and whose appreciation of Dallas included its hard-assed attitude toward crime.

  With an hour to spare at the airport, I phoned relatives in an affluent north-Dallas suburb. They seemed relieved that I was leaving, not arriving and, in the absence of anything to say, offered up a fulsome assessment of the Texas governorship and early presidency of George W. Bush—whose name they pronounced “Buish” or “Bewsh.”

  I told them I had spent a night in a banana truck in Seagoville, the response to which was that “Bewsh” had done a wonderful job making the state safe from wayward Chicanos and other riff-raff.

  I inquired about the shadow that had been cast over Dallas by the assassination, and was informed that the city’s shame had been eradicated by a fedora-topped football coach named Tom Landry, who had earned national redemption in the form of a series of NFL championships with the Dallas Cowboys. Even the site of the ignominy, Dealey Plaza and the Texas School Book Depository, had been transformed from a locus of guilt into a National Historic Landmark where the souvenir shop was proud to sell assassination postcards and T-shirts. The paved lot next door was unashamed to offer ASSASSINATION PARKING for approximately the price Oswald had paid for his mail-order rifle.

  On a whim I phoned Bob and reached him as he rolled toward Galveston in the banana truck. I told him I’d visited Dealey Plaza, and he said, among other things, that Texas was “the meanest state in the union,” and that whatever they had told me downtown, I should not believe for a moment that the assassination had been carried off by “some kookie little commie with a ten-dollar rifle and a couple’a grooved bullets.”

  I passed through security, thinking about tigers and alligators and water moccasins—and death by elephant and autopsy photos and Mexican “coyotes.” And Chilean terror and the wonders of redemption.

  I wrote a postcard home, bearing a recipe for “Texas Sweat” chili, and a half hour later was in the air, drowsy as I cruised above the clouds, and then asleep.

  A screening agent for Canadian customs had asked me, among other things, if I had “anything to declare.”

  As a matter of fact I had. But it was not the sort of thing that I could comfortably declare in the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

  So I kept it to myself.

  Charles Wilkins is the author of several books including The Circus at the Edge of the Earth and A Wilderness Called Home. He lives in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where he is at work on a book about his 2002 walk from Thunder Bay to New York City.

  Tulu and Biscutti.

  005Destination: Ethiopia

  HER EYES FOLLOW

  Camilla Gibb

  I’m squatting in a white hallway, waiting in line for my medication—“Smartie time,” the Glaswegian woman with the greasy hair ahead of me calls this nightly ritual. I’m turning my hands over and over, staring at the black of my palms, when the woman behind me interrupts my private agonizing to ask me how I burned my hands. I’m about to object, I’m working up to words:

  They’re not burnt. It’s henna. Henna that my friend Nuria and I darkened with gasoline and then slathered on our palms and the soles of our feet so that we would look beautiful at her sister Nimute’s wedding. We were bridesmaids last week, veiled and ululating in a city in the eastern highlands of Ethiopia.

  I don’t speak it—the story just sounds too implausible, like the stories of all the other people here. Last week I was a bridesmaid. This week I am crazy.

  In the brief journey between the walls of an Ethiopian city and those of an English psychiatric hospital, I am alone. I take airplanes, drink much wine, compensating for a year of abstinence; blurring the passage and the borders between worlds as the blues and oranges of East Africa morph into the crushing, familiar grey that is Oxford, that is home.

  Home is a swamp waiting to swallow. I’ve been neck deep in its mud before—depressed enough to have been hospitalized, wild enough to be diagnosed manic, depressed and wild enough that when I left to spend a year in Ethiopia to conduct anthropological fieldwork for my Ph.D. thesis I took two duffle bags: one full of clothes, the other full of pills because they didn’t have lithium where I was going.

  I’ve been back for a day now and I walk around Sainsbury’s with the boyfriend who has waited for me all this time. I cry at the sight of chickens—pasty poultry suffocating under plastic—frozen vegetables, foul-mouthed toddlers, and fluorescent lights. I think of ritualized slaughter, halal meat stewed with fenugreek, peppers and pumpkins taken from the fertile earth beyond the city walls. Women huddled over a fire, food shared between hands. The fights that would break out over whose turn it was to suck the marrow from the bone. In the first month, that honour was mine, but for the next eleven, no longer a guest, I had to fight like everyone else.

  Ted is beside me, and there is Marmite and Earl Grey tea and pasteurized milk for miles, but life’s former essentials seem unnecessary now, unwanted.

  We carry our bags full of pathetic vegetables down our street, passing door after closed door. Life here is the weak light behind shutters, the faint smell of cooking oil, graffiti and broken car-windows, and the footsteps of men making their way to the damp pub at the bottom of the hill. It begins to rain an English rain and I know that as tedious and protracted as this drizzle will be, my tears will outlast it—they will last through the night and into the next day when I have an out-patient appointment at the psychiatric hospital because my lithium levels have not been read in over a year.

  I am resuming a weekly ritual from which I had been spared during my time in Ethiopia, the ritual of a crazy person. I am trying to explain to the row of doctors in front of me that I am not crying because I am crazy, but because I’m suffering from something that anthropologists call “reverse culture shock”—the disorientation of returning to your own culture as an alien.

  “Does it look bleak? Does it look hopeless?” they ask.

  “Honestly? Yes it does. It looks terribly sad, devoid of any colour, all meaning.”

  The switch in worlds is unequivocally abrupt, so devastating that I am breaking up into pixels, stretched across oceans, unable to reconcile being here and being there. I tell the truth: I say t
hings that an anthropologist, a traveller, a dreamer, a refugee or immigrant might understand. But these are doctors, not travellers. This is psychiatry, not poetry. I am mentally ill, not heartbroken and disoriented. Last week I was a bridesmaid. This week I am crazy.

  Three hundred people are crammed into a domed shrine to celebrate the miracles of the patron saint of the city of Harar. We are awake and buzzing; drumming, clapping and chanting our way through a monotonous series of religious verses into the wee hours of the morning. We are fuelled by qat—green leaves that when chewed have the effect of a mild narcotic—cut earlier in the day from squat bushes on the farms surrounding the city. We have masticated leaves stuck between our teeth, green film accumulating at the corners of our mouths; we have reached the state of mirqana. We are high.

  The men drip with sweat as they beat drums, and some of the women, who dance together on the other side of the room, have reached a state of near-ecstasy—hissing through their front teeth, their eyes rolling backwards, they spin circles, lose balance, fall into the crowd, which gently pushes them upright and back into the circle so they can continue.

  As high as I am, I’m taking notes. I am an anthropologist, and this is my job. I’m studying the religious practices of members of a community known for feeding hyenas and worshipping saints. I am veiled, abstinent, conversant in Arabic, and increasingly in Harari, the local language. I’m an aberration, the only foreigner for miles with the exception of a scattering of Somali refugees.

  Fatima, my “mother,” localizes me by giving me a name: Aziza Mohammed. The girls my age laugh and tell me it is very old-fashioned. They have trendy names like Orit and Titune. I’ve been adopted into Fatima’s cluster of twelve children. She and her sisters and all their female children eat, sleep and pray together in one room; her husband, Mohammed, and their sons in another. There is little interaction between these two rooms; the world is cleaved in half. I am a girl by definition because I am unmarried. I must observe a curfew, I must wear a veil outside the household compound, I must not be alone with a man.

  Somewhere though, somewhere under this veil, there is a woman who used to be me. The one who lives with her boyfriend in England, struggles with sanity, drinks too many pints at the pub and wears short skirts and steel-toed boots. They don’t want her here, and I certainly don’t want her here. Several months into this and I’ve all but forgotten her and the place she comes from. The one reminder that she is still here somewhere is the 1,200 milligrams of lithium I have to remember to feed her every day. The essence of her is captured in these white pills.

  I am not at all depressed here, but I am, like most people who live in the city, chronically ill. There is the brown, intermittent supply of water that the neighbourhood shares. We drink it, we cook with it, we wash dishes in it, we bathe in it and then we throw it out into the street where it trickles downhill and seeps into the ground. We throw waste into the street as well, including animal remains, trusting that the hyenas roaming the city at night will have licked the pavement clean by morning.

  We eat stew that has been made with the brown water. Four or eight or ten of us break pieces with our right hands from a large, unleavened bitter pancake—injera—over which the stew has been poured. We scoop it up with pieces of injera, pop these morsels into our mouths. Breakfast, lunch and dinner—three times a day, every day except Friday when we honour the Prophet and, thanks to a brief Italian occupation of Ethiopia in the 1940s, eat spaghetti (with our hands) for lunch.

  There is the square patch of dirt behind the storage shed in our compound where we go to the bathroom, tiptoeing in flip-flops around the fly-covered excrement of our kin. There are flying cockroaches. There is leprosy, TB, hepatitis, HIV. We all have bloated, gaseous bellies and severe diarrhea courtesy of intestinal parasites. We routinely kill the parasites by taking pink pills that are sold singly alongside pieces of chewing gum and individual cigarettes in the makeshift stalls that line the main street.

  I get better at interpreting the early signs of parasitic invasion, but I don’t always catch it in time. When I fail to, I get dizzy and my vision begins to blur. I assume this happens to everyone, except that on the worst of these occasions, I’m suffering differently. My hands have begun to tremble just like they did in the early days of taking lithium. Lithium is toxic in high doses, and I’m pretty sure the dehydration that results from chronic diarrhea has increased the drug’s concentration in my blood. I’m showing all the signs of being poisoned and now I’m scared.

  I go to the local hospital in the hope that some form of testing might be possible. I pay the mandatory hospital fee and wait for hours before meeting the doctor—Dr. Abdulhassan Adem, a gentle twenty-four-year-old with an incredible command of English. He has had only one training session in psychiatric illness and no clinical practice in the subject, but he compensates for this with his bedside manner.

  Nuria and Sara.

  He can offer no means of testing my lithium levels, but he listens and empathizes as I reveal a deeply incriminating secret: a mental illness in a country where the crazy are those who sit alongside the lepers and beg on the streets. I am telling him something about the woman I left behind, the woman who has no place here, the woman under this veil.

  His kindness is enough to make me feel calmer, and feeling calmer, I realize the only option is to simply stop taking lithium for a while. Bring on the depression—I’d rather take that risk than die here from blood poisoning.

  Abdulhassan. Exceedingly handsome, six foot two, as black as black can be, with a soft voice that contradicts his size. He wears a grey suit under his white coat, and proper laced-up shoes as opposed to the flip-flops I wear and think of as national dress. Abdulhassan. Back in his hometown after four years of medical training at Addis Ababa university. A local boy done good. He dreams of doing specialized training in pediatrics in the United States. He’s preparing for exams he’s going to take in Cairo in a year’s time, the final stage in a scholarship competition for African doctors. He’s made it this far; he thinks he stands a chance.

  I am sick for a week and a half as the lithium leaves my blood. I want to lie in the dark with a sheet over my head, sleep in silence, daydream about Abdulhassan, but this is not the Harari way. No, to be alone is to invite evil spirits, so the women in the neighbourhood keep me company, sit around my prostrate body, sing songs together, weave baskets, burn incense, sort through grains. A tiny girl from the neighbourhood, whom they call Biscutti, crawls over me, tickles me, hides under the sheet.

  Fatima tells me the reason I am sick is because when I first arrived I did not wear trousers under my skirts. Someone must have resented my bare skin and cursed me with the evil eye. Tariqa, her sister, tells me the reason I am sick is because I am not Muslim enough. She throws a prayer rug down and points in the direction of Mecca. “But I’m not Muslim at all,” I protest weakly. “When then?” they shout. “You’re sick! What more proof do you need?”

  Finally I feel better, and much to my relief, my mood hasn’t plummeted. I am eager to get back to work. I’m interviewing local midwives now, trying to gain some understanding of whether they consider the female circumcision they perform to be part of Muslim practice.

  I start by interviewing the one midwife I know: Biscutti’s grandmother. Biscutti and her mother are supported by the grandmother’s paltry income and the three of them are desperately poor. They love Biscutti, but she is clearly suffering from malnutrition. I often find her sitting alone in the road during the day eating dirt. She must be about two and a half years old but she hasn’t started speaking yet, she doesn’t play with other children, she still breast-feeds and has open wounds on her face that refuse to heal.

  She’s taken to spending a couple of hours with me nearly every day. I give her crayons, fill buckets with hot water that I’ve warmed over the fire so she can bathe. She’s aggressive, a wordless holy terror, eating crayons, splashing water and tearing up my notebooks when I’m not looking. She leaves for
home when she realizes that no amount of tugging on my breast is going to yield the milk she needs.

  The sores on her face get worse, not better. It’s been two months since I’ve seen Dr. Abdulhassan, but I decide to take Biscutti to him. He gives me some antibiotic ointment to apply twice a day, and while I hold her, he paints her face with purple anaesthetic. We have this baby between us and I cannot help but think: Abdulhassan. If you and I had a baby would she be as beautiful as this?

  He invites me to a bercha’a on the weekend, a qat party, where people recline on pillows, drink tea, tell stories and chew their way into mirqana.

  I think about him for the rest of the week. What if we married? Would I become a real Harari? What if we adopted Biscutti and went back to my home country, Canada, and you could be a doctor there?

  The bercha’a at his house is a sultry affair. It is conducted in a hidden room because the company is mixed sex, young men and women, highly charged. It is conducted in the dark because Abdulhassan has something very rare: a television and a VCR. We watch an American thriller, the name of which I forget because all I am conscious of is Abdulhassan, cross-legged and breathing beside me in the dark.

  I AM SICK FOR A WEEK AND A HALF AS THE LITHIUM LEAVES MY BLOOD. I WANT TO LIE IN THE DARK WITH A SHEET OVER MY HEAD, SLEEP IN SILENCE, DAYDREAM ABOUT ABDULHASSAN, BUT THIS IS NOT THE HARARI WAY.

  When the lights come on, we talk about my work with midwives. Abdulhassan does not believe in female circumcision. He believes it only causes harm and that it has no basis in Islam. He believes, as I believe, that the answer lies not in preaching or prohibiting it, but in educating women so that they have ways to achieve status other than through being wives and mothers. He offers to accompany me on visits to the midwives I have not been able to interview because they speak Oromo, a neighbouring language, which Abdulhassan speaks.