For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  Jayne said she had studied very hard before her exams. She put her feet in buckets of cold water to keep herself awake at night as she studied. She opened the windows to let cold air circulate through her room. She knew math well but during the tests, she didn’t have time to complete all the work. “They didn’t give me large-type books or exams. It took me a long time to read the exam. In physics, biology, and chemistry I did well. The proof was in the pudding. But I got D minus in maths. I was good in maths, but I didn’t complete my exam because I couldn’t read it. They said, ‘This girl did not go to special school, therefore we do not recognize her as visually impaired. Therefore, if she cannot do the exam, she fails.’”

  Lucy defended Jayne by crossing her arms indignantly over her ample breasts. She shook her head vigorously. Her plump brown cheeks shone beneath the overhead lights. “Insensitive people, I tell you.”

  “And that teacher was a woman,” Jayne said incredulously.

  “A woman never knows to whom she will give birth.”

  “Ahhh. What kind of child will she have?”

  “The quality of your life tomorrow depends on your thoughts today.”

  “I am sure that we will return to Kenya and change the life for the blind and the albino.”

  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

  “We shall see what we shall see.”

  “God willing.”

  Jayne reached for her water glass, miscalculated its location, and reached a second time.

  They told me about the street violence in Nairobi, the shootings and stabbings and robberies; the hijackers who posed as policemen at roadblocks and the thieves who climbed onto public buses, drugged all the passengers, and stole their wallets and jewelry. Once, while Jayne was in the dressing room of a Nairobi shop, a robber came in and shot the two Indian shopkeepers just as she was pulling a dress over her head. “I went out and I saw the two dead bodies and, oh, I was so scared, but I didn’t look at them too long because I did not want to be a witness.” I asked her why not. “Eh! I did not wish to become another victim!”

  Lucy leaned close to me, her arms still crossed over her breasts, and in the firm, urgent tone of a mother dispensing imminently applicable advice to a child, she said, “Now, listen to me. In Nairobi, when you see a gun in the air, please fall down upon the ground immediately and ask no questions. Please do not look at them or sure they will shoot you. As for me, I prefer to fall on my stomach, because that way they cannot shoot me in the heart.”

  “Just let them shoot you in the rear end,” Jayne told me with no trace of irony or humor.

  “God forbid they should shoot you in the alimentary canal!”

  “Or liver.”

  “Hey!”

  In Kenya, the baddies would, apparently, kill you for anything—a cigarette, a spool of yarn, a bottle of beer. Jayne said, “In Kenya, you know, we leave our houses open. Not locked but open.” She spread her legs to show me exactly how open. “The gangster, he will go right into any open house. This one gangster, he went into an open house and he told the man there, ‘I have a gun! You take your pants off and you give them to me.’ Then he set the house on fire.”

  Lucy clapped her hands over the table in disgust, then crossed her arms again and leaned back in her chair. “My boyfriend, he is a cop. He has a gun. Loaded at all times.”

  “To protect himself from you!” Jayne cried, and then she cackled for a good long while.

  Lucy pursed her lips at Jayne. “Eh, wait until you have a boyfriend with a gun, Jayne!”

  The Kenyan girls were street-smart, experienced, and not a bit shy about sexual matters, and yet they had quaint romantic fantasies and schoolgirl obsessions with the fairy-tale cliché of true and everlasting love. On the desk in her room, Lucy kept a Bible next to a smiling teddy bear with a floppy hat on its head and a bouquet of dried flowers hugged in its arms. They claimed to know all the necessary tricks of catching a man, pleasing him, keeping him awhile, and then dumping him on his ear when he turned out to be a no-good, selfish, two-timing, chauvinist chump, which without question he would turn out to be. They preferred blond-haired, blue-eyed white men to black men. Of Mohammed and Sahr, the two Sierra Leonean students, they said, “Eeee, those West African boys are too dark!” And when I said that I liked those dark faces, they told me, “White woman, you can have them!”

  “The very dark men always seem to have glowing white teeth,” I said.

  Feigning boredom, Lucy sighed, examined her fingernails, fanned her ample cheeks with her folded hankie. “Okay, Rose, if there is a power cut, let them smile in the dark for you.”

  Jayne touched her lips in thought. “When they smile in the dark it is nice!”

  Lucy squinted around the room, pushed her dinner plate away, and said to the ceiling, “In the dark they are all the same.”

  Not entirely off the subject, Jayne said, “Lucy has big breasts.”

  Lucy unfolded her arms to show me the breasts and said “Hey!” in proud agreement. “But you were never gifted in that way, Jayne.”

  “Ahhh,” Jayne said ruefully.

  “I wasn’t either,” I said.

  Lucy looked me up and down through her thick lenses and then said pitilessly, “It is true. You are slight and without many gifts.”

  Since all decorum seemed to have gone by the boards, I mentioned the fact that Jayne and Lucy both had substantial rear ends. They liked this very much. Jayne said proudly, “Yah, Rose, if we carried a baby on our back, the baby would not fall off. Our ass would support him.”

  “Like a bookshelf, you see.”

  Jayne said suddenly, “The Pokot tribe in Kenya circumcise their cows.”

  “Cows?”

  They collapsed in giggles. “They also circumcise their girls and put a bone in the entrance of the vagina to be removed by their husband on the wedding night. It is to keep the girl from going with other men. She does not have the desire.”

  “Is it not abominable?” Lucy said.

  “Terrible,” Jayne said.

  Before we got up from the table that evening Lucy declared that the only good thing about blind men was that they could not see other beautiful women passing on the street in miniskirts.

  Jayne raised her index finger. “Ahhh. But they cannot see you either, Lucy.”

  At some point during my stay at the IISE, a red-furred kitten showed up on campus and took up residence as the school pet. We called him Louis Braille. One day the kitten got into my classroom and ended up sitting on Victor’s foot beneath the table. When Victor understood that it was the cat, he leaped out of his chair and shouted, “Oh, cat! Do not come around me!” He had moved so forcefully and suddenly that his big dark glasses fell from his nose to his lips.

  I got up, put the cat out of the room, and asked Victor why he didn’t want it near him.

  Victor looked badly shaken. He straightened his sunglasses. “Auntie Rose, a cat can do witchcraft.”

  I dismissed this, but Johnson quickly defended Victor. “Respected Auntie Rose,” Johnson said soberly, “in Liberia they use the cat for evil witchcraft. They would use this kitten. Because it is strongly believed in our setting that the cat is an ungrateful animal. No matter how much you care for it, it will betray you. Dog is submissive and obedient. Cat? Never!”

  “I don’t believe these superstitions,” I said. “I don’t believe in witchcraft.” Approximately half the students said they didn’t believe in it either.

  Johnson, Victor, and James protested. “And dwarves also can do evil witchery,” Victor said, “which is why they live only in the mountainous areas.”

  “Wait a minute, gentlemen,” I said. “Tell me what a dwarf is.”

  Johnson said, “Dwarves are the small people in Liberia who live in the mountains.”

  I explained to those in the class who didn’t know the term that dwarfism was a medical condition that retarded growth, that dwarves happened to be unusually small people with particular physical characteris
tics, and that there were dwarves all over the world, not just in Liberia. When I was sure that everyone knew what I meant, I asked the Liberians to explain what they were saying.

  “Dwarves are frightening and dangerous and we stay away from them,” James said.

  “They are over in the forest,” Victor said.

  “They group together and talk among themselves,” Johnson said. “They are human but they have a magical power. If you go near to them, you will never find a way out. They will grab you and tie you.” Johnson made a keen grabbing motion with his small hands. “They live in the mountains, where all the diamonds and natural resources are to be found.”

  The men were not laughing. They spoke with conviction. They fully believed what they were saying. The very thought of these evil mountain-dwelling dwarves seemed to frighten them.

  “They have natural magic, I tell you,” Johnson said adamantly. “My people, God created them to make you disappear. They will make you dumbfound.”

  “Dumbstruck,” Marco said.

  “Dumbstruck, my brother Marco.”

  We sat in silence for a moment while the class tensely pondered the possibilities. Pynhoi teetered on the edge of her seat and peered nervously around the table, not sure what to believe. There were supernatural forces in her culture too. Kyila and Gyentzen, with their Tibetan fear of demons and spirits, also looked uncertain.

  “So,” I said. “You Liberians would not go near a dwarf, is that right?”

  “That is right!”

  “Have you ever met a dwarf?”

  “We have not!”

  “You have never met a dwarf and yet you believe all these superstitious stories about them. Is that correct?”

  “Correct!”

  “But isn’t it true that in Liberia people also believe that blind people just like you can do evil witchcraft?”

  “True!”

  “Can you indeed do witchcraft?”

  They were indignant. Victor raised his hands in the direction of my voice in a pleading way. “Auntie Rose, you know us. You know that we cannot!”

  “But people who have never even met you believe that you can, in exactly the same way that you believe dwarves can without ever having met one.”

  A heavy silence followed. The ceiling fan buffeted the air above our heads. The day was overcast and oppressively hot; thunder purred faintly in the distance. The Liberians’ faces were damp behind their huge dark glasses. Jessie, who occasionally displayed mild characteristics of blindism, rocked slightly in her chair in a mood of coiled suspense.

  “Tell us why you believe these stories about dwarves,” I said.

  “People say them,” James said.

  “People say them because dwarves are physically different and that scares them. Because they don’t understand it. But people say the same about you because you too have a physical difference. You’re blind. You know firsthand that what people say is not necessarily true. And those false stories hurt you and make you angry. Isn’t that right?”

  All around the table, the students began to smile in recognition. Jessie held up her hand and snapped her white fingers, an indication that she urgently wanted to say something. She was smiling her foxy smile and didn’t wait for an invitation to speak. “Yah, so I think you guys are doing to the dwarves the same thing what you don’t want people to do to you. Ha!”

  “That is called prejudice,” Marco said, smiling.

  “Discrimination,” Kyila said.

  I made the point that prejudice and discrimination most often spring from irrational thinking and unfounded hearsay. The Liberians sheepishly pursed their lips. Finally Johnson conceded that we might be right.

  I said that if the Liberians brought a mountain-dwelling Liberian dwarf into the classroom and staged a witchcraft competition between that dwarf and one of our magical blind colleagues, and that if I could witness the outcome of that unusual competition, then I might believe their stories. “Otherwise, much as I love you, I think you are three collaborators in a social tyranny. The worst part is, you don’t even know it.”

  They knew that I was teasing them and laying it on thick. They also knew that what some of us were saying made sense. They had constructed a wall between dwarves and themselves for reasons that did not hold up under scrutiny. I suggested that this was where justice and reason ended and evil began and that facts, evidence, and truth were the only antidotes to the damage that superstition could do. Whether their ingrown, inherited animus toward dwarves would ever change was anybody’s guess.

  As I was leaving the classroom that day, Victor came to me and said, “Auntie Rose, one question: Are you African American?”

  The question took me by surprise. “No. I am white. Why are you asking me that?”

  Victor said, “We thought you were African American.”

  “But why?”

  “Because one day you read us a poem by an African American woman.”

  The poem was Maya Angelou’s “Human Family.” At Sabriye’s request, the other teachers and I had read it to our classes. The last line of the poem is “We are more alike, my friends, / than we are unalike.”

  “That’s a funny reason to think I was African American, Victor. If I had sung you a Chinese song, would that make you think I was Chinese?”

  Victor smirked and said nothing, and we all made our way down the hall. Perhaps he had had enough logic for one day. I began to sing “Dong Fang Hong” (“The East Is Red”), a famous Communist Chinese song, and Gyentzen, who was walking behind us and was well versed in Chinese propaganda from a lifetime spent in Tibet, recognized the song and began to sing it with me.

  Some days when it was particularly hot, we held our classes on wooden benches beneath the shade of the coconut trees at the edge of the lake. The breeze that picked up there in the afternoons offered the only relief from the unbearable heat. One afternoon, the seven members of the school literary magazine and I gathered at the lake to review recent student submissions. Jessie and I were the official editors of the magazine, but that simply meant we did the typing, the organizing, and the nagging when a submission was past deadline. The editorial board also included Yoshimi, James, Victor, Karin, Eric, and Holi. Since I was the only sighted person, it was often left to me to read the submissions out loud from a laptop screen. I enjoyed doing it, and I particularly enjoyed it when the others laughed at something in an essay that amused them. Once, I had to read aloud a very short piece that Johnson had written about his early life, and at the beginning of the last paragraph, a sudden flood of tears prevented me from reading further.

  …My Child Youth Days

  From the time my mom gave birth with me, along with my twin sister, she found it very difficult to meet our daily meal, because she was left alone with the children without a husband…She was two months pregnant when daddy left for the United States of America, and never returned up to now…mom decided to send us to a primary school near the town when I was twelve years old. it was one afternoon, at 2:15 PM, my twin sister called Zennah experienced a hot fever for one hour and could not feel any part of her body if she is touched. In this light, I suddenly lost my only twin sister on may 3, 1985, while at the age of thirteen. When I was promoted to fifth grade in 1988, again this time around my mom got seriously ill on June 6, which lasted for two months and she again died on August 8, 1988.

  Why this happened to me again? What I have done to you, God?

  There was more to this essay, but I was so impeded by unexpected emotion that I had to stop and return to it later. Johnson’s loss of his mother and sister, his plea to God, struck me as doubly moving because not once in his essay did he mention the fact that he had lost his eyesight to an exploding bomb at the age of twenty-one and that as a result his remaining family members had abandoned him; it was as though that major detail in his life was inconsequential compared to the deeper injury of losing his mother and sister. Too, his preoccupation with the specific dates of these sad events was characteristically
Liberian and seemed to me to underscore his suffering.

  Submissions to the magazine included fiction, personal essays, world news, current events, articles about our responsibility toward the environment, information on open-source software for the blind, ethnic recipes, and jokes. That afternoon we critiqued each piece and discussed how to improve it and whether it was worthy of publication. As we talked, the breeze transformed the surface of the lake from a flat plane to a chaos of serrated ripples; the edges of the lily pads flipped upward at its force. The lily pads were big enough that full-size coots could walk across the water on top of them. I could see, far off across the lake, two men poling themselves along in a wooden canoe. Terns cruised low over the water. Down to the west, a baby water buffalo stood among the reeds at the edge of the lake with a black crow pecking at insects on its back. A bird in the trees behind us screamed. A neckless, chestnut-brown kingfisher with an electric-blue back and a beak like a letter opener sat hunched on a palm frond above us, casting a murderous eye over the water. I could see smoke rising above the palm trees at the agricultural college on the other side of the lake. As Jessie began to offer her opinion on a particular piece, I noticed, from the corner of my eye, a tiny twitching in the long grass just to the right. Something was moving low along the ground in the grass between us and the lake. I turned my head and realized that it was a large snake weaving toward us at a slow, steady pace. I was transfixed, afraid to move. When the snake got to within twenty feet of us, I stood up. It was a grayish-green color with a yellow underside and a bluntly rounded nose, like the toe of a businessman’s wing-tip shoe. “Everybody, please get up and move away toward the auditorium,” I said. “There’s a big snake coming toward us.”

  They closed their laptops, got up unhurriedly, rattled their canes into the straight position, and stayed where they stood. At the sudden noise and motion, the snake, too, stood up. It lifted the front part of its long body several feet off the ground, straight as a staff, and looked at us. And then, before my eyes, it flexed its head into that unmistakable spoon shape that I had seen a thousand times in films, but only in films. It was a cobra. In films, that hooded head always looked terrible and real and close. This cobra was real and close, but because I had never seen one before, it looked somehow inauthentic. In reality, it looked hokey and unreal. It was almost literally unbelievable, like an illusion that would evaporate if I rubbed my eyes. I watched it in frozen fascination and disbelief. I saw it but did not quite accept it. It was like a bad joke. All it had to do now was open its hard, lipless little mouth and show me its forked tongue and venomous fangs, and the joke would be complete. I had a strong and inappropriate impulse to laugh, to say, Oh, come off it! But this was not a zoo or a film. I had to accept the fact that this was Kerala, a hot, jungly place “recognized as having a major problem with snakebite,” a place where one had to battle the wildlife in one’s own bedroom. There was no expert here to protect us or charm the snake down with a bamboo flute. The cobra’s bite has enough venom to kill twenty human beings. Since I was the only one here who could see it, it seemed to fall to me to protect myself and my blind students. I came to my senses. The voice of my human education said, Run.