by Igiaba Scego
It was a Sunday in May, a working day. The sun was hot and pleasant. It didn’t burn one’s skin with its usual demented ferocity. It had finally let up on the backs of men and banana peels. The rarified air, however, was sticky and insistent like sugar. That was Maryam’s feeling at the time. It was no small thing for her to make a trip so early in the morning. The girl saw that all the farmers were busy with their tasks. Some of them had white skin. Many Italians, despite no longer being the country’s rulers, had preferred to stay in Africa since it was a beautiful life for them. What would they do in Italy? A daily grind consisting of wives, office desks, traffic, and exhaust fumes. Here, on the other hand, was the yellow of the sun and bananas. Open expanses and multistory villas. Buxom women to the heart’s content. They could still live the Good Life near the equator. They knew that the money and power of the West still made them rulers.
Work on that May Sunday was at its peak. Breathlessly, people tried doing as much as they could in the shortest possible time. The hands and feet of manservants and masters churned frenetically in syncopated rhythm. After the cutting, the bananas quickly passed to the harvesting center for a careful selection of clusters. The skilled labor that followed these manufacturing phases combined duty with dulcet songs. They placed their struggle in the rhyme, the sweat and pain of having to spend hours under the woodland’s choleric sun.
Maryam harmonized to the words of the song. Living on a banana plantation wasn’t easy. They had to face many foes. The masters, fatigue, the sun, insects, boredom, monotony, accidents. Singing freed the spirit from ghosts and jinn. By singing, life became simpler. The plantation masters didn’t care to hear their servants’ modulating voices. “Songs always carry the germ of subversion. These sons of bitches need to keep quiet!” More than one master tried muzzling the workers. The attempts failed miserably every time.
Gurey, the prophet uncle, was pleased by the music that rose from the unripe banana forest. “You can’t silence your conscience, niece,” he always said. Then he would smile, flaunting his snow-white beard. Gurey was a master, too, but he did things his own way. He didn’t have jeeps or a multistory villa. The few square meters of his brick house were enough for him. He didn’t have the megalomania of the newly rich, and he didn’t want to sit like a pachyderm in an ex-colonial dwelling made of Corinthian columns and fresh lime. His brick house would do. Lunch and dinner guaranteed every day, prayer at fixed hours, and a healthy amount of sleep and leisure. He had few pretenses. He lived with the awareness that others like him were doing the same. Because of this, he’d transformed the plantation into a co-op. Some workers were also members, others had a guaranteed stipend and acquired rights. They didn’t work nonstop, they didn’t work like spinning tops, they weren’t humiliated. No one on Gurey’s plantation was barred from singing. The syncopated rhythm of the other plantations became a vigilant lullaby there. Their serenity was conducive to sleep, and their energy was worthy of the finest hours when they were strong and ready to conquer the world.
“He has queer ideas,” the other masters whispered malignantly. “He’ll bring them to our people, too, you’ll see. Shit communist will ruin all of us with his communitarian doctrines.”
When communism did arrive in Somalia with Siad Barre, it was somehow only Gurey who paid the price. The sharks that had exploited and trampled the people’s rights stayed afloat and built new floors on their ostentatious villas, while Gurey lost everything, down to the last banana peel. He really was a communist, in heart and paunch, who read Gramsci and renounced Stalin, who believed in the pure genius of humanity, who had been brought up outside of the mafioso system that Big Mouth Siad Barre erroneously termed “scientific socialism.” The loss of his plantations was a hard blow. The bananas, their golden shimmer, their fleshy softness had been his entire life. No longer having them meant no longer having a life.
But on that Sunday in May, Siad Barre was still far away. Somalia had recently become an independent state. Somalis dreamed of every possible future, and the bananas of the Lower Shebelle perfumed the air with possibility. A question about the future had brought Maryam Laamane to the Lower Shebelle. She’d embarked on an absurd journey to tell her favorite uncle about her promising future. He was the only person she felt was her friend beside Howa Rosario.
Getting off the shuttle, with the sweat from the previous night making her feel more tired than she was, her long legs took her toward her uncle Gurey’s co-op. Ali Said, a shambling young man who was also her uncle’s personal assistant, came to meet her. Ali Said’s stride was confused, like the revolving panels she’d seen in trendy restaurants. The slight asymmetry of his glasses made people feel maternally protective, women especially. Everyone wanted to coddle the sickly-looking boy. Coddle and then fix him up with food, fragrances, and a generous, welcoming bosom. Ali Said was easy to love. In fact, everyone loved him, including the men who left him bits of the choicest meats on the communal plate at lunch. Maryam knew the man wasn’t as fragile as people thought. She didn’t doubt his goodness. She knew her uncle could trust him blindly. She also knew that in the hour of need, Ali Said would bare his fangs to defend himself and the ones he loved. If it weren’t for Ali Said, she wouldn’t have been saved from Siad’s clutches. And if it weren’t for him, her Uncle Gurey would’ve died of desperation and starvation.
Ali Said was the first one Maryam Laamane saw at the co-op that day. He told her that her uncle hadn’t shown up on the plantation. “You’ve become a woman, Maryam, you know that, right?” Maryam had gone there because of this. She smiled as a thick, nectarous fluid flowed down her legs. A red fluid that accentuated her enchanting femininity. She smiled once more at her uncle’s assistant, and then she left.
The sun had risen a few hours earlier. The work raged on and a long-legged girl found herself walking alone again on a street imbued with the bittersweet essence of bananas. The girl was wearing an outfit that was in vogue in Mogadishu, the ballerina, so-called in Italian because the frills of cloth recalled the fluttering tulle of classical dancers. Hers was pastel-tinted, feathery. She preferred the ballerina to the traditional guntiino. Maryam wasn’t fond of walking around bare-shouldered and thought the ballerina suited her tastes, unpresuming and reserved. She still liked running, and the guntiino risked coming undone and leaving her as nude as God had made her. How many times had she witnessed scenes like that? How many nude women, with their shame exposed, had she seen shoddily covering themselves around Mogadishu? It was mostly young girls who had such accidents. Sometimes their naked chests leaped from the hems and oh, what shame, what eeb, if a boy nearby derided her. The guntiino was for older women who could tie the fabric securely, who knew how to make strong knots, who didn’t frantically careen through the world. The guntiino in its marmoreal beauty was not for young girls, and it was intolerable if you had to run, scuttle, or even bend down to grab an object from the ground. It called for experience. And it was a hindrance during fights. Besides dodging the opponent’s scratches and bites, one also had to be mindful that the knot at the top of the tunic wasn’t loose. Nude, with shame exposed, one was more vulnerable to the nemeses’ kicks and scratches. Meanwhile, the person who tried recovering would be massacred by their adversary, who benefited from the confusion the nudity created. Maryam didn’t like brawling with her peers. She was a pacifist, by the book. She couldn’t imagine or prepare herself for the eventuality of something like that. There were people like Fauzia Ahmed who, sooner or later, she would have to teach a lesson. Ah, how she hated that girl. She’d come this close to ruining the independence celebration for her, and Maryam couldn’t tolerate that hen insulting her best friend Howa. She hadn’t only insulted her, she’d also subjected her to the virginity test. What barbarity! People like Fauzia Ahmed made the country backslide. “If we were all like my Uncle Gurey or Howa Rosario, we’d be part of the United Nations Security Council by now.”
Maryam dreamed big, so she preferred wearing the ballerina. The one she wor
e that day sent her over the moon. The style was rather particular. The classic ballerina: short dress and long underskirt, which the people called a carambawi, with butterfly ribbon additions that gave her a sylvan frivolity. The few pedestrians she met on the plantation path at her uncle’s house watched her dumbly, as though she were an houri of paradise, descended to have her beauty admired. No one was bothersome. Women in those times were respected. They were the sisters, daughters, and nieces of the independence struggle. Eyes admired without vulgarity and everyone knew she was Gurey the communist’s niece, even if she was more of a woman than the breakneck little girl they remembered. Eyes looked her over respectfully because, despite the murmurs, everyone in the Lower Shebelle respected Gurey for the coherence of his ideas.
As she negotiated the tree-lined street, Maryam was suddenly approached by a young man on a bicycle. He couldn’t have been much older than her. He wore a beige, short-sleeved linen shirt, completely unbuttoned, and his breast pockets seemed inexplicably obscene to Maryam. Her eyes momentarily moved past them. The obscenity did not, in fact, lie in the two slits in the beige cloth, but in what was beneath them. Her eyes lingered on his white undershirt and black skin. The boy wore few articles of clothing, and from his pelvis down, she couldn’t tell how well he was covered. The futah was duly wrapped, leaving his hairy, burly legs exposed. He was a tall boy, towering over a bike that was evidently too small for him.
For the first time in her life, Maryam felt a quickening throb in her heart. She realized, somewhat perplexed, that her heart was making noise. She hoped the boy couldn’t hear it. Otherwise she would die of shame.
The boy stopped his bicycle in front of her. Maryam was shaking. The brake reverberated like an electric discharge in her stomach. Meanwhile, he watched her steadily. It was an intense stare, the kind she’d seen in films where a doctor examines a patient in critical condition. It was a mortifying, clinical exam. The menstrual blood which, until that moment, had flowed smoothly began leaking in discontinuous streams, like a drunken geyser. She felt a sharp pang at the base of her gut.
“Good afternoon, pretty young lady,” the boy said in Italian.
“Subax wanaagsan, good afternoon,” the girl replied.
“That dress fits you well. Looks like it was made especially for you—I’m glad.” Then he gave her a kiss and started off again on his bicycle.
Once she arrived at her uncle’s house, the girl couldn’t stop looking at herself in the mirror.
“Good afternoon, pretty young lady,” Uncle Gurey said in Italian.
The same words the boy said, the same words in Italian, which seemed to her especially singsong that day. The unexpected déjà vu propelled the girl into an abyss of pleasure. Suddenly, her Uncle Gurey was no longer there, replaced by the boy’s unbuttoned shirt, and particularly what she had seen underneath—black skin shimmering more than the bananas. She remembered everything, every gesture and faint noise. The boy’s pliable muscles moving like un-embroidered silk fabric. The swish of his pedaling and the shock of that soft-lipped kiss had seemed like the chirping of a bulbul. Everything about the strange bicycle boy was marvelous. Maryam couldn’t say whether he was beautiful, ugly, or just passable. She still didn’t know how to judge men’s beauty. She thought that boy had something of hers, as though he, a stranger, kept a part of her inside him. She didn’t dare call what she felt love. It was an intoxicating loss of clarity. She felt ridiculous in front of the mirror, admiring herself in her ballerina. She couldn’t help but look at herself. The green dress Howa Rosario had given her was becoming an obsession. What had the boy on the bike seen that was so special?
“You look lost, Maryam,” her uncle said.
The prophet’s voice snapped her out of the trance.
“Uncle,” Maryam Laamane said solemnly, “I’ve become an adult. I have a job. I start working as an operator at the Somali telephone company in three days.”
Her uncle smiled. He guessed that something noteworthy had happened to his favorite niece. He was elated. It’s time she had some secrets too, he thought. She’s not a girl anymore.
Maryam continued looking at herself in the mirror.
Out of respect, Uncle Gurey shut the door partway.
Maryam laughed bitterly at the memory of that May. She laughed bitterly about the tenderness she felt toward the little girl she’d been. She’d spent ten days retying the threads of something she thought was lost. Sitting cross-legged on a mat, she narrated into a recorder a past that was still very much present inside her. After ten days, she found less reprieve. She wanted to erase everything and kick the machine that collected her every breath and hesitation. She felt an increasing urge to regurgitate what used to be her story. Her happy adolescence was in those cassettes, which she’d been meticulously recording for days. The girl in the recorder’s stories was pure. She wasn’t the mother Zuhra knew, the one consumed by alcohol and nostalgia. These were still the blazing fifties, the mythical sixties, not quite the terrible seventies, certainly not the grievous eighties. Maryam was a little girl and she cheered for the Indians who fought haughty pale men in blue shirts. Little Maryam was so different from the Maryam she would become as an adult. She was an incorruptible child, a fleur-de-lis impervious to the malefic radiance of jinn. She hadn’t yet imbibed liters and liters of demons enclosed in a light glass. She liked little girl things: candies; Vimto, the sweet drink; colorful dresses; the delicious fresh-squeezed red grapefruit juice her Auntie Salado made for her every afternoon. Alcohol was nowhere to be found, not even in her worst nightmares. Maryam was young and people saw a kaleidoscopic future in her eyes. I was so pure then! she thought. She wanted to cry thinking about it, but the tears didn’t fall, they were stubbornly stuck in her eyes. Her body, however, was wracked with abnormal spasms, and saltwater gushed from her forehead. Maryam sweated, feeling chills in her bones. When the spasms became more violent, she decided to leave the house. She could no longer tolerate the memory of the slight and happy girl she’d once been, nor of the dignified and uncontaminated Somalia, warless Somalia. Her pink-hued memories, like Auntie Salado’s grapefruits. She shook away her chills, wrapped a green scarf around her head, put on dull brown shoes, and strung her favorite handbag across her shoulder, the confidence booster. Before leaving the house, she took stock of her most important objects. She didn’t want to forget anything. The pack of Camels, spare eyeglasses, sunglasses, wallet, bus card, I.D.…definitely couldn’t forget that. With her black skin, it was best to be wary in an unfamiliar Italian city.
She left and caught the bus, one of the new ones with tight spaces for standing commuters. She didn’t like buses. They weren’t made for a sprawling city like Rome. She got off almost immediately and started walking.
She walked all afternoon, and afterward went back home to her recorder, her recollections, the frail little girl she missed so much. She’d walked for a while. Her ankles were sore and her armpits stank like fresh codfish. She ran to the bathroom. She washed, pomaded, and smeared deodorant on. After prayer and a spare evening meal, she sat on the mat again. She pressed record and said:
“Zuhra, you won’t guess who I saw at Termini today: Ali Said. He came from Stockholm to say goodbye to Howa. Did you know he was in love with her?”
She hit stop. That would be enough for the day.
THE REAPARECIDA
Flaca never spoke. To make up for it, she wrote constantly, dementedly. She stooped without interruption over her papers. She didn’t sleep so that she could write. She didn’t eat so that she could write. She didn’t think straight so that she could write. Writing had become another form of breathing. I was impressed by her attachment to the written word. I couldn’t remember ever having seen her holding a pen in Buenos Aires, but in Rome she kept a thousand tattered notebooks near her bed. Quite the disarray. Cluttered things, ideas, emotions, scattered thoughts. I tried tidying up her disorder, uselessly. It was a lost battle, a Waterloo. Flaca restored her chaos, perfectly commens
urate with the previous. I ended up overexerting myself—gathering and reordering—since after five minutes everything went back to how she’d had it, if not worse. At first, I went three times a week to Pablo and Rosa’s house. Then one day I took Santana aside and told him, “Maybe I should be spending more time with her.” And so I went to live in San Lorenzo at their place.
Our tranquil, sleepy house was on one of the many slivers of street that had been devastated in 1943 by the Allied bombing of Rome. One of our neighbors, Nuccia, the old spotted crake, told me the story of San Lorenzo’s bombing. An interesting person. She was one of the tallest women I’d ever met, and her hands were like those of a dwarf. “When they bombed my neighborhood, San Lorenzo,” Nuccia said, “they had no idea over in Corso Trieste. They didn’t realize it in Parioli either, miss.” She turned red in the face and, in moments of heightened agitation, became mottled with blue. “Rome didn’t want to believe it had gotten caught up in the war. We have the Pope here, everyone said, we’re sitting pretty. No one will get bombed here. The world respects us because Christ is here, the Madonna, and the saints. Yes, we’ve got the Pope and the saints and the Christs and the Madonnas, but we also have Benito and all his terrible kind. They have no respect for anyone. Not even their own children.”