Beyond Babylon

by Igiaba Scego

  The cold iron of the AK-47 stayed on her forehead, but the bloodlust had cooled. The boy was ashamed of frightening a woman from his clan. It was possible that she’d even cradled him as a child.

  “Take that old woman away. We don’t want you old people around here. Next time we’ll kill you.”

  Majid, dressed as a woman, took the hand of his wife of long ago. She was flooded by his abnormal warmth. The hand, the heat of that man-woman, made her mad with desire. She didn’t think it was possible at her age to feel it. The hand told her a story. A bus in the desert and a smell of ancient war. An evildoing and a shackled love.

  “Let’s go to Elias’s house,” Majid said to Bushra.

  Bushra responded affirmatively and they walked down a path that neither of them could fully see.

  This is where I end, my love. I don’t know how to tell you the rest. I’m still waiting for my parents. I’d like for you to meet them when they arrive.

  EPILOGUE

  Mom speaks to me in our mother tongue, a noble Somali whose every vowel makes sense. Our mother language. Frothy, blunt, intrepid. In Mom’s mouth, Somali becomes honey.

  I wonder if my mother’s native tongue can be my mother, if Somali sounds the same in our mouths. How do I speak this mother language of ours? Am I as good as her? I doubt it. Actually, I know I’m not. I’m not on Maryam Laamane’s level.

  No. I, Zuhra, daughter of Maryam, am distant from every nobility. I don’t feel like an ideal daughter. I stumble uncertainly in my confused alphabet. The words are twisted. They reek of asphalt streets, cement, and the margins. Every sound, in fact, is contaminated. I try all the same with her to speak the language that unites us. In Somali, I knew the comfort of her womb. In Somali, I heard the only lullabies she sang to me. I dreamed my first dreams in Somali. But then, all the time, in every conversation, word, breath, the other mother peeks through. The one that breastfed Dante, Boccaccio, De André, and Alda Merini. The Italian that I grew up with and which I hated at times because it made me feel like an outsider. The vinegary Italian of neighborhood markets, the sweet Italian of radio broadcasters, the serious Italian of university lectures. The Italian that I write.

  I wouldn’t know how to choose any other language for writing, for casting out my soul. Written Somali isn’t the same thing. It can’t be, not for me. I barely know how to write in Somali at all. Some words, perhaps, but I screw up the script. Written Somali has a very unusual history. It was born in 1972, they say. Or maybe 1973? I don’t know the exact date, but I do know that it’s still very young. Mom doesn’t know how to write it. She got out before Barre’s literacy campaigns started.

  What a horrible man, that Siad Barre! He killed, molested, tortured. Many remember him only because he introduced the Somali alphabet. “He gave us a written language,” a handful of demented people tell you with foolish enthusiasm in their dry mouths. They forget the harassment, the hardship, the homicides, the threats. They only remember the alphabet. “The warlords killed even more than he did. In eighteen years of civil war, they’ve carried out far worse massacres.” But Barre was the one who signed off on the first dirty massacres with the red of Somali blood. Accursed Siad paved the way for today’s disaster. Somalis forget that the speech of the written language was born before Siad Barre. He gathered the fruit of other people’s labors. In the alphabet’s case, he appropriated other people’s things.

  Maryam Laamane doesn’t know how to write this Somali in Latin characters, which Siad pickpocketed from others. She writes in Osmanya. My mom’s Somali is spoken. Her Somali is made of history, poetry, music, and singing. When she writes—it happens rarely—she only knows how to do it in characters that no one remembers. She learned it when she was little in the cultural resistance meetings her older cousin, the patriotic one, dragged her to. She was a small girl then, and she entertained herself by tracing squiggles on squared sheets, like some pathological tic. The young Somalis of the League chose these characters to write their language and sign off on their new independence.

  Maryam told me the story of Osmanya. She says that the first characters, curvate as snakes and folded like an ox tripe, were more adapted to the richness of Somali sounds. “All these white people’s square letters, they’re not fit for us. Latin characters aren’t made for our lexical richness. The T with its toughness, the S with its serpentine hiss. You can’t trust them or their letters. They won’t carry what we say, think, or stow away. They betray. They are foreigners.”

  My mother is pregnant when she speaks. She gives birth to that other mother, her language.

  I enjoy listening. She makes me travel in the deepest part of her. I want to stay quiet forever, simply listening. Attending the birth of a mother who begets my mother. I also have to speak and, each time I do, my voice pronounces falteringly. I hear shrill sounds, my own. I plug my ears, disgusted at hearing my shaky voice. I want to cry every time, but I refrain.

  Mom likes my mix of Somali and Italian, she says that it’s my language. I’m still ashamed of it, though. I’d like to be flawless in each. When I speak one, the other emerges shamelessly without an invitation. Continual short circuits in my brain. I don’t speak, I mix.

  Now, my mom is in front of me. We’re sitting face-to-face. I got back from Tunis the other day and want to give her a full report of the trip. Howa died and we haven’t spoken about it in person. I’m happy we can talk about Howa and Tunis here, in Mom’s comfy home in Primavalle. The atmosphere is sweet and relaxing. Scientific studies show that the best air in the capital is in Primavalle.

  My mom’s house is penny plain. Like all the houses of diasporic Somalis it is practically unadorned. The painting of Mecca is the exception. The whiteness of the walls blinds me. I’d like to see a Renoir on one of the walls, but there is only whiteness with glimmers of devotion here and there. Multicolored fabrics only on the armchairs. A triumph of sensual delight that I sometimes can’t explain.

  Mom watches me, scrutinizes. All she needs is a microscope to vivisect my soul. I wait for her to say something.

  Until now, we’ve talked about nothing. Tunis, its streets, its fears, its thousand follies. I gave almost a full account of my vacation. I didn’t tell her everything. A daughter’s censorship. I didn’t tell her, for example, that I fell in love with the wrong man again. I didn’t tell her that I had a nervous breakdown. I didn’t even talk about Miranda. I didn’t want her to be jealous of that marvelous woman. I did show her how much headway I made with classical Arabic, though. She smiled and clapped, my Maryam Laamane. She had a soft spot for classical Arabic. Like all Somalis, she was in awe of the language of worship. I threw in a small sample of the Tunisian dialect. “Do you see,” I wanted to say, “how good your Zuhra is?” But I didn’t say anything else. I waited for her second round of applause and went silent.

  She was quiet, too.

  “Yesterday I spoke with Sabrie’s widow.” Linear words, which my mother said in one go, breathlessly.

  This was the signal I was waiting for. The serious conversation I was expecting.

  “I hadn’t seen her in a while, you know? She’s very fat now.”

  I laughed. Very fat wasn’t the right descriptor for Sabrie’s wife. I’d call her elephantine, and Howa Rosario would’ve backed me up. Between the two of them, Howa was the one without reservations. Mom, though, was always politically correct, even when she drank gin early in the morning.

  “So?” I ask. “What did she tell you? Can it be done?”

  The words leave me, wobbly as gelatin. Anxiety eats me alive. Our pointless conversations of a short while ago seem prehistoric.

  “So?” I press.

  “She gave me a telephone number, someone named Abucar. He started the work recently, but he’s honest, she told me. She trusted him with her niece and now the girl lives in Sweden.”

  Oh, yes, Sweden. I dreamed of Sweden because of my cousins Abdel Aziz and Muna. I dreamed of that perfect welfare country. There, Somalis could access e
verything, have a house, money, school paid for. Somalis there had a chance. Mom and I often spoke of Sweden as a solution for my cousins. Abdel Aziz and Muna were young. They couldn’t stay at my house forever. They couldn’t spend their entire lives reading Jehovah’s Witness magazines and watching TV. They couldn’t stay for so long in the blind Italy of Bossi-Fini. They had to venture elsewhere.

  Italy is no longer welcoming for anyone at this point. This applies also to those who were born here. When I came back from Tunisia, my cousins were a favorite topic of mine. Finding a solution for them, a solution for me. Finding them a life, a life for me. If this meant paying a soul smuggler to drive them around half of Europe, so be it. Was it illegal? No more than it was tossing toxic waste in Somalia or feeding civil wars and insecurities to plunder the riches of African countries, as the West did. The word illegal didn’t make sense anymore. Not for me.

  “Are you all right, Zuhra?” my mother asked in the other mother, the sweet Italian of radio broadcasters.

  Am I all right? In what sense?

  “Your face is tense, dear, and the words are coming out of you like a brook.”

  Really?

  “It’s like…”

  Like what?

  “It’s like you’re happy.”

  Happy?

  “How can I be happy, Mom?” I tell her. “Howa Rosario is dead. I miss her. How can I be happy when she’s not here? And I can’t sleep with this mess about my cousins having to leave illegally.”

  “But you are,” she said in her mother tongue, categorical, absolute.

  What can I say? How can I justify this untimely happiness? It was true. Mom read me like an X-ray. I was happy. It was because of the dream I had after getting back from Tunis. In the dream, I gave birth. My stomach was bigger than that of Sabrie’s widow and slightly disc-shaped. In the dream, Howa Rosario had a perfect, luminous nose. She helped me breathe. My contractions became more painful and came closer together. I don’t remember what happened after that, how I gave birth, how much I screamed, if they performed a C-section. I don’t know anything. I only saw the result. Instead of a child, long iron rods. They looked horrible, they were heavy and some were rusty. I looked at them and felt a burning sensation in my stomach. Howa was there next to me, though, smiling. Her smile and her perfect nose gave me courage. I didn’t ask, “Where is my child?” I knew that something else had come out of me. I remember asking, “Where are we hiding the umbilical cord?”

  I was fine when I woke up from the dream. Sweating, but with my heart beating at a normal pace. Seeing Howa’s gorgeous, perfect nose made everything okay. I touched my stomach and felt light as a butterfly.

  I told my mother about the dream, as it had happened to me. Partly in our mother tongue, and partly in the other mother.

  “Mom, you should’ve seen the awful tubes I had in my stomach. They were made of rusted iron. I touched them quickly. My fingers brushed against them. I was afraid to touch them for too long, you know? It was the fear of letting myself understand what had happened. I didn’t give birth. I expelled. That’s why I don’t have an umbilical cord. I don’t have to hide anything. After, when I woke up, I touched my stomach, and I touched my vagina. I felt so light! I went beyond Babylon, do you understand? Beyond everything, to a place where my vagina is happy and in love.”

  Beyond Babylon was a phrase I’d invented in high school. I’d been on my period. I knew nothing at the time about physical education. I was sitting in a corner with the other menstruators, two girls in the grade above mine. They didn’t speak to me much. Few people spoke to me in high school. I was fat, black, standoffish. I certainly wasn’t the social queen. I was the example not to follow. Suddenly, I don’t know which one of the two said something about Bob Marley and Babylon. She said that Babylon was everything bad that could exist in the world. White trash, vomit, disgust, pain. I suppose that in my mind’s silence I thought, I’d really like to live beyond Babylon.

  Beyond…

  “I have something for you, Zuhra. A gift, let’s call it,” Mom said.

  I was about to tell her that it wasn’t my birthday. Mom was like that with me, she often bought me underwear like she did when I was a child. All those pairs of underwear embarrassed me.

  “Hooyo, I don’t need underwear, I have enough, really. Give them to Muna, she’ll need them there where she’s going. She could use them on the trip.”

  “It’s not underwear.”

  She placed a colorful envelope on my lap. It wasn’t closed. Inside, some audiotapes. I took them out one by one, slowly. I felt like I was being invited on a trip backward in time, to an age buried by the rhythms of life, by progress, by music downloaded from eMule. I remember that audiotapes weren’t all that great for listening to music. The sound quality was poor, but in school they were passed around faster than word of mouth. I listened to so many tapes as a teenager, oh my God, so many! Tons of compilations, and my friends and I marked our favorite songs with heart shapes and asterisks.

  At home, too, a bunch of tapes played. We received the words of a coarse-voiced woman from Somalia. Maryam Laamane never let me listen to those tapes. She didn’t want to. She locked herself in her room and rudely distanced herself from me. Every once in a while, she forgot to close the door and I eavesdropped. I remember her crying to those cassettes. She cried like a storm. I eaves-dropped until I couldn’t take it anymore. I was small and didn’t understand anything about those messages, those characters, and like a breath of wind the words in my mother language slipped swiftly away from my ears.

  The tapes made me so nostalgic. They reminded me of my small self in front of the radio, my favorite station, searching for sounds to fill my soul. I adored the shape of cassettes, rectangular and contained. It gave me a sense of security, even of love. I trusted the cassette. Putting it in the recorder to listen was a ritual. The sound, despite all that rustling, was pleasant.

  “Once, dear, you asked me if it was nice being with Papa.”

  I hold my breath.

  “I didn’t know how to respond. I can’t really tell you how it went between me and him, honestly. But there’s a response in these tapes. One of the many possible.”

  A response? An attempt? I’m shaking. I touch the cassettes with my ringed index finger.

  “Is Papa in here?” I ask.

  “We’re inside,” Maryam Laamane said.

  We. What a marvelous word.

  To: alice.balambalis@hotmail.com

  Cc:

  Subject: I’m going to a party!!!! Should be fun

  Hi Alice, Abdi Nur! Your Zuhra here. Things haven’t changed much where I’m at. What’s the word among the igloos? I know there aren’t eskimos where you are in Sweden, but when I think about that place, brr, I think of ice and those semi-spherical little houses. They look claustrophobic on TV…but I wouldn’t know! From your messages, it sounds like you like the freezing cold and, like you say, the Swedes are super warm people… You can meet up with Somalis there, apparently. Ah, this diaspora! We’re every-where… but nowhere, in the end.

  It’s crazy hot here in Rome. I want a scholarship to get out of this absurd heat. Rome is grand, but I can’t stand it in the summer. It literally burns you alive!!

  I don’t have a ton of new things going on. Well, I might have one. Tonight I’m going to a party! If I tell you what kind, I already know how you’ll respond, “That sucks! You call that a party?” So first I’ll tell you what’s gonna be there. A lot of guys, apparently (fuckable ones between their 30s and 50s), a filthy rich buffet, African music… I know, I know, no one says “African music.” I’m black too (even if I’m Italian) and I know these things about Africa, sweetie. Everyone tells me I’m a go-getting intellectual, so show some respect :) and don’t be so fussy, okay? Even if you’re right, African music is too generic. You can’t put Libya together with Madagascar at all. What I’m saying is I know that only whites talk about Africa without qualifying, but it’s to abbreviate, OK? I didn’t a
bbreviate and I’m still getting lost in turns of phrase.

  So, to make it short, like Francis Bebey we’ll say there’s gonna be music. A.m.a.y.a. African modern and yet authentic. LEZGO! Sekou Diabate is DJing. He’s a mother lode, a reservoir, not a man. There will be Senegalese dancers too. Good!! We Puntlanders like to bring our big butts and dance the niiko. Everyone thinks it’s only a traditional dance, but to me it seems like what it is: women who make love (but with who? Among themselves? That’s what I never understood about the niiko and Somalis). Thank goodness no one realized it…that we have sex, that is. I’m going to be standing on the sidelines, I’m not shaking my ass in front of other people.

  Are you ready to hear it? I’ll tell you what the party is for. Brace yourself. It’s to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Ghana’s independence. It’s already been 50 years!! It’s slightly before we got it too and, slowly but surely, the whole continent. It’s been roughly 50 years since we were all declared free. But are we actually?

  If I look at the map I’d say not really. Have you ever tried? If you look at Europe, you’ll see lines and borders all jagged and curved. If you look at Africa you only see clear, straight borders cut with an ax. You see right away that they were made at the white man’s table, where we just bowed our heads, as usual.

  In the end, maybe we shouldn’t celebrate. No niiko, no amaya, no Sekou. Fifty years of freedom in ruins. Whose fault? The whites? No. And so who if not them? It’s easy to hate the whites, it may even feel good, but it’s pointless. We have to take our share of the blame too. It’s true, I know… first the Cold War… then the World Bank… then the arms trade, the trash trade, the children’s organs trade, and trades for the fresh meat of women in whorehouses. The whites have their hands in it, sure. Arabs too. Now it seems that even the Chinese are involved. The Chinese have always had a stake in Africa, but the West is only now realizing it. They always see things late. They think things exist only after them. Everyone is involved, no one’s left out. Africans are at the heart of it too. Siad Barre, Bokassa I, Omar Bongo, Idi Amin Dada, and Mobuti Sese Seko weren’t white at all. I don’t think. Amin Dada maybe, but I don’t really think of him as white…