by Zadie Smith
Fern stood up from his cashew disaster and wiped the ash off his hands on to his trousers: “She returns!”
Lunch was brought to us right away. We ate in a corner of the yard, our plates on our knees, both hungry enough to ignore the fact that nobody else got a lunch break from cashew-crushing.
“You look very well,” said Fern, beaming at me. “Very happy.”
The tin door at the back of the compound was wide open, giving on to a view of Hawa’s family’s land. Several acres of purple-tinged cashew trees, pale yellow bush and scorched black hillocks of ash that marked where Hawa and her grandmothers burned, once a month, huge pyres of household waste and plastic. It was somehow lush and barren simultaneously, and beautiful to me in this mix. I saw that Fern was right: this was a place in which I was happy. Aged thirty-two and one quarter I was finally having my year off.
“But what is a ‘year off’?”
“Oh, it’s when you’re young and you spend a year in some distant country, learning its ways, communing with the . . . community. We could never afford one.”
“Your family?”
“Well, yes, but—I was thinking specifically of me and my mate Tracey. We just used to watch people go on them and then slag them off when they got back.”
I laughed to myself at the memory.
“‘Slag off’? What is this?”
“Oh, we used to call them ‘poverty tourists’ . . . You know, those kinds of students who’d come back with their stupid year-off ethnic trousers and African ‘hand-carved’ overpriced statuary made in some factory in Kenya . . . We used to think they were so idiotic.”
But maybe Fern himself had been one of these optimistic young hippy travelers. He sighed and lifted his finished bowl from the floor to rescue it from a curious goat.
“What cynical young people you were . . . you and your mate Tracey.”
The cashew-shelling was going to continue into the night. To avoid helping, I suggested a walk to the well, on the thin excuse of collecting water for a morning shower, and Fern, usually so conscientious, surprised me by saying he would come. Along the way, he told a story about visiting Musa, Hawa’s cousin, to check on the health of a new baby. When he had reached the place, a small, very basic dwelling Musa had built himself on the edge of the village, he found Musa alone. His wife and children had gone to see her mother.
“He invited me in, he was a little lonely, I think. I noticed he had a small old TV with VHS attached. I was surprised, he is always so frugal, like all mashala, but he said a Peace Corps woman who was going back to the States had left it to him. He was very keen to let me know he never watched Nollywood movies on it or any of the telenovelas or anything like that, not any more. Only ‘pure films.’ Did I want to see one? I said sure. We sit down, and in a minute I realize it’s one of these training videos from Afghanistan, boys dressed all in black doing backflips with Kalashnikovs . . . I said to him, ‘Musa? Do you understand what is being said in this video?’ Because a speech in Arabic was droning on and on—you can imagine—and I could tell he didn’t understand a word. And he says to me, so dreamy: ‘I love the way they leap!’ I think to him it was like a beautiful dance video. A radical Islamic dance video! He told me: ‘The way they move, it makes me want to be more pure inside.’ Poor Musa. Anyway, I thought you would find this funny. Because I know you are interested in dance,’ he added, when I didn’t laugh.
Three
The first e-mail I ever received came from my mother. She sent it from a computer lab in the basement of University College London, where she had just taken part in a public debate, and I received it on a computer in my own college library. The content was a single Langston Hughes poem: she made me recite it in full when I called her later that evening, to prove it had arrived. While night comes on gently, Dark like me—Ours was the first graduating class to receive e-mail addresses, and my mother, always curious about new things, acquired a battered old Compaq, to which she attached a doddering modem. Together we entered this new space that now opened up between people, a connection with no precise beginning or end, that was always potentially open, and my mother was one of the first people I knew to understand this and exploit it fully. Most e-mails sent in the mid-nineties tended to be long and letter-like: they began and ended with traditional greetings—the ones we’d all previously used on paper—and they were keen to describe the surrounding scene, as if the new medium had made of everybody a writer. (“I’m typing this just by the window, looking out to blue-gray sea, where three gulls are diving into the water.”) But my mother never e-mailed that way, she got the hang of it at once, and when I was only a few weeks out of college, but still by that blue-gray sea, she began sending me multiple two- or three-line messages a day, mostly unpunctuated, and always with the sense of something written at great speed. They all had the same subject: when was I planning on coming back? She didn’t mean to the old estate, she had moved on from there the year before. Now she lived in a pretty ground-floor flat in Hampstead with the man my father and I had taken to calling “the Noted Activist,” after my mother’s habitual parenthetical (“I’m writing a paper with him, he’s a noted activist, you’ve probably heard of him?” “He’s just a wonderful, wonderful man, we’re very close, and of course he’s a noted activist”). The Noted Activist was a handsome Tobagonian, of Indian heritage, with a little Prussian beard, and a lot of sweeping black hair dramatically arranged on top of his head the better to highlight a single gray streak. My mother had met him at an anti-nuclear conference two years before. She had gone on marches with him, written papers on him—and then with him—before moving on to drinking with him, dining with him, sleeping with him and now moving in with him. Together they were often photographed, standing between the lions in Trafalgar Square, giving speeches one after the other—like Sartre and de Beauvoir, only far better-looking—and now, whenever the Noted Activist was called upon to speak for those who have no voice, while on demonstrations, or at conferences, my mother was more often than not by his side, in her new role as “local councilor and grass-roots activist.” They’d been together a year. In that time my mother had become somewhat well known. One of the people a line producer on a radio show might call and ask to weigh in on whatever left-leaning debate was happening that day. Not the first name on that list, perhaps, but if the President of the Students’ Union, the editor of the New Left Review and the spokesperson for the Anti-Racist Alliance happened all to be busy, my mother and the Noted Activist could be counted on for their near-constant availability.
I did try to be happy for her. I knew it was what she’d always wanted. But it’s hard, when you’re at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others, and besides I felt bad for my father, and sorrier for myself. The thought of moving back in with my mother seemed to cancel out what little I had achieved in the previous three years. But I couldn’t survive on my student loan much longer. Despondent, packing up my room, flicking through my now pointless essays, I looked out to sea and felt I was waking from a dream, that this was all that college had been for me, a dream, placed at too far a distance from reality, or at least from my reality. My rented mortar board was barely returned before kids who had seemed not so different from me began announcing that they were leaving for London, right away, sometimes heading to my neighborhood, or others like it, which they discussed in derring-do terms, as if these were wild frontiers to be conquered. They left with deposits in hand, to lay down for flats or even houses, they took unpaid internships, or applied for jobs where the interviewer happened to be their own father’s old university pal. I had no plans, no deposit and no one who might die and leave me money: what relatives we had were all poorer than us. Hadn’t we been the middle-class ones, in aspiration and practice? And perhaps for my mother this dream was the truth, and just by dreaming it she felt she had brought it to pass. But I was awake now, and clear-eyed: some facts were immutable, unavoidable. Whichever way I looked at it
, for example, the eighty-nine pounds currently in my current account was all the money I had on this earth. I made meals of baked beans on toast, sent out two dozen application letters, waited.
Alone in a town that everyone else had already left, I had too much time to brood. I began to look at my mother from a new, sour angle. A feminist who had always been supported by men—first my father and now the Noted Activist—and who, though she continually harangued me about the “nobility of labor,” had never, as far as I knew, actually been gainfully employed. She worked “for the people”—there was no wage. I worried that the same was true, more or less, for the Noted Activist, who seemed to have written many pamphlets but no books, and had no official university position. To put all her eggs in the basket of such a man, to give up our flat—the only security we’d ever known—to go and live with him up in Hampstead, in exactly the kind of bourgeois fantasy she’d always bad-mouthed, struck me as being both in bad faith and extremely reckless. I went down to the seafront each night to use a dodgy phone box that thought two-pence coins were tens and had many ill-tempered conversations with her about it. But I was the only one in an ill temper, my mother was in love and happy, full of affection for me, although this only made her more difficult to pin down on practical details. Any attempt to delve into the precise financial situation of the Noted Activist, for example, got me fudged answers or a change of subject. The only thing she was always happy to discuss was his three-bedroom flat, the one she wanted me to move into, bought for twenty thousand pounds in 1969 with the money from a dead uncle’s will and now worth “well over a million.” This was a fact which, despite her Marxist tendencies, evidently gave her a huge sense of pleasure and well-being.
“But Mum: he’s not going to sell it, is he? So it’s irrelevant. It’s not worth anything with you two lovebirds living in it.”
“Look, why don’t you just get on the train and come for dinner? When you meet him you’ll love him—everybody loves this man. You’ll have a lot to talk about. He met Malcolm X! He’s a noted activist . . .”
But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty. Our first meeting was dominated not by political or philosophical discussion but by a long rant against his next-door neighbor, a fellow Caribbean who, unlike our host, was wealthy, multiply published, tenured in an American university, owned the whole building and was presently constructing “some kind of fucking pergola” at the end of his garden. This would slightly obscure the Noted Activist’s vista of the Heath, and after dinner, as the June sun finally went down, we took a bottle of Wray & Nephew and, in an act of solidarity, stepped into the garden to glare at the half-built thing. My mother and the Noted Activist sat at their little cast-iron table and slowly rolled and smoked a very poorly constructed spliff. I drank too much rum. At a certain point the mood turned meditative and we all gazed over at the ponds, and beyond the ponds to the Heath itself, as the Victorian lamplights came on and the scene emptied of all but ducks and adventurous men. The lights turned the grass a purgatorial orange.
“Imagine two island kids like us, two barefoot kids from nothing, ending up here . . .” murmured my mother, and they held each other’s hands and pressed their foreheads together, and I felt, looking at them, that even if they were absurd, how much more absurd was I, a grown woman resentful of another grown woman who had done, after all, so much for me, so much for herself and yes, for her people, and all, as she rightly said, from nothing at all. Was I feeling sorry for myself because I had no dowry? And when I looked up from the joint I was rolling it seemed my mother had read my mind. But don’t you realize how incredibly lucky you are, she said, to be alive, at this moment? People like us, we can’t be nostalgic. We’ve no home in the past. Nostalgia is a luxury. For our people, the time is now!
I lit my joint, poured myself another finger of rum and listened with my head bowed while the ducks quacked and my mother speechified, until it got late and her lover put a hand softly to her cheek and I saw it was time to get the last train.
• • •
In late July I moved back to London, not to my mother’s, but to my father’s. I offered to sleep in the living room, but he wouldn’t have it, he said if I slept there the noise of him leaving for his rounds each morning would wake me, and I quickly accepted this logic and let him fold himself into the sofa. In return I felt I’d really better find a job: my father truly did believe in the nobility of labor, he’d staked his life on it, and he made me ashamed to be idle. Sometimes, unable to go back to sleep after hearing him creep out of the door, I would sit up in bed and think about all this work, both my father’s and his people’s, going back many generations. Labor without education, labor usually without craft or skill, some of it honest and some of it crooked, but all of it leading somehow to my own present state of laziness. When I was quite young, eight or nine, my father had showed me his father’s birth certificate, and the professions of his grandparents stated upon it—rag boiler and rag cutter—and this, I was meant to understand, was the proof that his tribe had always been defined by their labor, whether they wanted to be or not. The importance of labor was a view he held as strongly as my mother held her belief that the definitions that really mattered were culture and color. Our people, our people. I thought of how readily we’d all used the phrase, a few weeks earlier, on that beautiful June night at the Noted Activist’s, sitting drinking rum, admiring families of fat ducks, their heads turned inwards, their bills nestled into the feathers of their own bodies, roosting along the bank of the pond. Our people! Our people! And now, lying in the funk of my father’s bed, turning the phrase over in my mind—for lack of anything better to do—it reminded me of the overlapping quack and babble of those birds, repeating over and over the same curious message, delivered from their own bills into their own feathers: “I am a duck!” “I am a duck!”
Four
Stepping out of a bush taxi—after several months’ absence—I spotted Fern standing by the side of the road, apparently waiting for me, right on time, as if there were a bus stop and a timetable. I was happy to see him. But he proved to be not in the mood for greetings or pleasantries, falling in step with me and immediately launching into a low-voiced debriefing, so that before I’d even reached Hawa’s door I, too, was burdened with the rumor presently gripping the village: that Aimee was in the process of organizing a visa, that Lamin would soon move permanently to New York. “Well, is it the case?” I told him the truth: I didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. I’d had an exhausting time in London, holding Aimee’s hand through a difficult winter, personally and professionally, and I was feeling as a consequence particularly averse to her brand of personal drama. The album she’d spent a grim British January and February recording—which should have been released about now—had instead been abandoned, the consequence of a brief, ugly affair with her young producer, who then took his songs with him. Only a few years earlier a break-up like this would have been only a minor setback to Aimee, hardly worth half a day in bed watching old episodes of long-forgotten Aussie soaps—The Flying Doctors, The Sullivans—something she did in moments of extreme vulnerability. But I had noticed a change in her, her personal armor was no longer what it once was. Leaving, and being left—these operations now affected her far more deeply, they were no longer water off a duck’s back to her, she was actually wounded, and took no meetings with anyone except Judy for almost a month, barely leaving the house and asking me several times to sleep in her room, just by her bed, on the floor, as she did not want to be alone. During this period of purdah I had assumed, for better or worse, that nobody was closer to her than me. Listening to Fern, my first feeling was that I had been betrayed, but the more I considered it I saw that this was not quite right: it was not deceit but a form of mental separation. I was comfort and company for her in a stalled moment, while, in another compartment of her heart, she was busily planning for the future, with Lamin—and
Judy was her co-conspirator in that. Instead of being annoyed at Aimee I found myself frustrated by Fern: he was trying to get me involved, but I didn’t want any part of it, it was inconvenient for me, I had my trip already all planned out, and the more Fern spoke the further I saw the itinerary plotted in my head slipping away from me. A visit to Kunta Kinteh Island, a few afternoons at the beach, two nights in one of the fancy hotels in town. Aimee gave me almost no annual leave, I had to be resourceful, stealing holidays where I could.
“OK, but why not take Lamin with you? He’ll talk to you. With me he is like a clam.”
“To the hotel? Fern—no. Terrible idea.”
“On your trip then. You cannot go out there by yourself anyway, you’ll never find it.”
I gave in. When I told Lamin he was happy, not about visiting the island itself, I suspected, but because of the opportunity to escape the classroom and spend an afternoon negotiating with his friend Lolu, a cab driver, over the round-trip price. Lolu’s Afro had been cut into a Mohican, tinged orange, and he wore a thick belt with a big silver buckle that read BOY TOY. They appeared to negotiate all the way there, a two-hour journey filled with laughter and debate in the front seat, Lolu’s deafening reggae music, many phone calls. I sat in the back, with little more Wolof than I’d had before, watching the bush go by, spotting the odd silver-gray monkey and ever more isolated settlements of people, you couldn’t even call them villages, just two or three huts together, and then nothing again for another ten miles. I remember in particular two barefoot girl children walking by the road, hand in hand, they looked like best friends. They waved at me and I waved back. There was nothing and no one around them, they were out on the edge of the world, or of the world I knew, and watching them I realized it was very hard, almost impossible, for me to imagine what time felt like for them, out here. I could remember being their age, of course, holding hands with Tracey, and how we had considered ourselves “eighties kids,” more savvy than our parents, far more modern. We thought we were products of a particular moment, because as well as our old musicals we liked things like Ghostbusters and Dallas and lollipop flutes. We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn’t feel this way? Yet when I waved at those two girls I noticed I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that they were timeless symbols of girlhood, or of childish friendship. I knew it couldn’t possibly be the case but I had no other way to think of them.