Things I Have Withheld

by Kei Miller

  He takes me around, knocking on the few gates dotted about where the Rastas still live or worship. He warns me away from the Twelve Tribes Headquarters, however. “Yeah de vibes dere not nice any more. Mi nuh tink you woulda like it. De elders dem get old, suh dem not dere fi keep the livity. A just some young eedyat bwoy who a try hustle a money. Yu zimme.” I believe him, and trust him, and find it sweet that he doesn’t see the irony—young boys just trying to “hustle a money”. We end up at Bolt House—a Jamaican restaurant. Outside, along the wall that encircles the restaurant is a kind of mural—Usain Bolt is in the middle of the mural, and posing in the middle of a Jamaican flag, Haile Selassie is on the far right, Bob Marley on the left as well as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Inside, I meet Sister Joanne and later her husband, Brother Desai, a Twelve Tribes elder who leads the very same Headquarters we did not get to. Brother Desai smiles widely when he hears that I too am from Jamaica but frowns deeply when he asks what it is that I do and I confess that I am a writer.

  “I don’t trust writers!” Desai says gruffly. He is not being impolite, but he does not seem like a man interested in politeness if it came to that. I nod. I get it. He continues, “Writers are a dangerous set of people. Dem only want to write the negative things. The sensational. And dem don’t want to tell people the truth about dis great Africa.” And it seems to me that he is talking from experience—that there are specific writers he is thinking about. I do not know what to do other than nod again. I wonder how many writers and journalists Brother Desai has come across in his forty-four years of living here—how many have sat before him with their tape recorders waiting for him to tell them again the story of the Rastas in Ethiopia. How many times has he read back a portrait of himself that he does not recognise? Would he recognise himself if he read this that I am writing now?

  “What month you born?” Brother Desai asks, and I tell him, October. He looks me up and down. “October. Hmmm. You know what you are led by? The backbone.” He reaches a hand behind himself and runs a finger along his own spine. “Listen, this is not horoscope. Rasta don’t deal wid horoscope. Dis is de ancient wisdom dem did try to hide from we. You are led by the backbone. Balance is your ting. Balance is what guide you.” And I don’t know why this should have made me feel so unsettled, so exposed, as if this complete stranger has looked and understood something very true about me, as if his ancient wisdom is true. I put my hand to my chest and bow. “Blessings, Elder,” I tell him. “I’Ll take that.”

  Desai talks for a while longer about the evils of Babylon and the greatness of Africa, but I am only pondering his early words. “Writers are a dangerous set of people.”

  In Lalibela, the mountains are monasteries and the rocks are churches; the holy places never built or constructed in the way we usually think of buildings or constructions. Rather, they are dug into the landscape, or chiselled and carved out of the boulders. It is breathtaking to stand in these places and contemplate the work done, to have carved out from a single rock an entire church! This is Africa’s Jerusalem—or at least that was the intention, to make a holy place on the continent so that the early Ethiopian Christians would not have to risk their lives pilgriming across hostile territories to get to the real Jerusalem. So many hundreds of years old, and these churches are still in use. On any given evening sitting in Lalibela, it might sound as if the rocks and the mountains are chanting.

  I go up the mountain with Prince as my guide—Prince who grew up here in Lalibela, who studied biology at university and used to teach in a high school, but the money was too little. He makes more now as a tour guide. Climbing up, the mountain is especially loud. It is the Day of Emanuel. We reach and I wander about. Even in the midst of the solemnity and the worship, an argument develops on the mountain. Prince is involved. It takes me a moment to realise I am implicated as well. We are standing in the doorway of one of the worship spaces. A man is sitting on the floor in front of the priest, his camera out and the full zoom of the lens pointing at the priest. So this man, sitting down and trying to take his picture, has turned around, visibly annoyed by us. “Could you come further in!? You’re blocking the light!” Prince does not move. He would have to squeeze himself into a corner to accommodate the man trying to take the photograph. When I realise what is happening, I stand firmly with Prince. The man is trying again to take the picture, but whatever he sees in the viewfinder is obviously too dark. He throws his fists in the air and turns to us again. “Could you get out of the damned doorway!?” He is almost frothing with rage. Prince does not move and I am standing firmly with Prince. And then Prince can no longer hold his tongue. “You are selfish man, sir.” He says. “You come here, into holy place, and command people, make people uncomfortable. You are selfish!”

  Two English women are standing behind the sitting man, and in a fluttering, flustering kind of way they are suddenly tripping over their own mouths to speak. “Oh no, no, no! He wasn’t making us uncomfortable at all!” They protest. I assume by “people” they could only understand Prince as referring to them, as if he too is not a person in this place, as if he could not possibly be speaking on his own behalf. “Yes,” I say to the women, adopting as much of a British accent as I can conjure, “but it is rather impolite, don’t you think—to come to someone’s country and be so rude about things—to bark orders at them like that? Don’t you think?” And they look at me, seemingly stunned, not sure what to make of me. “Yes, I suppose,” one says. “I was just trying to defuse an argument.” I do not say the obvious—that in trying to defuse the tension, they instinctively came out in defence of the rude man—the man who has now picked up his camera in a huff and stormed out.

  Prince’s hands are now a flurry of activity—his finger constantly going from forehead to chest, then shoulder to shoulder, making the sign of the cross, the way that Haile and the taxi driver had been making this gesture on my first day in Addis Ababa. “I’m so sorry.” Prince says to me. “I did not want to start an argument in a holy place.”

  He seems embarrassed that he has possibly offended me, but even more, that he might have offended his god. I do not know about God, but I try to reassure him that I am not offended.

  “That man was Italian you see,” Prince says, as if that should explain something else, and it does—the complicated history between the two countries and these ways that tourism often replicates colonialism—the outsider who feels the native should show deference, should happily squeeze themselves into corners when commanded, but who could never contemplate, yet alone tolerate, bodies such as ours—dark bodies­—­visiting any of their European cities and making such demands.

  We walk out of the temple. The Italian man is there at the door waiting on us. He is still obviously bothered. He needs to get something else off his chest. As if he has not already revealed his full self, he looks to both of us and says, “You people should be grateful that people like me visit your country! You people should be thankful that we are pouring money into your economy.”

  You people. I have been included. Because of my body. Because of my skin I have become Ethiopian and worthy of his contempt. He cannot imagine someone like me being similar to himself. He cannot imagine me as the tourist. People like me, he had said next, by which he meant white, though I suspect he is not fully aware of all that he implied. I am seething. I am so very angry at this Italian man who thinks Ethiopians must all obey and grovel before him; I am angry at the English women who seem to only understand themselves as people; I am angry enough to say something. And I wonder, how do we do it? How do we make it through each day when there is so much in the world to be angry about?

  Prince has ignored the Italian man. He has simply walked ahead. I follow him, skipping from stone to stone and climbing higher up of the mountain. Prince stops and takes a seat. I sit away from him, understanding that he maybe needs a moment.

  The sky is so very large and the mountains are still chanting and the landscape spread
out before us is holy. I look over to see that Prince’s eyes are now closed and his lips are moving in prayer.

  13

  MY BROTHER, MY BROTHER

  To hear him speak it, every man here in Ghana is K’s brother. “My brother, my brother” he says, a linguistic embrace, a claim of kinship, and when K does this—when he pronounces that word “brother”, there are no rolled Rs and no highland lilt. He loses, at once, all traces of his usual Scottish accent, an accent that at times could seem peculiar to his body. Instead of the Scottish accent he would have learned at school and from his friends and from the world around him growing up, he draws for the other accent he would have heard in his household—West African sounds. Nigerian to be specific. “My brudda, my brudda,” he says. K tries to secure local rates of entry at the Wli Waterfalls and at the monkey sanctuary and clutches his heart as if mortally wounded when they charge him, as they do me, the tourist rate. “But am I not your brudda?” K asks with wide and hurt eyes, and though they both laugh at this, slapping each other as men do on their shoulders—that slightly-too-loud laugh that often happens between customers and service providers that reveals the entire interaction as false, scripted—there is a hurt unsaid in all of this: No, sir. I do not really consider you my brother.

  I too could claim brotherhood here. Given another history, this is the country to which I would have been born. Or if not to this country, then at least to this landscape. The same history that took my ancestors away is the same history that drew the borders and invented a single country out of a patchwork of ethnicities. It is the same history that created sudden brotherhood between Ashanti and Ewe and Konkombo men. Look, said some English governor, you are all brothers now! You are all Ghanaian. But which of these are my actual brothers—I do not know.

  There are so many things I do not know, not even the seasons, and it worries me. It is always important to know the seasons. I was just about twenty years old and at a writing workshop in Trinidad. I must have blithely said something about enjoying the summer not knowing then that the word “summer” slipped easily off the tongue of a Jamaican but not so easily off the tongue of a Trinidadian. The tutor, a fiercely bright writer and activist who still had shrapnel in her bones, mementos of a revolution she had helped to fight on another island, looked at me over the rim of her glasses. “Summer!?” she gasped? “Allyuh in Jamaica have summer now? And I suppose you does have winter and autumn and spring too?” Funny—I would actually defend the Jamaican use of “summer” now. I would say, But isn’t this what we have always done—taken language, hollowed it out and then refilled it with our own meanings? We remade the language for ourselves. But I also heard her loud and clear. Yes, it is important to know the seasons. It is important to describe a place and its seasons on its own terms.

  Here, it is the harmattan—a season I have never felt or witnessed before. It is nothing like spring, or autumn, or summer, or winter. And neither is it anything like the Caribbean’s dry seasons or our hurricane seasons. The harmattan is its own thing. The sky is nowhere to be seen, as if Nyame has taken his entire lodgings elsewhere, off on his yearly God-vacation. The sun is an orb shining dimly behind what feels like fog. It is as if a huge thunderstorm is building, except there is no moisture. The air is dry. You feel it in your chapped lips. What I mistook as fog, I understand now is the tiniest particles of the Sahara Desert. The whole thing feels like a landscape of dreams. My brothers are always coming out of, or disappearing, into mist. It is weird when I realise I too must always be doing the same. I walk about trying to take note of this season I have never before experienced. The time of the desert in the sky; the time of the low sun; the time when we go along as if entering or exiting dreams; the harmattan.

  I do not know the languages here—not Ga or Ewe or Nzema—not a single one of the over seventy indigenous tongues, not even Ashanti Twi, though I know much of my own Jamaican patois borrows from the structure of that language. And can I really be a brother in this place if I do not speak a language from here—or if I can only speak to my brothers in the language that separated us from each other?

  In Kenya and in Ethiopia I had felt a tinge of embarrassment, but the feeling wasn’t unlike the way I have felt in France—that shyness of not knowing a language, of having to be accommodated, of having to sheepishly ask, “English?” In Ghana the feeling is much larger than just a tinge. It is a profound hurt. And sometimes it is as if I really ought to understand what is being said, as if I really could if I just concentrated enough, if I tried a little harder to remember something I must have forgotten. At the market, a woman with mangos crowded between her legs calls to me, “babarima”­—­son. And then she says something else I do not understand. I smile and say, “English?” and she stands up from her mangos. She looks me up and down, her arms akimbo, and then makes a sound, deep and guttural, “Eh!!”

  I say “Sorry.”

  On her face is a look of scorn, but it is as if she is looking not at me but at something behind me. It is as if she is saying, “But really, what kind of a mother is this, who has taken this boy to be raised in another country but never taught him his mother tongue? Now look at him! He has come back, so big and worthless, yes? So big and worthless. But he cannot even speak to us. Eh! What kind of mother is this?”

  And I think, oh maame, if you just replace that word “mother” with “history” then you would be correct. For really, what kind of history is this?

  In the streets of Accra the men are hawking their goods—carvings and cheap touristy paintings and bags and shirts and shoes all with Kente designs. They call to me. They call me “brother” but with extravagantly affected black American accents, as if they are in Harlem or the Bronx. “Yo ma brother! Whassup!? Come here and look!” I walk by but cannot avoid the man who, free from the confines of a stall, approaches me—one hand dripping with leather necklaces, the other covered with T-shirts. “Yo ma bro!” he says to me, “Why don’t you buy some o’ my Authentic African shit, man.” I observe him for a while, stone-faced, the silence just long enough to make the veneer crack a little. “But why do you speak to me in an American accent?” I ask. Now the mask slips completely. “I am sorry my brudda,” he says, “I am just trying to sell these things.” And I love this moment, how without the pretence the distance is reduced a little between us. I look at his things, still doubtful that I might buy anything. “But where are you from then?” he asks me. “Jamaica,” I answer. And he smiles brightly. “Ahhh but see! You are still my brother!” re-­establishing both a brotherhood and a distance between us.

  We go to Elmina Castle. I feel it is something I have to do, because I have imagined for so long this “Door of No Return”, this precise place where so many of my direct ancestors—great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers—would have crouched their malnourished bodies under, would have squinted at the first direct sunlight they had seen for months, and would have boarded the boat that was the beginning of a terrible amnesia, would have taken them away from everything they knew. To return then to this place where no return was ever expected, ever imagined—to walk the opposite way, from the beach and to the door and through it—is something, a kind of healing perhaps—a way to say, I am so sorry that I do not know your names; we have forgotten so much. I only know that I am from you and that you were here, and that my body is the legacy of you. So I bring you back; I bring you back inside my own body. Look, look! You are finally home.

  The tour begins in the dungeons. About twenty of us follow the guide. I know that this experience will be meaningful, but I do not expect it to be emotional. I am generally not built like that. I already know what to expect from this tour but I am still not ready. All my reading has not prepared me for the actual smell of it all, how more than a trace of what happened here should still linger after so many hundreds of years. And the air around is suddenly so thin. I feel some part of myself slipping—a feeling I have never felt before—and I realise if I
don’t concentrate really hard, if I don’t push my entire consciousness into every part of my body—my toes, my elbows, my ears—I will faint.

  I linger behind, allowing the tour to walk a bit ahead. K comes over to ask if I am OK, and I can only lift up a hand, unsure what that hand might communicate but knowing that if I opened my mouth to speak I would only start sobbing. K seems to understand and leaves me alone. I take a few deep breaths and then am about to join the group again in the next room when a couple return to the room I am still in. It is a white couple. They smile politely at me and then the woman places herself against one of the walls, extending her neck and smiling brightly. “Here, John! Right here!” she instructs the man as he focuses his camera, and it takes all my willpower not to grab the camera and smash it to the ground.

  Twenty minutes later and we are all back outside in the sunlight. The tour guide is recapping for us some of what we saw down in the dungeons and pointing to the chapel where we will head to next. He lets the group walk a little and then comes over to me. “My brother,” he says. “Are you OK? Would you like to do this tour without . . .” and he does a gesture that makes me smile, a gesture I have grown up my whole life knowing. He points with his lips. He does not say “white people”—just the gesture, but I tell him it’s OK. I’m OK.

  Of course I am not completely OK, but I think my feelings are more layered than I know how to sort through. I feel a sudden profound disappointment in everything—in history. I am disappointed in the white woman who felt a slave dungeon was a great backdrop for a picture of her wearing her biggest smile. But my disappointment extends even towards the tour guide. It is not fair, what I feel. I am disappointed in a history that we had no part in playing—a history that our bodies merely inherited. Still, there is a reason that I was born in the part of the world to which I was born, and a reason why my guide was born in Ghana. It is the reason why when he approached me and said, “My brother,” I felt a hollowness in the words.