The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

  I asked Michael questions about his life in Texas, where he had found work as a chef in a popular hotel near the Alamo. To end my interrogation, he said, “Safe trip, baby girl.” When I complained about how none of our other siblings had called to say bon voyage, Michael said, “You worry too much about the little shit that don’t matter.”

  Of the things I carried that April of 2007, most notable were my clothes and shoes, for how wrong the pieces were—the shoes soft and thin soled, gold and animal skin—Miu Miu sling backs and green suede peep toes that the Burundian ground devoured, straps first, soles second; the tops and skirts and dresses were too dark, mostly black, or too revealing. The fabrics weren’t light, nothing blew according to the wind. Everything stuck.

  The smell of Bujumbura, Burundi’s capital, greeted me first: burnt rubber and banana peels, I thought; later I would learn that it was unprocessed palm oil and coal, trash burning in backyards. I did not know my coworkers’ names or where I would live, only that someone would meet me at the airport. A woman headed to Rwanda mistakenly exited the plane in Bujumbura, an error she was horrified to discover but quickly did, Burundi’s airport lacking the facade and accoutrements of Rwanda’s—Wi-Fi, free luggage carts, air-conditioning, red-painted cafés, and duty-free shops. When Burundi’s airport closes, and it does close, the lights power off and the building, designed in the shape of a village hut, dies in one great exhale.

  My lost look must have given me away. A uniformed man shuffled me through the visa line, delivering me to four men in a white Toyota pickup truck—all radio station employees. I would not see Alexis Sinduhije, who had convinced me we’d be making a radio revolution, for many months.

  The road, red like rust, seemed like a video game. Phil Collins was playing on a cassette tape the whole while we flew by boys driving motos with baseball caps for helmets and a man on a bicycle with a door balanced on his head. We swerved wildly to avoid potholes, driving onto small bits of sidewalk where people knew not to walk. Some drivers sat behind steering wheels on the left sides of cars; others were on the right. Phil Collins sang on: “One more night. Give me just one more night …” At first I thought the driver played him to make me feel comfortable hearing a language I knew, but Phil blared from rolled-down car windows everywhere and would be sung on karaoke nights from stages where live bands performed covers. The men who worked for Alexis were singing along now, too. People here loved Phil Collins. By the end, I would like him, too.

  The scant travel literature, none of it written by Burundians, called this a francophone country despite the fact that 90 percent of the population, those living outside Bujumbura, spoke Kirundi not French. In the city people spoke French mixed with Kirundi, sometimes mixed with Swahili—three languages I did not know. Those who spoke French spoke it badly. But not as badly as I.

  I had arrived in Burundi with a well-honed and much-practiced description of myself that I spoke often in poorly constructed French: I was from New Orleans. (Where? they asked.) It had been a declaration in my life before this point, requiring no pause, conjuring its own fantasies. I had gone to UC–Berkeley in California. (Where, what?) I had worked for Time Asia in Hong Kong and Oprah’s magazine in Manhattan. (Who, what, where?) I had absolutely nothing to stand on except my name and the fact of my having been born.

  When I said my own name someone would always ask what the name Broom meant; beyond the practical they wanted to know why it was my name and what the name foretold. I did not have a philosophical translation for the name, as did the Burundians I met whose last names were decided at the moment of birth: Ntahombaye, “he who lives nowhere.” Or Mpozenzi, “I know but won’t say.” I’d try to explain American slavery by saying, “I do not know what my last name means. It is the name of my family’s slaveholder,” but my capacity for language was not sophisticated enough. People asked about my siblings, and this was the one detail that excited them, that I had come from a mother bearing so many children who were all still alive. Did they know their meanings? people wanted to know. No, we are all named the same, I’d say, behind our fathers, Broom and Webb. A family of children in Burundi could not be identified as kin by their last names; you would not know who was born into a clan unless you knew the family personally. To them, I must have seemed as unmoored as I felt—calling myself by a name whose meaning I did not know. One late night in a bar, a few of the radio journalists decided I would go by the name Kabiri, twelfth child in Kirundi, but the name did not stick. I wrote it down in my notebook and forgot about it.

  For the first time in my life, I was mostly silent. When I did speak, after much mental calculation, my voice trembled. When I listened, my ears strained and still did not interpret rightly. I was exhausted by translating, sometimes catching only the words around the perimeter of sentences, which were generally not the key words. I prayed that no one would ask me a complicated question because then I’d be forced to prove just how little I understood, which made me feel unintelligent, a fool for not knowing.

  In Burundi, I was l’étranger, without language; I was without the sound of my voice. This was slightly romantic in the beginning. “I desire to dream in another language, which would place me in a different world altogether. Ultimate displacement,” I wrote in a letter to a friend.

  At first, I lived in Alexis Sinduhije’s gated house, which contained hints of him, photographs posted on a wall in a room whose door mostly stayed shut. A wild, unkempt place on the outside, the gate falling apart, the garden untended, but inside I had a neat sky-blue room with a low bed and mosquito netting. In that house, my waiting life began. I could pass hours sitting by the window staring outside, through burgundy-painted security bars.

  Everything was done for me. A man opened and closed the gate, which I never entered or exited without someone having come to take me someplace that they had decided upon. In the mornings, the chauffeur arrived to drive me to the radio station, but the time was never fixed. It was whenever he showed up. I could never say who would be in the car when he came or where we would stop along the way.

  Even at the office I was a wanderer with no fixed place to sit.

  Because we were just across the street from the executive offices of the president whose corruption charges, human rights abuses, and self-serving policies RPA’s journalists investigated, it was not uncommon for our lights to be mysteriously shut off, or for Kirundi-speaking soldiers with guns on their shoulders to appear in the newsroom while we worked. When RPA’s journalists reported criticisms leveled against the president, the following types of things happened: The spokesman of another political party had his house demolished while he was in it, a crane lifting off his roof as if it were a playhouse. Five other local politicians had grenades thrown into their homes.

  There was a single bulb hanging in the wide-open newsroom and one cord that all sixty of us shared to connect to the internet, which was mostly how I did my work—searching for grant opportunities, writing emails, things that required the world beyond Burundi. My work at Radio Publique Africaine would never provide the feeling of achievement that I was used to, but I worked steadily, chasing down money and designing along with the journalists new radio programming—a show called Connaître Vos Droits where reporters would read the Burundian constitution in Kirundi over the air so people knew their basic rights. Another show would cover the parliament live, a first for Burundi and a major step in holding politicians accountable to voters. The station, whose tagline was “Voice of the People,” was a kind of open-air market for those in need. Women routinely appeared when their children went missing. Radio hosts would stop midshow so the parent could describe the missing child on air. One time, a man robbed a local bank and then came to the radio station, dressed neatly in slacks and a button-down shirt, demanding airtime to rail against the country’s discriminatory lending practices. He ranted live on the air until the police arrived.

  Burundi’s heat was work, too. Every day I was driven home for a meal and nap only a few hour
s after arriving at the office. After which I was driven back to the station until someone could give me a ride home, and thus my days had no measure.

  At dinnertime, Alexis’s houseman, Robert, five feet three, with an afro larger than his head, spoke to me in French. He was a former schoolteacher, alcoholic, I heard someone say. I understood him because he spoke slowly. But still, I had to burn a hole in his face with my eyes, could not look away and understand at the same time, which he didn’t seem to mind.

  As days went by, Robert advised me over the dinner table, saying, “The black are mischief, the lighter-skinned ones are gentleman. Don’t get darker,” he told me. “Then you’ll just be like everyone else.” It was too early in my stay to know the depth of his warnings. All I noted then was that he sounded like a New Orleanian, obsessed with gradations of skin color. Early on, everyone I encountered in Burundi was someone I already knew from New Orleans: the skinny boy at the restaurant was Carl; my boss, Emmanuel, reminded me of Manboo. This was psychic grounding.

  At night, lying in bed underneath the mosquito netting, I seemed unable, at times, to remember why on earth I had decided to come to Burundi. In notebooks, I wrote: Je suis libre ou folle? Free or crazy?

  One night, at bedtime, a month after I’d arrived, a drunk Robert banged at my bedroom door. He was wearing only boxer shorts.

  “Je t’aime, Sarah,” he said. “Je t’aime.”

  He spoke the one simple sentence that I understood. He was a man in love.

  I could take him, I knew. Still, I locked the door. The next day, I moved into a house of my own, helped along by two new friends who I met at Cyrille’s Bar, where I’d begun to spend my evenings after work, nursing Amstel Bock and Primus, the local beer whose factory never closed, even during the worst days of the war. I am not a beer person, but it was the only thing in unlimited supply, unlike drinking water, petrol, bullets, and sugar, the procuring of which required bribery and government connections. At Cyrille’s one night, I met Gregoire, a native Burundian who had returned to his country after thirty years in Germany. He was an architect, father of three girls, quiet, and watchful, who had come to rebuild many of Burundi’s schools and banks. Gregoire became like a brother to me. Through him, I met Laurent-Martin, who grew up with Gregoire in a small village, up country. Laurent fled Burundi after the war and spent years in Nairobi, first working as a taxi driver, then covering sports for the BBC. He rose through the ranks to become a political correspondent for the station. He was composed and extremely vain, his forehead always shining, clothes creased, cowboy boots polished. Together we formed a small family of three, inseparable, like Joseph-Elaine-Ivory. Gregoire and Laurent were my local historians, educating me, helping me to locate the nuance. I can see now that I was collecting brothers. Both men reminded me of Byron: mostly silent with strong protective urges.

  My new house was part of a community called Kinanira III, in Bujumbura’s flatter terrain, where the roads were unpaved and dust flew. Up above us, high in the hills, lived the president of Burundi and the ambassadors—of America, Norway, South Africa, France, and Belgium. Those houses, in stark contrast to ours, had terraces, stone walls, generators, guard towers, cable television, and landlines, which were not available elsewhere because, per the local news, “The country doesn’t have enough wire.”

  Burundians called the place where I moved a compound. It had a tall white metal gate that stayed closed except for a few times during the day when the security guard I inherited opened it to let the car from the radio station enter. My house was a squat concrete block notable for its security bars and its many keyed doors. It cost three hundred dollars a month, which was half my salary. There were three bedrooms. I had one, and another belonged to Consuelette, the housekeeper who came with the house. The third was for my expected guests, friends who would never come, who would change their minds after they read travel warnings or learned the cost of a ticket.

  The floors of my house were gray concrete—unpolished, like my mood. In photographs taken shortly after move-in day, I wore pink lipstick where it belonged and the same lipstick on my cheeks, as if to liven myself, but my large eyes looked shocked by something. Dull, like my new floor. The bathroom in my bedroom was huge. Someone had painted the tub sea green, and now the paint was flaking; you could peel strips off, like dead skin. Sometimes, out of desperation, out of a deep need for comfort, I’d fill it until the hot water ran out and sit down in the peeling tub anyway, but never for too long.

  The house’s bareness was a spirit that muted all I tried to do to cheer things up—the tablecloth with a bright-yellow background and green peppers disappeared into the void of the room, as did the bright-orange curtains that I hung. The walls were watery white, the doors ivory colored but barely, as if dyed with an Easter egg kit.

  In a small sitting room off the formal living room where hard, resisting chairs drew a square, I hung maps of New Orleans and black-and-white pictures of the destroyed Yellow House on one wall. On the opposite wall, I taped up images of child soldiers, a map of Burundi, and photographs of refugees torn from a Ryszard Kapuściński article. Sometimes I would sit in this room and look to my left and look to my right, at the walls that showed where I used to be and where I was at present, and think about how those two things felt like exactly the same thing.

  Without language, I had little control over the narrative and thus became whatever others made me. A man in a bar called me Tutsi after approaching and speaking to me in Kirundi, which happened at least once a day. “Je suis américaine,” I was always saying. Another man, another day, called me “Tutsi from the hills,” who, a friend explained, were disliked even by ordinary Tutsi. A small boy on the street yelled, “Muzungu,” which meant white person, in my direction. Another day, I was Ethiopian. A Belgian woman thought I was Tanzanian or Rwandan: “Tutsi definitely,” she said, “but not Burundian. It’s the style of your hair.” I was Tutsi even to the elderly mother of Alexis Sinduhije, whom I had still not met. “But I am not Tutsi,” I told her. “I cannot even speak to you in your own language.” She advised me through a translator that I was Burundian; it was just that I had forgotten my language. “That is all,” the translator told me. “You have been gone too long.”

  I was being claimed as Tutsi because of my height, the praline color of my skin, and the sharpness of my nose. Samantha Power had not mentioned this detail of her time in Burundi, how one would be designated and claimed, because she is white. She would not have been privy to conversations about who to turn to if and when the war resurged, as I was. These discussions were a matter of routine, like talking about the weather. When the war comes, “Vous êtes Tutsi, not American,” a local doctor told me one night when we were sitting at Cyrille’s bar. “Mais, I am American,” I said. He explained that under the duress of war, there would be no time to explain and no time to dig up a passport. In so many words, he was saying, I needed to shore up my Tutsi alliances. I kept saying, “Quel horrible.” “C’est grave,” he agreed, but still true, he said. When I described this conversation to Laurent-Martin he said, “My mother is Tutsi. My father is Hutu. Who will I kill?”

  How uncomfortable, people claiming me in this way, when I did not know what having been born Burundian actually meant. I had never been claimed this hard even in my native place. In New Orleans taximen still asked me, “Where you from?” Or they said, “You not from here, are you,” no doubt picking up on behavior acquired from my having lived in other places. I always huffed at the insinuation that I was from somewhere else. It is the return not the going away that matters, I always wanted to say. That painful snapping back into place.

  At nights, alone in my compound, I wrote thirty-page letters to friends who rarely ever wrote back, or if they did, the letters no longer arrived. My letters from Burundi were one long desire—for my family, for home, for direction: “I wish to see my niece Amelia—and to be talking to the Harlem people in the street,” I wrote in one. “I want to write about home, but who doe
sn’t?”

  I wrote to my mother: “Dear Mom, I feel like talking to you.” Asking at the end: “What ever happened with Road Home?” Mom sent a page-long reply on notepaper with flower borders that left little space for writing. Her letter answered none of my questions, ending instead with scripture penned in her oversize script: “Love the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your path.”

  “Wherever one is in the world,” I wrote to a friend, “life begins to go like normal. All the color turns to gray, all the surprise normalizes, and then one can see through. Somehow this goes back to loneliness, about the places on earth where we find ourselves and where we feel at home and where we feel roped in and where we feel lost. Feeling lost in the French Quarter of New Orleans is just like feeling lost here. I’ve got on my walls photos of the Yellow House breaking apart. I’ve got to go back to that raggedy falling-down thing and talk about my father. My father, the raggedy falling-down thing of my imagination.”

  During the three-hour siestas and on weekends I mostly sat inside, reading books and writing letters. I treated my books like people, complaining about which ones I brought with me: “Mavis Gallant was a mistake,” I wrote in a letter. “So was Henry James. Mark Twain was a brilliant idea.” I read more hours than I worked at the radio station—Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (for the fifth time), Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, and James Baldwin’s Evidence of Things Not Seen. My letters were full of quotations from these books that said what I could not: “My memory stammers: but my soul is a witness,” Baldwin wrote. And from Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs: “I don’t want to write any more letters. What’s the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I am changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am someone else, it’s obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can’t possibly write to strangers.”