The Yellow House

  “Well, he’s right,” I wrote to a friend. “But me, I can’t stop talking to paper. Kisses, darling.”

  My hard work and insistence on my own ability to drive had won me the right to a borrowed car from RPA and in this stick shift, I found further escapes from my Bujumburan escape, to UNHCR refugee camps on the Congolese border and in Tanzania, where families hung clotheslines between their white tents with blue tarps for roofs, rust-colored rocks gathered in piles at the bottom to hold the tarp during rains. Everywhere I went, kids in plastic sandals or knee-high rain boots kicked soccer balls in the dailiness of life. During these visits I learned about the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, wherein people forced to flee their communities due to natural disaster—“internally displaced persons”—have the human right to return. I’d by then read a New York Times article about Edward Blakely—executive director of New Orleans Office of Recovery Management, described as “the rescuer from afar”—denouncing the right of New Orleanians who he demeaned as “buffoons” to return. “If we get some people here, those 100 million new Americans, they’re going to come here without the same attitudes of the locals,” Blakely said. “I think, if we create the right signals, they’re going to come here, and they’re going to say, ‘Who are these buffoons?’”

  On weekends, I made repeat trips to a lush village called Banga, which sat at the very top of a hill with a view of Burundi’s rolling mountains. Its fertile land was dotted with six small huts not more than two hundred square feet where Catholic nuns rented rooms for two dollars a night. The nuns—who reminded me of the ones at Sisters of the Holy Family on Chef Menteur where Mom worked—laughed to see me driving up, a woman driving, especially up country, being a rare sight. But there I came leaning hard on the horn the entire time, as was the custom, to warn pedestrians and bicyclists, herds of cows or goats led by children. Many of the streets in Bujumbura looked like Times Square or Bourbon Street. If you didn’t stick your neck out when driving in Burundi you would wait forever. Inside the hut, surrounded by banana trees, I banged more letters out on an Olivetti typewriter I bought in a dusty Bujumbura shop called Typomeca, after my laptop died.

  In Banga, the rain was predictable, seeming to arrive at 5 p.m. daily, in a great rush, at which point the electricity would go out and I would light the plain white candles that were a staple of my life, sticking them upright in their own wax, while the rain beat up the tin roof. After, all the sounds seemed sharper. The cows’ moos, the trumpeter hornbills’ calls, my own feet shuffling across the floor.

  Back in Bujumbura, I asked Laurent if he knew anyone who died “in the storm” when I meant to say massacre. Laurent understood my point, as the wounded often do, and did not correct me. “Everyone in Burundi knows someone who died,” he said. “If they needed to, they could give detailed reports on how exactly they died.” I understood. A sadness descended on us both.

  “One important reason to travel the world is so you know how to speak about things,” I wrote in a notebook. “So that there exists in one’s mind a system of comparison so that one can realize, finally, and most importantly, that it is true: no one thing exists unto itself and that is finally, I suppose, why I came here.”

  Five months into my life in Burundi, by summer’s end, ambushes and banditry had intensified. There were grenade attacks. Tensions lingered between the FNL and the president’s party. Laughable police checks suddenly appeared along roads blocked only with a piece of blue string that a car could easily drive over. The United States embassy held security meetings for the Americans where nothing useful was relayed: security measures concerning us, they said, were still secure the way they were secure before. I knew what they were saying. If war were to break out again, as it threatened daily, we Americans would be the first to get airlifted out of there.

  I brought a machete found in the backyard into my bedroom. Consuelette found it under the mattress while making the bed one day and took it back outside.

  I mourned the small things that had risen to be great, the five boxes of books shipped media mail from New York that never arrived. I tried to recall which books were lost and figure out where they might be stalled. When these lost children finally arrived, I became ecstatic, as if a best friend had come to visit.

  I seemed sad to some. One day in the office I said, “Je suis déprimée”—I am depressed—to one of the journalists, who laughed. “Déprimée,” I said again. He repeated the word out loud and said, “No, you are not déprimée. You must have said the wrong word.” Embarrassed by my feeling, I said, “Yes, tu as raison, you are right, I have the wrong word.”

  Friends urged me to return home.

  I said the moment you want to leave is probably when you should try hard to stay. It sounded nice, it was a good idea, but I had no idea what it actually meant. Still I stayed. Mostly because I felt I had no other place to go.

  A curfew was declared so that the army could “hunt down the enemies of peace.” One night, returning home, I was followed by a truckload of armed men. They waited as I waited to enter the gate to my house. My watchman was asleep inside; I waited a long time, blowing and blowing the horn, not knowing what would happen next. Eventually, the gate opened and I went in. That night, I put my mattress on the floor and slept there thinking that an attack was imminent.

  When Alexis Sinduhije finally arrived in Burundi six months after I had I was ready to leave. With his appearance, however, the pace of the city, and certainly of my work, seemed quickened, as if he had given everything heart. He seemed always to be running to and fro. Wherever he sat, a meeting formed around him. I found him invigorating. He scolded me for acting too Burundian—saying yes when I meant no, laughing instead of protesting. “When they act Burundian,” he said, “you must act American.” Alexis made every gathering part school lesson, part political rally, part strategy session. “I am fighting for ideals, not Hutu not Tutsi, because I believe that justice is about humanity,” he would say.

  His big news was that he had returned from exile in Europe, despite the Burundian government’s threats, having decided he would run for president, finding that the power of radio was not enough. He had formed a political party called MSD, Mouvement pour la Solidarité et la Démocratie. Emmanuel, he told me, was now head of RPA. Emmanuel had a short thumb, was hypercontrolling, and stared at my breasts the entire time I spoke about anything.

  Alexis was in Bujumbura for short bursts, when he was not campaigning up-country. His house, where I first lived, was now heavily secured. One day a man with whom he was building his political party was kidnapped and later returned. Alexis kept on until an assassination attempt forced him to flee to Europe again.

  My loneliness bored holes in me, especially on weekend afternoons, Sundays in particular, when no one, not even the housekeeper, came. “I tried talking in a letter to sarah d today about James and Alvin and started crying at the Olivetti: it seemed to last for ages, my heartache, but then when I reread the letter it was only one graf or so of talk—the very little I actually gave at the moment felt like an awful lot,” I wrote in a notebook.

  The letters were no longer sufficient company. I watched war movies on the computer, lusting for the food; even the sticky rice in those films looked delicious. I ate to fill a gluttonous hole: mukeke, local fish from Lake Tanyanika; and ndagala, tiny fish with the eyes still in them that you ate whole. Beans and rice. Spinach and rice. I sought the perfect avocado, having never in my life tasted such delicious alligator pears, as my mother calls them. In this way I gained twenty-five pounds. Enough to make my clothes fit badly. The Burundian women noted this, saying: “You are fatter than when you came,” which was meant as a compliment.

  I woke often with a start, from dreaming and thinking I had heard, say, a man’s voice or someone walking just outside my window.

  Had I? I considered the possibilities only to arrive back at the beginning: there is nothing I could do regardless—and so usually I read myself back
to sleep until it happened all over again. In this way I had sleepless, restless, damaging nights.

  I woke ravenous; I was never full.

  I lost faith in the radio station, in the idea that I could ever “help” Burundi. I felt for the country, how its natives thought it was the greatest place on earth, but how it was almost always passed over for funding and attention, which generally went to Rwanda.

  What cheered me up at the end of my stay was securing for the station a small grant from Canada for the new radio programs. But money moved around in funny ways, it seemed, to support Alexis’s presidency or his new ventures. He cared about the station, but he was using it and us, too, rearranging our lives and duties to support his presidential aspirations. It had become another thing we laughed about in bars at night—Alexis’s running for president when he could not show up at meetings on time.

  Everything was life and death; if you didn’t laugh you could die inside, too.

  Many things had shifted over the course of my life in Burundi: I understood more French, was freer going around speaking it badly. I even learned some Kirundi. I loved the sound of it, how when you said no it was oya and when you said yes it was ego, which sounded like heeeeeey-go.

  More of this story would only sound the same. By Christmas, I knew it was time to leave. And two strange things happened. The first was that I swallowed a piece of goat meat too fast. The huge lump of meat with some bone still in it scarred my throat going down. I thought I would die in Burundi standing upright at a dinner party. I had been too happy to see and eat meat, after so much beans and rice. The story of my demise would have been dark comedy: she didn’t chew the tough meat; she choked standing up. Somehow, I willed the meat down. Afterward, though, I couldn’t swallow my own spit without severe pain. After days of this, Laurent drove me to a private doctor in a hospital where Burundians who couldn’t pay their medical bills had been chained inside, forbidden from leaving. This doctor performed an endoscopy on me without anesthesia. The first several tries, I fought the tubing going down my throat as if it were an oversize person lying on top of me. I thought nothing of having this procedure done in this way until I was back in the States and seeing a doctor who expressed horror at hearing this story.

  And then, days after: Evening time. I was sitting on my sun porch, reading. A dog barked beyond the gates. Inside, on the CD player, Billie Holiday was singing about how some man was her thrill when I was stung by the Nairobi fly, a bug drawn to the halogen lights above where I sat. Somehow the bug lost its footing and fell down onto me. If stunned—and shooing it off your skin counts—it emits a toxic acid that scars. For my remaining days in Burundi, I wore the bug’s long, thick-blistered kiss on one side of my neck like a dangling earring. It was full of pus and hard to look at. People stared anyway. Everyone who saw the mark cringed and said how unlucky I was for that rare occurrence to have happened to me. I took these two events as signs.

  I had not had a meaningful conversation with any of my siblings during the entirety of my life in Burundi. Their stories were frozen in what I last knew, which made me feel that my family—my connective tissue—was lost to me. I had ripped myself away. What I sought in Burundi was understanding from people who, I reasoned, ought to already know how to resolve the loss and migrations I was reacting to. But this could never be true: the people who knew, my family, were still in the place where I left them. My time in Burundi had helped me to place New Orleans in a more global context as part of the oft-neglected global South where basic human rights of safety and security, health care and decent housing, go unmet. But the distance only clarified; it could not induce forgetting. My traveling to Burundi was my trying the elasticity of the rubber band, pulling it all the way to the point where it should have broken, but did not. The band snapped violently back, and I found myself in the bowels of the city I left searching for. I took a job in Ray Nagin’s city hall, in New Orleans, on a street named Perdido, which in Spanish means lost.

  VIII

  Perdido

  January–August 2008

  Burundi–New Orleans

  How had this come to be? It began in Burundi, on New Year’s Eve. I celebrated my twenty-eighth birthday in the backyard of my compound, seated at a long table, candles stuck in their own wax, blocked from the night breeze by empty wine bottles. Around me sat the foreign family I had made. A writer friend from New York had flown in. My first and only visitor, she sat close to me, our faces shiny from humidity, lips wine bruised, laughing and singing aloud, using bottles as mics. Drunk.

  In the Archipel nightclub afterward, we sweated into 2008, danced as if for our lives, butts low down, arms contracting like giant happy wings, our whole bodies involved, when in the middle of a Congolese song the DJ yelled, “HAPPY NEW YEAR.”

  HAPPY NEW YEAR!

  No one stopped dancing; 2007 became 2008. I wondered about my mother in St. Rose for whom the new year was still seven hours away. I hadn’t been able to call her for days because Bujumbura had been without electricity for days. That night I knew I would not finish another year under Archipel’s strobe lights, that I was going back to America, from where I had displaced myself, and possibly to New Orleans, which is the same as saying I was going back to my position and grounding in the family.

  Just before Christmas, I had begun a series of phone conversations with Ceeon Quiett, the director of communications for Mayor Ray Nagin in New Orleans. “Come work with us,” she implored, “to rebuild this wonderful city.” From the table in the office of my compound where I sat talking to her, I watched Gortien, my latest watchman (the last of four), sweep the same spot over and over on the sidewalk just outside the window. There was a breeze but the marigold curtain at the window was too heavy; it did not stir. I have a lot to offer, I told Ceeon, but no political experience. “Your experience in Burundi is major,” she had said. I talked about the “exhausting context” that was Burundi, which was how the NGO workers described it. I worried that if I stayed in Burundi too long, I’d never be able to reenter anyplace else. My American friends who were in Burundi were career expats, which I did not want to be. Gregoire seemed swept into the country’s vortex, extending and extending his stay until his return to his family in Germany seemed a distant dream. Foreignness, I had discovered, could become a geography and a job, as could the perpetual search for a haven. I no longer believed in havens. Also, I had traveled all the way to Burundi for people and a place I would never know. Why on earth wouldn’t I go home? “I decided to return here because I was afraid to,” James Baldwin had written in 1961. This mantra hung at eye level on my bathroom mirror.

  Ceeon explained that she, too, was a New Orleans native who had left home for better work opportunities only to return for the city hall job. This moment, she was telling me, was “an opportunity to do something.” She explained how she built a communications department that was well run and progressive. We would, she assured me, get things done. Recovery funds that up until then had been stymied in Louisiana’s bureaucracy had finally arrived and were ready to be spent. As senior writer, I would tell the story of the city’s unlikely recovery, would “start grabbing and shaping the mayor’s tone” was how she put it.

  Would I come home? she wanted to know.

  I could collect evidence about how the city was run from inside it, the journalist part of me reasoned. This seemed likely then, as do all untested ideas.

  The notion of evidence had taken on great importance to me during my time in Burundi. If I couldn’t find the paperwork, the written background to support an idea, it was hard for me to believe in it. This was, I can see now, a facile response to all that had been erased. I was still writing everything down, as I had learned to do during high school in the Yellow House, especially the rote detail, as if by doing so, I was making things real, findable, fighting disappearance.

  When I was finally able to reach my mother by Skype to tell her that I had accepted an interview with Ray Nagin, her voice went from cheer to disbelief.


  You did? She was not happy.

  When I returned to New Orleans from Burundi, I did so with the intention of living there for a long while. It would mark the first time I lived and worked in the city for a continuous stretch as an adult. In January 2008, I interviewed for the speechwriting job in the mayor’s office on Perdido Street. I knew vaguely the direction of city hall, having entered it once before in the early nineties when Mom and I visited the tax assessor’s office. I recall our not being able to find the entrance. How once we were inside, the air was cold, the floor sky-blue marble, the elevator cranky. I had a weak bladder from always holding everything in for too long and the bathroom was hard to find. Once we found it, it required a key. I peed myself. For this reason and for a long time, I associated city hall with locked doors that should have been open—bureaucracy’s essence. The discomfort of the wetness I carried around that day made the memory stick. And the fact that the tax assessor was not in. After all of that. Mom and I turned around, headed back to the parking garage, and drove the seven miles over the interstate to the Yellow House, feeling that the trip and my public humiliation had been in vain.