The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana was surveying the longest line on the globe’s three-dimensional grid, the equator, the first line of latitude. Her special point zero, 40,075 kilometers long; 78.7 percent across water, 21.3 percent over land, zero degrees, all the Kenya equator places she had never imagined to claim as her own: Nanyuki, Mount Kenya. The invisible equator line crossed only thirteen countries—Kenya, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, São Tomé and Principe, Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Somalia, Maldives, Indonesia, and Kiribati—thirteen countries that were the center of the world, and hers was one of them. She vowed she would one day go and walk the spaces for herself.

  Ayaana turned her gaze to the blue area on the globe, to the 78.7 percent of equator that she was supposed to reflect on.

  Deluged, and at sea.

  Far too many forces to contend with. Yesterday’s celestial-navigation session had introduced her to quasars, those remote, energy-producing constants from which GPS devices framed their reference. The week before, the class had focused on active and passive sonars. The sea had many sources of noise, she had learned; she had been surprised that something so obvious was treated as news. Today Ayaana scowled at an enhanced image of the oceans. Earlier, the class had been reviewing electronic navigation systems while she had been daydreaming about Mehdi’s and Muhidin’s stars, or night boat rides from Pate to Lamu with a nahodha who watched skies, monitored winds, and read sea surfaces. She blinked and returned to the work at hand, disappointed to imagine that getting from point A to point Z now required so many beeping and burping units that governed the waters on behalf of real navigators. She was studying the data from her Geographic Information System readings and toying with other buttons to try to make a map of her own imagining of the seas. Ayaana moved the navigational computer’s cursor before pushing a button that revealed the latitude and longitude of a longed-for waypoint: “Pate Island: 2.1000 ° S, 41.0500° E.”

  Ayaana would learn that there seemed to be no absolutes in the world, only codes and questions and a guarantee of storms. In realizing this, she excavated echoes of a childhood conversation: She had asked Muhidin, “What is good about water?” Muhidin had said, “Storms.” She then asked, “What is bad about water?” He had answered, “Storms again.” Now, in class, Ayaana stared miserably at her accumulation of the technical instruments with which she would analyze and eviscerate the unknowable sea.

  She raised her hand.

  She lowered it. What had she been about to ask? A matter of distances, the place of intimacy: What was the story of a human being within the epic that was the sea? She chewed on a finger and looked around and chose silence.

  She would have to relinquish her feeling for water to the power of numbers, navigational compasses, Napier’s Rules, coordinates, and geopolitics. She watched her lecturer. Could she propose that the sea sweats differently depending on the time and flavor of day and night? That there are doorways within the sea and portals in the wind? That she had heard the earth and moon and sea converge to sing as a single storm-borne wind, and these had called her to dance, and that she had danced at night with them under a fecund moon?

  A secret grin.

  She would be deported.

  A shuffle of papers, a different image on the projector. The lecture on sea routes was proceeding with another elaboration of “the Belt and Road Initiative.” They were reviewing the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. Suddenly the lecturer called out Ayaana’s name: “Baadawi xiao jie.” Ayaana jumped as the lecturer gestured. “Shared future destiny, yes?”

  The class turned to gaze at Ayaana.

  Ayaana shrank into her seat, focusing on the sound of the slogans: “Honor in trade, prosperity for all.” The lecturer continued, “Our Western Ocean is our gateway to mutual greatness.” In the retelling of the life of her sea, Ayaana saw that the Maritime Silk Road initiative had gobbled into Pate’s place in the Global Monsoon Complex. By her very presence, Ayaana felt implicated, as if she were betraying her soul. She sank further into her seat, also overwhelmed by this infinite land of infinite armies and infinite words, and the machinery that at a signal could roll over skies, waters, and earth to reach her home and cause it to disappear. She had come to school wanting to enter into the language of the seas through a people she was to imagine were her own. Instead, she was learning how the world was reshaping itself and her sea with words that only meant energy, communications, infrastructure, and transportation. Storm warning. Neither Pate nor the Kenya she had rarely thought about had acquired a vast enough imagination to engulf the cosmos that was writing itself into their center. Ayaana suppressed a sigh and eavesdropped on the snipings of the other foreign students, who had resorted to petty territorial snipings that changed nothing, her thoughts in turmoil.

  One hot and humid day, Ari, a student of marine engineering from India, observed that the Maritime Silk Road initiative subsumed the Indian Ocean—he had emphasized “Indian”—to “others.” “It is not for nothing that the ocean is called Indian,” he noted.

  Ayaana retorted, “Ziwa Kuu?”

  Ari turned to her. “Oogle Boogle?”

  “Ziwa Kuu.” Ayaana refused to cede territory.

  Ari said, “We’ll discuss that with your good self the day your country acquires a motorboat to start a navy.”

  Ayaana said, “Ziwa Kuu, and we have a navy.”

  “Doubtless its fish bounties are commendable, but what else?”

  Titters.

  “Ratnakara,” said an Indonesian.

  “Indian Ocean,” emphasized Ari.

  “Ziwa Kuu,” repeated Ayaana.

  “Indian Ocean.”

  Two Pakistani students chimed in: “Ziwa Kuu!”

  The class slipped into an uproar that did not change Chinese foreign policy. The lecturer, who had watched the disintegration of order in his class in disbelief, his face becoming blotchy, at last screamed, “The Western Ocean! You are in China.”

  “Western Ocean,” murmured Ayaana, looking at Ari from beneath her bangs as she doodled the words “Ziwa Kuu” on her notepad, thinking about a Kipate toponym, her heart pleased about the meaningless skirmish she had stirred. The lecturer was shouting out his points. Ayaana returned to jotting down notes of another nation’s imagination for her sea. “One belt, one road,” she wrote. She would have to ask Muhidin what the different Kipate names for her sea were.

  * * *

  —

  The debate re-emerged outside, and more positions were taken, which then split into nation-states and cultural attachments. Ayaana was in the middle of the argument, standing on the shifting water of history, her memory, and the silences of men like Mehdi. She was still astounded by the delusions built over the debris of the lives of her people, stories razed and reacquired by others, the strangenesses—that, for example the dau belonged elsewhere. She did not have the lexicon, and she knew the fear of an inability to explain, reclaim, and possess. She tried to speak of the poetry of sea lives, of the ceaseless ebb and flow of her people to other worlds—as traders, seekers, and teachers; as navigators, shipbuilders, archivists, and explorers—and their return.

  “Slaves,” Ari added.

  Ayaana glared at Ari. She had never spoken so much to her classmates. In slow-drip mischief, she told Ari, “We want our maharaja back.” Ari gestured at her. “Sardar Singh of Jodhpur, Ari.” Her voice was cool.

  Ari spluttered.

  Then, just as quickly as her ire had risen, Ayaana was overcome by the languageless-ness of the present, the silenced and ruined who inhabited the present, the terror that there would be nobody left to salvage the ocean’s Kipate name.

  She walked away.

  What was the point?

  In this country, they spoke of the sea’s future in Mandarin and English, not in Kiswahili, or Gujarati or Mala
y or Kipate. Ayaana walked toward the shimmering water, scanning for patterns. Dark blue clouds in southwestern skies—a cold front was approaching. She strode past an older student, a man turned out in the latest Yohji Yamamato gear, who had taken to watching Ayaana, and to whom she was still oblivious. She was thinking of the charts she had not studied in preparation for the rough-seamanship sessions taking place on open water the next day.

  [ 63 ]

  The rain and mist had reduced visibility to zero when a vision rose from the smoke of an explosion that had just killed his ship. It had outlived its usefulness, Shanghai Accent had informed him, enjoying his pallor. Lai Jin had raised his voice in rage at the plan, and by doing so had inadvertently revealed a vulnerability point. Shanghai Accent would avenge the loss of his contraband. MV Qingrui would be scrapped. It had taken time for them to obtain all the documents for a legal scrapping. This coincided with the end of Lai Jin’s prison term. Now what Lai Jin saw cut him. An explosion. He heard it. He saw it. He acknowledged it. It was intended, although it would be registered as an accident. Buffeted by a helplessness that his recent prison sojourn had underlined, Lai Jin watched his beloved companion, the MV Qingrui, die needlessly. And a grown man who had been unable to grieve his other losses bawled for an even-keeled, plucky vessel of the seas that had always brought her captain and her crew to harbor. He saluted her and wished death on the insensible world.

  * * *

  —

  Captain Lai Jin had been arrested, charged, and judged guilty of negligence and obstruction, and of partial responsibility for the death of an unregistered passenger. Before he could protest, imagining this was a joke, to his shock, he had then been sentenced to prison for thirteen months. Losing face. Losing life. Losing self. Losing heart. He did not faint. He lost his voice. He had disembarked from his ship and re-entered his country in chains, his home a dormitory also occupied by murderers and embezzlers. They all worked the fields and roads. His only meaning was in routine. Rhythm, as if this were a version of sea waves—this and silences kept his mind ordered. He learned to become indifferent to his nightmares until they, too, lost their voices. A year and a month later, his sentence served, the prison authorities returned to him his earthly goods. These included Muhidin’s watch.

  Ping!

  In the end, again, there was fire. This has been said before. In Lai Jin’s end, there was a fire. If passersby wondered at the disheveled man peering seaward and stooping next to a temporary rubbish dump, they said nothing.

  Ping!

  The watch: marker of sentiments. It reminded him of her.

  He would return the watch to her. Finish with the past. He was a product of his country and its habits of rewriting itself and always starting again.

  Ping!

  He had paid his debts.

  He watched the minute hand of the watch as if it might go backward.

  Ping!

  There was only now.

  * * *

  —

  Yellow fire, thick black-silver smoke, and the stench of dead dreams: in the beginning, there was fire. In the distance, five rust-and-gray ships drifted toward other elsewheres. He was standing before thresholds again. Lai Jin shuffled his feet, warming them. They pressed into a brittle object, which crunched and cracked. He bent and picked up a broken embossed vase, with an unusual red swallow fluttering over a motif of blue waves. It had a thin white glaze. There was nothing special about it.

  The next explosion that rent the air disintegrated the former MV Qingrui. Black smoke. Lai Jin might have cried out again if her spirit had not descended from the fray and found him. We shall sail again, he might have promised her in English, which was the agreed-upon common language of the waters.

  But everything fades.

  Even promises.

  Above the fire, dark sheeplike clouds trotted across the sky. Lai Jin watched. He heard seagulls cry, playing with airstreams and diving for fish.

  Life.

  What was his destination now? He looked at the glaze on the vase, reading its texture with the tips of his fingers. How did the vase travel here? The rain and sun and dust had left traces on these fragile portions. Churning heart. He stroked the shape of assorted brokenness, its bruises. Where did it come from? He looked around for its other parts, retrieved a discarded plastic bag, and started collecting ceramic shards. To whom did it belong when it was whole?

  Memories. His mother, Nara, at her kiln.

  She was weaving his tiny hands into the wet clay. Laughter. They laughed because they were not expected to. She was mad, he was told, and she laughed far too loudly, and she pulled odd beasts out of the soil with her hands and turned them into things that lived. “Vessels,” she had whispered to him, when he was too young to understand, “they are for the storage of ghosts.” They had laughed again before he was found and taken from her. But he knew that the night was for making things. He would crawl out of bed to find her at her wheel, then watch her until he fell asleep. He watched her because he was afraid they would make her leave him. They would. They did. They never told him. At night, before they dismantled Nara’s wheel and brick kiln, he would still go to the wheel and will it to action. He would do this until the day he was also sent away from home—to study, they told him.

  A landfill guardian appeared. He chased the former ship captain away, imagining him to be another decrepit entity, one among millions who scavenged for the scraps from life’s table. Lai Jin hurried out with a supermarket bag over his shoulder. It was bulging with so many broken fragments.

  [ 64 ]

  Ayaana had swathed herself in the cocoon of night as one of Xiamen’s many anonymous restless ones. Night pulsed with its particular beat. From a wooded enclosure where swans slumbered, close to the waterfront, Ayaana watched the flickering of human nightlights as if they were the stars she needed to sit under. Another landscape, one she preferred, emerged after midnight. Here she forgot about the day. Blurred objects. Blurred emotions. Blurred lines. A good night was if she managed four hours of sleep. Nothing worked. Since she did not bother with sleeping pills, she preferred to watch the night as if on a ship’s bridge, navigating her vessel through dense currents, under the gaze of constant stars.

  Stillness.

  Then something stirred in the woods—a breaking twig, the mew of wind, salt smells, a lone bird’s frantic cry. The scent of sea here was not the same as it was in Pate, nor were the silences. In the night, she could see into the edges of her heart and hear its silent hopes echo back. Soon a sense that she was not alone settled upon her.

  * * *

  —

  One night—ping! As if Muhidin’s watch and its lost time had found a way to her. She did not turn. She shut her eyes and remembered the indecipherable murmurs of the djinns at sea. Two days later, a delicately wrapped package was delivered to Ayaana. When she tore it open, she found Muhidin’s watch. There was no return address. The watch pinged. A feeling grazed her heart. It was the same as that of being seen and known by a Zao Wou-Ki painting.

  * * *

  Munira called Ayaana. “Rumors in the wind. Suleiman has been lured by the Jabhat Tahrīr Sūriyā al-Islāmiyyah.”

  The Syrian Islamic Liberation Front.

  Stunned silence.

  “Amina Mahmoud parades the land, cursing the stars, demanding that God retrieve her son.”

  Ayaana shivered: the specter of Fazul the Egyptian. The memory of how her will had been bled by a ghoulish man with word, touch, and a look. She scratched her skin and looked over her shoulders. “Ma-e, have the dragonflies returned yet?”

  “Soon. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.” Ayaana missed the golden skimmers. She missed her anticipation of their arrival. She missed how they summoned the rain and the warm matlai. “No reason,” she repeated to her mother. But, later, she would whisper to the Fujian night that the dragonflies would be l
anding on Pate Island, far away, that a boy she knew might have been seized by an abyss of hate.

  * * *

  —

  Elsewhere.

  * * *

  —

  After that infinity of watching his ship disintegrate, the man would take a year to cover a wide and large road back to one of the places that had been home for him. Guangzhou in Guangdong. The place from which he had departed to enter the world, leaving behind a career bureaucrat father and his fancy wife. Lai Jin had gone to Beijing to study business, physics, and visual arts before being dispatched by his father, first to Singapore, and then to Canada. Lai Jin would give up on his half-hearted efforts to keep in touch with the family that, he realized, had restarted life without him. He had focused on excelling in business, and, after he met Mei Xing, becoming the quality husband his father had not been for his mother, Nara. But now, wistful steps back. Emptied. He stopped to gape at the multipurpose complex that had replaced the apartment building where the family had lived.

  Seeking work, Lai Jin looked up a former business associate. The man, a maker of kettles for export, offered Lai Jin the job of factory night watchman. Lai Jin tried to object. Tried to ask how the stain of a perceived disorder—his imprisonment—could erase the knowledge of his total being in the eyes of one whom he had imagined was an intimate. They had got drunk together, several times, at Lai Jin’s expense. A single crack on the record of his life now prevented this person from seeing him as he had been, and still was. Hollow-eyed, cracked-lipped, he gathered his few things, those broken shards of glazed pot he had picked from the shipyard, and quietly walked away.