by Nana Nkweti
Temi was no threat, even though she was screeching at the moment.
“Ow, ow, ow, ow. You got a Band-Aid or something? Messed around and forgot what I came in here for. This redbone chick just burnt the fuck out my arm. She claimed it was an ‘accident’ but I saw her eyeing my shoes. Just hating. They real red bottoms, you know. Girl, I was about to pop off. She lucky I’m trying to be good tonight though.”
“Why?”
“Huh?”
“Why are you trying to be good?” Zeinab is truly curious. All her life she had tried to be good—study hard, pray faithfully, be of help to her mother at home. She’d believed this righteous path was a ward against the world. But it wasn’t.
Temi takes her time answering, helps herself to a complimentary Tootsie Pop, sucking contemplatively before finally she says, “I’m just trying to do better. For me. For my man. Wilding out gets tired. See this burn right here?”—she extends her unbangled arm—“I’m going to put some Vaseline on it, keep from picking at it, getting it aggravated, and it’ll be like it never happened. No scar. Nothing. Sometimes things just need time to heal.”
She puts her hand on Zeinab’s shoulder. Smiles.
“Now show me that dance.”
In the early hours of the day, Zeinab packs her countertop wares into four bins and a laundry cart, then goes outside to sit on a hydrant near Sa’id’s cart.
“Shukran,” she says as he hands her breakfast—a halal chicken gyro, generously drenched in white sauce, a creamy goo bubbling through her fingers. Meat cooked to perfection on a hot plate. They break night chatting as she awaits her cousin Mamadou’s arrival for the daily ride back to the Bronx in his beat-up Dodge Diplomat. Sa’id often grew expansive in the pink flush of the predawn hours, teaching her Egyptian slang—you are a muza, a beautiful girl, “hot”—and some Arabic phrases to flesh out her slender vocabulary of Qur’anic verses and hadiths. Back home, her Fula mother had spoken Fulfulde. Her Christian dad had spoken French and Bamilike and at least twelve other dialects helpful in selling his leatherwork at the Maroua marketplace, yet had barely spoken to her at all since her mother died. But Zeinab refused to speak on such sad things at sunup, refused to tinge the day’s possibilities with sorrow. Instead, she listened as Sa’id, who told her his own name meant “happy,” spoke excitedly of his grand plans. Of how he would become a BIG MAN, insha’Allah. Saving up seventeen thousand dollars for a black market permit from Habib Hamini—a distant uncle who had waited ten years for his own permit, and since retired to Sharm el-Sheikh, living large from renting his much-coveted, limited-supply, two-hundred-dollar city vending-cart license. Every night at 3:00 a.m., Sa’id pushed his shiny silver cart to the front of the club to catch the flow of clubgoers tottering down its marble steps—tipsy and ravenous.
• • •
Nighttime is full of deceptions, of temptations, of taboos. Its allures almost always haram.
Nighttime is for spirits and libations. Haram.
Nighttime is for touching the curve of your lover’s shoulders. Haram.
Back in Cameroon there were curfews for the nighttime, cautionary tales of headstrong girls who had followed the wrong men into the darkness. But your anxious schoolteachers, and aunties, and the errant shopkeeper never warned you of the dangers lurking in broad daylight.
On a bright sunny day, holding her mother’s hand as they bought food to celebrate her sixteenth birthday, Zeinab and her mother, Mariama, were blown up. A sixteen-year-old girl named Hanifa detonated a suicide bomb not ten yards from where they stood buying tomatoes. Mariama was thinking of her husband’s dinner, she was humming a pop song her daughter teased her for knowing, while examining sun-ripened tomatoes, some pocked with black carbuncles. Her daughter’s hip bumped the table, toppling a cavalcade of red that went rolling and rolling in the dust till hitting the knees of a girl, about her daughter’s age, kneeling in the dirt. The girl’s hijab had fallen back from her face to reveal a head of unkempt and uneven cornrowed hair. Mariama clucked her tongue in sympathy. Her last thoughts—before she saw what was cradled in the girl’s lap, before comprehension curdled a scream in the base of her throat—she thought to herself, Where is that poor child’s mother?
• • •
Hanifa adjusted her hijab. She wanted to be beautiful and most worthy in His eyes. She had walked right to the center of Maroua Marché Centrale just as the Commander had instructed. The kneeling was her own design. She would enter the afterlife in supplication. Al-Quddus would be merciful. Eleven months prior, she was kidnapped from a village schoolyard by a band of jihadis self-styled as the Islamic State’s West Africa Province or ISWAP or Boko Haram or better known still by the people as the devils terrorizing the Far North region. Hanifa was a slave, used by everyone, till the Commander made her his bride. Nine months ago, she fled in the night as the group decamped from the caves of the Mandara Mountains to their lean-tos in the Sambisa Forest. She ran miles home to a village whose people rebuffed her. Who gnashed teeth and shook heads in suspicion as she came by. So when she felt the woman pains and saw her belly growing round with the Commander’s seed, she returned to her husband. Told him she would be a soldier in Allah’s army, but told him nothing of the child. She hoped her son, she knew it was a boy, would have a better life in the next world. She clasped her hands together, to Christian onlookers she seemed to be in prayer, yet in that simple act two wires touched, completing a blast connection that left thirty-five bloodied in the dust and the charred bodies of eighteen victims, including her own.
• • •
Zeinab flew up in the air as the shock wave hit. Before pain, a nanosecond really, she thought she might take flight. Lifting up and up and up. But then pressure came over her. A concrete wall collapsing. Falling from grace to the ground. Then her death for two minutes and her mother’s for an eternity. Zeinab came to in a world transformed. White dust on ripped clothing, in hair, in throats. Screams. Carts charred and overturned. Bodies bobbing in the dirt—face down or belly up, sightless eyes fixed on the fractured skyline. Torn bits—of flesh, bone, fabric—scattered everywhere. A father wailing over his wife and child. Over her.
That first month after, she spent at home, healing her soul. The second month, her unassuming father, a man whose leatherworking made beautiful the remnants of dead things, joined men armed with machetes and arrows and bush rifles, a self-defense militia standing ready to pick up where the government’s Third Bataillon d’Intervention Rapide left off. The third month after, the whispers began about a girl who had lived when so many had died. A girl with gris-gris who emerged, body healthy and seemingly unscathed. In the Maroua market people rebuffed her. They gnashed teeth and shook heads in suspicion as she came by. When she came home at night, her father held her tight, thinking how much she looked like her mother, unable to live with a ghost. He went off with the others to patrol in the dark. Left Zeinab standing alone wondering why her father looked right through her, wondering had she died in the marketplace too.
In the fifth month after, another bomb detonated. Another village. Another girl.
By the sixth month after, she was on a plane, passport stamped with an asylum visa, on her way to a place in America called the Grand Concourse. The plane lifting up and up and up.
• • •
“Do you think one who never sleeps can still dream?”
When Zeinab asked him, without thinking Sa’id said yes.
He believed in the American dream, in rags to riches and VIP stashes. In flossing. He was a striver like his elder brother, Tariq, and their father before them. Ready to fight so that Egypt could be prosperous once more. He and his brother were at Tahrir Square with their fists raised on January 25. They organized, mobilized, marched, got gassed and bled in the streets. Even as the government tried to shield its mess from the judging eyes of the world, suspending mobile service, even shutting down the internet itself, they protested louder. The revolution would go on. So strong was the people’s voice th
at it only took eighteen days to topple Mubarak’s thirty-year regime of corruption and injustice. But by then hundreds had died. Many were injured, including his brother. But still they were hopeful. But then came the Muslim Brotherhood with their own brand of repression. The weakening economy. His crippled brother left with no work. Left him wondering at night what they all had fought for. His uncle Habib had offered a lifeline. His mother told him to take it. He came to America with a bitter heart. His hopes like ashes in his throat. Then a sweet girl spritzed him with honeysuckle. A girl whose world was blown apart and miraculously she survived. If she could rise from the ashes, maybe he could too.
• • •
“It was only ten dollars,” Zeinab lies evenly (she always downplays her earnings) as she hands Mamadou his cut, what he called his finder’s fee. He had been disappointed to learn she was robbed like some rank amateur. Did I not teach you better? he asked.
“Here,” she rolls her eyes sideways as she has seen American club girls do. “You still have forty dollars. And yes, I will do better tomorrow.”
It’s 4:00 a.m. and Mamadou is behind the wheel, the big boat of a car bouncing on the concrete waves of the Grand Concourse. He coasts, dreaming of upgrading to a new used car so after his night shifts he can make Uber pickups in a better part of town, can make more money to send home for his wife. In a month, in a rare show of softness, he will confide this dream to Zeinab, who will take pity and give him a bigger nightly cut, but for now she gives him “side-eye, is it?” and keeps stockpiling funds so that the very next spring will find her breathless and twirling in a modern dance class at a Harlem studio.
“Cousin. Did I not tell you no trust women? They dancing all night with different-different man. Who can trust them?”
“Yes, cousin.”
“You keep your eyes open all times.”
“Yes, cousin.”
“‘Yes, cousin. Yes, cousin.’ I know you are city girl. I know you say yes to me in day and no in the night. Is okay. Your mother make you good girl.” He had a habit of changing the subject whenever talk turned to his favorite aunt. But today, he lingers.
“You know your mother give me money to come to America. She do hair braiding for tourists because I no have a good father. She take care of me. Like I do for you.”
Hearing her sniffle, he turns, asking, “Zeinab, why you crying?”
“No, cousin,” she says, lifting her face. “I’m laughing you see.”
Earlier that morning, talk with Sa’id had also turned to mothers.
“You taste the difference, no?” he had asked. “Fresh dukkha spice. Sent straight from home by my mother. Look, she even sent photos of her and Tariq.” He felt slightly chagrined handing over old-school print photos. “My umma, Barak Allah Feha, doesn’t believe in digital. She won’t even email and … Zeinab habibti. Why are you crying?” But even as he asked her, he was already berating himself, knowing her thoughts must have flown to her own family.
“Come on now. This food is too good for crying. This day’s too young. And this song,” turning up the Sufi rock on his radio, “this song is my jam, it’s made for dancing.”
Then he was clapping. And hopping. And pulling her up from her perch on the hydrant.
“Sa’id, no! We’re outside. The people. Everyone will see and—”
“Let them see,” he said, doing a ridiculous whirl-push-shuffle step that made her laugh till she had to hold her belly. “I got this.”
“You call that dancing,” she said on a twirl. “I’ll show you dancing.”
She moved like she was seeking a spotlight. She shook and shrugged her body free of all the world around her. And it’s like moon time in their garden back home, her father’s weathered hands on her mother’s waist, holding her aloft, twirling. The scent of mother’s smoked skin perfuming the air. Red dust slippered her father’s feet. Both of them giddy with dance, with the tinny rhythms of Sufi rock and makossa wafting from the radio. And a man with a voice like warm sugarcane holds a tremulous note so high and true it takes to the stars. Steady and soaring. Lifting up and up and up.
Schoolyard Cannibal
Youth makes you too apt a pupil of coarse lessons it takes decades to unlearn. Your headmistress, a family television—ancient, venerable—cased in oak heavy and vast as the Encyclopedia Britannica, entire. Poor, poor pickaninny, pick a program. Poison. Drink in definitions as you sit transfixed on grainy carpet, chin on the kickstand of your knuckles. In looney toons, you are jungle bunny—drum-bottomed, tuber-lipped. You coon for that rascally rabbit. Savage beneath ivory smiles. In sepia broadcasts, you are darkie, cowering to a towering Tarzan—a broad-framed, onetime Olympian, swooping down from treetop fiefdoms to be your savior, your civilizer. There is a peculiar lull as your agile young mind absorbs these images, so at odds with those of parents and uncles and aunties cum doctors and lawyers and engineers. A chimpanzee familiar is smarter than them all—these spearchuckers, these cannibals. A cruel tutelage.
You were once a Brownie. Awarded a Wilderness Survival Patch for handily identifying which innocuous sparkle-veined leaf inflames, itch licking skin, given the slightest brush. But the school playground at recess is a curious kind of badlands of concrete-sunk jungle gyms— its wild ones wear high-tops and Kangols, have brown faces that are cousin to your own yet claim no kinship. They hoot hot and holler. Their tongues tinted—purple or blue or yellowed from time-stamped taffies—lash out. “African booty scratcher. Betchu live in a tree. Bet yo’ mama’s a monkey.” You try for calm, take big, gulping breaths that puff up your lungs with air gone to rot. But you are swinging now, punches wild, child, some landing, some not.
Later, hurting in places unknown, you ask your family Why do they hate me? and What about me is wrong? Your father, who is a professor of cultural anthropology, will try for social context, speak of old wounds. Of wires-crossed associations linking you with treacherous tribesmen who sold off their enchained ancestors to slavers dotting Cameroon’s coast. Your Uncle Elias, who drives a gypsy cab and has no papers, will tell you to ignore the ignoramuses: “Eh-eh. These akatas barely go to school, even though it is free. Me, I have a whole master’s degree and cannot get work. Nyamangoros! You are better than them. Who cares what they say?” Your Aunty Alexis, who bleaches her skin and married a very fat yet very rich mukara man, tells you Africa is doomed. “We could be strong; but we never unite like the whites. Our rubbish leaders sell our countries, our futures, for dix-dix francs. Your schoolmates were born in America. Who wants to be African?” Your mother, who is a psychotherapist and a prolific hugger, will tell you it is because they are yearning, learning late to love themselves, still so mired in their pocked history. You remind them of all they have lost.
Your fourth-grade homeroom conducts safety drills. Students orderly file out from class imagining infernos at their heels or practice futilely ducking beneath desks in the event the Soviets should do the unthinkable. Your teacher, Ms. Bunches—she of the closed-book pop quiz and nightly essay assignment—performs spot hygiene checks after roll call. They say she can smell nasty at thirty paces. You watch her face for signs. For a telltale twitch of her high, pinched nose. But there is no emergency alert system. This is not a drill. She sidles up to student desks, ostensibly collecting homework, pausing, sniffing out the secret stink that had beckoned her from her blackboard. Flop sweat beads, then trickles down your back. She is behind you now. You clamp down your arms. All too late. “Raise them,” she says, head bent to yours. A chalky stick of deodorant materializes, flaking white like her hair. “You need this,” she whispers. “You’ve got the African smell.” Head bowed, you let her mark you; never quite sure what she means by “African smell” but somehow knowing it reeks of dank humiliations and day-old bologna, moldering.
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Another February. Your homeroom plastered with posters on BLACK ACHIEVEMENT—all caps imperative. Inventors and innovators who gave us pencil sharpeners and peanut butter, blood banks and traffic signals, street sweepers and dustpans. But something is new this year: portraits of African royals from antiquity, graciously supplied by a prominent brewery. King Tenkamenin of Ghana; Makeda, queen of Sheba; Emperor Mansa Kankan Musa of Mali; Queen Nzingha of Matamba; King Shamba Bolongongo of Congo. A bevy of tongue-numbing names like your own to be memorized along with the liturgy of Charles Drews, Garrett Morgans, Ida B. Wellses, and Mary McLeod Bethunes. Eyes unblinkered, your classmates look at you anew. Something like pride seizes you. You’re shook. But memories are short and March rolls in. The continent is on the news once more, embroiled in another far-flung war. Lenses zoom in on HD atrocities in the here and now. Black History. Black Present.
