Then, abruptly, he stops. He is so still that curious eyes turn on him, this sunlit figure stepping calmly into the middle of the busy intersection. He stands there, immobile and slightly stunned as cars come to a halt and motorcyclists slow. Traffic waits for him to move. Instead, he begins to gesture, a conductor leading an invisible orchestra. His bony arms bend and extend, propelled by an energy only growing stronger. Each sweep of his hand pulls the rest of him upward then twists him in an awkward circle. He continues as observers pause, then shake their heads and walk on by. Soon, he is working his mouth around words, and even before he starts, I know he is about to shout.
I let everything else disappear so I can focus on the developing scene. People move past him, irritated but still polite. Motorists carefully angle around his intruding figure. Everyone ignores him as best as they can, treating him as no more than a mild disturbance, unremarkable. He continues gesticulating, his head turning one way then the other, his actions getting progressively faster. There is a strange kind of rhythm beginning, an erratic dance that is leaving him desperate to keep pace. While I watch, something squeezes against my chest and makes me take a sudden breath. I don’t understand the ache that fills me. Or maybe I just do not want to recognize it. Maybe I do not want to find the words because to do so would mean to tumble down somewhere dark, far from this bright and busy street.
I have come to the café to escape the day’s barrage of disturbing news. I have come with a notebook and my pen to distance myself from reminders of the turbulence continuing in America, in Ethiopia, in the Mediterranean, in the Middle East, in Europe: everywhere. I have come to find a way out of what I know in order to make my way toward a space where I can imagine, unhindered by unnecessary distractions. I have come to be alone, to write in solitude, free of the noise that has seemed to follow me for months, or perhaps it has been years. It is hard to know how to measure time, how to orient oneself when horror and shock begin to embed themselves into the pulse of daily life. It has become easy to live in the present moment, to spin from one disturbing event to the next, to move so quickly between disasters that entire days are spent in stupefied surprise.
Lazarus, I think, as I keep watching this young man: a defiant body refusing stillness, resisting quietness. A body using noise to stay alive, to move, to be seen. The waitress comes to take my order and smiles down at my notebook. I notice the couple next to me eyeing it warily, as if they are afraid I am taking notes on their conversation. No one seems to be aware of the drama unfolding outside the café where a young black man with unkempt hair is spinning in increasingly wide circles, motioning wildly, shouting incoherently at passersby. He is a spectacle without an audience. He is an actor in Shakespeare’s tale, full of sound and fury.
He spins and flings his arms. He throws up a hand and snaps his wrist. He closes a palm over an ear and listens to his own whispers. He frowns and smiles, laughs alone, then twirls and catches another stranger’s stare. There is anger in his spastic energy. There is sorrow and confusion in his eyes. He is breaking, I say to myself, and doing what he can to keep himself together. My reflection catches my eye and so I put my head down, and in my notebook I write: “You did not leave home like this. This is what the journey does.” It comes again, that ache in the middle of my chest. For a moment, it is so strong that I am sure he can feel it. I am certain it is a tether binding us together and he will turn in just the right way and I will be exposed. If he looks at me, then our lives will unfold and in front of us will be the many roads we have taken to get to this intersection in Florence and we will reveal ourselves for what we are: immigrant, migrant, refugee, African, East African, black, foreigner, stranger, a body rendered disobedient by the very nature of what we are.
When I glance up again, the young man has quieted down. Now, he looks almost bored as he weaves between pedestrians while twisting a lock of hair around a skinny finger. He moves lazily, as if he has accomplished what he set out to do. From where I sit, it looks as though he is walking toward me, but he is simply following the sidewalk, and soon it will force him to proceed directly past the open door of the café where I am. As he saunters past, I notice a small bald patch on the back of his head. It is a perfect circle, as if a round object was placed on his scalp to burn away his hair through to his skin. I tell myself that I cannot possibly know what it is, that it could be an illusion, it could be just a leaf stuck in his hair, but that is not enough to keep myself from flinching.
Stories come back to me, told by a friend who crossed the Sahara to get to Europe by way of North Africa. He spoke of horrifying treatment at the hands of human traffickers and police in detention centers and makeshift prisons. He shared what he could and skipped the rest. In moments when several who made the journey were gathered, I would watch them point to their scars to help fill the lapses in their stories. Sometimes, there was no language capable of adding coherence to what felt impossible to comprehend. Sometimes, it was only the body that bore the evidence, pockmarks and gashes forming their own vocabulary. Staring at the busy intersection, I don’t want to consider what this young man might have gone through to arrive in Italy, to be in the street on this day. That he is alive is a testament to his endurance. What he has been subjected to, what might have caused that scar, what was too much for his mind to accept—these thoughts lead the way to far darker realities than I can possibly know. I look back at the first note I took upon seeing him: “You did not leave home like this. This is what the journey does.”
Lazarus was given the chance to walk again in the land of the living. On one hand, it was a simple proposition: he obeyed the command to stand up and he was able to live. The rest of his days paled in the brilliant light of this astounding miracle. It is easy to imagine that he moved gracefully through his new existence, a man pulsing with this exposure to divine grace and might. We want to think that when he rose from the dead, he did so untainted and unburdened. That it was a rebirth, free of unsettling wisdom. But Lazarus was an ordinary man who opened his eyes to find himself incomprehensible. Somewhere between the end of this life and his second chance, he shifted forms, became a miracle and a stranger, remolded from loved one to aberration.
Medical science understands death to be a process rather than a single event. Though death might seem a cataclysmic and sudden event, the body undergoes several functions before it no longer lives. The various organs that support it collapse one by one. They each must cease all activity for an extended period of time in order for a person to be declared dead. It is not sufficient for the heartbeat and circulation alone to stop, for example, they must cease long enough for the brain to also die. The end of life involves a journey, a series of steps before that ultimate destination. A body requires certain signposts to nudge it in the right direction. An abrupt shift in that progressive movement disrupts the order of things. It deforms a natural process and leaves behind something warped and unrecognizable.
Perhaps this explains Lazarus’s complete silence in John 11 and 12 in the Bible. To give him a voice would mean to grapple with the messiness that his resurrection created. It would be to insert a complex, human component in a direct and potent lesson. Though the Sanhedrin wanted to kill him along with Jesus Christ, though his resurrected life and all that it represented was as much a threat to them as the claims of Jesus, Lazarus is not allowed to speak. He is a muted miracle, still alive today as a metaphor for uncanny second chances. We have found many ways to make use of his example, but we do not know what to do with the living man. In part, it is because the Bible reveals so little about him. His story ends when he is no longer convenient. But to assume that he became worthless once he stepped free from his grave is to shrink his life down to its most significant moment. It is to believe that nothing else can possibly matter after so great a feat. It is to embrace the idea that we are, all of us, simple beings relentlessly pivoting around the same occurrence, trapped by the enormity of an important event, as if it is both the sun that guides us and the dar
kness that leaves us spinning in uncertain space.
There is a phrase in medieval Chinese literature used to explain the biological phenomenon of an ailing body that revives, suddenly and briefly, only to collapse and die. It is hui guang fan zhao, translated as “last glow before sunset,” that brief shimmer before night. I think of this as the café where I sit begins to empty and a new set of patrons streams in. A DJ near me starts to spin his music against the slowly darkening sky outside. Through the window at my side, I gaze past my own reflection to focus on the unbroken flow of pedestrians and motorists at the intersection. The young man I observed earlier is gone, and in his place, routine and repetition have stepped in. I see him for a moment, though, leaving home, wherever that might have been, and making the tortuous trek through the Sahara. I see him trapped in containers and overloaded trucks and crowded boats. I see him struggle with a deadening stillness, then step onto land to face the boundaries set up in Europe. The journey is designed to test the body’s resilience. Its intent is to break a human being and rearrange him or her inside. Every inch forward is a reminder of one’s frailty. You do not arrive the same as when you left. You will sometimes look at a stranger and recognize yourself reflected in that new life: impossibly alive, walking through the lingering glow of a splendid sun while trying to spin free of a permanent darkness.
Sisonke Msimang
A South African writer and public commentator, who spent much of her youth between continents and cultures as her parents’ political life took the family from Zambia to Canada, Kenya and Ethiopia, she is the author of Always Another Country: A memoir of exile and home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek and Al Jazeera, and she is a contributing editor to Africa is a Country.
Black Girl in America
America gives me anonymity and gives me love. In that order. The two are intertwined in my heart and in that place inside me that belongs to America. Anonymity comes first and then—in the terrain of the unknown, this landscape where I am nobody special, in the crevices and shadows of places where I have no birthright—I find love.
Until now, I have always been at the centre of the universe. I was born into an Africa that was waiting for me, into a movement that needed children as emblems of the future. We were totems not just of our parents’ love but the ability of the struggle to regenerate. It wasn’t only us ANC kids. All across the continent were Africa’s promise, middle-class children birthed with the purpose of walking away from the past with absolute confidence. The post-colonial children of the elite, whose parents’ hearts were filled with dreams, we carried the vision of a decolonised future in our smiles.
In America I am given a new meaning. I am just a black girl.
In America I learn quickly that to be black is to be both unknown and unknowable. As an outsider I see almost immediately that this society deliberately misrecognises black people and the effect is to diminish them individually and as a group.
At first I marvel at the stories of mistaken identity. My friends were the best and brightest in their schools. That’s why they got plucked—into a private four-year college. They are shining stars in their communities. The minute they step beyond their drooping blocks into cities that gleam and glitter grandly, they become invisible—a superpower they didn’t ask for but know how to use to their advantage. Sometimes their luck runs out. They’ll be just walking, just shooting the breeze, and suddenly they attract attention, like glow-in-the-dark figures.
They learn to creep, to walk close to walls, to put their hoodies up and keep their heads slouched; to shrink so they aren’t noticed. Attention aimed at ghetto children is rarely positive.
In my first year I am assigned a room with a girl named Katie. She is half-white, half-Sri Lankan. Everyone hangs out in our room a lot.
Someone says, “They thought my cousin was a guy on America’s Most Wanted so they shot at him.”
Someone else says, “The clerk said I looked like a lady who had been in the store last week and stolen a watch so she kicked me out.”
And another one: “That landlady said she forgot what I looked like. I just met you last week and you supposed to be tryin’ to rent me an apartment! How are you gonna forget what a client looks like? My money’s the same colour as everyone else’s.”
I learn quickly that to be black in America is to be looked through, passed over, or locked away. It is to be constantly misrecognised.
None of these experiences would be new to my compatriots who grew up in South Africa. They are not entirely new to me either. The years in Canada took their toll. Still, I have not grown up in the belly of the beast. When your individuality is denied, when you are constantly thought to be someone other than who you are, you either die or blossom. America shows me how this feels. I am grateful that it’s too late for my soul to be killed by my encounter with American racism. I am even more grateful that, by the time I go back to South Africa, its worst edges will have been blunted.
So, because I have been raised to believe I am the centre of the universe, America does not threaten who I am. It makes me a soldier in a way I may not otherwise have been.
Before I went to America I was as politically aware as a high-school student can be. I was enrolled at the International School of Kenya, where I was on the student council and wrote for the school paper. My favourite classes were Social Studies and English and French because we read real books and grappled with ideas and our French teacher was a renegade and plucked his eyebrows and we didn’t know yet what gay was but he was anti-authoritarian. And the carefully crafted multinational bubble made us feel special and loved and part of the politics of the country, even though we weren’t.
So, it is only in America, in the fall of 1992, that I begin to understand the difference between being politically aware and politically active.
It begins with being made to feel small. In the first weeks after my arrival, I am followed wordlessly in shops in the mall. One night, as I’m coming home on a bus, an old man sidles up as he gets off and says softly in my ear—almost lyrically—“Nigger bitch.”
I have spent eighteen years mainly protected from the psychological harm that comes of being looked through or past or over. Canada punctured but did not deflate my self-esteem and Nairobi put the air back in my tyres. So now, each time someone dismisses me, I grow stronger. I understand the power of having a lens through which to interpret the world. It signals the difference between drowning and swimming to safety.
America makes me brave because it forces me to fight for myself.
I make friends. There is LaKeesha from Gary, Indiana, Michael Jackson’s home town. She is petite and wiry and intense. We talk through long nights, an inseparable, incongruous-looking, pair. I am tall with a big butt and a teeny chest, she is short but with boobs enough for both of us. We laugh about sharing our assets. Physical differences aside, we occupy space in the same way, filling every room with our preoccupations. When I am reading Sula everyone knows it. When we discover for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow was enuf, there isn’t a table we sit at that isn’t informed about it. We read aloud. Our sisterhood is kinetic. Then, there is Sharon. A year ahead of me, Sharon is from Natchez, Mississippi, but went to high school in Minneapolis. Her mother followed the river north, looking for freedom for her kids. Sharon is the hope of her family—hardworking, diligent, strait-laced. Yet all Sharon wants to do is act. When she is on a stage, nothing else matters. But college-educated black women with strong family ties don’t become actors: they become accountants or lawyers or doctors. Sharon struggles with the decision, wedded both to the joy performing brings and to her commitment to being a good daughter.
And there is Simone from St Vincent originally. She too was raised by a single mother and, like the rest of us, cannot afford to mess up. Simone isn’t prone to smiling, but she is protective and loyal, as good a friend as you can ask for in a hostile enviro
nment. There is Katie, my roommate. Her father is Sri Lankan, her mother white American. There is Marika whose pale skin and freckles belie her African and native American heritage.
The group of us become angry and eloquent spokespersons for diversity. We are intense. We read a lot. We talk a lot.
We form a poetry troupe, call ourselves Sistahs of the Rainbow. A year later we have become Sistahs ’n Struggle. Only the black members of the troupe remain. We scowl often and stage performances. Sharon and LaKeesha can really act and have talent. The rest of us are passionate but should probably not be on stage. It doesn’t matter to us, though; our politics is our art. We rehearse earnestly, reciting Margaret Walker, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Nikki Giovanni. White students both love and fear us. We care a lot what they think even as we profess not to.
Soon everywhere we go on campus we are recognised and applauded. This makes us even angrier because the accolades don’t change the attrition rate for black students on campus. It doesn’t increase enrolment figures either.
We decide acting is not enough. We take on institutional discrimination. We scrawl graffiti on campus. We stage a sit-in at the president’s office, demanding that the university review its policies on hiring black professors, admitting more students of colour and addressing the high dropout rate.
We win some concessions and we celebrate. A black professor is given tenure. A political science hire is made and he is African. We have not yet learnt—because we are so young—that institutional racism is a wily old beast, and that these are just superficial wins.
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