Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘It would be odd to forbid her, when she thinks she’s helping,’ he said. ‘It seems to make her happy. All these cakes and pastries that she’s learning to cook. She’s very good at them. Maybe she has a talent in that way.’

  ‘That’s Halima, she’s been teaching her all that,’ she said. Then she turned and looked at her husband for a long moment. ‘I hope you’re not suggesting that she should do that for the rest of her life, cook samosas and pastries.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  Of course not.

  There was one last attempt to educate Farida. At the end of the school year in December, their mother took Farida with her to see relatives in Mombasa. Her eldest sister, Saida, had married there. Also, their mother’s mother had come from there, so there were cousins without number as well. Their mother had written to her sister, asking her to make enquiries about schools for Farida, who was eager for the plan, and could not wait to go and stay with her Aunt Saida and go to school in Mombasa. Their trip was to see what had come of these enquiries, to see if Farida would like Mombasa, to see and make up their minds, to work out the delicate financial arrangements which could not be discussed by letter, for neither family was wealthy. At the end of three weeks, their mother returned on her own, leaving her daughter behind to repeat the final year of primary school at the age of fifteen before making another attempt at a secondary school entrance examination, this time in Kenya.

  While Farida was in Mombasa, Amin passed the same examination that Farida had failed two years before. Boys had two schools to go to, but it was still a tall order for them too. In any case, Amin’s name was second on the list, so even if they had taken ten students he would still have been one of them. Farida arrived back soon after this success. Mombasa had not worked either. That January, at the end of a year which Farida had enjoyed in so many ways, and memories of which would stay with her for the rest of her life, she returned home defeated. She had not been chosen in Kenya either, and the cost of a private school in Mombasa was beyond her parents. She had tried her best, she said, but she was too stupid.

  She took up where she left off, helping her Aunt Halima in the morning, washing, cleaning, making lunch for the family. She volunteered to oversee Amin at his homework, now that he was at secondary school and everything was so hard, though in truth she distracted him more with her chat and laughter. She drew up a working timetable for Rashid’s revision, for the same dreaded examination, citing her own lack of organised study for the tragedy that had befallen her. Rashid dutifully pasted the timetable to the inside cover of his revision exercise book and then completely ignored it, preferring to play cards and football with his friends to falling in with his sister’s orders. She noted every single infringement of his timetable in a notebook that she kept, and threatened to report him on each of these counts to the powers that be, which had some effect. When it came to it, he too duly passed at the end of the school year. But despite all these labours and chores, Farida was smiling with the old happiness, or something like it, for there was a subtly knowing twist to her smile, a trembling at the corners of her mouth as at a secret joke. Perhaps it was nothing more than age and a growing self-consciousness. The year in Mombasa gave her a new glamour, and it was impossible now not to see the way boys and young men looked at her, but she smiled at them all with such uninhibited carelessness, and responded with such laughing assurance when they spoke to her, that no one dared approach her. It was as if she was a grown woman beyond flirtation and intrigue.

  Her brother Amin, in the meantime, was effortlessly becoming all the things that were predicted of him. He was courteous, reliable, truthful and kind. He’s a good boy, his mother sometimes said, with a catch in her voice. He was more silent than he had been as a child, and was inclined to speechless stares for no obvious reason, but this was hardly a blemish compared to his virtues. His silences and the increasing inexplicitness of some of the things he said made him seem deeper, wiser. He was successful at secondary school from the beginning, even at subjects and procedures that were new to all of them and in which so many of the students at first struggled. He understood instructions, and worked competently to deliver what the assignment required. He did not chafe under the rules of this new learning, and did not try to find short-cuts to the tasks he was set. His teachers delighted in his unfussy thoroughness. Despite this diligence and excellence, he was a relaxed and unflamboyant member of his class. The teachers never expected any obstinancy from him, yet also looked upon him as one of the leaders. They relied on his acquiescence as an endorsement of their authority, and as an example to others. Amin was not exceptional in this role, but he was among the exceptionals. They had all been schooled in diffidence. They all knew how fortunate they were to be where they were, and had not arrived there by obstinancy and rebelliousness. He was healthy, strong without being intimidating, graceful in a youthful way, and with a devastating smile. Everyone was proud of him, especially his parents, of course, who looked upon his achievements with relief and gratitude. Who knows how children will turn out? How many examples are there of progeny who guzzle on parents’ love to satiety and then turn into tireless wasters and relentless demons, blighting every waking second of their parents’ lives?

  Rashid was proud of him too. Rashid loved him, although he would not have thought to say either of these things to Amin, and perhaps would not have said them to himself until much later. He followed two years behind him, enduring comparison with his elder brother with equanimity. He felt party to Amin’s distinctions, was intimate with the effort to achieve them and so did not think them remarkable. When a teacher told him that he was not as good at some task as his brother had been, he only suffered a pang for the disparagement, not because he wanted to compete with Amin. In any case, it was not as if Rashid was hopeless in comparison. He too was successful at school, but in a different way. For a start, it was not a universal opinion that he had a talent for academic work, as it was with Amin. In the eyes of some of his teachers, he was opinionated, inclined to over-reach himself, unrealistic and reckless at times. He was not as thorough, and sometimes just went through the motions. Some thought he would burn himself out with all his show and racket, and amount to not very much. He was intelligent, his teachers thought, but flawed in many small ways. He was noisy, a chatter-box in class, had poor concentration, was enthusiastic on the sports-field but without skill, unlike his elder brother who did well in all the sports he took up. He was a hot-headed debater, which may sound like a good thing but was not. Not in a school debate, when a bit of logic and strategy was required, a bit of stateliness and decorum and sagacity, a bit of guile and show, otherwise what is the point of a debate. In such situations Rashid was likely to rush in with indignation and scorn and bloody-mindedness, putting people’s backs up or making them laugh, playing to the grumblers and the malcontents.

  There was also his fervour for all things Italian. To tell the truth, aside from the phrase-book and a few pictures and posters from the same source, some magazine cuttings and photos of Giacomo Agostini on his Vespa and a bio-comic of Garibaldi that his sister brought back for him from Mombasa, his fervour was not based on much substance or knowledge. But in any debate about style or beauty or poetry, especially in his adolescent years, his champions were always Italian. Shakespeare is well and good, in fact phenomenal, but bears no comparison to Dante. Why aren’t we given a chance to study Dante? Silvana Mangano is the most beautiful film actress in my view. The Italian football team is almost as good as Brazil. When he was younger, his primary school teachers had taken his Italian pronouncements as a bit of high spirits, the inevitable exhibitionism of a bright boy. In any case, most people at that time thought of Italians as slightly comical, from the stories that came back of their antics during the war in Abyssinia, so Rashid’s championing of Italy was also taken as a perverse comedy in itself. But by the time he was an adolescent, almost all his teachers at the government college were British, and some of them saw his fervour
as an absurd affectation. The history teacher was unreasonably irritated by Rashid over the Italians. He always looked at Rashid before quoting something by a Roman scholar or notable, one of your ancestors so-and-so said such and such. The literature teacher quoted him lines in Italian, and smiled icily as he informed the uncomprehending little fellow that that was Dante. He bade him consult the Everyman translation, which was in the library and which in his view was the most accessible to a beginner, before he continued with his pointless flauntings. Perhaps he should learn to walk before he tried to run, the literature teacher wisely advised.

  It happened that Rashid really did have a passion for poetry, reading it in the school library and buying battered anthologies from the second-hand bookshop. When he was younger he had loved singing qasidas, and had known several by heart. People loved to recite passages from the Koran or lines from a qasida or a story. Those who had the skill, slipped in a line or a passage on the most casual occasions, and recited their lines with a fluency which never failed to impress and give pleasure. Sometimes, when in the middle of speaking, someone began to recite beautiful lines, others joined in in a delighted chorus, showing off and enjoying themselves. But at his age and in the school he was in, he no longer sang qasidas. Poetry meant Shakespeare and Keats and Byron and Longfellow and Kipling, and it was into this poetry that he threw himself with zeal and pleasure. It was what education meant. It did not mean knowing what everyone else knew, and it did not occur to him to lament any loss in the process. He even had his own copy of Dante at home, although he had not got round to finishing it.

  At some point he started writing poems of his own in English, mostly to amuse friends, jokey and excessive verses in the style of Hyperion or Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage They went on interminably and were deliberately mock-sagacious. He learned a few of the lines by heart and declaimed them to the world with florid gestures as they rode home from school. One of the friends told the literature teacher who had been irritated by Rashid’s Dante affectations, and the teacher was even more irritated by this new information, as was the intention. He demanded to be shown the opus. Rashid gave him the exercise book reluctantly, anticipating scorn. It was not his idea of a joke, and even though the poems were lightly done, he felt a kind of tenderness for them.

  ‘The poetry is altogether immature,’ the teacher reported to the whole class afterwards, as if they had all eagerly sought his opinion. ‘When it isn’t tedious cut-price Arabian Nights mysticism, it is copious, rambling, imitative blather in the style of Byron in satirical mode. Confused and meaningless, as attempts by Africans to write evocatively in English usually are. Even to attempt to write in this way indicates an overweening temperament, an unrealistic estimate of your abilities. Pull up your socks, young man. Your homework for today is a character analysis of the captain in The African Queen, and I expect something clear and organised, unlike this froth.’ The African Queen by C. S. Forester of Hornblower fame was the great work their teacher thought suitable for their talents. Rashid was too intimidated by the teacher’s disdain to think of any reply. It was at this stage in his life that the name Mtaliana started to become a burden to him.

  So his teachers’ opinions were divided about Rashid in a way that they were not about Amin. His parents were proud of him too, of course, but their minds were not as easy about him as they were with Amin. His mother, in particular, worried about him. Sometimes when he sat in the kitchen while his mother was preparing food, and chattered as if he would never stop, she glanced at him between her tears of laughter and wondered if he would always be well. Not like that, not illness, not instability, God forbid, but whether he would always have the strength to carry on. His enthusiasms were so obsessive, his wit sometimes disrespectful, his confidence so reckless that she wondered if he would know how to deal with disappointment. As he grew older, she saw a growing stubbornness in him, a willingness to disobey and to ignore what he did not like. He was smaller than Amin, small for his age, always on fire. Burning. She thought she saw something of herself in him.

  This was in the late 1950s, when the world was as full of ironies as ever and almost all of Africa was ruled by Europeans in one way or another: directly, indirectly, by brute force or by strong-arm diplomacy, if the idea is not too illogical. A British map of Africa in the 1950s would have shown four predominant colours: red shading to pink for the British-ruled territories, dark green for the French, purple for the Portuguese and brown for the Belgian. The colours were a code for a world-view, and other imperial nations had their own colour schemes for their maps. It was a way of understanding the world, and for many who studied such maps, it was a way of dreaming about journeys that could only be pictured in the imagination. Maps are not read in the same way now. The world has become much more confusing, and full of people and names that obscure its clarity. In any case, nothing much is left to the imagination now, when the picture has become the story.

  In the British maps, the red was a gesture to the English national banner, and it represented the willingness to sacrifice in the name of duty, and all the blood spilt in the name of the Empire. Even South Africa was still red shading to pink then, a dominion like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, places where Europeans had travelled half the world to find a bit of peace and prosperity. The dark green was a joke at the expense of the French, to suggest Elysian pastures when most of the territory they ruled was either desert or semi-desert or equatorial forest, so much useless territory won with arms and a grandiose hubris. The purple was for the anxious self-regard of the Portuguese and their obsession with royalty and religion and symbolisms of empire, when for most of the centuries of their colonial occupation they had been plundering these lands with barefoot brutality, slashing and burning, and transporting millions of the inhabitants to the slave plantations in Brazil. And the brown was for the stolid and cynical efficiency of the Belgians, who came late into the festivities but whose gift to the people they ruled turned out to bear no comparison to any of the other Great Powers of that mean-spirited era. Their legacy to the Congo and Rwanda will keep the rivers and lakes of those places muddied for a while to come yet. The Spanish had their territories as well, marked yellow on the British maps as a gesture to their national colour, which signifies an obsession with plundered gold. Later in the decade, the colours would be toned down to pale pink, light green, mauve and beige. This was to signal a gradual relinquishing of colonial rule, perhaps, an evolution to self-government, everything under control, here today gone tomorrow.

  The 1950s map would also have shown the exceptions to European rule. Egypt was nervously free, and had been since 1922, but had no choice about playing host to the British Army, Navy and Air Force. Liberia had never formally been a colony, but had come into being as the liberated land where freed African slaves could be sent back from the United States of America to build a New Jerusalem, and what a fine job they made of it. Ethiopia had held out against the shambolic Italians twice. In the nineteenth century, when every European army that wanted to managed to grab a piece of Africa and slaughter thousands of its inhabitants, Emperor Menelik’s army defeated the Italians at Adwa. You can be sure that it was buffoonery that led to this unnecessary defeat, although some authorities give the credit to Rimbaud’s efforts as a gun-runner to the emperor. Later, Mussolini’s armies were expelled by partisan and British and colonial African forces, Uncle Habib among them. Then there was Sudan, an independent military dictatorship since 1952; and Libya, a theocratic kingdom under British protection since 1951. These were ironies about which such a map had no comment to make. Otherwise everything was in the hands of the Civilising Mission, from Cape Town to Tangier, and that included all of East Africa, where these events were taking place.

  The reason for indulging in this glimpse at a 1950s map is to recall how different the world looked then. No one really understood what a panic was in the offing, that in a few years most of these European administrations were going to break camp and dash off home, leaving behind t
hem a series of paper-thin treaties and agreements that they felt no obligation to honour. So the way that young people like Amin and Rashid thought of themselves and their future had not even begun to disentangle itself from the expectations of a colonised people, living in a small place, in the interregnum (although they did not know it) between the end of one age and the beginning of another. In his last years at school, Amin was convinced that he wanted to go to the teaching college where both his parents had studied, and no one argued with him or discouraged him, or suggested that he should consider other possibilities with independence only seven or eight years away. No one knew independence was that near, and not many had even speculated on what opportunities it would make available, and in any case, there was no reason why Amin should not aspire to the useful and contented life that his parents lived, useful to their community, fulfilling to themselves and their dependents. Except that it was all going to change in a mad scramble out of Africa, and no one seemed able to imagine that, at least not anyone Amin knew. Not even his father, who listened to the news on the radio every day, had mentioned anything about independence being on the way.

  His father was a well-known and respected teacher at a school in town, although all teachers were respected, as we know. In the streets people addressed his father as Maalim Feisal, addressing him by both his profession and his name, and went out of their way to greet him and wish him well. Whenever he went to a government office, or to the docks or to the hospital, wherever he went to feed the hungry bureaucratic machinery of state, he ran into a former pupil who was only too glad to be of assistance. It thrilled Amin to hear them praise his father for his kindness and for his cleverness, and to hear them tell their favourite stories about him. Do you remember that time, Maalim? Amin knew that wherever in the world he himself went and whatever he did, he would never have a greater importance or meaning than his father did in his community. Even though his mother too had been a teacher until Amin’s last year at school, her former students did not populate the public world in the same way because they were women.