Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  I remember only fragments, not through wilfulness or denial, but because vision at such frenzied times is limited in inexplicable ways, and because new knowledge sometimes obscures what was known before, and I have been here now for a long time. I wish I could remember more. I know I did not feel afraid or intimidated, except in the ordinary way of a stranger arriving at an uknown destination, uncertain of directions, wary of misuse or mockery, self-conscious about getting things wrong. I thought of myself as someone who had travelled a long way to join an institution which would contain other people like me, conscientious, modest about their talents but secretly ambitious, novices to the intellectual vocation. In that institution I would do my best to dazzle and win praise and fulfil myself. So I was not afraid, and had no idea what I should be afraid of.

  I arrived towards the end of August and was taken in hand by a slim, awkward man from the British Council. He seemed embarrassed by our encounter, and asked me trite leading questions between long silences. I remember he wore a college scarf and I envied him that, and promised myself one in due course. We took a coach to London, and then a red double-decker bus to Euston where I was to have temporary lodgings in a college hall until the beginning of term. The British Council man said he would check on me the next day, smiling wanly, but I never saw him again. There were long corridors of empty rooms, with a few other foreign students diffidently hugging the walls. Somewhere nearby (in a building across the road, it turned out) there was a dining room where I was to go for food, but I failed to absorb this information when the hall porter gave it to me, as I also failed to absorb most of what he said. I spent the first night without food. On the second day I went out for a walk, and with some of the sterling money my father had exchanged at the money-mart in the market for a farewell gift, I bought a big bar of chocolate from a newsagent. He was a small, elderly man in a green cardigan, whose tiny shop was filled with the sweet, strong smell of pipe tobacco. Even when I did locate the dining room, I w not at first able to persuade myself to enter it for a meal, unsure of what I would ask for and fearful of mismanaging the tools. So yes, I was a little bit afraid, after all. What I had seen of the city terrified me with its hugeness and rush, and I was not to lose the edge of that terror for several months, and perhaps not to lose it fully ever.

  By the time the British Council induction seminars started, I was in some need of them. We sat there in our assortment of uncomfortable suits while a florid, balding man with an unabashed belly spoke to us with what I would later recognise as a kind of officer wit and badinage. He grinned and nodded to us, encouraging us to relish his wit as much as he did himself, inviting us to find more joy in life. His sentences were studded with words like palaver, badmash, hatari, inshaalah, establishing that he was an insider when it came to our cultures. He called us boys – we were all male – but I think he meant it affectionately, as if we were all in it together, members of the same team. He spoke to us about the etiquette of what to do and not to do when invited into an English home. When we first arrived at the house we were to wipe our feet thoroughly before entering, in case our shoes had picked up mud or worse. We were not to take off our shoes as this would give the impression of unwelcome informality. If invited to a meal, we were not to eat too much, or too fast, or to belch. We were not to ask for more, and most certainly not to serve ourselves unless we were invited to. We were always to leave something on the plate. We were not to get up from the table until we were invited to. It was some years before I could put any of this instruction to use, because it took time for the invitations to turn up. But our lecturer also showed us how to count the money, how to use the underground and where to get our student supplies, some of which information was of more immediate use.

  In time, I moved to the hall where I was to be permanently accommodated, where I made friends with a group of other foreign students there. I had done all my dealings with the officials of the college, taking the bus as instructed, locating the academic offices, and registering for my classes, all done with trepidation that I might get something wrong, and then a brief feeling of triumph that I had not done so. It was in that mood of having managed that I sat down to write my first proper letter home. I had written on first arriving (and then carried the letter around with me for days before I found a post office that I dared enter) but this was my first settled-down letter. I can’t remember the detail of what I wrote, but I can see the desk where I sat, with its smooth grey formica top that I thought so elegant and so clean. I imagine that I would have expressed in that letter my relief that I had been able to manage without mishap, playing up to my reputation as the incompetent dreamer. I would probably have written that I was unimaginably fortunate to be where I was, and how I would do my best. I would have said something about the hugeness of the city, and the multitudes that thronged its streets. Perhaps, despite my attempts at wit and self-mockery, I would have been unable to disguise my anxiety about what still remained to be done: the bank, the canteen, the doctor, the shops, all of them places where I could yet make a fool of myself.

  I know I would not have told them how much I longed to be back with them, how homesick I was. Or how much I missed everything, my friends, the smells of the streets, the breeze off the sea. How chilling and belittling blue eyes can be. I would not have told them that, not yet, not at first. I would not have wanted them to think me childish and overwhelmed. And even when I did, it was only to Amin, after we started writing to each other properly in the months to come.

  I made friends in the hall, a group of foreign students like me, all of whom were in their second or third years. They beckoned me over when hunger forced me to the dining room downstairs, and they welcomed me and made much of me because I was a new arrival. I remember them all, and because it is important not to make light of such gifts, I will name them here. First there was Andrew Kwaku from Ghana, who was quiet and watchful, but who smiled at the slightest eye contact. He spoke slowly, as if giving himself time to consider what he was saying. Then there was Saad from Egypt, plump and genial and wearing a thick moustache, like a joke policeman in the Egyptian movies we used to see at home. He was always talking and grinning, always slipping away. He was the eldest in the group, in his final year of a radiography course. Ramesh Rao was from India, and he was usually silent and deliberate in what he did, more than a bit dull from a certain way of seeing. His face always managed to look kindly but you could see his eyes counting and sorting, pricing everything that went past him. He was the butt of many of Saad’s sexual innuendoes, because he assumed that Ramesh did not get the joke, which made the joke even funnier. Then there was Sundeep, also Indian, but suave and dashing where Ramesh was cautious and watchful. Saad called him cosmopolitan and Sundeep liked that. He had a head of thick glossy hair which he handled lovingly, and an expensive wardrobe which he displayed at least once a week when rich friends came to collect him in a car. He sneered a lot, though not at us, and under the circumstances, his arrogance made me feel a lot better about some of the slights we had to endure. Then there was Amur Baadawi, who was from Sudan, and who with Andrew became the friends I got to know best in that first year.

  It was not easy to get near the English students, even ones in the same class. The feeling of resistance was there from the beginning, a feeling I sensed but was not sure of. I had not known what to expect, but I sensed it in the slightness of the smiles I was given in return to my beaming ones. I saw it in the way the eyes slid away, and in the frowns when I followed the other students out of the class, trying to join in whatever they were doing next. I saw that I was not included in the rendezvous outside the library or in the coffee bar or wherever else. I saw this in the quick looks of mischief they exchanged, and in their suppressed smiles. Sometimes I saw embarrassment, especially in the women students, although I thought the men intimidated the women in some way. And one day soon I was allowed to overhear one of the students as I hovered on the edges of the group at the end of a class. What is he doing here? a well-s
poken, round-cheeked young man of medium height with a fringe of dark hair who was called Charles asked in a loud, exasperated hissing whisper. Only he didn’t say he, and I can’t be bothered to remember exactly what he did say. So at first I sensed this feeling of resistance, and then I heard the embarrassed sniggers and saw the looks of surprise and irritation in anonymous faces in the corridors and in the streets, and in time I came to hear their vexation and dislike. It was all a bit of a surprise. It took a long time to learn not to care, years, a lifetime.

  It was not all I learned in those first few weeks, but the feeling of those encounters has stayed when other lessons were revised by repetition and new knowledge. I saw and heard many other things, and learned to live, or at least learned to make a way through life, as everyone does in all circumstances, but the earliest lesson I received in London was how to live with disregard. It was the same lesson many of us had to learn in our different ways. Like many people in similar circumstances, I began to look at myself with increasing dislike and dissatisfaction, to look at myself through their eyes. To think of myself as someone who deserved to be disliked. So at first I thought it was the way I spoke, that I was inept and clumsy, ignorant and tongue-tied, perhaps even transparently scheming, wanting too much to be liked. Those beaming, ingratiating smiles must have embarrassed everyone I talked to, because they had to struggle not to laugh. Then I thought it was the clothes I wore, which were cheap and ill-fitting and not as clean as they could be, and which perhaps made me look clownish and unbalanced. But despite the explanations I gave myself, I could not help hearing the slighting words or the irritable tone at petty everyday encounters or the suppressed hostility in casual glances.

  I realised that I did not know very much about England, that all the books I had studied and the maps I had pored over had taught me nothing of how England thought of the world and of people like me. Perhaps I should not say England, as if it was not differentiated and various, although I think in this matter of how the non-European world and its denizens were perceived there was largely a common cause. So I might have made my observation about suppressed hostility in reference to Britain or Europe and its dispersals and still felt that there was some truth in it. Living in our small island, deep in the uproar of our complicated dramas and our self-regarding stories, I had not grasped the significance of those English teachers talking to us about Shakespeare and Keats and the golden mean, had not understood the global magnitude of what seemed only a local phenomenon. There were English teachers everywhere in the subjected world, speaking about Shakespeare and Keats and the golden mean, and what mattered was not what the subjects thought about these writings, but that they were being told about them. The teachers too were not all English, but how could we tell and what difference would it have made if we could?

  So I had to learn about that, and about imperialism and how deeply the narratives of our inferiority and the aptness of European overlordship had bedded down in what passed for knowledge of the world. I had to learn something about that before I could have an inkling of the meaning of the dislike and embarrassment I encountered and could not at first withstand. One of the teachers spoke to me about this. He must have seen me cringing, or perhaps was familiar with the phenomenon I was experiencing. British people like to think of themselves as cold and unfriendly, he said. It makes them feel tough and hard to fool. If you tell them they are welcoming, they’ll start whimpering with self-pity, assuming you mean they are credulous. Be cold and unfriendly and you’ll soon make friends.

  We talked about these things among ourselves, of course, but the way we talked was not how it felt to experience them. I think when we talked we simplified the complex sense of hurt and diminishing that we felt, or at least that I felt, the sense of injustice and incomprehension at being both misused and despised. What were they so upset about, when it was they who went overbearing over the world and filled our heads with our unworthiness? That sense of shock was truer to how I felt than the way we talked about these things, at which times we came up with our own summary defences and were abusive and condescending in return. At such times, we piled story after story, our own and other people’s, petty ones and global ones, suitably salted and dressed as the moment required, to describe the small-minded meanness of the people we found ourselves among. We did not understand that our squeals of protest were already anticipated and explained as petulance and a deficiency of character. I learned to evade the questions that seemed to invite you to speak about such matters because they were accompanied by that sceptical look, so that even before you opened your mouth or marshalled your petty grumbles into line, you understood what the eyes or the tilt of the head, or the tight smile were saying. Go on then, let’s hear your trite moans about colour prejudice, after everything we’ve done for you.

  If Sundeep was around, he would take charge of our grumbling conversations about the English. His eyes would glow and glitter, the man of bitter experience. He had lived longest in England and obviously knew his way around, and it was predictable that he was the most irregular of our group of foreign students. He had complicated arrangements, engagements and phone calls, about which he was discreet and slightly mysterious, pursing his lips with courteous reluctance if anyone asked him too directly. He would wrap up our discussions with an invective of such cruelty and scorn that it made me thrill with guilt: ‘Listen, they’re scum. I know them better than any of you. I’ve been to school here, remember. They bathe once a week, if that, the whole family in the same scummy water. They clean their arses with paper. Every time you shake hands with one of them, be sure to go and wash your hands immediately afterwards, and certainly don’t touch food without doing so. Their women are whores. They eat blood and hooves and fur, and they have sex with animals. When you listen to them talk, you’d think they invented the world. Poetry, science, philosophy, all their doing, and yet everything they know, they learned from us.’ He was gracious enough to include Andrew and I in his us, nodding firmly in our directions. We were from darkest Africa, and I suppose Sundeep did not want us to feel left out, even though he probably did not think that much had been learned from us. I certainly could not imagine what anyone could have learned from me and mine that they would not have arrived at themselves in good time, but Sundeep’s arrogant flourishes made us laugh and feel good enough to cast our own contemptuous looks. Later he was to become a writer famed for his mockery of the intolerances of Africans and Muslims, but at that time we were all happy to share in these blustering summaries of the English.

  Back in my room, I wrote letters, three, maybe four, a week. I studied for a while in the evenings, then when I tired I wrote a letter for an hour or so, the Sony transistor I had inherited from Saad tuned to the BBC World Service, and then read until midnight. The letters just flowed, dutiful, lonely, homesick, excited and supercilious, I expect, depending on who they were for. I was probably not that guarded about what I wrote, because I don’t think I felt I had anything very much to hide. I wrote to Amin once a week, and distributed the rest of the letters between my parents and friends. In the early days, there was a letter for me every day in the students’ pigeon-holes. It only took three days for the post to arrive, so I could send a letter and get a reply in the same week, although this did not happen frequently enough for my liking. In quite a short time I exhausted my other correspondents, but not Amin. My mother pleaded lack of time and aching eyes, and took to sending regards and messages of exhortation via Amin, who sometimes added a jeering twist of his own. My father wrote once in those early days, a serious and stern letter of advice which was composed with obvious care but whose contents have completely evaporated over time. I don’t think it was very long, and there was a quality of ritual about it. It was a letter from father to son, a bestowal of blessing, which made me feel adult and slightly abandoned, although I knew that was not its intention.

  I wrote freely to Amin, unburdening and complaining, lamenting my loneliness, describing the indescribable cold of that wi
nter, the blizzards and the frozen lakes. He wrote back with news and encouragement. Homesickness is inevitable. You’ve made friends, he said, that is so important. Soon you’ll have made so many friends you’ll forget about us. Seriously, don’t feel lonely and low, don’t allow it, don’t tolerate it. Make the best of it, because what matters is that you fulfil your talent and your gift, that most of all. Tell me more about these friends, they sound a good bunch of people. Tell me about snow. How does it feel to touch it? Describe it to me. So I did, and described the arguments and conversations with my friends and the places we visited. He even suggested places I might go and see, and things I could do. I envy you, being able to see so much of the world. Have you visited the British Museum? Have you been to the theatre? You must go and see a Shakespeare play, and see how they do it properly there in London. Have you seen Bush House? I had walked past Bush House, the great shrine from where the BBC World Service broadcast its programmes, and which for some people had greater potency as an abstraction of London than Downing Street or Trafalgar Square. I stood across the road from the great building, shaped like a battleship from one angle and like a cave-village sprawling down a mountainside from another, and watched people striding in and out of its revolving doors, and felt a small hiatus of disappointment. I think I expected to see a crackling traffic of sparking sound waves in the air around the building. I told Amin about these visits, and about my classes, and my petty triumphs. I boasted about my essay marks, something to show for all those hours alone in my room, and what the teachers said, and Amin asked me to send him copies of the essays so he could read them. I sent him some books instead, after I had read them myself.