Sweetness in the Belly

by Camilla Gibb

  We established the community association that year, anticipating an influx of refugees. We knew that there would be thousands—tens becoming hundreds—of people on the move, families fractured and scattered. Those who did not die would be internally displaced or spend years in refugee camps in Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya and Sudan. But it is not these people who would make it to Rome or London. It would be the urban, the educated, the ones who had the means to pay their smugglers to make it this far. The minority, most of them men, most of them alone. People like Amina. From Dire Dawa to Nairobi in the back of a truck, from Nairobi to London by plane.

  A similar office had been established in Rome a year earlier. Italy is the point of entry into Europe for most Ethiopians. They come by boat or they come by plane; they come illegally or they come with coveted papers as Convention-status refugees. However they come, they arrive with mixed emotion: hope, despondency, relief, want and fear. And guilt. The unrelenting guilt that burbles in the bowels, the magma at the core.

  Every month the office in Rome sends us a list of recent arrivals in the hope that we might be able to match them with relatives in London. Our mission is family reunification. The matches are few because we are still a relatively small community here, but one reunion between brothers spreads a fire of hope among the rest. Amina and I play a small part in rebuilding if not families, at least spirits, and after reviewing each list, we make a copy for our files and send the original on to North America, where, eventually, a great many more matches will be made.

  Our work is not as altruistic as it sounds. We are each looking for someone. Amina’s husband Yusuf. My friend Aziz. (Such a weak word, friend. In Harari he is kuday, “my liver,” he is like rrata, a piece of meat stuck between my teeth, but English does not allow for such possibilities.)

  Every month we try not to appear hopeful, but we are. Every month we try not to appear disappointed, but we are. The truth is, reuniting people as we do is bittersweet. And the more time that passes, the more bitter the sweetness. It can overwhelm. The names can become indistinguishable, impossible to grasp. Like the specter of him: the way he can appear in the bubbled old glass of the windows of a pub, in the fog of reluctant mornings, his image distorted and fleeting.

  It is Amina’s hope that keeps me buoyed, keeps it bearable in those moments when the names slip like water through my fingers. She places a bucket in my hands and together we begin again, pulling out one name at a time. We compare the names from Rome with the ever-expanding list of names of the family members of all those who pass through the doors of our small office in London.

  In each case we begin by drawing a family tree. It’s necessary because Ethiopians do not share family names—one’s last name is the first name of one’s father. Amina Mergessa is the daughter of Mergessa Largassom. Sitta is Sitta Yusuf, as Ahmed is Ahmed Yusuf, just as Hussein and I took the name Abdal.

  It has a striking effect, this mapping of relations. We offer coffee and a seat across the desk from us to each new visitor. Pull out a fresh sheet of A4 and align it horizontally. Begin the questions: date of birth (almost always an approximation), place of origin, ethnic background. And then the painful drawing forth of names. Spouse and children first, then working back—siblings, parents, grandparents—and across—grandparents’ siblings, uncles and aunts, cousins. Question marks beside those who are also believed missing, and subtle, lowercase ds next to those who have died.

  When we finish, we spin the paper around. Most people are speechless. They see their own names at the center of this complex web and they no longer feel quite as alone or displaced. They have a family, a place they belong, here is the proof. We give them a copy to take with them. To fold into the back of their Qur’an or Bible, place under a mattress in a room of like mattresses in a temporary shelter, tape to the mirror in their room or tack to the inside of a kitchen cupboard door in their first council flat.

  Amina has encouraged me to map my own family in this way, but the one time I tried it proved dispiriting: it looked like a rubble-strewn field. At the far left of the page I positioned the Great Abdal as father to Hussein and me. Next to him, Muhammed Bruce Mahmoud. I drew a dotted line across the paper, as if marking footsteps west to east across the Sahara. At the far right-hand side I wrote “Nouria”—the name of the poor Oromo woman with whom I lived in Harar. I connected her to me on the page as older sister, as I did her cousin Gishta. I wrote the names of Nouria’s children beneath hers, precious to me, children I cared for and taught.

  But then what of the man I love? I could think of no way of representing this relationship on paper. I left Aziz hanging in the middle of the page, as if he were a lone cloud hovering somewhere over the desert.

  “Wait!” Amina exclaimed, picking up the pencil as soon as I threw it down.

  I watched as she added her own name somewhere in the blank middle.

  “Your co-wife,” she declared. “And your co-wife’s children.” She added Sitta’s and Ahmed’s names.

  “But there’s not an ounce of blood shared between me and anyone,” I said.

  Amina sighed. “Sometimes you are exhausting, Lilly, honestly. Okay, so yours is not a map of blood. But can’t you see? This is a map of love.”

  Amina and I copy the names from each new family tree into binders arranged alphabetically by first name. Perhaps one day we will have a computer, but for now, our resources are limited; most of what we do we do by hand and we’re grateful for the things we have. This office, for instance. It’s an old pantry, complete with shelves lined with paper in the 1920s and a hidden stash of tinned war rations. Beyond a battered and bolted wooden door, Amina grows onions and garlic in a tiny garden she has planted between crumbling bricks.

  The building belongs to Mr. Jahangir, who did so well operating a grocery out of the front that he was able to buy the entire building. He and his wife moved off the estate and into the first-floor flat. They offer us this room at the back of the building, behind the grocery, without condition. This is in part because, Mr. Jahangir says (and only half jokingly), that it is thanks to the crisis in Ethiopia that he has become a rich man.

  When Mrs. Jahangir first introduced Amina to her husband’s grocery, she filled Amina’s hands with garlic, ginger and chili peppers and put fenugreek on her tongue. Amina, taste buds deadened by plain pasta and potatoes, was overjoyed at the revival in her mouth, but when Mr. J presented her with a mango, her face froze as if her entire life were flashing before her eyes. Inhaling the skin, she broke down.

  Every Ethiopian who has arrived on the estate since has undergone a variation of this ritual.

  For the most part, this stretch of road is good to us. Mr. J sells halal meat, and two doors down there is the Mecca Hair Salon, with its special enclosed room at the back where hijab-wearing women can reveal themselves without shame. Volunteers offer Qur’anic classes at the back of the church on Saturdays, and while the Brixton Mosque, which draws us to Friday prayers, is only a bus ride away, the Refugee Referral Service just down the road offers a place in the neighborhood for daily worship, clearing out its reception room at dusk every day to receive the knees, foreheads, palms and prayers of men and women of all colors.

  This is where we are reassured of our place in the world. Our place in the eyes of God. The sound of communal prayer—its growling honesty, its rhythm as relentless and essential as heartbeats—moves me with its direction and makes me believe that distance can be overcome. It is the only thing that offers me hope that where borders and wars and revolutions divide and scatter us, something singular and true unites us. It tames this English soil.

  There are rooms being similarly transformed, senses being reoriented, everywhere on earth. I know from experience that you can remap a city like this, orient yourself to its strange geography, strew your own trail of breadcrumbs between salient markers—mosques, restaurants, markets and grocers—and diminish the alien power of the spaces in between. You can find your way. You grapple with language, navigate y
our way on the underground, stretch your meager allowance, adapt unfamiliar provisions to make familiar food and find people from back home in queues at government offices, which at once invests you with a new sense of possibility and devastates you with the reminder of all the people you have left.

  Ten years ago, Ethiopians had no word for diaspora, or emigration. There was only the word for pilgrimage, a journey with an implicit return—to Mecca or the shrines of beloved Ethiopian saints—but the idea of leaving your country, except for a very educated few who sought higher degrees abroad, was incomprehensible. A betrayal, even.

  Amina is an anchor in this small but growing community. While the others moan their longing for injera, Amina sets about making the Ethiopian bread using millet instead of teff. The women are grateful for the instruction, even though the injera lacks the critical bitterness that distinguishes it. But taste ultimately comes to matter less than resourcefulness. Amina locates a Yemeni merchant in Brixton who smuggles in qat from Djibouti twice a week. The men are jubilant. Bread and stimulants. The stuff of life.

  Amina is not a specter in this landscape; she is unusual in putting down roots. She began by washing dishes in the kitchen of a Punjabi restaurant, which she did while taking advanced English for foreigners at Brixton College at night. She soon began taking secretarial courses as well. Now she works from Monday to Friday in the legal aid department of the Refugee Referral Service alongside well-meaning English women with solid names like Marion and Patricia.

  While other refugees dream of mountains and hyenas and rivers, Amina takes Sitta and Ahmed to the zoo in Regent’s Park and introduces them to lizards and giraffes. She fashions paper boats out of pages of tabloids for Ahmed to float on the Thames near the foot of Lambeth Bridge. Old England looms large on the other side. Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament would cast shadows over his tiny paper boat if it were to cross the river, but a paper boat cannot span the distance, and we are both alienated by and grateful for the divide.

  We know plenty of Ethiopians in London who do not even furnish their flats. What possessions they acquire sit in their cardboard boxes ready for transport. The tower of boxes holding televisions, toaster ovens, microwaves, electric heaters teeters to the left of the door, ready to be shipped at a moment’s notice. They commit to nothing. They float on the myth of return.

  When the coffee beans are nearly black, Amina tips them from the plate into a mortar. She brought that mortar with her. Showed up at Heathrow with nothing but Ahmed, a man’s wallet and that mortar, Sitta still in utero. She unwraps a ball of waxed paper pulled from the pocket of her skirt and shakes two cardamom pods into her hand. She rubs these briskly between her palms, adding their silken ashes and brown seeds to the mix, and then passes the mortar to me.

  Sitta places her hand over mine as if to help. A twist of the wrist brings a distant yet familiar sting. The suddenly charged senses and the near-primal urge to follow. Everything lifts. The dull hangover of nightmares about bodies ripped from houses and dragged through streets; bodies jailed in terror and left to sleep in their own excrement; bodies stripped of fingernails, expressions and will; bodies raped with rifles, sodomized with sticks, lacerated and mutilated and broken.

  Everything lifts with the twist of a wrist. Everything comes alive.

  part two

  harar, ethiopia

  1970-1972

  al-hijrah

  It was a still night in November 1969, the air thick with the smell of overripe fruit and woodsmoke, when Hussein and I disembarked in Harar’s main square. We stepped out of the Mercedes in which we’d traveled from the capital and skulked away. The extravagance of having spent three days winding up and down the miles of scrub-covered mountains in the back of a chauffeured car, complete with an ashtray full of chocolates wrapped in gold foil, had somewhat sullied our arrival. Not only did it seem contradictory to the spirit of pilgrimage, it was hardly representative of the rest of our journey, an arduous overland odyssey of months spent blistered and parched and subsisting on little else than the gritty bread our Tuareg guide baked in sand.

  We would repent, we told ourselves, as we stood in the muddy shadow of a mosque and looked up at the stars. Soon, we would be kneeling to pray before the entombed remains of our beloved saint.

  We could hear the patter of drums in the near distance, and Hussein gripped my arm. I nudged him on, following him downhill through dark and narrow streets littered with vegetable matter and animal waste. Cats feasting on carcasses scattered as we grasped the walls on each side of us for balance. Before us, we saw a green archway framing the entrance to the compound surrounding the shrine. Through that archway, the movement of hundreds of people sparkled like sunlight on the crests of waves.

  I was used to the slow, quiet, uniform ways of the Sufis at the shrine in Morocco, but here, worship was far more colorful: urban Hararis, the men in their starched white galabayas and white knit skullcaps, their wives, daughters and sisters glittering in bright head scarves and beaded shawls; the people of the countryside, Oromo peasants who work the Harari lands, darker skinned and wearing duller hues than the Hararis, and the herders, sinewy Somalis and their butter-scented wives draped in long diaphanous veils. Landlords, serfs and nomads. Conspicuous wealth, backbreaking servitude and drifting poverty—secular distinctions all erased in the presence of God.

  In front of the shrine, a small, white, cupola-capped building buttressed against the city wall, a semicircle of men pounded taut-skinned drums with heavy sticks, throwing sweat from their bodies with each beat. The saint’s descendant and disciple, Sheikh Jami Abdullah Rahman, stood in the middle of them, his white turban the only thing visible at this distance, but his huge voice audible over the crowd. He was leading the heaving mass through a series of dhikr, religious chants, some recognizable to me in Arabic, others offered in a foreign tongue.

  Women were clacking wooden blocks together high above their heads as they repeated the dhikr over and over. Stalks of qat were being passed from hand to hand, their leaves washed down with water drunk from a hollowed gourd. Mouths were green, lips spittle caked, sweat flying as people bounced from foot to foot. They were too entranced to take any particular notice of Hussein and me. We leaned left and right with the crowd, and stalks of green leaves were passed into our hands. We hadn’t known qat in Morocco, and it was tough and bitter upon first taste; I spat it out onto the dirt at my feet.

  The qat fueled devotion, allowing people to sustain their energy over the hours and taking them to a point of near ecstasy, where they began hissing through their teeth and their eyes rolled so far back their pupils disappeared and they spun around in blind circles. When they lost their balance, they were pushed gently back upright by the crowd.

  “Like whirling dervishes!” Hussein marveled.

  At some point in the early hours of the morning, the sheikh’s voice suddenly vaporized and people’s movements began to slow, until their feet were leaden, still, and they took deep breaths and began to drift homeward. I looked at Hussein and implored him. Speak to the sheikh. It’s time.

  We had come to Harar to honor Saint Bilal al Habash and seek his blessing and protection, for this is the city that houses the original shrine in a series of shrines in his honor strung like pearls on a necklace across the sands of North Africa. The shrine in Morocco where we lived and studied with the Great Abdal lay farthest west. The Great Abdal had once made this pilgrimage, and like all his students, Hussein and I had been raised to believe in this journey as our duty, and our desire.

  “You will go when God wills it,” the Great Abdal used to say to us.

  But first, Hussein had to fully recover. I never knew exactly what ailed him, only that he had spent some time in a cave in the desert and returned a broken man. When I first arrived at the shrine, I noticed him because he sat apart from all the other Sufis. He hid under his woolen cloak clutching a string of prayer beads and remained still for days at a time.

  But one day, while the Great A
bdal and I were having our morning lessons, something compelled Hussein to look up. His expression was utterly blank. His teeth were black, the whites of his eyes yellow and his hair a mop of greasy black strings. He looked so old to me, though he was probably only in his early twenties. So old and so sad.

  From that day on, Hussein made feeble attempts to move. By the time the Great Abdal and I had reached the twentieth chapter of the Qur’an, several months later, Hussein had managed to push himself upright onto thin, quivering legs. He was a white spider, all limbs poking out of a brown wool sack. He stood staring at his dirty feet, his face contorted with the effort of considering what he should next do. I worried he was going to topple over and asked the Great Abdal if I should help. “Go on, then,” the Great Abdal encouraged.

  Much to my surprise, Hussein let me take his limp, bony hand and place it upon my shoulder. He then slowly raised his leg, but he couldn’t put it down. I suggested he try stepping backward, the way my mother used to do whenever she’d lost something. A key, her cigarette lighter, me.

  Hussein looked up at the sky and considered this, taking a long, deep breath through his nostrils. He leaned his bony weight deeper into my shoulder and raised his leg again. “Steady me,” he said weakly.

  Then a dog barked in the distance, and Hussein’s foot came down and touched the ground behind him. The Great Abdal gasped. So did Hussein. “Subhaanallah,” he said. Glory be to God. “It is easier when I cannot see where my foot will land.”