by Camilla Gibb
He released my finger from his mouth and leaned into me, his mouth at my neck. His lips searched my face, grazed my cheek, my eyebrows, my forehead as if he was touching the raised letters of an old gravestone, trying to read the story of a life from its beginning. He wrote the future onto my face with his lips.
“I hear that you silenced the sheikh,” he whispered between kisses.
“That wasn’t my intention.”
“No Harari girl would ever have been so bold.”
“I was angry.”
“You fight for what you believe in. That is something beautiful and rare.”
obstacles in the path of righteousness
The residue of guilt coated my skin like egg white. One false expression and I feared the sheen would crack. I prayed for forgiveness every Thursday night. The sheikh’s rejection of me and my students had not deterred me from joining the heaving crowd that gathered around the squat shrine once a week to celebrate the saint and his miracles.
I bounced from my left foot to my right, whispering prayers. I asked Bilal al Habash to pay special attention to Bortucan, whose mind was not right, to ensure the Great Abdal was safe in heaven, to bring good fortune to Nouria, to recognize Hussein’s efforts, to help Aziz pass his exams, to forgive me my flirtation with the devil. I never mentioned my parents or Muhammed Bruce in my prayers because I feared they had gone to that other place, a burning pit Bilal al Habash would never have occasion to visit.
Hussein stood tall beside Sheikh Jami at the front of the crowd as the sheikh led us through the dhikr. I lingered at the back, clapping and dancing and chewing qat like everybody else. Well, almost like everyone else. Part of me, admittedly, could no longer surrender on these occasions and resisted mirqana. While everybody else’s mind loosened and expanded, my focus seemed to telescope to the singular image of a tall and handsome boyish man with a compelling bittersweet smile and a soft voice that contradicted his size.
It was not worship of him, for that would be a crime, the greatest crime a Muslim can commit: idolatry. We who believed in saints were sometimes accused of such a thing. Not everyone condoned our practices; many of the clerics in the cities dismissed our beliefs and rituals. They believed the roots of our devotion lay in the pagan practices that existed here before Islam rolled like a wave over our part of Africa in the ninth century. They called this ignorance, backwardness, African.
Beyond the critics were those who condemned, those who said we were engaged in practices hostile to Islam, saw our beliefs as heretical, our actions as criminal, and would have us imprisoned, even killed. In Saudi Arabia beliefs like ours were seen as a deadly plague. Hararis making the pilgrimage to Mecca had to suppress the names of the saints on their lips, but as soon as they returned home, they headed straight to the shrine of Bilal al Habash to secure his blessing for having fulfilled this pillar of faith.
We felt safe here, under the protection of more than three hundred saints, Bilal supreme among them, in a country with an emperor who was said to love his Muslim subjects as much as his Christian.
But then I had also heard Aziz say that the emperor feared his Ethiopia was a lonely Christian island floating in a Muslim sea. He needn’t have worried. Unlike Morocco, we did not have brotherhoods here, nor proselytizing disciples, simply a proliferation of local saints, their shrines cared for and memory kept alive by their descendants and the people under their care.
Our practices were gentle, diffuse, apolitical.
While I did my best to lose myself in the sway of the Thursday-night crowd, I imagined Aziz in his mother’s compound, wearing a sarong knotted at the waist, his hospital clothes hanging on a nail in the wall, making pencil marks by candlelight in the margins of a textbook. Closing the book and repeating entire paragraphs in English about the central nervous system.
I was glad to have the excuse of taking Nouria’s girls home and putting them to bed. This left their mother free to remain at the shrine and twist and turn and hiss and bounce into the dawn of the next day. And it left me alone, my susceptible soul leading me to imagine the kisses in the dark over and over, to carry the watery sensation of them with me into the early morning. It was not worship. It was more that distraction Hussein had always warned about: earthly love.
terms of endearment
I sat cross-legged on a straw mat in the courtyard, taking advantage of the last light of the day. I was working on my new project, a Harari-English dictionary, an endeavor people encouraged because Emperor Haile Selassie had long been preaching the virtues of learning English, reforming the education system to reflect this and insisting it was the way to go forward as a nation.
Islam teaches us that education is the means to enlightenment, and that discipline is the only way to get there. But while Haile Selassie’s educational reforms might have been celebrated, they appeared to benefit very few. Except for the richest people in the cities, no one could spare their child for an hour, let alone half a day for school. The Hararis were that exception, ensuring all their children, girls included, got some education—at a minimum, in Qur’an.
I took great pleasure in working on the dictionary, though I occasionally annoyed people with my questions. “Precocious,” my mother used to say. “Curious Lilly-George,” my father called me, “monkey.” He too had loved language. He gave me a notebook when I was six, and it was soon after that that I began collecting words. Arabic words and later Harari, and even the occasional English word, usually to do with medicine or politics.
“Tell me the name of every plant you know,” I asked Gishta. “Tell me every single word you can think of that has to do with the sky,” I asked Nouria.
Sometimes they indulged me; other times they said they were too busy for my games. They liked it least of all when I asked about abstract entities—“I don’t know, Lilly. How would I know? Happy, sad, there is no in-between”—and obscure technical terms—“I’m not a farmer, Lilly. I don’t know what they call that thing. Why does it matter? It’s only a peasant’s word, after all.”
We were surrounded by the debris of another bercha, but instead of whispering and drawing close in the dark as we usually did after everyone left, Aziz rose and threw open the shutters. He had something he wanted to show me: a new medical textbook he had just picked up from the post office in Dire Dawa.
I admired its hard, shiny white cover and the color photographs of internal organs on its slippery pages.
“Do you know why I am showing you this?” he asked, looking over my shoulder as I flipped through its lurid pages. “Because this is the last one I need to study.”
“And then you’ll be ready to write your exams,” I said, realizing the significance.
“In six months’ time, at the end of August, that is when they are scheduling the next exams. I will have to go to Cairo to write them.”
I wasn’t sure how far away that was, but however far, it was away. “For how long?”
“I will probably only stay for one week. But there is the journey to Addis and back, so maybe I will be gone for two. Have you ever been on a plane?” he asked.
“Yes. A long time ago.”
“I have always wanted to go on a plane,” he said.
“What happens after you write the exams?”
“I wait for the results. I have to get top marks to be awarded a scholarship. I can’t afford the tuition otherwise. I’ve been saving money, but you know, this is Ethiopia, where even the doctors are poor.”
“Well, I know you’ll get the scholarship.”
“Insha’Allah,” said Aziz. “And if I do? You know this means I will be in Cairo for four years.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Then I will return and serve the community. I want to develop expertise that we don’t have here. Internal medicine—especially for children.”
He will be able to save a generation of children, I thought. He’ll rescue children like Bortucan from the dirt.
“Insha’Allah, we will have ber
chas together again after that. That is, if you are still here.”
Still here? “This is my home, Aziz.”
“You won’t return someday to Morocco?”
“Not now,” I said. Not since the Great Abdal died. Not since I started teaching the children. Not since knowing you.
“But then, of course, berchas will not exactly be possible because your husband will object.”
“My husband?”
“The ladies will find a husband for you,” he said. “Perhaps they have done so already. It is what ladies do.”
Gishta had come to refer to me using favored terms of endearment: kuday, kulayay, “my liver,” “my kidney.” “If only you were circumcised,” she lamented. “You would be almost perfect. Are you quite sure you don’t want to be circumcised? It’s never too late.”
“Quite sure,” I insisted.
“Well, maybe your gums . . .”
“I told you I wasn’t having that done.”
“Just like a teenager,” she sighed. “So stubborn. So hot blooded.”
“It is a mother’s job to extinguish the flames,” Gishta would warn Nouria. But Nouria had never treated me like a parent. I tried to dampen the fire that Gishta rightfully suspected burned inside, but Aziz invariably rose from the ashes, his lips moving, his conversation endless, his words making me feel heavy and slow as if there would never be enough time before he left for Cairo to finish what we had to say.
Since the first day that Aziz had held my hand, I’d been discovering that nothing was quite as it first appeared. But then, this is where we begin in every new world: first we read the manual. We practice the laws as they are laid out, and it is only when we become literate through living them that we find the contradictions, the subtext, the spaces in between. There were signs everywhere: evidence of a current flowing beneath the strict rules of engagement that governed the relationships between men and women. Like the placement of the water jug in the small niche to the right of the main doors inside Gishta’s house. “Normally, the jug sits on the floor,” Gishta explained, “but if it appears in the niche, then it is my turn.”
This meant that most Tuesdays Gishta sent her two children over to her co-wife Zehtahoun’s house after the last call to prayer, leaving her alone to line her eyes with kohl, anoint her hair and body with oils and perfume and dress in a sheer diri, a Somali nightdress, pulled over her bulging breasts and plump thighs.
“He comes to surprise me in the night” was how Gishta described it. I wanted to press her for details, but I knew my curiosity would alarm her. I was meant to be passive. To wait until I was chosen by a suitor—a Harari suitor, my passport to full acceptance within the community, a man who would marry me, then teach me.
If she knew that I had kissed Aziz. That I craved being in the dark with this man, that I daydreamed him into the pauses between sentences. That I would wait four years for his return. That I was compromising the one thing, the only thing I had always believed mattered, to be near him.
People were not supposed to marry for love; they were supposed to marry to secure alliances between families: for lineage, for wealth, for status. And darkness like Aziz’s offered none of those things. Hararis turned away from the dark even when it ran in their own blood: they preferred to look east, not to Africa, for their origins. They preferred to think of Arabs—the Prophet and his companions, the saints—as their ancestors, rather than slaves. It was a fiction that was complicated by dark skin.
I was meant to wait for a suitor, but I was nineteen now. The wait was not meant to last too long.
“Life is short in Africa,” Gishta often said, “too short to waste time. You don’t want to stay on the tree for too long, Lilly. Eventually you will lose your grip, drop to the ground, splatter, go rotten. No one wants to eat the fruit that has fallen—that is for the beggars and the birds. They will only want to step on you.”
part five
london, england
1987-1988
reunion
Ten women have been cooking in ten flats all day in anticipation of Yusuf’s arrival, each woman behaving as if it is her own husband coming home. Those who have already been reunited with their husbands want to share their good fortune, those who have yet to hear anything fantasize that this reunion is their own, and those who know their husbands have been killed live vicariously for a night, while I battle envy and berate myself for selfishness.
Amina, a giant duba, waddles away, off to collect her husband at Heathrow, while I supervise the rest of the preparations. We arrange the food on the table, and the Oromo brothers from down the hall bring roses, the scentless variety wrapped in cellophane that come from a petrol station, and carry a bucket of beer that’s been fermenting for weeks in their loo. It is thick and cloudy, sweet and yellow: honey rich, Ethiopian-style. We stick a cassette into the tape deck and a warped chorus of faraway voices fills the room.
Soon enough, Yusuf is waving his hand and bowing his head at the ululating crowd standing before him who shower him and Amina with rose petals and words of welcome. Amina waves to Sitta and Ahmed, who are both lurking on the periphery. “Come and greet Baba.”
Sitta sticks her thumb in her mouth. I take her by the other hand and suggest we go and get the picture she has drawn for her father at school that day. She shakes her head and stares at the small bearded man with the scar on his cheek.
Ahmed strides forth wearing a suit he’ll be able to wear for the next three years. He breaks into an unabashed grin.
“Masha’Allah,” his father rumbles. “Such a big boy.” Yusuf pulls his son awkwardly onto his stomach.
One woman, then another bursts into song. Attention gradually shifts away from Ahmed and Yusuf toward the table of food. I introduce Sitta to her father.
“Sitta?” Yusuf whispers gently, squatting on the floor so that they are eye level. “Beautiful Sitta?”
She nods, thumb still in her mouth. She pulls it out just long enough to ask: “Did you bring me a present?”
Yusuf smiles sympathetically and looks knowingly at me. How simple it can be. To let Sitta be Sitta, an English girl.
Yusuf moves through the room, chatting quietly, nursing a heavy glass of beer. I can tell he is trying to keep his mood light for his family’s sake, but he is preoccupied, not entirely present. Insomnia and depression have been his devoted companions for the last seven years, taking the place of his wife and son after they were separated in the refugee camp at Thika, outside Nairobi.
There were thousands in the camp, housed in tents and buildings, lining up for food, sharing a communal well. There were Ugandans and Sudanese, Eritreans and Ethiopians. Men separated from women and children, families split apart. Yusuf’s roommates, three Amharas, were disgusted by the presence of an Oromo among them. They made trouble for him right away, reporting him to the camp manager, an officer with the Kenyan security forces. They said he wasn’t a genuine refugee but a member of an Oromo nationalist movement, an agitator communicating with other Oromo in the camp in order to plan their attack on the Dergue, Mengistu’s government, from bases in Kenya.
Yusuf was arrested by the Kenyan police, handed over to Mengistu’s agents and taken by helicopter to Addis, where he was jailed and tortured for years. He had no idea his wife was pregnant with Sitta when he was spirited away. Because she wasn’t. This is the secret Amina has kept from him and only recently confided in me.
After Yusuf was taken they began interrogating all the Oromo in the camp. Amina, as the wife of an alleged Oromo agitator, was immediately regarded with suspicion. How could she convince them of her innocence? The only way to protect her son was to yield to their demands. She lay down, spread her legs and let the first officer charge into her. The second officer, dismissing her as a prostitute because she was not infibulated, and demanding a tighter hole, heaved himself into her anus.
She was ruptured, she was pregnant, she was free. A man in a police uniform scares her far more than some drunken neo-Nazi bi
got on a tear.
The first officer packed Amina and her son into his vehicle and drove them to the airport, where he threw them out onto the dirt. “See if the farenjis will have anything to do with a Galla whore,” he spat before careening off.
She picked up her son from the cloud of dust and ran. She’d had the temerity to steal the officer’s wallet, stuffed with American dollars and Ethiopian birr he’d stripped off refugees in the camp—stealing their savings and destroying all means of escape—enough to feed and keep her and Ahmed sheltered in the months it took to secure the forged documents she needed to get them on a plane.
“He must have been afraid that I, this dirty Galla, would give birth to someone who looked like him,” she told me. “But it was the end of Africa for me, in any case,” she said, wiping her hands across the Formica table as if to obliterate the past. “I would have died and gone to hell rather than stay.”
And then came Sitta, with that mole like a continent stamped on her cheek. And the fact that Amina chose to see that mark as Africa.
It will get easier. It does, eventually” is all I can think of to say to Yusuf as I make my way to the kitchen, though I wonder as soon as I say it if it would be kinder to say nothing. I’m not even sure I believe it. It’s more that the emphasis eventually shifts.
When the celebration goes quiet and the kids reluctantly go to bed, Amina and I wash up, while Yusuf sits cross-legged on the floor with the holy book open in front of him, tears streaming down his face. Amina and I pretend not to notice, but it is agonizing to bear witness to the moment when the dams in a man’s river collapse. One of the cruelties Yusuf endured in prison was lack of access to the Qur’an. The only thing that is certain is the Qur’an. Precise and uncompromising—exactly as it was delivered to the Prophet Muhammed as he sat in a cave and received the words of God through the angel Gabriel more than thirteen hundred years ago.
