Silence Is My Mother Tongue

by Sulaiman Addonia

  SILENCE IS MY MOTHER TONGUE

  Also by Sulaiman Addonia

  The Consequences of Love

  SILENCE IS MY MOTHER TONGUE

  A Novel

  SULAIMAN ADDONIA

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2018 by Sulaiman Addonia

  Published by arrangement with the Indigo Press, London.

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organisations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-64445-033-8

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-129-8

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2020

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019956895

  Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

  Cover images: iStock

  To the girls – my playmates in our refugee camp: we had no toys but only our imagination to play with. Our playfulness was our painkiller in that place of scarcity. I thought of you, and the childhood friends we saw buried, whenever I came close to giving up.

  This book is for you.

  We know absolutely nothing about the appearance of the Celestial Stag (maybe because nobody has ever had a good look at one), but we know that these tragic animals live underground in mines and desire nothing more than to reach the light of day.

  ‘The Celestial Stag’, from The Book of Imaginary Beings

  Jorge Luis Borges

  THE TRIAL

  Cinema Silenzioso

  The night Saba’s trial was announced by the camp’s court clerk, I was sitting on a stool in front of my cinema screen. Cinema Silenzioso.

  Dusk fell over the thatched roofs. A full moon appeared over the camp I viewed through my screen. Light like thick blue ink splotched on the walls and between the alleys, wood-burning stoves glowed red.

  I saw the clerk riding his donkey in the dusty narrow streets. His silhouette skittered among the huts.

  You are requested to attend the trial of Saba, the clerk declared through his megaphone. The courtroom is moving to the cinema compound.

  On hearing her name I leapt to my feet. The sketch of Saba I was holding dangled above the open furnace next to me. The charcoal strokes defining her nipples glistening in the light of the smouldering fire. I looked at Saba’s compound appearing through the screen like a picture. She was nowhere to be seen. Her lime tree stood frozen against the clay colours of the surrounding huts. Grasshoppers hung off the slant of sugarcane leaves in front of her hut’s window.

  When I first built my cinema inside my compound, I was inspired by the memory of the forty-five round lights on the facade of the Italian Cinema Impero in Asmara, where I worked before I fled to the camp. I made my cinema screen from one large white sheet I ironed and tied to two wooden poles embedded in the ground, with a big square cut out in the middle. I placed it near the crest of the hill on top of which my compound was located. Many thought I had done so to let the full light of the stars and the moon cascade over the performers on the open screen, the camp behind them existing in isolation. Like a mural, an artifice of a bygone era.

  The real reason, though, was different. From the hilltop, looking through the screen when the light was right, you could see into Saba’s compound, fenced on three sides, letting the hill on which the cinema stood act as the fourth fence. I could watch her all the time, her world a part of mine.

  The trouble was that I, like many, had bought into the illusion that the sheet was an actual screen and that everything inside it was a real film – scene after scene made in a faraway place. Illusion nested in my life with each day passing in front of my cinema. And the two worlds, the real one in which Saba lived, and the virtual one of the film I watched, where all is not what it seems, existed in harmony.

  I saw her cooking, reading, ironing, working, teaching adults to read and write, but I also watched her do what people do out of each other’s sight. And as I talk to you now, a random selection of images of her replays in my mind. There was that evening she spent masturbating behind the latrine, as her brother cooked doro wot stew for her and her husband.

  But that scene is blurred by another one. There she sat on her heels in front of the large curved stone placed on the ground, and, as she crushed the grain on the big stone, her bottom rose off her heels, and the hem of her black dress fluttered as she leaned her shoulders forward to grind the grains by moving smaller stones backward and forward over them. Her burnt thighs were glowing like candles, her history of wounds concealed by the cloud of white flour coiled in front of her and into which her head entered and exited, her hair turned white. Saba’s flour-dusted face exists in my mind next to her made-up face on the night of her wedding, when she sat next to her middle-aged husband wearing a dress once owned by a dead woman. Everything is recycled in our camp, happiness as well as despair.

  And I keep returning to her wedding night. I still shiver at the thought of her brother tiptoeing his way to the marital bedroom long after the music had died and the guests had departed to leave the bride and groom to consummate their marriage. How he twisted as he placed an ear to the wall.

  Now, I was thinking about Saba, her crime, her impending trial, when she exited her hut and appeared on the screen in her black dress, her other skin. Sitting back on my stool, I returned to watching my cinema and Saba through it. She perched on her bed under her lime tree, a book in hand. The oil lamp by her bedside flickered. Saba always slept outside in the open air, and I would watch her every night as the moon and stars cascaded over her taut skin.

  I assumed she would read her book now. She’d been rereading Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog, which the English coordinator had left in our camp with his British newspaper, as if by reading it over and over again she would have an equally happy ending to her own love story. But whom did she love?

  The screen of my cinema quivered. Saba turned on her radio. Music blurted out into the silent evening. And moments later, as I placed a pot of milk on the open furnace, I heard footsteps. When I raised my head, I saw her walking up the hill towards me, gliding like a ghost among the shrubs and cactuses. As I leaned forward, I nudged the open furnace.

  Saba, in her black dress and ankle-strap sandals, stood next to the multicoloured chair in front of me, a bag in her hand. She looked like a character escaped from an Italian film. A figment of my imagination? I could see her though. Smell the perfume of her body.

  She walked away from the screen and hung her black dress over the low branch of a hibiscus tree near the edge of the hill. She ret
urned to the screen naked and sat on the multicoloured plastic chair, the same chair on which performers sat to tell stories, to recall life in our homeland before the war, before our exile. In the cinema, I often pleaded with performers that they were free to say and do what they wanted. But people remained bound by their exiled condition. I knew I didn’t need to remind Saba of this.

  Ants climbed her toes, pedicured by Hagos the evening before.

  Saba retrieved a pair of scissors from her bag and began cutting away at her hair. The white-silver glow of the bright sky poured onto the screen. As the long strands of her black hair fell on the floor, she stared at me through her dense eyelashes. The whites of her eyes were disturbingly clear.

  The wind stirred. Sparks flared up in all directions. The milk in the pot boiled up, turning into a fluffy dome of white spilling over, putting out the flame.

  Saba stretched her arm through the gap in the screen and took the cigarette I had lit in the open furnace before her arrival. I wished I could hold her hand for just a moment, but to do so would mean calling into question all that I had believed until then. This is a cinema in a refugee camp, I told myself. Saba is an actor in a film made in a foreign land.

  She puffed out cigarette smoke. Her face vanished in the cloud. Saba has a history of disappearance, and reappearance. And for a moment no one existed on the screen. Not even the camp. Saba was a lie, this camp an illusion. But the fumes of neglect rose from the camp behind her, rooting me to reality. The smell of damp yellow thatches, of dung-filled mud walls, of the open field we all shared as a toilet where I had encountered Saba so many times.

  An eagle landed on the hibiscus tree inside my cinema, opening its beak as if Saba’s black dress was laced with bloodied memories, her flesh the thread holding this fabric together.

  The moon disappeared behind the clouds. Saba vanished in this momentary darkness, her face resurfacing as she drew on her cigarette. But darkness always returned in this place. Lamps ran out of oil. Batteries expired. Half our lives were spent in darkness.

  Talk, I urged Saba. Please say something.

  And she did, after the eagle flew away. I used to believe, she said. I believed that, although people flee their homeland, leave their belongings behind, our traditions stay glued to our core. They escape with us to wherever we go.

  She paused and raised her eyes to the sky.

  What was she trying to tell me? What was she trying to prepare me for? Did this have anything to do with the trial?

  A gust of wind whipped life back into the hissing charcoals. Sparks hit the side of my face. Tears welled up in my eyes. It was I who encouraged members of the audience to hold no fear when they entered my screen. Instead of retelling their tragic stories in the camp, I urged them to recount their dreams so that they turned into fantasy in this remote place. Once they were within the confines of my cinema, they were not refugees bound by their exile; instead, they could say or do whatever they wanted. Because, I told them again and again, you are characters in a film made in a free place somewhere far away.

  And some believed it. I remember the boy who told of his fantasy about his uncle’s wife. His brothers dragged him out of the screen through the hole in the sheet and beat him unconscious. Or the girl who was to be married off by her parents, but who became captivated by the illusion of my cinema, declaring the name of her true love the moment she stepped inside. Her parents disowned her.

  And now my innovation had infected Saba too. I wasn’t ready to hear the truth. I picked up a chunk of charcoal and stood up ready to hurl it at the sheet. Burn down my cinema for good and with it my fantasy, and Saba, and all the fragmented scenes of her I had collected and woven together. The scenes through which I had survived. My life was a mirage because Saba was a mirage.

  Turn off the lamp, she said.

  I dropped the ball of fire. And when I did as she asked, she faded. But her purple thighs and the chair under her dark body shimmered in the moonlight. Half of her turned into a sitting silhouette, as if she was the negative of a picture, the real person behind the image being somewhere else.

  Whenever she inhaled on the cigarette, her features emerged inch by inch, redrawn out of darkness, in the way she wanted, as if she were ready to replace with her own words all the stories told about her.

  But then came the knocks I had been dreading. Loud and persistent.

  Jamal, we know you are in there.

  I could hear the court clerk shouting through the door.

  Jamal, open the door at once. Are you talking to yourself again?

  I slipped my hands through the screen, touched Saba’s purple thighs, and drew my breath from the violence printed on her skin, as if confronting her wounds was the only way to confirm her existence, and challenge her invisibility in my mind.

  Jamal, open the door now before I break it, the clerk said.

  Saba zoomed out of the cinema screen. I followed the tip of her cigarette as she strode to the hill. The clouds scattered.

  Her trial began under a bright sky.

  And as soon as I opened the gate to my cinema, the clerk stepped in, followed by droves of people.

  Girls carrying firewood trudged in line. The firewood on their backs squeaked. Behind them, old men in turbans and with gabis swathed around their blazers stopped, blocking the entry. They reminisced about Asmara. Since I arrived here, and every time I close my eyes, said the eldest among them, I see Mussolini in the central boulevard he named after himself.

  They held hands and moved forward together, facing the memories in unison. Buonasera, Jamal, they greeted me as they sat in the front row. A herder showed up while still shaking her goatskin in which she churned milk into tesmi. The smell of butter receded when a sex worker – face covered in black seed oil perfumed with cinnamon – appeared in the doorway.

  Asmarino boys entered my compound with cardigans tied around their necks, still holding their playing cards. The joker among them mimed an explosion with his hands as women balancing jerrycans full of river water on their heads arrived through the gate. The women, though, smiled, threw their hips to the side, arms akimbo. Their chattering stopped when an eighty-something-year-old woman, whose daughter and granddaughter had been martyred at the front fighting for our country’s independence, arrived on her donkey. The animal brayed when the grandmother dismounted from its back.

  I stood and gave up my chair to this woman whose womb had once upon a time sheltered lionesses. Saba is free, she said, squeezing my hand. Saba is free. A woman is free before her country is liberated.

  I kissed her forehead.

  The judge and the elders had yet to arrive. One woman lamented the peculiarity of putting each other through trial, as if life in the camp wasn’t doing this already.

  The crowd soon laughed again though, when our camp’s barber asked me if I had finally lost my virginity to the uncircumcised woman working at the aid centre, whom I helped translate English to Tigrinya and Arabic. I wanted to bring a quick conclusion to what would no doubt be a long discussion by revealing I had lost my virginity instead to an uncircumcised man. I said no such thing, though. Instead, I smiled and kept the mask of pretence going.

  My silence intensified the curiosity. Eyes continued to probe the disguise over my face. I firmed my posture to affirm my manhood, countering the femininity that infected my bones like ants digging holes in the ground. Somehow, I collected my fragmented body into one, and stood straight as a doum palm tree.

  The judge will arrive soon, said the clerk.

  And, as if to kill time while waiting for the trial to begin, a man handed me and the son of our Sufi imam a sword each. Time, the saying goes, is like a sword: if you don’t cut it, it cuts you.

  The mystic and I were requested to jump closer to the divine, closer to exhilaration, and return to this ground bearing his love. The imam’s son and I jumped, elevating ourselves high above the compound, the camp, and glided towards the berry-coloured sky, our blades clashing mid-air, and togeth
er we tapped our weapons into the monotonous sky until it bled. Dusk arrived. Blood filled the curves of the thatched roofs.

  My friend and I fell back to the ground giggling. We hugged, our swords behind the other’s back. In this isolated, neglected place, it’s your friend you must watch out for, Saba had once said to me.

  Recalling her words, I dug the heel of my hand into my friend’s shoulder blade, just as he did mine. We marked each other’s presence in the other’s memory and, laughing, we returned to our seats.

  But where is the judge? I asked, hoping to put an end to this charade once and for all. Not that I had had enough of my fellow refugees. On the contrary. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it was their merciful solidarity that kept me alive during the first weeks and months of life in the camp. Some families allowed me to share their children’s beds and their few spare items of clothing, so that at night both their children and I slept naked as our clothes dried outside. Our limbs intertwined, sweat glued us together.

  And for a long time, before I had inherited my hut from a man who had drowned in the river, I slept in different huts and laid my head on the same pillow as a poet, a rapist, a widow, an adulterer, a fantasist and compulsive liar, an imam, a homosexual, a priest, a closet transvestite, a man who molested his son, a mother who beat her children until her rage was engraved on their skins, and for a while, I dwelt with a young widow who spent her nights parked on the ground of her hut on all fours, surrendering her naked body to the ghost of her deceased husband, so I went to bed with the smell of her yearning sex filling my lungs.

  These people’s dreams, their fears and crimes, became mine. I lived wondering whether I would end up a dreamer, a wanderer between countries and lovers, or someone who would stalk a victim through dark alleyways, or whether I would be a man of words, or even be transformed by the might of the divine into a woman like Saba whose moonlight-flooded curves I had pictured as my own.