Silence Is My Mother Tongue

by Sulaiman Addonia

  My adolescence was full of possibilities, of becoming this or that, captive to ambition that changed with each night I spent in a different hut and listened to the hearts of those laying their heads next to mine, their breaths awakening gruesome thoughts as well as sensuous and compassionate ones. I am nothing but the sum of the many thoughts of those companions. Because, unbeknown to them, I became many things: an image of their generosity, a case study for their noble creeds, and a bearer of their most unbearable secrets.

  Now here I am, I thought, awaiting Saba’s trial while sitting among the good and bad, among those who committed their crimes and deeds in silence.

  There was no police station here. Just us and our conscience. The unwritten law of silence, of family honour, of solidarity among the dispossessed and the kinship of inter-family marriages kept the camp plodding ahead on this path of purity, like a stream flowing between rocks and mountains, all the dirt receding at its depth. Even God has been fooled by us, a girl once said to Saba. That girl, who was dying during the labour of a baby conceived in rape, was not even fifteen.

  But since God is of our making, we are only fooling ourselves, Saba replied.

  As I looked around me, I realized why the judge had used my cinema instead of his own hut, which also functioned as a courtroom. The committee of elders had brought out the whole camp to witness the downfall of Saba.

  My large compound was full. Every chair under the tree was taken. Boys perched on the compound’s walls, like eagles, eyeing up the girls nestling on each other’s laps. We have lived like this for a long time now, on top of each other, under each other’s scrutiny. We policed, judged and imprisoned each other. How did Saba escape our gaze?

  Babies crawled under the chairs, their lips still coated in their mother’s milk. The ears of the only cat in the camp perked up. The heat freed odours from bodies crammed together. The clerk paced up and down the gallery with an incense burner. I leaned towards the aroma coiling in the air.

  And when the clerk requested silence, declaring that the elders were about to come, I went around the gallery embracing my fellow rootless people, reaffirming my existence in their arms.

  I hugged the rapist and raised the chin of his neighbour, a boy who still walked with bowed head. I thanked the molester and his wife for putting food in my mouth all those months ago and patted his bastard son and his daughter with whom I had shared a bed. I wondered whether the time was right to tell his daughter that after her father had finished with her, he came to me, and to ask her if she’d heard my muffled screams as I heard hers. No. Nothing like that. She and I shook hands. And I turned to the next silenced guilt. Here I was pleading with the adulterer not to forget to take my powdered milk after the trial to feed her malnourished children since she had poisoned her husband and ascribed his death to God. But in her sleep, I had heard her confess and console herself at the same time: I killed one bastard, but how many has God himself taken away from us?

  All rise! yelled the court clerk.

  The chatter gave way to the scuffle of a crowd getting to its feet. The judge arrived, accompanied by his three assistants.

  My eyes turned away from the judge and peered through the screen, Cinema Silenzioso. Saba’s name echoed around my compound. I wondered if people could see beyond the screen in front of which the clerk had placed a table and four chairs, and into Saba’s compound. Saba was now sitting on her bed under the lime tree, her back to the court. Oil lamps flickered around her compound. She was not attending her own trial.

  The judge stood to his feet and said nothing for a long time. He looked around the audience. His silent stares drew out gasps here and there. He lowered his head and broke down. His sobbing was so uncontrollable that he shook. He slumped in his chair.

  The men making up the committee of elders shut their eyes. After sipping on water fetched by the clerk, the judge rose to his feet again. He drew a deep breath. His authoritative voice returned. Ladies and gentlemen, he said. It pains me to state that we have charged Saba with a grotesque sexual act against a hapless man. Her own disabled brother.

  Silence. And then gasps that followed turned into shrieks when a woman in a white zuria walked to the front of the gallery and wept, throwing her arms in the air. As though she were a conductor, she had forced a familiar outpouring of collective grief. A young boy joined the raucous choir when he lamented, Why us? Why can we not live in peace?

  I looked around me. Some bowed their heads and there were a few who turned side to side as if caught between belief and disbelief. I noticed doubt in the eyes of those who blinked while muttering their disgust at Saba. Grief is beautiful when it is worn by people as a pretence. I felt this even more when a florid woman, with eyes that darted about to make sure she was being watched, fainted, and took down another woman and two men. One of them was the man who had raped me.

  I was like a charcoal iron, smouldering inside. Birds resting on the shrubs inside my cinema flung themselves into the air and flocked above Saba’s thatched roofs, heading towards the rugged hills.

  The breeze blew and Saba’s black dress hanging from the hibiscus tree on my screen shook. Her scent dispersed everywhere. I imagined her sadness too dispersing in the wind.

  Saba abused Hagos. A woman cried as she beat her chest. Saba had abused poor Hagos. Our local doctor, the midwife, went around the court with a sliced onion to revive those who had fallen. The judge was on his feet again: Quiet. Quiet.

  He composed himself. His hands no longer trembled. His back was straight. Mosquitoes buzzed behind him inside Cinema Silenzioso and around Saba’s dress. The thirst for blood spilled outside when a man stood up and called for her head without a trial.

  This trial must go on, the judge said.

  The crowd quietened. His voice dropped. My brothers and sisters, he said. I have thought for weeks about whether it would be preferable to conduct this trial in private given the magnitude of the accusation, but I decided against it. We must establish the facts. Just how did this woman manage to take advantage of a poor man under our own eyes? We must learn lessons so this hideous crime will never happen again.

  Silence.

  The judge proceeded with the hearing. He called on his appointed court stenographer. And on came a thin young man, known around the camp for having a chest as deep as a well in the way he kept other people’s secrets inside him. Yet he was light as a feather as he glided to the front of the gallery and sat on a chair to the right of the judge.

  After registering Saba’s full name, the judge, who insisted on pursuing correct court procedure from his Asmara days, asked the midwife if she knew Saba’s age. The midwife, who had delivered Saba, couldn’t remember. She gave some reference points of political events around the time of Saba’s birth.

  The judge ordered the appointed court stenographer to record her age as almost twenty.

  It was as this point, when the stenographer took out of his bag a flat surface of wooden board used in the church and mosque to write verses from the holy book, that I volunteered to the court my own notebook.

  To record facts about Saba, the stenographer leafed through a half-finished film script I had written about her, which I had intended to shoot when we returned to our free country. In my mind, as in my notebook, the real and imagined Saba coexisted side by side.

  Saba’s nationality, though, took longer to solve. Her mother was Ethiopian, said the midwife. But from what I can remember, I think her father was Eritrean.

  I’ll take your word, said the judge, as if eager to move on.

  No, said a man. His eyes bulged as he added: If her father was Eritrean, then she is Eritrean. A child’s identity follows that of the father.

  The son of a slain fighter leapt to his feet. My mother didn’t fight until she was martyred, he said, so that someone like you could claim that her identity mattered less.

  The discussion raised a sarcastic laugh from a young man at the back of the gallery. He strode to the front waving his UN-provi
ded identification. Look at this, he said. To me, to you, I am Eritrean, but, you see this here, this passport says I have no country. Why is that? Well? Well, why?

  It was clear to me that he’d forgotten the point he was trying to make. So I snatched the ID out of his hand and announced to the public the intention I believed I had read in this man’s smooth face. I think, I said to the gallery, this man is trying to remind us that since our country is still engaged in a war of independence, then, to the outside world, Saba’s nationality is debatable.

  Why? asked the man again.

  I could hear muffled laughter coming from some in the audience.

  I returned to my seat and looked at my cinema screen. Saba’s compound was clear to see. She sat on her bed, a book in her hand. She was wearing her nightgown now. I had to look twice. I know about the peril of my cinema: sometimes when I recalled memories, they became so real, so alive on my screen. And I was full of memories of Saba.

  Soon after, the court’s proceedings were hindered once again, this time due to the lack of evidence regarding Saba’s religion. Unconvinced by the varied accounts about her faith, that her father might have been a Muslim and her mother a Christian, the judge left a blank space. Religion unknown, said the judge to the stenographer.

  A man stood up and wondered aloud: How is it that Saba has lived among us for all these years and yet we know so little about her?

  The judge, who, in the absence of police authority in the camp, also had to act as an investigator, called the main witness.

  In the far distance behind him Saba was still reading, and her compound basked in the yellow light of the oil lamps she had lined up against one of the walls.

  The midwife sat on the witness chair. She took her oath and mumbled some prayers. The sorrow on her face vanished as she started her testimony.

  I have been suspecting something was going on between Saba, may she be cursed, and Hagos since the afternoon, a few months after our arrival at the camp, when I entered their hut and found them lying together on a blanket. May the Lord forgive me for repeating this in front of you, Your Honour, but I discovered then that they had been sharing the same blanket ever since we arrived in the camp. I had to restrain myself from slapping that shameless girl. But no amount of beating was going to change her. I wished her mother had listened to me and had left her back home instead of paying so much money to bring her to this camp. You will never have peace with that girl, I had told her mother. I beg you, dear judge, to give her a severe punishment.

  Please continue with your testimony and leave the sentencing to us, the judge said.

  The midwife nodded. But she then turned towards us and, standing up, she wagged her finger as she addressed the fathers in the gallery. Be extra vigilant and extra forceful with your daughters. We are in a camp but a father is a girl’s land and a girl would never be exiled from her culture and traditions with her father around.

  Please could you sit down and continue, the judge said, shuffling in his chair.

  As you wish, our judge, said the midwife. Anyway, I gave their mother my own blanket so her son would sleep away from that girl. I also know now why, when the businessman proposed to Saba, she immediately agreed without any of the trouble I had expected. I will never marry until I finish my studies, she used to tell her mother regularly. But when I brought the marriage proposal to her, she didn’t even shed a single tear. All she asked in return, and in fact insisted on, was that her brother move in with them. It wasn’t as if she was moving to a different village. But the kind-hearted and good-natured businessman agreed.

  Yet, I was still blinded. How can I or anyone here accept that such a thing can take place in our community? I continued to hope it was all a misunderstanding. But my suspicions were heightened when, immediately after the marriage, Saba barred anyone from entering the compound. Even her own mother.

  All these facts built up inside me, confusing me, but I never shared them with anyone. Except with the Lord. Then, a few months ago, their relationship was finally confirmed to me beyond doubt when Hagos was bitten by a snake in the middle of the night and the businessman came to seek my help. It had to take a near-death experience for them to open the gate of their compound to an outsider, and I never turn down a person in need. So I went, and to my horror, I found Hagos’s hut full of women’s clothes. Pants and bras in his bed. For all this time, Saba lived in his hut, and must have shared the bed with him.

  The midwife finished and looked up, mumbling prayers.

  The silence in the court continued.

  I had watched Saba through the screen for so long, and now tried to remember if I had seen anything that aroused my suspicion. The judge called the next witness. He was known as the circumcised young man, even if we all are, because he was one of the few left with permanent disfigurement after the midwife cut him.

  The young man with dishevelled hair, his shirt covered with straw and wet mud, waddled to the witness chair. I was convinced the judge had meticulously prepared his case to present Saba as a sexual predator, a woman who found satisfaction for her perversity in the extreme situation of human struggle. I had prayed then that he would not call on me to testify again. This was a man of law who learnt his trade at the hands of the British. A surprise, I assumed, lay around the corner.

  The circumcised boy mumbled something no one could understand. For a street boy, he was shy. But then again, those who have lost everything seem most reluctant of letting go of what’s inside them. The boy spoke in whispers, head bowed down. His voice opened up when he sat in the witness chair next to the judge, as if the responsibility and the attention of all the eyes focused on him freed his dying spirit.

  Saba was his first lover, he said, and it was true you never forget the one who gave you your first orgasm.

  The elders muttered their disapproval to the judge, but the man of law overruled their objection and instructed the young man to continue.

  Sir, all I could remember after the midwife had done her job and washed the blood off the razor was Saba’s face in the window. Then I fainted. It took me a few days after my circumcision to be able to stagger out of my bed, and the person who steadied me up as my knees buckled was Saba.

  Stay in bed, she said to me.

  I froze when I saw her. It was as if she had come to me in a dream. I touched her hand, felt her warmth. Where is my mother?

  I told her to take a rest, Saba said. I am here now.

  I didn’t know you and my mother knew each other.

  Saba smiled: We do now.

  I want to get up, I said.

  Saba held my arm and I could see how my hesitant steps, slow and agonizing like those of an old man, made her twitch, as if it was she who was in pain.

  After faltering for a while, I said I wanted to take a piss. I had expected her to find a man to carry me to the open toilet, but instead she brought a large empty pot lying by the door and placed it at the centre of the hut. And after helping me to hold on to the pole, she turned to leave. Wait, Saba. Can you help me with my robe? I can’t bend.

  I tensed my jaw, reclining my head backwards, biting my lips. My knees wobbled. Saba, I can’t understand why my mother would need to circumcise me in this place.

  Traditions go with us where we go, Saba said, as she raised the hem of my wide robe, red patches at its front. She didn’t turn her face away as I expected her to. I shuffled and leaned my shoulder against hers. Long minutes passed and silence continued in the hut. Then, finally, I heard a drip on the tin. I squealed. And fell quiet again.

  A warm breeze seeped inside the hut through the window. Her fluttering hair tickled my neck. Saba, please, lift my robe higher, you are hurting me.

  I pushed once more. A few minutes passed and there was still nothing. I cried.

  Don’t worry, Saba said, wiping my eyes. I will help you.

  It was like putting my burnt hand in cool water, like taking an aspirin. I grunted the moment she placed my wounded penis in her palm. The pain tur
ned into a strange sensation the moment she pressed it. I couldn’t stop crying. Then, in her blood-soaked hand, I noticed a trickle of white. Saba was my first love.

  The judge stood up and shouted at the top of his voice to quell the commotion in the audience of the court. What kind of court is this where street boys’ words are given credence?

  Quiet. Quiet! The judge finally managed to stem the noise when he threatened to expel the whole crowd and continue the hearing in private.

  Silence.

  Mr Jamal, the judge called.

  It was my turn to give testimony. The witness chair felt warm and sent a tingling sensation up my spine. I crossed my legs. I am ready, I said.

  Very well, let’s get to it then, the judge said. Please tell us everything you know about Saba. And let me remind you: anything you say will help us. We are interested in justice.

  Let me start at the beginning, I said.

  I first saw Saba at the river on our first evening in the camp when she jumped in the water after her brother to save a jerrycan that had been tugged from a woman’s hand by the current. Job done, the brother and sister returned to their hut drenched, Saba carrying a bucket full of water on her head. I stood watching them, motionless and soaked through. Though I had hesitated to dive in the river to save Saba, I had lost my balance and fallen into the water.

  I rushed back to the camp when I remembered the thick stack of birr notes I had hidden in a pocket sewn inside my underpants the night before fleeing home. I would have to spread the notes all over the floor of my hut to dry them. When I arrived back at the camp, I realized I didn’t know where my hut was. Others returning from the river had their family members posted by their huts. Names were called out around me. But I had arrived at the camp alone. And I didn’t leave a sign to enable me to identify my hut from the rest. I didn’t even leave anything inside to reserve it as my own.

  I opened one hut on my left and found at least five people lying on the floor close to each other, with white gabis covering their bodies. I jumped back, thinking death had already struck. But once I heard their deep breathing, I shut the door and tried the one next to it. This time, I avoided storming in. Instead, I pushed the door ajar and peered inside. An old man sat next to a woman and stared at the door with a watery secretion in his eyes. Have I woken you, Aboi? I asked.