There are two conditions, she said, her voice low, barely able to breathe. She turned her head away from him.
He nodded without smiling. Say them then.
A light wind had risen and Saba heard it rustle through the field. First, Saba said, you can’t have my vagina. Because I will never let a man I don’t love inside me that way.
It was when Saba revealed the second, that Zahra would leave with them so she could be treated in a village for the wounds Tedros had inflicted upon her, that Hajj Ali insisted on a new deal.
Saba hadn’t seen the nomad’s hunger for Hagos coming. His desire for her brother was as invisible as Hagos was to the people in the camp.
To smuggle two out of a camp is high risk, Hajj Ali said. I can only do it if I get Hagos as well as you.
Of course not, Saba said to Hajj Ali. It’s only me or nothing.
Then I have to go, he said. We will see each other in the camp for the rest of our lives now that you will be staying. My greetings to your husband.
Hajj Ali, wait. Please understand, Zahra needs a doctor urgently or she will die. Please.
It was the morning after Tedros had fled the camp on foot, leaving Zahra behind fighting for her life. Saba and Hagos left their hut for a walk. Clouds obscured the morning sun. They climbed the hill, the same hill on which they had sat on that first morning in the camp. Flowers tickled Saba’s feet. Hot wind blew. Saba studied the profile of Hagos’s face as he stared out to the camp. His hair fluttered against his face.
A moth landed on her shoulder and spread its wings. Insects climbed her feet. She had become a habitat for wilderness just as the wilderness was her habitat.
Saba took the map from under her bra and showed it to Hagos.
Six hours. Yes, it would take me six hours to get to the village by cart, Saba said to Hagos. She whispered to him her new dream, because the old Saba she had dreamed was no longer feasible. Saba is leaving the camp to fight. She had made the promise to Zahra that if anything was to happen to her, she would take her place.
But he set a heavy price, she said to Hagos. A price we both have to pay to Hajj Ali. And I will never let you do this.
Hagos pulled her closer to him. They wrapped their arms around each other and their cheeks pressed together, like the intertwined flowers her grandmother had planted on the wall of their courtyard back home.
LOVE SHARED
Hagos was asleep alongside Eyob. Both men shared the habit of heavy sleeping, as if, Saba thought, they were in one long, deep dream which ought not be interrupted. As if their love could only come alive in the hours when the midwife, the judge, the mother, the committee of elders were asleep, in the hours when tradition closed its eyes, leaving desire free and unhindered.
Saba lay next to Eyob. She emulated her brother and placed an arm on her husband’s chest. This was her time to be loved.
We all entered this camp as humans but only some of us would leave so. Disgust is an acquired taste, she reminded herself.
But this wasn’t disgusting. It astonished Saba how judgemental thoughts still arrived in her mind and how much resisting she still had to do. Eyob was the oasis in which both she and her brother took refuge from their long journey. His heart, the heart that had stopped twice before, beat under his ribcage, rhythmically.
Saba undressed and squeezed herself between the two men.
THE DEPARTURE
At the crack of dawn Saba arrived at Hajj Ali’s compound as the nomad descended from his barn at the top of the hill, where she saw the long slender shadow of her brother rising to his feet. The animals around Hagos scurried, ramming heads and horns against each other and the cage.
Hagos had gone to see Hajj Ali before dawn, when, said the nomad, darkness would shield them from view. But Saba remembered the imam’s words to her on the first day in the camp: God is everywhere. The first flicker of light appeared in the sky. As if, Saba thought, he lit the wick of the universe, longing to be seen now, now that it was over.
And it was at that time of the morning when the camp was just beginning to emerge from darkness, when the streak of a flame split the sky, that Hajj Ali parted the legs of his goat. Let me finish milking and we will leave, he said to Saba.
Saba looked at the picture of the graduate and folded the newspaper which the Khwaja had insisted she take with her as a reminder of her dream, now shelved. For ever, perhaps. When the goat kicked, Hajj Ali placed one of her legs over his shoulder and wrapped his fingers around her teat. Milk splattered into his bowl.
Saba studied his appearance. The face that she once thought reflected nature, as if refined by the constant wind against which he travelled, seemed fuller and lighter. For someone who was supposed to be a traveller, he had become rooted in the camp. He had established a monopoly over the production of meat and dairy. His roosters roamed the field, next to the large chicken cage, inside which Saba could see many eggs. His daughter sold milk by going hut to hut, his wife churned the remainder into butter for making ga’at porridge as well as oiling the hair, and he had set up a makeshift slaughterhouse, selling meat in affordable portions.
Saba’s sun-strained eyes looked over to her left at the animal skins treated with salt. They had multiple uses: they were used as mattresses and seating rugs, as well as praying mats. Saba remembered it was she and the businessman who had persuaded Hajj Ali to stay. But then she noticed the donkey at the bottom of a hill, the donkey that would lead her and Zahra out of the camp.
The goat hobbled. But Hajj Ali was as steady as the rock on which he sat. When he finished milking, the goat trudged away, then rushed to her flock in the barn, where Hagos was rubbing mud off his chest.
Of course, she cried.
i do it will, I wrote to Saba in the broken English she taught me, a language that was foreign and new to us both and that we spoke as though we had regressed to the time we ought to have spoken it first as toddlers.
no, she wrote back, never let i you this do
but saba say you not always we same are that our bodies same are feel you pain when feel i pain we one are one we are
When she hugged me after reading my note, whispering in my ears, oh Hagosey, I love you, I tell you, I felt as broken as the words we spoke, as unnatural as the foreign language we tried to root in us. A day would come, though, we both said to one another, when we would tell our history, recount this time in our own language. But that day would be when we returned to our country, the country Saba was on her way to fight for in Zahra’s place.
As Hajj Ali rose from me, I stayed supine on the ground of the barn, remembering Tahir, the lorry driver, and the words he said to Saba as he asked her to keep the seeds from the orange he gave to us, so she would plant it in the camp: Our country, Saba, is like any in the world, there are good and bad people. I hope and pray you won’t have to pay a high price to leave the camp.
I wished he’d made that same prayer for me too.
Dung. Dung everywhere. Around me. And on me. The smell of that first time we entered the camp wafted to me from my chest that Hajj Ali had squeezed with his hands smeared in manure, from the barn where I lay, from my face, my feet. It was as if I was a hut, a camp built with animal remains to last in this wilderness.
Dawn embraced me now. I stood still in the barn looking at my sister next to the nomad. He drank some of the milk from his goat and passed the bowl to Saba as he munched on some dates, thanking God, his voice reaching my ears, as if I was Saba near him. He thanked Mother Nature. And in the camp, nature possessed tenderness. I wept as Saba wrapped her arms around herself. In the same way I did.
The donkey brayed. Come, let’s go, Hajj Ali called to my sister as he pulled the cart and linked it to the reins around the donkey. He wound his turban and, looking at the sky, he spread his hands in prayer: May God make our path ahead safe.
Saba stroked the donkey’s face and wiped the secretion from its eyes, for the road ahead, for the journey ahead, for the life ahead. Fighters don’t cry, I wanted
to shout. But then she was a human being first. She freed herself before her country, she freed me, and freed love in our compound, in our camp, before she set off on her way to the front to pick up a gun to free a piece of land.
Saba jumped on the cart next to Hajj Ali, her legs dangling over the large wheels. The nomad smacked the donkey’s back with his long stick and the cart edged forward. I followed it as it turned right, plodded up a hill and then slowly trekked over the narrow passage, and into lanes onto which wafted heavy breathings, moans, baby cries, dreams spoken loud, stories told to the ghosts, and when it entered the square, the cart sped up past the imam, who was about to enter the mosque with his oil lamp. Then it stopped.
Holding the hands of her grandmother and the Khwaja, Zahra limped past the aid centre, as if she were carrying Tedros on her back.
Let’s go. Hajj Ali’s voice rose as he pulled the reins, swinging his whip so it sliced the air. The donkey moved forward, then bolted off through the square. A flicker of light trickled through my mother’s hut.
As the donkey cart drove past the aid centre, Eyob ran into the square and came to stand next to me. He waved with the note Saba had left him. I moved my lips. I love you too, Saba said, taking a final look at me, as I became visible in the glow of the man I loved, as I loved her.
The graduate girl on the British newspaper quivered on Saba’s lap. Saba loosened her grip. Dreams for a woman are no longer inherited but created, she’d said. The paper flew out of her hand. It sailed onto the ground and rested on a thorny shrub. I picked it up.
Saba placed an arm around Zahra and her friend rested her head on my sister’s chest. Saba turned her face towards their destination, the path that would take her back to her country, still at war, across this vast, open land of Sudan, full of generous people.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To my mother – Sadiyah: I thank you for taking me out of the refugee camp and saving my life. But the timing couldn’t have been more wrong. It happened just as I was falling in love for the first time! To my grandmother – Mebrat: thank you for bringing me up, for teaching me how to make zigni stew and for allowing me to be quiet when I didn’t want to talk as a child. You saw that silence was my mother tongue.
My friends know now why I also call myself Sulaiman Sadiyah-Mebrat.
Lies Craeynest, I’m so grateful for all your support, for standing by me, and for reading time and again. Amira and Saleh Addonia, sorry I moved away from London, from you, but thank you for always supporting me, you are my inspiration. Minna Salami, whose meditation tips helped when editing this novel: thank you for being there for me.
My son, who raged at me last year that this book was as old as him and still not finished. I didn’t put you in time-out then, because you being an Arsenal fan is punishing enough.
My daughter, who teaches me ‘how’ to dance all the time. ‘It’s like this, Daddy, not like that.’
Massive appreciation to Ellah Wakatama Allfrey. It’s been a dream working with you.
Isobel Dixon, thank you for believing in this book. Lisa Classen, Susanna Nicklin, Maaza Mengiste, Michael Salu, Vimbai Shire, Alexander Spears, Lee Gillette, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Kate Vrielynck, Geert Craeynest, Tamara Gaussi, Anne Bathily, big thank you all. I wrote this book, mainly, around cafes in Ixelles, Brussels, so thanks to all baristas who became friends.
Hawa Addonia, rest in peace my beautiful sister. I love you.
Karen Goeyens, may you rest in peace our dear friend.
To young Sulaiman: those multiple childhood traumas resurfaced aggressively during the writing of this book, reminding me how much you’ve endured. Thank you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sulaiman S.M.Y. Addonia is a novelist who fled Eritrea as a refugee in childhood. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan following the Om Hajar massacre in 1976, and in his early teens he lived and studied in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He arrived in London as an unaccompanied minor without a word of English and went on to earn a BSc in Economics from University College London and an MA in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His debut novel, The Consequences of Love, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was translated into more than twenty languages. He currently lives in Brussels where he has launched a creative writing academy for refugees and asylum seekers.
The text of Silence Is My Mother Tongue
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