by Lisa McKay
“Oh, yes,” he reassured me. “Very calm.”
The area where Willy lived had been hit hard by the rioting, but he hadn’t lost his house or any of his family. He had, however, seemed to have lost any faith he once possessed in his government, or democracy, or perhaps both.
He would never vote again, he said.
“What is the point?” Willy said. “You get up before the day comes and line up all day in the sun to vote, and in the end it means nothing and you can lose everything – your home, your family, your life. Everything, eh? Everything.”
There were many things I wanted to ask him in the car that night, not least of which was why he believed that not voting was the best way to prevent such violence from happening again. But I felt too tired and too foreign to formulate that question with appropriate tact, and in the end Willy didn’t give me the space to try.
“Where is your home?” he asked me.
Five years ago whenever someone asked me this question I’d launch into a long list, rushing to pack it all in before their eyes glazed over. I was born in Canada but my parents were Australian, I’d explain. Then we moved to Australia. Then Bangladesh. Then Washington, D.C. Then Zimbabwe, the U.S., and Australia again. Oh, and Indonesia.
Three years ago when someone asked me this question, more often than not I’d simply freeze.
Lately I’ve been embracing simplicity. And brevity. I seem to finally be losing the need to assault strangers with my own uncertainty around this issue.
“California,” I told Willy. “I live in Los Angeles.”
“Oh!” Willy said, impressed. “Lots of movie stars, eh?”
Yes.
“This is your first time to Kenya?”
No, I told him. This was my fifth trip here in five years. I was here to run workshops on stress and trauma for aid workers.
“You see and hear a lot of terrible things when you work for humanitarian organizations,” I said.
Willy fell silent. I wondered whether he was thinking that someone should come run those workshops for Nairobi’s taxi drivers.
“You could hear it, the shooting and the yelling,” Willy said, and I knew his mind had jumped back in time, to the terrible uncertainty of January and February. “You could hear it from my home. My neighbors, eh … How can you forgive the people, afterward, those ones that killed your family, your parents? How can you forgive those ones? No, that forgiving—that is not possible. It is better just to forget those terrible things. Everyone, they want to forget. They do not want to talk about it. Except, maybe it is that you look like you forget, but you do not. And in ten years, or twenty years maybe, those things they come back. And then there is the revenge. You like Kenya?” he demanded, suddenly switching tack.
“Yes,” I said honestly, “I like coming to Kenya. I’ve been here so often that now it feels a little like coming home.”
But even as I used that troublesome last word, home, I felt an internal tickle. A sense that I might be blaspheming something that I do not yet fully understand.
Willy, however, liked it.
“Ah,” he said. “That is good. This is a very good. Karibu. You are welcome.”
“Asante sana,” I said, using about half the Swahili that I know in that one exchange.
Thank you.
Kona, USA
The fact that I might have a real problem when it came to this concept of home didn’t occur to me until I was twenty-six years old.
I was having the time of my life at the first creative writing workshop I’d ever attended. A friend had linked me up with accommodation for ten bucks a night, I was surrounded by people who loved to write and, as a bonus, I was in Hawaii.
During the first week I didn’t have much trouble with any of the writing assignments we were given in class. We had to write about two people meeting on a beach when one of them was self-conscious about being seen in a bathing suit, or create a scene where what one of the characters said and what he actually meant were very different. These sorts of exercises came relatively easily. It wasn’t until day seven that I really stumbled.
Borrowing inspiration from the tale of the prodigal son in the Bible, our instructors had told us to write a “coming home” story. We should, we were told, write the prodigal who was us as an adult, coming home to ourselves as a child.
“Pick the clearest recollection you have of home and use that,” they said.
Everyone else reached for a pen or a laptop. I just sat there.
I was still sitting there ten minutes later.
Eventually I went up to the front of the room, to the giant leather-bound book of synonyms that was sitting on a podium, looked up home and wrote down these words: Birthplace. Stability. Dwelling. Hearth. Hearthstone. Refuge. Shelter. Haven. Sanctum.
I went back to my seat and stared past the book of synonyms, past the palm trees standing still under a blanket of midday heat, and out into the hazy blue of an ocean that promised a horizon it never quite delivered.
The list didn’t seem to help much.
Birthplace conjured Vancouver, a city I’d visited only twice, briefly, since we’d left when I was one.
Stability then. Unlike my parents’, not a word that could be applied to my childhood. In stark contrast with their agrarian upbringing, I’d spent an awful lot of my time in airports.
Maybe that was it, I thought, wondering whether the sudden spark I felt at the word airport was a glimmer of inspiration or merely desperation.
There was no denying that as a child I’d thought there was a lot of fun to be had in and around airports. More than one home movie shows me and Michelle arranging our stuffed animals and secondhand Barbies in symmetrical rows and lecturing them severely about seat belts and tray tables before offering to serve them drinks. When we were actually in airports, we spent many happy hours collecting luggage carts and returning them to the distribution stands in order to pocket the deposit. We were always very disappointed to find ourselves in those boring socialist airports with free trolleys.
Money was a bit of a recurring theme in my childhood airport adventures. Traveling out of Bangladesh one time, Michelle and I procured an in-flight blanket and draped it over our two-year-old brother. We then persuaded the agreeable blond cherub to toddle off and beg from the other passengers in Bengali. “Baksheesh? Baksheesh?” Matthew said, his green eyes and dimples irresistible. As I recall, we got some money out of the exercise, which my scandalized and exhausted parents made us return when they figured out what we were up to.
In Hawaii, I was tempted to start writing my story about home but didn’t.
“Your clearest memories of home as a child cannot possibly be in an airport,” I scolded myself, still staring past my laptop and out to the white-laced toss and chop of cerulean. “Home is not a topic that deserves flippancy. Work harder. … What about dwellings and hearths?”
That year my parents were living in the Philippines. Matthew was in Sydney. Michelle was in Washington, D.C. The bed I could legitimately call mine resided in Indiana. I had lived none of these places except D.C. as a child, and they were such awkward, lonely years that the thought of going back, even in a story, made me squirm. We lived in Washington, D.C., for three and a half years before moving to Zimbabwe, and what I remember most clearly about that time is that I spent much of it reading.
I’ve been in love with reading since before I can remember. Our family photo albums are peppered with photos of me curled up with books – in huts in Bangladesh, on trains in Europe, in the backseat of our car in Zimbabwe.
I can’t remember my parents reading to us before bed, although they swear they often did – sweet tales about poky puppies and confused baby birds looking for their mothers.
“You were insatiable,” Mum said when I asked her about this once. “No matter how many times I read you a book, you always wanted more.”
“Awwww,” I said, envisioning long rainy afternoons curled up with my mother while she read to me. “You m
ust have spent hours reading to me.”
“I did,” my mother said in a tone that let me know she fully expects me to return the favor one day. “But it was never enough. So I taped myself.”
“What?” I asked.
“I got a tape recorder,” she said. “I recorded myself reading a story – I even put these cute little chimes in there so you’d know when to turn the page. Then, sometimes, I sat you down with the tapes.”
“Nice,” I said in a way that let her know that I didn’t think this practice would get her nominated for the motherly hall of fame.
“You loved it,” she said, completely uncowed. “Plus, I needed a break every now and then. You were exhausting. You never stopped asking questions. You asked thirty-seven questions once during a half-hour episode of Lassie. I counted.”
I can’t remember any of this. My earliest memories of reading are solitary, sweaty ones. They are of lying on the cool marble floor of our house in Bangladesh, book in hand, an overhead fan gently stirring the dense heat while I chipped away at frozen applesauce in a small plastic container. But it’s when we moved from Bangladesh to the states when I was nine that my memories of books, just like childhood itself, become clearer.
Of all the moves I’ve made in my life, this was one of the most traumatic. Abruptly encountering the world of the very wealthy after two years of living cheek by jowl with the world of the very poor, I discovered that I didn’t fit readily into either world. My fourth grade classmates in Washington D.C. had no framework for understanding where I had been for the last two years – what it was like to ride to church in a rickshaw pulled by a skinny man on a bicycle, to make a game out of pulling three-inch-long cockroaches out of the sink drain while brushing your teeth at night, or to gaze from the windows of your school bus at other children picking through the corner garbage dumps.
I, in turn, lacked the inclination to rapidly absorb and adopt the rules of this new world, a world where your grasp on preteen fashion, pop culture, and boys all mattered terribly. Possibly I could have compensated for my almost total lack of knowledge in these key areas with lashings of gregarious charm, but at nine I lacked that, too. I was not what you would call a sunny child.
So I read instead. I read desperately.
I read pretty much anything I could get my hands on. One of the few good things I could see about living in the states was the ready availability of books. Some weekends Mum and Dad would take us to the local library’s used-book sale. Books were a quarter each. I had a cardboard box and carte blanche. On those Saturday mornings I was in heaven.
Like many kids, I suspect, I was drawn to stories of outsiders or children persevering against all odds in the face of hardship. I devoured all of C.S. Lewis’ stories of Narnia and adored the novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett, especially the ones featuring little girls who were raised in India before being exiled to face great hardship in Britain. But I also strayed into more adult territory. I trolled our bookshelves and the bookshelves of family friends, and those bookshelves were gold mines for stories about everything from religious persecution to murder, rape, civil war, child brides, and honor killing.
“It would be nice,” my father commented dryly upon reading the first draft of this chapter, “if you could manage not to make it sound like our personal library was stocked exclusively with troubling filth.”
“Dad,” I explained, “that’s why I used the gold-mine analogy. You don’t just stumble across gold; you have to dig for it. I worked really hard to find that stuff in amongst all the boring family-friendly fare you were prone to buying.”
Mum and Dad didn’t know everything I got into, of course. After they caught me reading a tale set largely in a brothel in South Africa and confiscated it, I got stealthier with censorable material. I also found their hiding place – behind the pile of sweaters on the top shelf of the wardrobe – and read the rest of that particular book in chunks during times when they were both out of the house.
In retrospect, even at eleven I wasn’t reading largely for pleasant diversion, for fun, for the literary equivalent of eating ice cream in the middle of the day. I was extreme-reading – pushing boundaries – looking to be shocked, scared, thrilled, and taught. I was reading to try to figure out how to make sense of pain.
It is entirely possible that had we remained in Australia throughout my childhood, I would still have spent the majority of these preteen years feeling isolated and misunderstood. After all, in the midst of our mobility I never doubted my parents’ love for me or for each other, but this did not forestall an essential loneliness that was very deeply felt. I suspect that I would still have grown into someone who feels compelled to explore the juxtaposition of shadow and light, someone who is drawn to discover what lies in the dark of life and of ourselves. But I also suspect that the shocking extremes presented by life in Bangladesh and America propelled me down this path earlier, and farther, than I may naturally have ventured.
It was largely books that were my early companions on this journey. They were stories of poverty and struggle, injustice and abuse, violence and debauchery, yes. But they were also threaded through with honor and courage, sacrifice and discipline, character and hope.
Many people seem to view “real life” as the gold standard by which to interpret stories, but I don’t think that does novels justice. For me, at least, the relationship between the real and fictional worlds was reciprocal. These books named emotions, pointed to virtue and vice, and led me into a deeper understanding of things I had already witnessed and experienced myself. They also let me try on, like a child playing dress-up, experiences and notions new to me. They acted as maps, mirrors, and magnifying glasses.
In those lonely childhood years, books also provided refuge. They were havens and sanctums.
Did that make them home?
When the writing exercise ended after half an hour and we were invited to share, I’d come up with only two ideas.
Set the scene in a bookstore. Or set it in an airport.
I hadn’t written a single word.
Canberra, Australia
Perhaps one of the reasons I got so stuck in Hawaii when asked to write about home is that my images of what home should be are so firmly anchored in place. But how can you have a firm sense of a place as home when you’ve moved a dozen times and your longest stint in any single city was from age one to seven? I can barely even remember that house in Canberra.
There was a giant dog that lived next door, some sort of Great Dane mix. It was as big as a small horse, and I was both fascinated and terrified by its majestic, seemingly placid presence.
A bird flew into the kitchen window one day with a tremendous bang and broke its neck. We buried the limp still-warm body in the garden in a shoe box and marked the grave with a cross made out of popsicle sticks.
I shared a bedroom with my little sister. There was a foam couch between our beds that we used as a bridge for silent post-bedtime acrobatics. Michelle fell one night and took a chunk out of her eyebrow on the metal frame of her bed. Blood fountained. Mum and Dad were not impressed. That was the end of our late-night acrobatics.
I find it a little disturbing that the only clear memories I have of my first real home in Canberra were apparently imprinted there by fear, death, or injury. The details of happiness, it seems, take longer to settle in.
Los Angeles, USA
I asked my sister and brother about this shortly after I moved to Los Angeles. Through part happy accident and part good trans-continental schedule coordination, they both managed to visit L.A. on the same weekend. New to L.A. myself at that stage, I cast around for something cool for the three of us to do and settled on the Huntington Gardens.
That Saturday we took a picnic blanket and wandered around those green and manicured acres – through the rose garden, past the prickly and bulbous cacti, and down a long shady pathway that wound through a stand of bamboo. At the very bottom of the park, past a pond jammed with lilies, we found what we we
re looking for: the Australian section.
We spread our picnic blanket on the grass under the gum trees and lay down. Pale bark hung off the trunks in papery sheets, and, above, dry gunmetal leaves rustled in the breeze. I took a deep breath, searching for the eucalyptus signature, menthol.
I can’t remember which of the three of us suggested calling Mum and Dad, but it was probably Michelle. Michelle tends to be the one who remembers things like the fact that it would warm the cockles of our parents’ peripatetic little hearts to know that we were all together in the Australian section of the Hungtington Gardens.
“We can’t call the parentals,” Matt said. “We only have a mobile phone.”
“We can,” Michelle and I said at the same time and then looked at each other and laughed.
“I’ve got Mum and Dad’s calling-card number memorized,” I said proudly, since memorizing any string of digits is a noteworthy achievement for me.
“Me, too,” Michelle said.
Matt did not give us the applause I thought was warranted.
“Are you two still using Mum and Dad’s calling card?” he asked.
“What?” I said. “Mum and Dad don’t care, as long as we also use it to call them.”
Matt looked at me in silence, with eyes narrowed and just the merest contemplative curl to his lips. Matt is very good at communicating in silence. This particular silence said something like “Don’t you think, my dear sister, that perhaps it’s time you got your own international calling card?”
I answered him out loud.
“Aren’t Mum and Dad still paying for your car registration and insurance?”
Matt’s wide grin appeared with all the sweet suddenness of the sun coming out from behind clouds.
“That’s my tax for staying in Australia,” he said. “With you two both gone, they’re pretty happy to have one of us still there.”
“Does Australia feel like home yet?” I asked. Like both Michelle and me before him, after spending childhood and adolescence abroad, Matt had returned to Australia to attend university. He’d now been back for about four years.
