by asha bandele
I said nothing to Rashid that day on the phone. What words would mean anything? Back ten years ago, when I was first falling for this beautiful Guyanese man, I asked him if there was any chance he could be deported. He assured me then that immigration issues had been taken care of. When the new law changed this in 1996, if he mentioned it to me, it was a casual thing, nothing for me to think or worry about. And I didn’t. Until now. Now I feel betrayed. I want to scream, cry, use my anger toward him to make this all go away. But that’s stupid, pointless. That’s why I say nothing. But I’m thinking.
I’m thinking that for years that have somehow spun into a decade—and a child—I have agreed to fight alongside him, stand up for him and with him to anyone, anything. I will push back, pull forward, keep the faith even on the days when the faith wasn’t keeping me. After all that work, how could this be our here and now? Rashid under a deportation order and there can be no hearing to say, But I have children in this country, a brand-new baby, a wife. No provision in the law for that, for Nisa, for me.
I am thinking these things as Rashid talks to me and I am thinking, bitterly, He sold me a lie. And that anger will sit there, it will grow tumorlike and malignant for years until it occurs to me that we all do it—that I do it—the same thing. It occurs to me one evening when I am selling Nisa the dream she most wants. It’s my negotiation tactic with her: I need to write and she needs attention, she needs to make noise.
When she tells me, as she does most evenings, “Mommy, I need to jump and when I jump this sound has to come out,” I know she is not lying, my wild-as-the-wind Aries girl, my tiny, magical dragon. She came into this world with so much of her personality already affixed. Early in my pregnancy when I went for a sonogram that normally takes about fifteen minutes, it became a two-day trek back and forth to the hospital for me and an ordeal for the technician, who sighed, exasperated, “She just won’t stay still.” Nisa in the womb was already who she was destined to be. That I know.
Which is another reason why I try more often than not to negotiate with her rather than yell at her to be quiet. On many a night, many a day, you can hear me and I am saying to her that Mommy is trying to figure it all out: how to buy her house, a home with more than one floor, a backyard big enough to put a swing set in. And, of course, this biggest of all promises: her very own puppy. I tell Nisa to trust me, I’m trying. I tell her if we work together as a team, we can make them happen, the dreams we have for ourselves.
That’s when it occurs to me that I am doing to my baby what was done to me: the offering up of the idea of a life, a bigger life, a life outsize in its proportion of joy, if only she has faith, hope, an impossible sort of patience and perseverance, even on this one brilliant summer weekend when I am writing and she is holed up in the house. And as I settle into this practice, this practice of negotiating in what I would only consider good faith, I finally get it, finally I realize what Rashid did with me.
He asked me to hold on, to hold out for a dream he thought he could really make happen. He’d asked me before and then again, that July fifteenth: “Just hang in there, baby. I am going to fix it. I promise you. I promise you.” I said okay. I said I would, but there was nothing inside of me that allowed me to make a rational decision in the wake of that news. In the wake of disaster, we may say anything to send it all away—the unfolding reality before us. But a few days out, shock and denial turned to anger and it would be years before it diffused. Years and years.
At first I said OK. I said I could endure it, fight it with him. I mean, what else had I ever done? But then I found I couldn’t even say the word, the terrible, brutal, life-altering word, deportation, without my throat, my stomach tightening, without feeling as though I might lose my ability to breathe right then, right there. When he called in the days just after, I changed my tone, though slightly. All I could say to Rashid, all I could say to myself was this: I can’t. Can’t talk, can’t think, can’t plan, can’t stay, can’t run. I can’t believe. That was the bottom line. I couldn’t believe. I did not say that aloud though. Not to him. Not to myself.
When I was able to lurch toward some level of engagement with Rashid, then all I could say was, I’m tired. But of course that described nothing. If I were simply tired, I could get in bed, rest, sleep, come back out swinging the very next day. But there was no next day, there was no nothing. Nothing for us, nothing for Rashid, nothing for our family.
There would be no more fantasizing about the day we would be there, standing at the prison gate one morning, waiting as Rashid exits the facility for the final time. No more dream of walking these Brooklyn streets together doing what normal couples do—errands, a stroll in the park, playing hooky and sneaking in a weekday matinee and a slice of pizza afterward. There would be no coming-home party, no looking for a house together, no fashioning an oasis inside a concrete box in an overpriced apartment in an overpriced city. No lounging in bed together—our own bed, not a prison bed—with my family on some rainy or cold Saturday morning, reading the paper, making hot chocolate, eating popcorn, watching videos. No more hope that there will be more babies, maybe a dog.
It was all gone. All the dreams, all the stories that I had told myself for ten years, the stories I told to sustain myself, every part of them, eviscerated. And they were gone at the very moment that they most needed to be here, because here was Nisa and when we knew she was coming, we talked it through and we agreed yes, the first couple of years of her life, Rashid would be away, the first couple of years would be challenging, but what beauty lay on the other side of patience! Nisa’s memory of her father would not be shaped by distance and bars.
And that’s how we did it, that’s how I did it, that’s how I made it through the nine months alone but not lonely, alone but not broken. It’s how I made it through labor and birth. That’s how I did not lose my composure when I came back to my apartment with my baby that first night, the night without my husband, and all we had was the phone and he called and sang the “Adon” in her ear and we felt close and we felt as though, no, no, everything wasn’t as we wanted it, but that part, the as-we-wanted part, it was just around the corner. This is how I kept my sanity in proximity.
But now, what? What do we say to ourselves in order to make it across the rocky days? What tool did I have? These are the questions I would not ask of Rashid, the words I would not speak. That every piece of the life we had knitted together over the last ten years, everything we waited for, everything we believed in, sacrificed for, were gone. And if all our dreams were gone, all the dreams and all the pieces of dreams, then how could I not be gone too?
I asked girlfriends, a therapist, anyone who would listen, that very question. “Because of Nisa,” was always the quick answer shot back at me. And of course, of course. I wanted my love for Nisa to be enough to set aside the hurt, to crowd it out. And of course I did everything I could to compensate for all I was feeling. And of course too, it wasn’t enough. Not really.
I MET A YOUNG man once who had only recently reintroduced himself to his son. He kept the child now every weekend, and from what I could see, he appeared to be a very devoted and loving father. But as we chatted, he went on to confess to me that he had hit a rough patch, and during that time—a year, he told me—he didn’t see his boy. According to him, he hadn’t been involved in his son’s life at all, not emotionally, physically, or financially. For mothers, for most of us anyway, there’s no such option, no way to check out for a year or so while we get ourselves together, grieve, organize our finances, meditate, teach ourselves to breathe again. I don’t imagine that many of us would even want that, but if we did, where would we go to take a break?
As much as I wanted to crawl under a bed, hide in a closet, escape, I couldn’t. Both the joy and demands of motherhood each day grew bigger and more complex, and they required my presence. And I was, present. I was present at least during the day, during the hours in which responsibilities spiraled way over my head. I wrote and edited articles, bo
oks, maintained a modicum of my political activism, took Nisa to gardens, to museums, to libraries and playgrounds. I worked out, learned how to make (though I rarely did) organic baby food. I visited my parents most Sundays, traveled several times with Nisa in her first years of life to report stories or give lectures.
I was in the world. I was in it until the sun went down and the baby went to sleep and stories were filed and the phone calls were returned, and then, not immediately, but after a time when the pain swelled so large it felt as though I could not move or think, conscious or not, I fell into a half-life, a life checked out, a deported life, a life sent away by sweet wine, glasses and glasses of it, sweet wine and cigarettes. They transported me, but where? They allowed me to pass out, to not think about what had gone away. They allowed me to sleep without dreaming until the alarm went off and it was time to rise and pretend to be more than I was, more than I was perhaps even capable of being. It was time to pretend that nothing, not the separation, not the deportation, nothing, cut or crippled me.
But before this, before I can recognize the way my sadness is forming a fence around my heart, before we’re headlong into some new, distanced reality, Rashid calls me. It’s September of 2000. Nisa is five months old.
“I know things are hard, baby,” he begins, “but they’re going to get better. I’m going to beat this thing and be home with you and Nisa.” I hate to hear him say this because I am trying to come to terms with the new configuration of my life. I am trying to consider how to have new dreams. And yet I cannot stop listening.
“We’ve been issued a date for a trailer,” he continues. “Please. Just come up. Let’s spend some real family time together. Let me take care of you and my daughter. Let me spoil you for two days, baby,” he says, and I’m right there again, right in the center of hope, right back in a life I thought I’d have to leave behind. But maybe. Maybe things will work out. Maybe we can love it all away.
Maybe he has a real plan he can only tell me in whispers, alone in a trailer on a prison compound. Maybe we are meant to be together, a couple, a family. Maybe we can overcome the deportation order. Maybe the law will change. Maybe parole will work out. Maybe everything we promised each other and believed during our long courtship and five-year marriage will come to pass. I tell him what I always wound up telling him: Yes, baby. I’ll be there. I pack up food, clothes, diapers, sheets, toiletries, the baby, and me. I hire a car and head up to the prison.
How do you know, do you ever really know, that the last time with someone is really the last time? Is it ever possible to conceive such a thing when it is late and quiet and the entire of the world has briefly contracted, and now, now the world is no bigger, no more complicated than a size that you and your tiny little family can manage, and he is touching you? He has spent the day touching some part of you and Nisa, almost in disbelief that you are alive and real, not some hologram, some mirage. We could not have conceived then, neither Rashid nor I, that our first conjugal visit as a family would also be our last. I’m sure of that.
During that visit, that easy, that calm, that beautiful, that life-giving visit, Rashid watches everything Nisa and I do with the eyes of someone who has gone blind and through some sudden miracle—not a medical one so much as an otherworldly one but a miracle nonetheless—he has been regranted the gift of sight. The way I breast-feed, the way Nisa nestles in my arms, flapping her arms, studying her surroundings, relaxing when she’s rocked, this is all new to him, and if I am to understand the wonder I see in his eyes, we are nearly holy. He bathes us and he washes our hair and he cooks for me and feeds me, a fork he lifts to my mouth. He changes Nisa and insists he be the one to hold her until she falls asleep, which she finally does on his chest, moving peacefully with the rhythm of his breathing.
He places her in a crib in the next room and comes back to me and this is when we make love, late, late into the visit, so unlike our other visits, our pre-Nisa life when sex was immediate and constant and wild. Now it happens on our daughter’s clock, and we laugh about this and we embrace the change. But finally when we are certain Nisa will sleep for at least a couple of hours, this is when it happens.
Somehow, then, that time, it was more intimate, our sex, more musical. It was nearly like a rescue, the way we made love, the kind of touching where you leave nothing behind. You leave everything right there in your lover’s hands, his mouth. We were more generous than we’d ever been, more gracious, and when we moved together we cried, both of us did, to know how this is what we needed, how this was what we needed daily, how this was what kept us in contact with our own humanity, in contact with the best of ourselves. And yet it was exactly this thing that we could not have.
But for forty-four hours in September of 2000, we did, we had it. Deportation was set aside; parole issues and money issues, they were beyond our consciousness. We set aside everything, everything that was hard, we didn’t even glance at them and we really lived, however briefly, however falsely even, but for us, we lived a lifetime in a moment, and a moment in the space we had always sought to occupy. For forty-four hours, the world was animate and it was ours and everywhere it was safe and everywhere it was shining.
In short, we sipped the wine. Perhaps we should not have. Because as the old adage warned, the sipping made it all the worse. It made it all the more shocking when we could not have it the night after that or the night after that. It was more shocking than even before, before we had a child, because now Rashid’s presence was bigger than my desire for him. Now there were two of us and desire was coupled with absolute need and that need could not be fulfilled and although logically I understand that I should not have been shocked, I was. I could not believe that I would not wake the next morning and find him there, there with us, and suddenly one night became two and two nights became years.
Years passed and that September became a memory that recessed into the shadows and I realized that yes, wow, that time back then was the last time for us and had we known, had I known, I would have surely have marked the date on the calendar, noted it as a sad anniversary each year, observed a moment of silence, told close friends and loved ones about what happened. I surely would have mourned.
But none of that happened and we spent those forty-four hours and perhaps even a short time after as though we, us, our family was going to be possible. Rashid spoke in defiant terms about beating the deportation order and was just as certain he would make parole. And after our visit, briefly I was a believer again. Encouraged by my perennially optimistic husband, I started thinking about how I could juggle work, parenting, writing, and a husband who was in prison. He wouldn’t be there for very much longer, I told myself.
But it was then, in the midst of those thoughts, that the reality of our life came along and made things all so simple. Rashid was transferred to a prison nearly impossible to get to. Never in all the years that we had been together, in all of the years before he became Nisa’s father, had Rashid ever been made so inaccessible.
As always, I receive the news like this: I get a phone call from one of Rashid’s friends, who says, “He’s in the box.” He offers no real explanations, makes nothing clear.
As of that call, I had known Rashid for more than ten years, been his wife for more than five. We’d run up thousands and thousands of dollars in phone bills, spent countless hours in conversation with one another, speaking, sharing. But in all that time, across all those years, never had I heard those words, the ones that I’d always feared, the ones that meant that Rashid would be locked in special unit, alone, for twenty-three hours a day. The other hour was allowed for exercise in an outdoor cage. Alone.
Phone calls were banned. Our only communication was letter writing, which was much harder for me now with a job and a daughter. The fissure that grew between us was nearly one you could see. Without visits or real-time communication, Rashid’s life in a prison no longer was something I could understand or make sense of. And my life doing a slow redaction into working, parenting, cl
eaning, bill paying, sleeping, working, cleaning some more, was not one he could understand.
Our worlds, and so the two of us, became unknown, unknowable to one another. And Nisa and Rashid became distanced as well. Important milestones—her first steps—could not even be shared over the phone. Fatherhood via fiber optics and weekend visits was not even possible. Months would pass before we were able to get there, up to the new facility, so that Nisa could visit her father, my husband, this stranger.
Eventually letters from Rashid came that told a bizarre story about how he was accused of being the mastermind behind a stabbing incident in the prison. Rashid and five others were convened before a prison panel and found guilty of stabbing another member of their Muslim community. Never mind that the only evidence against Rashid and the others was secret and—to this day—uncorroborated testimony. Never mind that the minor wound on the victim hardly corresponded with his story of being attacked by several men. Never mind that it was public knowledge that the so-called victim disliked Rashid intensely because Rashid was considered a leader in the community. And never mind that in the end, the court system, months after Rashid finished his time in the box, every day of it, found him innocent of all charges.
But that’s getting ahead.
In the days following the false incident, prison officials sentenced Rashid to 120 days in isolation and before you could say, Whoa, Nellie, where’s the goddamn evidence? he was shipped an unimaginable nine hours away to a new facility in a part of the state neither of us had ever heard of before. This is what happened in the time following the time we were on the trailer in September. This is what happened that took our hope apart. That took us apart.
