As such, we are here as part of an always-unfolding politics of surprise. We are here because the smarting, tingling sensation of our phantom limbs calls us to lean closer and pay attention to a troubled world.
We are hoping for a different kind of miracle. These lives here are a testament to the fact that we are weary of the familiar. We have tried everything we know to do. We’ve explored the possible. Now we must try the impossible. We must wait here, with questions that may not have answers, as the universe turns to meet us halfway.
Why are we here, dear? We are here for you and all our children that will live after us.
We close the windows, and bolt them shut. A few minutes ago, your grandmother had called to say a massive cyclone was about to hit, and that she hopes we’ve stocked up our apartment with food and supplies. You are three years old, oblivious to nature’s motions of fury. Already, we can hear the whistling sound of rapid, passing winds squeezing through the tightly packed buildings in our neighborhood in Chennai, India. Merely the spinning tassels of Cyclone Vardah’s ceremonial dress. The news stations and their reporters are saying Vardah will make landfall any moment. At 3 p.m., she does, snaking her way to land from the Bay of Bengal, grinning and spinning like a maddened Kali, lifting cars and uprooting trees, tearing through buildings and ecosystems, making palm trees bend and look away as she purges everything.
The next day, the fury is done, but Vardah—a name given by Pakistani observers that appropriately means “red rose”—has left death and destruction in her wake. In spite of the fact that the Tamil Nadu government has evacuated tens of thousands of people away from coastal regions, the cyclone uproots twelve thousand trees in Chennai, destroys electric poles and transformers, drowns seventy-seven cows in Kanchipuram, and blocks 224 roads—2.1 billion dollars in public infrastructure and private property is estimated to have been lost. That estimation has nothing to do with the lives lost—up to forty people, including a three-year-old child.
Not quite “Chennai’s Hurricane Katrina,” which had eleven years before claimed 1,800 lives and caused destruction to property that exceeded a hundred billion dollars, Vardah’s gust speeds of more than seventy-five miles per hour (the most severe in more than twenty years of cyclonic storms) still rekindles memories of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami—which your mother barely escaped coming home from school, but which resulted in the unfortunate loss of up to three hundred thousand people.
Apart from calls by concerned citizens for the Tamil Nadu government to protect its coastal cities with better infrastructure, old questions rage: was Vardah punishment for our sins? Was this climate change?
In the evening of the next day, we are picked up by Peer, a family friend, who takes you and me in his tiny car to purchase some items at a nearby store. As we navigate past felled trees, bits of billboards and shrapnel of wood strewn across the street, mangled electric cables hanging precariously over the street, the extent of Vardah’s wrath is made manifest to me. My jaw hangs open as I gaze at empty spaces where familiar landmarks should be. For the first time since we moved to Egmore, I am able to see the insides of PT School because its fence has been breached by the falling of a massive oak tree, its thick trunk making the road inaccessible. I cannot help but feel we are in a war zone.
As Peer parks the vehicle, I carry you out of the car gently and hold you tight as we walk into the store—still open even now. “Dada! Let me walk,” you snarl. But I am not about to let go. Not now.
One month later, in the opening weeks of 2017, scientists would move the Doomsday Clock thirty seconds closer to midnight, positioning the globe at two and a half minutes to annihilation. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, established in 1945 by the University of Chicago scientists who helped build nuclear weapons in the Manhattan Project, designed the Doomsday Clock to draw critical attention to threats to humanity, and inspire world leaders to take action about events, trends, and issues that significantly diminished the odds for human survivability. With the rise of “strident nationalism” and the rushing populist-antiglobalist wave of identitarian politics—embodied by the startling and disturbing emergence of Donald Trump first as candidate, then as Republican nominee, and then as forty-fifth President of the United States, as well as the Brexit referendum vote by Britons to leave the European Union—the scientists would feel there was an increased likelihood that international cooperation to control carbon emissions, especially among leading industrial states, could suffer. Carbon emissions would therefore not drop fast enough to avert danger, even after the much vaunted successes of the Paris Climate Accords in late 2015.
Moreover, after several U.S. intelligence agencies publicly announce that Russia had in fact done all they could to manipulate the 2016 presidential election in favor of the outsider Trump, the political tensions between the two superpower states (as well as the riotous brinkmanship of Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un) would give grounds for the clock-keepers to worry about thermonuclear war. Not since 1947, when the clock was first designed against the backdrop of nuclear threats, has the hand of the clock leaned so close to midnight—the point of no return, which the scientific community warned might be a global catastrophe of permanent repercussions.
In the eyes of these scientists, the fact that Donald Trump, who had expressed dismissive opinions about climate change and promised to withdraw the United Sates (the world’s biggest contributor to carbon emissions) from the “bad deal” in Paris, cast climate discourse and action back several decades. Apocalypse could come like a thief in the night. According to old yet relevant reports, India could be two degrees warmer by 2030, at which time you’d be turning eighteen. Sea levels will rise due to thermal expansion—warmer water takes up more space than cold water—and threaten India’s four thousand miles of coastline. By these calculations, inhabitants of coastal megacities like Chennai, meaning us, already experiencing the brunt of heavy floods and unprecedented cyclonic storms, will suffer the most damage to their farmlands and public support systems.
In the store, we try to pay for the items we’ve picked, including biscuits and apple juice for you. The cashier takes Peer’s card, inserts it into the credit card reader, pulls it out and tries again … and again. “I’m sorry,” she says in Tamil. “It seems the internet is down.” We have no cash to offer, no thanks to the prime minister’s demonetization scheme that, much to the annoyance of the general populace, had rendered large-currency rupee notes obsolete. The ATMs are not dispensing cash either. We drop the items, and leave the store. As I descend the steps into a street with felled trees and debris, trying to create some excuse for not picking up the biscuits that you can understand, I remember Kutti and his family and the precarity of their living conditions, and I realize just how fragile everything is—so that one bolt out of place could dismantle the feverish contraption that is our modern lives. It feels like the end of days.
It’s 1993. Wednesday. Night falls in Kinshasa as a violet-blue sky weaves a deceptive tapestry of coziness across the tense landscape. Tito is lying on the leather settee, her eyes closing to sleep. Wendy, about a year plus, is sleeping in mummy’s lap. Lou Dobbs is on television with his haughty macho media voice, reading the news moments after James Earl Jones’s voice had announced: “This is CNN!” Dad and mum, both dressed in their pajamas, are sitting down eating from a small bowl of peanuts, facing the TV. They are, however, not watching it. They are speaking rapidly in Yoruba. I am lingering behind them, near the inside wall aquarium, simultaneously watching the monstrous fish chase away the colorful spritely small ones, and trying to listen for clues about what they are saying to each other.
I am not totally oblivious: earlier this week, there had been reports about disgruntled soldiers leaving their barracks and ransacking the homes of diplomats in the country to exert their fury for unpaid salaries. Zaire’s stylish president, Mobutu Sese Seko, wears leopard print hats and ornate skin suits lined with bulletproof protection, flies in a Lebanese barb
er every Wednesday on his personal Concorde to maintain his hair (according to Eric, my father’s own Rwandan barber), and walks around with an elaborately carved wooden stick that our butler, Uncle Bernard—who, in spite of his violent epileptic seizures, has served several Nigerian high-ranking diplomats before my father—whispers is the source of his enduring power and longevity. Tito and I had talked cavalierly about soldiers invading our home, and hatched a plan to take them down. First, I’d hide behind the gates, and scare them. Seeing nothing but shadow, they’d run toward our swimming pool, where Sumbu, our sentinel, would trip them up with an outstretched leg, and Tito would Chuck-Norris them to their watery demise. And then we would call Bimbo—who is in the Nigerian Navy’s secondary school back home—with dad’s briefcase mobile set, and tell her how “gen-gen!” we are.
Tonight, however, with Tito now fast asleep, and my father in his striped pajamas, we do not exactly cut the picture of a disciplined fighting unit. There is consternation in my mother’s voice. She is saying she is worried. My father looks irritated, and assures her no harm can come to us. Why should she worry so much? What could possibly happen with Sumbu outside, our heavily fortified doors and all that? Watching him speak, with the delicate gold chain encircling his slender neck—as if to ennoble every word from his manly throat—I feel safe, and carry out conversations with mum in my head: “Yeah, mum. What could happen?”
And then, as if in response, she tenses up and says “Yomi!” under her breath, gripping my father’s arm. She points outside, to the colonnaded wall. The violet-blue sky is now an impenetrable midnight hue, but I can still discern them: a pair of fingers, and now four pairs of fingers, and now camo-sleeved arms, scaling our impenetrable fortress.
Could this actually be happening?
My dad rushes to switch off the lights, and whisks us—in a single move—to the master bedroom, through the corridor where our family portraits hang on white walls. We lock ourselves in the toilet, just as the electricity goes out. We are all here, Dad, Mum, Tito, Wendy, Uncle Bernard, and me, in the same place we’ve dyed my father’s hair jet black, preserving his youth in alchemical scoops of magic. This place where we laughed at my mother’s cluelessness about action films. This place my father first called us “the golden family.”
A dead silence falls. We are still wondering what just happened, our hearts still racing. The dark is threaded through with soft murmurings of my mum weeping and praying. Otherwise there is n—
A crackling sound smashes the eternity of our horrid wait, like unexpected thunder. Kprak! Kprak! And then, it rains. Bullets. From up above. The sound of guns crackling and of feet stomping on our flat roof and shouted orders in Lingala leave us all a whimpering huddle of dread. Something breaks in the bathroom.
Moments later, we hear male voices barking even more orders outside the toilet door. They’ve found us. Uncle Bernard is speaking with surprising calm in his native tongue, pleading with the soldiers to leave us be. But the angry retort, officious and French, does not yield: “Ouvre la porte! Ouvre la porte!” They threaten to bring the door down if we do not open it. My father, in fluid French, joins the heated cacophony of barked orders and firm entreaties. My French is no good too, but from the tiny space between the toilet and the wall where I have squeezed myself, I hear numbers. A countdown. Dix! Neuf! Huit! Sept! Six! Cinq! Quatre! Trois! Deux!
A foot crashes through the bathroom door and withdraws immediately, and the tip of a machine gun peeps into our sanctuary. Dad and Uncle Bernard have already backed away from behind the door by the time it caves in.
The whole place erupts into an explosion of voices. I can hear my mother—she is praying louder now. My father is speaking; Uncle Bernard is pleading; and the men—big, armed with bullet belts, oily skin glistening in the faint glow of restored electricity, red eyes, worn-out leather boots, and berets the color of blood. They hold a pistol to my father’s head, dragging him out. Mum is screaming in Yoruba now, saying she will not let him go, and that if they want to kill him they should take her too. Tito and I are sobbing. Wendy is blasé, not even crying as she is used to doing when strangers show up. She is quiet, in mum’s one hand. A soldier comes to her, tries to pull her away from my mum, but she spits fire in his face. He holds her ear, surveying Wendy’s earring, and orders my mum to take it off. Both of them. Now.
Meanwhile I can hear commotion in the hall, the sounds of husky voices and glass breaking. I even see women, whom I will later learn are the accompanying wives of the renegade soldiers.
It all comes down to this moment: the big boss in the group quietly tells my father he has to die, and asks him if he owns the Peugeot 505 parked outside. My father says yes—their conversation held against a backdrop of escalating chaos in the rest of our house. The boss calmly says my father should come outside with him. My mum says take me too. Her jaw is trembling, her eyes a primal white of animal rage. But her body knows with certainty that she is not going to live one moment longer than my father if he is to die today. Something about her matter-of-fact way of saying “take us both” makes the boss delegate the dirty task to a boy soldier in his flanks and leave the room. He tells the boy to kill us all, as he walks out with Uncle Bernard following, still pleading for our lives. We are pushed back into the bathroom, the doorway guarded by the un-bereted boy, who withdraws his gun. Tito and I are crying. My mother is praying furiously, at the top of her lungs. I close my eyes. I can hear a loud gun cock. My father steps back, his arms out, covering us behind him.
If my father lived to see Trump’s nativism and Le Pen’s angry anti-immigrant rhetoric in France today, he might have been concerned, but just as uncannily calm and collected as he was that night in 1993. Unlike me. I inherited my mother’s drama and tendency for elaborate displays of emotionality. I inherited her worry. Thankfully, your own mother, otherworldly in her composure in the face of chaos, is a better parent than I’ll ever be.
But what does one do in these times? Pressed into a corner by the intimidating gun cock sounds of possible thermonuclear war, corporate malfeasance, and excavatory capitalism? I have written about race, about painful colonial elisions, about the ongoing efforts to convert our common wealth into wealth for the few—under the banner of neoliberal development and progress. I explored these issues on my trail for home, on this hajj to become the father I promised to be to you. Surely, answering the question about how we respond to these crises is vital to my quest, is it not? I think so. It is.
So what do we do? How do we respond to the fact of our Normal—this consistently grinding premise of social ascendancy, this numbing to the effects of the material climate on our bodies, this suggestion that our very breath—the things we take for granted like the techno-consumeristic paraphernalia we employ to be “more effective” human beings and to enjoy ourselves—is built on the backs of generational occlusion? How do we “rise” to meet a world that well and truly seems skewed in the favor of the rich? A world where people like Kutti and his family, even though they are reconfiguring their lives at the edges, are also produced by a giant machine that takes away people from their lands and gives them to large corporations? How do I respond to these dispossessions, to the horror of residential areas carved out for the nations of Canada, to the snaking infiltrations of big oil into the solemn waters of the Sioux people at Standing Rock? How can I come to terms with the fact that due to rising sea temperatures, you will grow up in a world without the Great Barrier Reef, or that the tall trees in Munnar, Kerala, which you enjoyed visiting when you were only two years old, might be extinct in a few years because of mining activities in the state? Should I care that what lubricates our easy movement from here to there in the modern world might be the blood of whales, the blood of the sea, and the blood of people we cannot see? What happens when we connect the dots?
Only yesterday, I read an account of a purchase made in an Arizona Walmart store with a story at its heart. The item purchased, a purse, had in its zip compartment a tiny note from
a Chinese slave who worked fourteen hours a day producing goods for U.S. consumers, and didn’t have a lot to eat. The note read: “Inmates in the Yingshan Prison in Guangxi, China, are working fourteen hours daily with no break/rest at noon, continue working overtime until 12 midnight, and whoever doesn’t finish his work will be beaten. Their meals are without oil and salt. Every month, the boss pays the inmate 2000 yuan, any additional dishes will be finished by the police. If the inmates are sick and need medicine, the cost will be deducted from the salary. Being a prisoner in China is even worse than being a horse, cow, sheep, pig, or dog in the U.S.”1
Were it not for the letter, it would never have crossed the buyer’s mind that her purse was so diffracted that it is composed not merely of the threads and leather with which it was sewn, but the criminal justice apparatus in China. The fashion label on the purse didn’t tell the whole story; in fact, the brand was an agent of reduction, hiding away the fascinating (and tragic) entanglements of the purse. To stop and consider that momentarily might give us the occasion to see that we do not—nothing ever does, in fact—emerge fully formed, independently realized. There are certain conditions we are framed in that make us possible—the terroir for our being/becoming.
In Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” she imagines an idyllic city, “bright-towered by the sea”—a place so happy that it feels too good to be true. It is a city of noble architecture and profound science and deep wisdom. A truly responsible happiness irradiates Omelas. Why this utter and wholesome joy? The narrator doesn’t tell or doesn’t know, but enlists the reader of the story to fill in the details on their own. The details of what makes them so happy “doesn’t matter,” the narrator just knows that they are happy—and not the insipid, vacuous, “goody-goody,” “puritanical,” derivative, stupid, or plain-minded kind of happiness, but a real, embodied, intellectual, and affective liberation.
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 30
