Gravel Heart

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  There was no choice but to sit silently while history was narrated anew, no choice but to wait in a dumbly unenthusiastic silence for the mocking dismantling of our old stories, until later when we could whisperingly remind each other what the plunderers had tried to steal from us. As times became harder and the humiliations and dangers mounted, the search for work and a place of safety made many people remember that they were Arabs or Indians or Iranians, and they resuscitated connections they had allowed to wither. Some of these connections were works of the imagination or fantasies in the minds of people made desperate by need, but many were real if long-forgotten. That was how people lived, with relatives and acquaintances all along the shores of the ocean, obligations to whom they preferred to ignore most of the time but whose addresses they now anxiously searched for in old letters and scraps of paper. The government did not prohibit this frenzy. The politics of decolonisation could not tolerate these divided loyalties, and required commitment to nation and continent. With the revolution, that politics turned violent and punitive, and forced many people into flight because they feared for their lives and their futures. To the government, this search for connections across the ocean demonstrated the underlying foreignness of these people and it waited patiently for their departure, stripping them of whatever it could in the meantime.

  In time, Maalim Yahya was offered a job in Dubai, and received a passport and permission to leave, which was not easily done at that time, not for any good reason but because nothing was easily done at that time. He had found a good job in Dubai where they sought and rewarded his kind of scholarship. He made his preparations as modestly as he could so as not to draw the attention of anyone in authority. He left on the ferry, carrying only a small suitcase as if he was going away for a few days. He bought his airline ticket to Dubai in Dar es Salaam, where no one knew who he was and no one would have any reason to wish to delay him. Maalim Yahya was not one of those ascetic religious scholars who worried that the wrist watch was a challenge to God’s mastery of the day, and that flying in an aeroplane was a blasphemy because it mocked God’s design (if God wanted us to fly He would have given us wings). But nor did he give a second thought to the ingenuity which provided the aeroplane which was waiting there to take him to Dubai. It could have been a donkey or a dhow, any means of travel that God provided. Allah Karim. For Maalim Yahya, the builders and operators of the aeroplane occupied faraway fringes of the everyday and did not live real lives. They were no concern of his. It was still possible at that time to live in a small place without television or the internet or email and to be cut off from the world and its hectic enterprises, and yet to live a life of vindicated self-assurance.

  Several weeks later, safely in Dubai, my father sent word to us that he had found a house to rent and had arranged a loan in advance of his salary to bring his family to join him. He did not tell us about the difficulties he had had to face in finding somewhere to rent, how expensive it was and how humiliating the arrangements he had been forced to agree to for the loan. As husband and father it was his duty to put up with all that and no more needed to be said about it.

  What humiliating arrangements? He told me about that later. He had to find six people to guarantee the loan. They had to be paid a fee and insisted on seeing his bank account. He had to pay a lump sum in goodwill and to commit himself to large monthly repayments, which he could only do by taking more loans. It was a nightmare but he did it all and did not tell us anything about it until later. So far as my mother was concerned, the money was now available for the family to join him.

  When my mother Mahfudha told me of my father’s instructions, I said that they should go without me. I refused to leave. I was seventeen then, living in the house where I grew up and where later you grew up, and I was in the final year of secondary school. In the recent past, I had had trouble with my father, he whom everyone respected for his learning and found deserving of God’s blessing. I did not wish to quibble about my father’s deserts but I found him demanding and unreasonable and increasingly bad-tempered at times, and felt that he expected me to be more enthusiastic in my obedience to God than I was or felt inclined to be. As I mentioned earlier, I grew less desperate for God’s blessing in my teens. That was probably one of the reasons why he was bad-tempered with me, and because he had lost his government school job and was worrying about finding work in the Gulf.

  I found it difficult to contain my impatience with these demands my father was making on me even when I rebuked myself for my petulance and lectured myself about my duty to obey. I knew that my slouching and shrugging and I don’t know in answer to most questions made me seem childish but the knowledge did not make it any easier to bear my father’s irritation and harassment of me. He chased me to go to prayers – I would be failing in my duty if I do not and God would punish me, he told me – and he corrected me for transgressions that sometimes came as news to me. I liked to stay in bed late when there was no school, as all young people do, but my father disapproved and shook me awake to get me up so I could do something useful.

  ‘Do your schoolwork,’ he would say.

  ‘It’s the holidays,’ I would reply. ‘I don’t have any schoolwork.’

  ‘Don’t be cheeky with me, you little goat turd. You can prepare for next term. Or you can read the Koran with me, go to the market for your mother, or even just go for a walk and get some exercise. Don’t just lie there like an old rag all day. Don’t waste the life that God has given you.’

  My father also disapproved of my love for the cinema. When I was younger I loved to go there. To Maalim Yahya it was corruption and venality, kufuru, an affront to morality and a complete waste of money. I agreed on the last point. After the revolution the government became stupid about censorship. It was the influence of the Soviets and the East Germans, I expect. We were ignorant cinema-goers who went to watch whatever the proprietors put on for us and these were mostly Hollywood and British films and Indian films, cowboys, spies, musicals, love stories, Tarzan. So many films were mutilated by the censor or were banned at the last minute and something else was shown instead, another film or an old newsreel or a cartoon, but I still liked to go.

  Everyone knew who the censor was, and that he was a loud-mouthed, timid man who cut anything that he thought the powerful might dislike: no Sindbad or Aladdin or Ali Baba because film-makers who liked those stories could not imagine these people without a turban, which meant a suspicious nostalgia for the overthrown sultans, none of those silk robes and flowing beards and kissing of fingertips for the same reason, no spy thrillers because the Russians were always the villains and the Russians were now the government’s friends, no empire adventures because the British were so sneeringly superior and always defeated their dark-skinned antagonists, and no undressed black people because that made them look like savages. Instead there was a steady supply of melodramatic Indian musicals in which the heroines exploded into energetic dances every few minutes, strident Chinese operas in which short thin young women with heavy make-up screeched for hours, and underdressed Italian versions of mythic Greek heroes, with ridiculous special effects. Not all the films were plain rubbish but many were, and many were incomprehensible or endless (the Russian ones), but I still liked to go. It was a waste of money but not a lot of money. I loved that darkened pit and its flashing lights, and how I could come out of one world and enter another, and then return to my own an hour or two later.

  But it was not just the cinema my father disapproved of. He disliked my friends, or rather the people I moved around with as I made my escape, the noisy ones who laughed loudly and swaggered on the edges of discourtesy as they roamed the streets. Hooligans my father called them, which was not true. They were only playing at being hooligans, messing about, pretending to be bad. What my father really meant was they did not go to the mosque, which was true. Perhaps it was the inevitable bickering between father and son, and if I had been wiser I would have said to myself that one day we would have a laugh about
this. But I was not wiser, I was going on seventeen and I lived in a place where fathers were used to having their way in this kind of exchange. I knew enough about my father to understand his detailed sense of the respect owed to him as a parent and as a man of virtue, and I knew that what he wished from me was complete submission. That was what I believed was happening between us, and maybe that was what always happened between fathers and sons.

  I refused a confrontation, I could not even contemplate one. It would have been unthinkable disrespect for me to defy my father, but I found my own way of evading and escaping his demands. I hid from him, I lied to him, heading in the direction of the mosque and then slipping into a lane that took me towards the cinema or the café. I think he knew what I was doing but he did not try too hard to catch me out, and I in turn carried out my evasions with enough care to appear obedient and respectful to my father’s wishes. So my disobedience when the summons came for the family to travel to the Gulf was unheard-of audacity. I flatly refused to leave. It would have been harder for me to do so to my father’s face, but as he was not there, I could say to my mother that I was not going and nothing was going to make me change my mind. This was my country, I told her, and I was not going anywhere like a homeless vagrant, to beg for mercy from people whose language I did not even understand. What was out there that was so desirable I should give up everything I knew? I would stay here and wait for life to return. My mother and my sisters waited for me for a whole year while I finished school, hoping for me to come to my senses and to stop being so stubborn. They passed on stories of the good life in the Gulf that were current then: how respectful and pious people were, how easy it was to get a job, a house, a car, how brightly lit the hotels, how full the shops, how ingenious the gadgets, how good the schools, how generous the state. They believed these stories themselves, and either through inexperience or desire did not suspect them for fantasies of migrant labourers. They passed them on to me, pressed them upon me, because they wanted me to change my mind and leave with them, but I would not, even though those were terrible and violent times. There was another reason I did not want to leave and that was your mother.

  *

  I could not restrain a smile when Baba said that. ‘I’ve been waiting for her to come into the story,’ I said.

  He held his hand up palm outwards as if to restrain me. Be patient.

  ‘She never talked about how it was with you two,’ I said. ‘She refused to tell me anything.’

  He looked surprised and thought about that for a moment. ‘I loved your mother,’ he said. ‘I loved her even before she became your mother. Does it embarrass you for me to talk like this?’

  I shook my head and he smiled but I could see that his eyes watered with emotion. I waited for him to continue.

  *

  She was one of the reasons I did not want to leave although I did not say this to anyone, not even to your mother – that is to say, not at the time I was being summoned to Dubai. I would not have known how to say such a thing to her. The thought of saying anything to her, let alone something as provocative as that I loved her, terrified me and made me struggle for breath. I mean that exactly. I had this problem when I was younger, that if I panicked my tongue felt as if it had swelled and filled my mouth and I could only make drowning, gurgling noises. It had happened a few times with my father, sometimes with teachers, and once with a policeman who stopped me for riding a bicycle at night without a light, and I knew it would happen if I tried to speak to her.

  And if I did manage to get those words out against the odds, I had a good idea of what she would do. Yes, I expected she would look pityingly at me and burst into uncontrollable laughter. I was pitiful and worthless, an ugly young man with a thick tongue, meagre schooling and no prospects, the very emblem of ineligibility. In addition I was too thin, my feet were large, my ankles were fat, and I was no good at anything in particular whereas she was a beauty. But I could not give up the possibility of winning her love, not give up just like that without trying. I mocked myself, abused my absurd fantasy, but I could not stop thinking about her and talking to her even when she was not there. It was not something I learnt, this way of being with her, it was not something I heard people talking about. Something of her slipped into my body and fitted there so snugly that I knew it would never leave or diminish.

  I met her at a debate organised by the Youth League of the party … Oh, you know about that! So she did tell you something … As you well know, any association of the Youth League with lively juvenile fun, even of the unruly kind, would be mistaken. The Youth League liked to speak of itself as a cadre of radical political workers that had been transformed into a revolutionary vanguard … that kind of Bolshevik double-speak. It was an organisation packed with hot-headed ideologues, not all of them youthful, who spoke a language of force and confrontation and blood-letting and cruelty. Their pronouncements and proclamations were intended to expose, accuse, implicate and call for the arrest of the enemies of the Party and the State, which were one and the same thing. Only one political party was permitted, a convenience many African states allowed themselves at the time so they could proceed about their affairs without any annoying questions or opposition from imperialist stooges, social malcontents and sexual perverts.

  Several Redeemers and Their Excellencies the Guardians of the Nation had already made the intellectual case for one-party state rule, and only revilers of African civility still sought to argue that it was an authoritarian practice. Elections were regularly held, which the President and his government always won. Why shouldn’t they? Who did they expect to win if not the President and his government? Some unemployed homosexual? A reformed housebreaker? The obstinacy of these opinionated disparagers stemmed from their failure to understand the complexity of African cultures: African citizens preferred the one-party state with a powerful virile leader mounted on it.

  As one exalted His Excellency the President argued, the one-party state was an authentically African concept, a continuation of the traditional practice of rule by consensus – that is, since he was the President, everybody was bound to agree with him anyway, so what was the point of having another party? Another Excellency, who wrote poetry in his spare time from guiding the state, suggested that it was logical for all citizens to prefer a one-party state. Rather than introduce contention and fitna with an opposition outfit, a one-party state encouraged dialogue and bonding between the people, freeing the spirit for that uniquely African civility of communal unity and obedience that was the envy of the world. His Excellency the Poet was fond of obedience and thought it a virtue of great value.

  For similar reasons, only one Youth League was permitted, and one of its most important recent initiatives was a schools debating competition to get more young people involved in party-sponsored activities, to give them a sense of national unity and responsibility and to stimulate their rhetorical and intellectual skills in the service of the people. My school and Saida’s were paired in a debating contest, and the two of us were selected for our respective teams. As I told you, I was inclined to freeze when I became tense, which I did when I had to address several people at once, and my headmaster put me forward for the debating contest because he thought it would do me good, get me over the psychological barrier, unblock me. There’s nothing wrong with you, he told me. It’s all in the mind. I’ve heard you chattering away like a fisherman on hashish. The headmaster was known for his anarchic practical jokes, which he used in place of punishment. Not everybody found them funny but we preferred them to abuse and the cane and laughed along with them to keep the peace. So even as he encouraged me to defy my disability, he was already grinning at his own joke. I think he despised my quiet ways and wanted to see me hopping around a little more. And even if it doesn’t work, the headmaster told me, and you stand there with your mouth shut as if you had swallowed a whole bun in one bite, the sight will cheer up the Youth Leaguers and you will have done good. Go on, off you go. Give them hell.

&
nbsp; The debate was held in the Youth League offices, the rambling, three-storeyed building near the market we went past today that is now a collection of small shops and money lenders and stores. Before the revolution it was the headquarters of the other party, and in those days it was a buzzing, crowded building, covered with flags and banners, people coming and going or pausing outside to catch the latest gossip.

  At the time of the debate, when it was the Youth League headquarters, it was sparsely furnished and empty, a parody of its old self, almost derelict. It was part of the government’s revenge against its defeated rivals, to turn some of their venerable sites into ruins. I had been in it a few times before to play games of coram with Yusuf, a school friend whose father was a big man in the government. He was a good friend and will appear again in what I have to tell you but I don’t expect you knew him. Yusuf and I played in the games room on the ground floor, which also contained a table-tennis table and a broken-down fan on a stand. I had never been to any other room there or to any of the other floors. Later I found out that Saida was entering the building for the first time, and doing so nervously. The Youth League had a reputation for intolerance and enjoyed humiliating its victims. Its rages were at times random and unexpected. Worse than that, this was the party which had murdered her father and she usually kept her distance from all its activities. I think she expected to see smears of blood on the walls and the gloating faces of her father’s killers whose names she knew.