Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Camilla Gibb
Map
Dedication
Title Page
Prologue: Harar, Ethiopia
Part One
Scar Tissue
Alive and Kicking
Exile
Part Two
Al-Hijrah
Call to Prayer
A Single Wellington Boot
Purity and Danger
The Doctor
Blood
The Education of Girls
Affliction
In the Blue Glow
Introducing Custard
Big Fashion
Part Three
Encounters with the Jinn
A Bitter Habit
Eid el Fitr
Phantom Limbs
Instinct
Part Four
The Emperor
The Inner Sanctum
The Book of Lies
Kissing in English
Obstacles in the Path of Righteousness
Terms of Endearment
Part Five
Reunion
Check Mates
Prosthetics
Chalk Outlines
Restricted Access
Part Six
A Crack in the Holy Armour
The Shrunken Heads of Enemy Invaders
Calling All Saints
Shame
A Mother’s Job
To Hold a Girl
Eyes Peek over the Wall
A Beach, a Bridge
Part Seven
Butchering the Stems
Learning Chess
Part Eight
Static
Feast and Famine
September 12, 1974
Part Nine
A Story of Famine and Refugees
Some Measure of Happiness
A Final Aria and a Manila Wave
East, West and Farther West
A Bit of Background, a Lot of Thanks
Copyright
Mouthing the Words
The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life
For Abdi, Biscutti, Agitu and
the ge waldach – the children
of Harar
THE SUN MAKES its orange way east from Arabia, over a Red Sea, across volcanic fields and desert and over the black hills to the qat- and coffee-shrubbed land of the fertile valley that surrounds our walled city. Night departs on the heels of the hyenas: they hear the sun’s approach as a hostile ringing, perceptible only to their ears, and it drives them back, bloody lipped and panic stricken, to their caves.
In darkness they have feasted on the city’s broken streets: devouring lame dogs in alleyways and licking eggshells and entrails off the ground. The people of the city cannot afford to waste their food, but nor can they neglect to feed the hyenas either. To let them go hungry is to forfeit their role as people on this wild earth, and strain the already tenuous ties that bind God’s creatures.
A hundred years ago, when the city’s gates were still closed at night—the key lodged firmly under the sleeping head of a neurotic emir—the hyenas were the only outsiders permitted access after dark. They would crawl through the drainage portals in the city’s clay walls. But the gates are splayed open now, have been for decades, a symbol of history’s turn against this Muslim outpost, a city of saints and scholars founded by Arabs who brought Islam to Abyssinia in the ninth century, the former capital of an emirate that once ruled for hundreds of miles.
For all the fear they inspire, though, if a hyena must die, one hopes it might do so on one’s doorstep. Pluck its eyebrows, fashion a bracelet, and you are guaranteed protection from buda, the evil eye. Endure the inconvenience of having to step over a hideous corpse baking in the African sun all day, but be assured that by the following morning, thanks to hyenas’ lack of inhibitions regarding cannibalism, the street will once again be licked clean.
As every day begins, the anguished cries of these feral children grow dim against a rising crescendo of birds quibbling in the pomegranate and lime trees of the city’s courtyards. And then the muezzins call: beckoning the city’s sleeping populace with a shower of praise for an almighty God. There are ninety-nine of them within the walls of this tiny city—ninety-nine muezzins for ninety-nine mosques. It takes the culmination of the staggered, near-simultaneous beginnings of a hundred less one to create the particular sound that is heard as godliness in Harar.
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you ca’n’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
ON A WET night in Thatcher’s Britain, a miracle was delivered onto the pockmarked pavement behind a decrepit building once known as Lambeth Hospital. Four women standing flanked by battered rubbish bins looked up to a close English sky and thanked Allah for this sign of his generosity. Two women ululated, one little boy, shy and tired, buried his face in his mother’s neck, and one baby stamped with a continent-shaped mole tried out her lungs. Her wail was mighty and unselfconscious, and with it, she announced that we had all arrived in England. None of us had hitherto had the confidence to be so brazen.
I was one of those four women. I trained in this God-forsaken building, a gothic nightmare of a place, a former workhouse where the poor were imprisoned and divided—men from women, aged and infirm from able bodied, able-bodied good from able-bodied bad—each forced to break a daily quota of stone in order to earn their keep. Adjacent is the old infirmary, which once had its own Register of Lunatics, among them a woman named Hannah Chaplin diagnosed with acute psychosis resulting from syphilis while in residence there with her seven-year-old son Charlie, some eighty years ago.
I don’t share this history though I’ve moved within its walls. In the places I have lived, the aged and the infirm and the psychotic are not separated from the rest of us. They are part of us. I don’t share this history, but as a child, I did see a Charlie Chaplin film in a cinema in Tangier through the smoke of a hundred cigarettes. I sat cross-legged between my parents on a wooden bench, a carpet of peanut shells at our feet, the audience roaring with laughter, united by the shared language of bodies without words.
Amazing that humour could ever be borne of this place. The building now stands condemned, slated for demolition, and I work at South Western, a hospital largely catering to the poor from the beleaguered housing estates in the surrounding areas: the mentally ill, the drug addicted, the unemployed white, the Asian and Afro-Caribbean immigrants and the refugees and asylum seekers, the latest wave of which has been rolling in from torn parts of East Africa, principally Eritrea and Sudan.
Many of these claimants avoid the hospital, overwhelmed or intimidated as they are by the agents and agencies of the state—the customs officers, police, civil servants, lawyers, social workers and doctors—with their unreadable expressions and their unreadable forms. I know this, because they are my neighbours. I encounter them in the elevator, in the laundrette, in the dimly lit concrete corridors of high-rises on the Cotton Gardens Estate. I’ve lived in a one-bedroom council flat on the fourteenth floor of one of these buildings since the autumn of 1974—compensation for the circumstances of my arrival.
My white face and white uniform give me the appearance of authority in this new world, though my experiences, as my neighbours quickly come to discover, are rooted in the old. I’m a white Muslim woman raised in Africa, now employed by the National Health Service. I exist somewhere between what they know and what they fear, somewhere between the past and the future, which is not quite the present. I can translate the forms for them before kneeling down and putting my forehead to the same ground. Linoleum, concrete, industrial carpet. Five times a day, wherever we might be, however much we might doubt ourselves and the world around us.
I was not always a Muslim, but once I was led into the absorption of prayer and the mysteries of the Qur’an, something troubled in me became still.
I was the daughter of two solitary renegades who’d met at Trinity College Dublin in the 1950s; freaks pulled by the magnet of shared disenchantment into an inseparable embrace. Alice and Philip, so convinced they had enough love, intelligence and language between them to make their way around the world that they took a leave of absence from university and obligation that would last the rest of their lives, setting off on foot, with me nothing more than an egg in my mother’s belly.
Nomads, my father called us, though there was no seasonal pattern to our migration. I was born in Yugoslavia, breast-fed in the Ukraine, weaned in Corsica, freed from nappies in Sicily and walking by the time we got to the Algarve. Just when I was comfortable speaking French, we’d be off to Spain. Just when I had a new best friend, the world was full of strangers again. Until Africa, life was a series of aborted conversations, attachments severed in the very same moment they began.
There was a familiar pattern to the leaving speech. “You put roots down and they’ll start growing. Do you know what I mean?” my father would say, poking me in the ribs.
“But why is that so bad?” I remember asking as we lurched and bobbed our way toward Yet Another Unfathomable Destination.
“It just makes the passage between places too painful. It’s all about the journey. You don’t want to spoil the journey by missing what you’ve left and worrying about where you’re going” was his standard reply.
For them, the journey ended in Africa, while for me it had only just begun. After several months in Tangier, where I’d played in the streets of the medina while they lay about naked and high in the unbearable heat of our room in a crumbling hotel, we made our way south, to the Sufi shrine of Bilal al Habash on the Moroccan edge of the Sahara. Their friends in Tangier had suggested it: the saint was known as one who could bless pregnant women and their unborn children. My mother had suffered a miscarriage the year before, and she was willing to try anything this time, whatever lotions or potions or blessings might guarantee she carry this next baby to full term.
The saint’s disciple, the Great Abdal, received us with some initial reservation, but softened once he’d placed his hand on my mother’s stomach. It was too late: the baby lay still. She turned away, she turned inward, and I’ve always felt she blamed me somehow, as if I had robbed her of the capacity to bear more children. Some weeks later my parents told me they had business they needed to finish up in Tangier and they asked the Great Abdal if he wouldn’t mind looking after me for the weekend. It would only be for three days.
I was not unused to being minded by relative strangers, and the Great Abdal seemed keen to use their absence as an opportunity to introduce me to the Qur’an. I’d already expressed some curiosity about his big green and gold book and the woollen-cloaked Sufis who mumbled and swayed in the courtyard surrounding the shrine. I had always envied children who went to school and so I welcomed the Great Abdal’s lessons. My father had bought me a notebook in Tangier, and I’d already filled several pages with Arabic words I had learned in the streets of the medina. I began a fresh page for words from the Qur’an.
Three days became three weeks, my anxiety eased somewhat by the repetition of new words, before the arrival of a friend of my parents’ from Tangier. Muhammed Bruce Mahmoud was a large English convert with a white beard and algae-green eyes who had lived in North Africa for decades. We’d spent many nights in his company in over-lit sidewalk cafés and dimly lit bars.
He did not mince his words as one might with an eight-year-old, though he did feel responsible as the messenger. My parents had been killed in an alleyway in the city. He did not say how or why. He and the Great Abdal conferred and decided it would be best that I remain at the shrine rather than return to the city. I had no home to be sent back to—no relatives that I knew of, no England that I knew. The Great Abdal would be my teacher, my guide, my father in senses both spiritual and mundane. Muhammed Bruce would be my guardian, visiting me regularly and paying for my keep. And I would be absent and haunted for a long time while together they worked hard to fill the hollow and replace the horror with love and Islam. And so for me, the two have always been one.
Faith has accompanied me over time and geography and upheaval. From Morocco, to Ethiopia, to England. A faith that now binds me to my Muslim neighbours in this country my parents referred to—despite calling it a dark and oppressive place where the sun never shone and the English (Dad’s people) hated the Irish (Mum’s people)—as home.
In this country they called home, I became a nurse and began, fairly early on in my career, to bring my work back to the estate, to administer tetanus shots, treat head lice, sew stitches, mete out painkillers and counsel wives on the sofa in my sitting room in my off-hours. I hold my neighbours’ children, listen to their stories, reflect in their silence and, in the most serious cases, insist on the hospital, accompany them there: men with fractures and hernias, women hemorrhaging from botched abortions, even one poor boy who’d lost the tip of his penis while his parents argued about whether or not he should be circumcised.
In all honesty, I’m not licensed to do half the things I do, but there is a need, both theirs and mine. Treating my neighbours restores my humanity after laundered and sterilized days of rounds spent injecting person after pain-riddled person with morphine, days when “nursing” feels more like a euphemism for euthanasia.
I’m certainly not licensed to deliver babies, but by the time I ran through the rain down the dark February streets after the two Eritrean women from my building who came to fetch me on that auspicious night in 1981, Amina’s baby was well on its way.
They pointed at the Ethiopian woman squatting under the partial shelter of a gutter. It was too late to move her. I turned her chin toward the light. Her face was contorted with pain: a blood vessel in her eye had burst, her bottom lip, quivering with prayer, held the imprint of her teeth, and sweat ran down her cheeks and plunged into the tunnel between her breasts. For all the strain, though, she made no more noise than the rain tapping gently against the gutter over our heads. A young wide-eyed boy stood at the woman’s side, hand burrowed deep in his mother’s hair.
One of the Eritrean women took off the veil she was wearing, wiped the woman’s twisted brow with a corner and then suspended it like an umbrella over this unlikely cluster squatting on the pavement. The other Eritrean moved to massage the woman’s stomach but I held her back by the hand.
“She needs no help,” I whispered.
And she didn’t. I held my hands under the woman’s voluminous skirt while she bit down on a scarf to stifle a cry. She arched her back with a blue surge of pain and out swam a puddle of black-haired girl.
“Alhamdullilah!” the two Eritrean women exclaimed.
Seven pounds, I guessed, as I lifted the girl up before her mother’s face. Ten fingers and ten toes and one large, irregular mole on her cheek.
I cut the umbilical cord with the razor blade I’d packed along with a towel and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. I’d feared I might have to use that blade for something else. If the woman had been infibulated the baby might have been in distress, might have even suffocated by the time we’d moved her into an operating theatre. In that case, I would have had to cut through her scar tissue to open up the birth canal, at the risk of injuring the baby, at the risk of the woman hemorrhaging or going into shock. But we were lucky; it was just a minor circumcision: clitoris and labia minora.
Amina took the baby in her arms and touched the girl’s cheek in wonder. “Masha’Allah,” she wept, her tears now following in the tracks of her sweat. “Africa!” she exclaimed, outlining the mole with her finger.
The mole did indeed have the shape of a continent. We agreed to call it a miracle, even though, truth be told, it had a tail that made it look slightly more like South America. But that is the thing about miracles: it is perception that determines them as such, not facts.
SITTA SPENT THE first few weeks of her life in my bedroom. It is customary for mother and baby to rest for ulma—the period of seclusion after birth—baby feasting on milk, mother feasting on honey, both concealed out of range of heat and flies and the evil eye. We do not have heat or many flies here, but still, Amina sits ulma because the evil eye is everywhere. Even in England.
We draped sheets from the ceiling to enclose my bed, the bed in which mother and baby would lie for forty days. The Eritrean women had honoured Amina’s request and buried the placenta at the base of a tree in the nearest park. I wonder how many placentas are buried in Kennington Park; how many drunken neo-Nazis fall asleep under those trees and whether they dream life-altering dreams when they do.
We lined the walls of my sitting room with pillows to accommodate the neighbouring women who came to visit Amina and her baby. For weeks, the flat was flooded with the smells of ripe bananas and garlic and incense smouldering on aluminium foil held over the flame of the gas ring in my kitchen. The rooms buzzed with spontaneous song, regular prayer and the constant chatter of women taking on the role of Amina’s family and friends. There weren’t many other Ethiopians in London yet—almost none living here on the estate, anyway—but with the help of the Eritrean and Sudanese women, and other Muslim friends like Mrs. Jahangir from down the hall, we managed to make it feel like a real ulma.
Amina had left a refugee camp in Kenya for a hostel room in Brixton so crowded the women had to sleep in shifts. Her husband, as far as she knew, was imprisoned somewhere in southern Ethiopia. I offered her a bridge, but her presence in my flat, her body and soul kneeling and praying beside me, gave me a way back to the life that I’d left behind. For the first time in years, I felt part of something. For the first time in years, I felt happy.
I’d had seven hard years here before Amina’s arrival, years during which I could not even risk sending a letter. Whomever I might address could be indicted, if not specifically for their connection with me, then more generally for their association with the West. I carry the guilt of the specific and the mixed burden of the general. I ask questions in the hope of relief. Every time I introduce myself to a new neighbour or a patient I presume to be Ethiopian, I watch their faces soften, distrust yielding to uncertainty as they listen to the white woman with the Semitic tongue and peculiar accent reveal pieces of an Ethiopian history. I invite them to drink coffee, caffeinate before asking: Did you know a doctor there, by any chance? In the refugee camp? Dr. Aziz Abdulnasser from Harar?
On the eighth day of ulma, as I held Amina’s baby while she dressed in the mismatched patterns of clothes donated by neighbouring women for the occasion, I could not help but wonder. Not a word for seven years, not a single sign, yet I’d managed to keep the fantasy of our future together alive. But the reality of this wide-eyed caramel-coloured wonder was arresting. This was the future, alive and kicking in my arms.
The day before the naming celebration, our Bangladeshi neighbour, Mr. Jahangir, went in search of goat meat. Tradition demands a trek to a shrine on the eighth day of ulma. In return, one is supposed to offer a goat. Here, we were, as we are with most things, forced to improvise. Mr. Jahangir wheeled his wife’s carry-all to the Brixton Market and argued with the Jamaican women who refused to reveal their source. Then, so he reported, they demanded “a bloody greedy fortune” for the scraps they usually wrap into their take-away rotis.
“But I am no fool!” Mr. Jahangir said, standing on the threshold of my flat, shaking his head, hands gripping the handle of the tartan carry-all.
I waited for the end, where the good Bangladeshi man always wins. It’s the way of all stories told by immigrant men: encounters end in victory because in the bigger scheme of things they feel (and justifiably so) powerless.
“Back and forth, back and forth, I’m playing with them,” Mr. J said, drawing circles in the air with his hand, “and just when they think they have beaten me, I pull out what is called the trump card!” he shouted, his whole body an exclamation mark as he stood on his toes and paused for effect.
“What was that, Mr. Jahangir?” I asked.
He shrank then, adopting a demure posture. “Well, I said: ‘Oh, dear ladies, perhaps I have misrepresented myself. This meat is not for my own personal consumption, no, it is for my dear Ethiopian friends, beautiful people who love the great Emperor Haile Selassie.’
“‘Jah Rastafari!’ the women shouted as if their lord had just entered the room. ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of Jah—take, take this meat to your friends, brother.’
“You see? From a bloody greedy fortune to take, take. It pays to know your history. Lucky thing I am an educated man!”
The next morning, Mrs. Jahangir helped me with the stew. We stood side by side, frying garlic and onions in ghee, and debated spices.
“But it’s a wat, Mrs. J, not a curry,” I insisted, replacing the mustard seeds in her hand with those of fenugreek. “Not better, or worse, just different. Please.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay,” she finally gave in, waving a tea towel at me, “I’ll make your smelly wat not.”
I kissed her on the cheek.
I heard the pop of the mustard seeds as soon as I turned my back.
Amina sat on the bed behind the curtain, thanking each woman who filed into the room for coming. She engaged politely, remarked on her good fortune, exchanged pleasantries in Arabic and English, the languages of religion and exile shared among the women. But despite the smile, she was remote. I wondered how she must have been feeling: apart from her son, Ahmed, she had known none of us for more than eight days.
When everyone had arrived and crowded into my tiny bedroom, I asked Amina what she was going to name her baby. She turned to her son, who, although only four years old, was (so the Eritrean women teased him and only half-jokingly) now the man of the family.
“Obboleetii,” he whispered shyly.
“Sister?” I asked, not sure if I’d heard correctly.
“Sitta?” he repeated, intonation and all, posing his first English word as a question. The women erupted with laughter and applause, and Ahmed buried his face in his mother’s lap.
After the naming day, Amina’s formality began to ease. When I returned home from work each day, I’d make us tea and sit down on the end of the bed while Amina breast-fed Sitta and Ahmed stared intently, eyes like wide-open windows, taking it all in—the sunshine, the inclement weather, the birds—as we talked.
Her English was good; she used to teach it, she told me, to Red Cross workers in Ethiopia. She spoke matter-of-factly about the circumstances that had forced her to flee. Her husband had been linked to the Oromo Liberation Front, an underground movement the dictatorship deemed counter-revolutionary. All the Oromo at the agricultural college where he taught had been placed under house arrest. One by one they were taken in for interrogation; one by one they had disappeared.
“There are only two feelings left in Ethiopia now: fear and paranoia,” Amina said, speaking of the horrors that had befallen the country since Haile Selassie had been deposed in 1974. The papers had reported the emperor dead of prostate cancer the following year, though no one believes he actually died of natural causes. There were rumours that he was suffocated with an ether-soaked pillow during an otherwise successful operation. We don’t expect we’ll ever know the truth.
Amina offered me a first-hand account of the violence I’d only gleaned since Mengistu had come to power. “People dragged from houses and gunned down in the streets in front of their families. Or they lined them up in city squares—yes, even in Harar—and in less time than you can say a prayer, the ground is covered with red.” Qey Shibir, they call it, without subtlety or apology—the Red Terror.
And those who were merely sent to prison? I’d seen reports by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch: nearly one in fifteen Ethiopians was in prison by then, and prisons were notorious as houses of torture where men were hanged by their testicles and women were raped and sodomized with red-hot rods in order to elicit “confessions.”
I don’t look at his photograph any more. I can’t bear to think of what might have happened.
On the fortieth day, we made a thick sorghum porridge and carried Sitta outside, where we showered her with rose petals under a brooding English sky. It was the end of ulma, and in two weeks time, Amina would have a two-bedroom flat of her own in the building. Ethiopians had suddenly jumped to the head of the housing queue. It was the beginning of the decade of the Ethiopian refugee.
The night before she moved, I rummaged through the drawers in my kitchen, trying to match an old set of cutlery for her. Amina sat at the kitchen table and poured us each a cup of tea. She spoke to my back, asking why I had been so kind to her these past few weeks.
I am drawn to Amina because of what we share. Not only is she from Harar but we are the same age—twenty-seven we were then, fifty-four years of life between us stretched across an African canvas, one lip of which is permanently stapled to the wall of the Ethiopian city that once circumscribed our lives, the other lip flapping loosely over the motley tapestry that is London. One side is permanently hinged, even if only in our imaginations.
I slowly pulled out the other chair and sat down across from her. I picked up the cup of tea in both hands, put my elbows on the table and sighed. “Because you remind me of people . . . people I love,” I finally said. “And none of them are here.”
She leaned forward and wiped a tear from my cheek with her thumb. Then she, who had not cried since the day her daughter was born, pulled an arsenal of toilet paper from between her breasts and handed it to me.
“Maybe they will come,” she said with a gentle smile.
SITTA SITS IN my lap, busily twisting a paper clip in my ear while I stuff envelopes. For all her early unabashed bellowing, she is now, at four, terribly shy. She might grow out of it—Ahmed has—but perhaps we are at fault for overwhelming her. Every Saturday morning she sits here with us in the community association office, witness to the wildly shifting moods of the place. Opening a letter or answering a phone call is a lottery, as likely to inspire joy as to incite rage.
I’ve often wondered whether it is fair to expose her to all this, but Amina is adamant: her children will know their history, even where that history hurts. “She can have her dolls and her plasticine,” Amina says, “just as long as she knows where she comes from.”
Where she comes from is undergoing one of the darkest periods in its history, and that is written on the faces of everyone in the steady stream of people who come through the door of this office seeking news of loved ones and requests for help with housing, asylum applications, employment, English.
It’s hard to know how much Sitta understands. What she cannot know is that Ethiopia has not always been this way, that there were happier times.
While Sitta sits in my lap, her brother is at the madrasa where he studies Qur’an alongside Iranian and Pakistani children in the Bible-scened back room of a church.
Amina stands behind me cheerfully bouncing coffee beans in a tin plate over a Bunsen burner perched on top of the filing cabinet. We had a call earlier this morning from someone Amina had known in the refugee camp in Kenya. He remembered her little boy and asked after him. Although his news was not entirely happy, it was news, and where there is a dearth of information, this alone can sometimes be cause for joy.
“Do you think Ahmed remembers the camp?” I ask her.
“I don’t know,” she replies. “I think he has a feeling. But not the words for it yet. Not the questions.”
Amina lights a stick of incense and waves it in one hand as she sings a song of few but potent words. The coffee beans smoke and chuckle their way from green to brown, transforming this cramped, windowless room on the ground floor of a house in a desperate London borough into a more comprehensible world. A familiar world where the smell of coffee draws women together, an olfactory call throughout a neighbourhood luring women from their homes to gather, to chatter, to solve the mysteries and miseries of the universe, or at least of their domestic lives.
Amina and I started talking about this organization in 1982; we were sensing the increasing need for an office in London where people could exchange names in the hopes of locating family members. But much as we talked about it, we didn’t act. We said it was because we were too busy: daily life traps you with its demands. We offer some relief to each other in this regard: every Sunday we cook together, making a week’s worth of injera and preparing and freezing containers of wat. I often babysit, and I’m always available to help with homework, while Amina stops by the market for fresh vegetables on her way home from work and has an unfathomable love of ironing, a passion I encourage by turning up in wrinkled shirts.
“Give me that, Lilly,” she’ll tsk, tugging at my sleeve. “Honestly, you are shameful.”
I’ll unbutton my shirt and she’ll tsk again. “I know,” I’ll say, rolling my eyes, “too skinny.”
She teases me about this all the time. “Too many cigarettes,” she chastises. “And never enough food!” She happily slaps her own belly. My body is a whisper where hers is a shout.
“My husband loves this—” she hesitates, looking for a word, “this duba!”
“Pumpkin,” I remind her.
“Yes, my pumpikin!” She laughs infectiously.
Amina and I live in separate flats, though we share domestic responsibilities, including the children, tease each other, bicker occasionally and compare appearances that are nothing alike. We are co-wives, though we lack the common tie of a husband.
What we share is rooted in the past. I grew up in Morocco at the shrine of the great Ethiopian saint Bilal al Habash, while Amina grew up beyond the walls of the ancient city where the saint was born and served as patron. We both made our way to Harar: me by way of pilgrimage when I was sixteen years old, Amina by way of assimilation at about the same age. For both of us, Harar became home, the place we came of age, fell in love, the place we were forced to flee.
The more we disclose over the years, the easier it becomes to weave the severed threads together. We make sense of our lives by reconstructing them as linear stories that carry us from African childhoods to London streets. Mine begins in Morocco, under the tutelage of the Great Abdal. He showed me the way of Islam through the Qur’an and the saints and the stable of mystical seekers who gathered round him. Although he and Muhammed Bruce agreed my education would be more orthodox, the Great Abdal hoped that one day this would lead me into the more esoteric world of Sufism. Among the Sufis who lived at the shrine I found a brother in Hussein. It was Hussein who accompanied me on the pilgrimage to Harar, though once there, the differences between us became acutely apparent, differences that would eventually lead me, alone, to London.
Amina’s journey is no less remarkable. She was the youngest child of Oromo tenants who farmed green fields beyond the city, and the only one in her family to attend school. When her older brothers were imprisoned for smuggling arms into the Sudan, her mother took the money the police had failed to find, sewed the bills into the hem of Amina’s dress and sent her to live with cousins in the city. Amina became educated in the urban ways, adopting the language and culture of the Hararis as many Oromo did, aspiring to become Harari, for to be Harari is to be cultured and rich. She found a like-minded man in Yusuf, married him and bore a son, before the three of them were forced to flee to Kenya.
Amina and I did not know each other in Harar, though we shared the outsider’s struggle to assert a place there and the euphoric, if fleeting, sense of peace in finding one. We know each other now, as refugees in the aftermath of the revolution, re-enacting rituals, keeping the traditions of home alive in our council flats.
But there are some threads that hang loose, out of place. These are the love stories. The best we can do is knot these threads at the ends so they won’t unravel any further. In truth, I think this is why we delayed starting the organization. Not because we were too busy, but because we were in some ways afraid of the answers our work might bring.
But then came 1984, the year that half a million people died of starvation and half a million more fled the country. Every evening for weeks, Amina and the several other Ethiopians who lived in the building by then crowded into my flat to watch in horror as a parade of bodies on the verge of crumbling into dust crawled across the screen. We were sickened with ourselves for being riveted by the spectacle of this death march. We were ashes-to-ashes fascinated by this movement, heaven-bound invariably, for there is no hell any more when it has arrived here on earth.
We established the community association that year, anticipating an influx of refugees. We knew that there would be thousands—tens becoming hundreds—of people on the move, families fractured and scattered. Those who did not die would be internally displaced or spend years in refugee camps in Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya and Sudan. But it is not these people who would make it to Rome or London. It would be the urban, the educated, the ones who had the means to pay their smugglers to make it this far. The minority, most of them men, most of them alone. People like Amina. From Dire Dawa to Nairobi in the back of a truck, from Nairobi to London by plane.
A similar office had been established in Rome a year earlier. Italy is the point of entry into Europe for most Ethiopians. They come by boat or they come by plane; they come illegally or they come with coveted papers as Convention-status refugees. However they come, they arrive with mixed emotion: hope, despondency, relief, want and fear. And guilt. The unrelenting guilt that burbles in the bowels; the magma at the core.
Every month the office in Rome sends us a list of recent arrivals in the hope that we might be able to match them with relatives in London. Our mission is family reunification. The matches are few because we are still a relatively small community here, but one reunion between brothers spreads a fire of hope among the rest. Amina and I play a small part in rebuilding if not families, at least spirits, and after reviewing each list, we make a copy for our files and send the original on to North America, where, eventually, a great many more matches will be made.
Our work is not as altruistic as it sounds. We are each looking for someone. Amina’s husband Yusuf. My friend Aziz. (Such a weak word, friend. In Harari he is kuday, “my liver,” he is like rrata, a piece of meat stuck between my teeth, but English does not allow for such possibilities.)
Every month we try not to appear hopeful, but we are. Every month we try not to appear disappointed, but we are. The truth is, reuniting people as we do is bittersweet. And the more time that passes, the more bitter the sweetness. It can overwhelm. The names can become indistinguishable, impossible to grasp. Like the spectre of him: the way he can appear in the bubbled old glass of the windows of a pub, in the fog of reluctant mornings, his image distorted and fleeting.
It is Amina’s hope that keeps me buoyed, keeps it bearable in those moments when the names slip like water through my fingers. She places a bucket in my hands and together we begin again, pulling out one name at a time. We compare the names from Rome with the ever-expanding list of names of the family members of all those who pass through the doors of our small office in London.
In each case we begin by drawing a family tree. It’s necessary because Ethiopians do not share family names—one’s last name is the first name of one’s father. Amina Mergessa is the daughter of Mergessa Largassom. Sitta is Sitta Yusuf, as Ahmed is Ahmed Yusuf, just as Hussein and I took the name Abdal.
It has a striking effect, this mapping of relations. We offer coffee and a seat across the desk from us to each new visitor. Pull out a fresh sheet of A4 and align it horizontally. Begin the questions: date of birth (almost always an approximation), place of origin, ethnic background. And then the painful drawing forth of names. Spouse and children first, then working back—siblings, parents, grandparents—and across—grandparents’ siblings, uncles and aunts, cousins. Question marks beside those who are also believed missing, and subtle, lowercase ds next to those who have died.
When we finish, we spin the paper around. Most people are speechless. They see their own names at the centre of this complex web and they no longer feel quite as alone or displaced. They have a family, a place they belong, here is the proof. We give them a copy to take with them. To fold into the back of their Qur’an or Bible, place under a mattress in a room of like mattresses in a temporary shelter, tape to the mirror in their bedsit or tack to the inside of a kitchen cupboard door in their first council flat.
Amina has encouraged me to map my own family in this way, but the one time I tried it proved dispiriting: it looked like a rubble-strewn field. At the far left of the page I positioned the Great Abdal as father to Hussein and me. Next to him, Muhammed Bruce Mahmoud. I drew a dotted line across the paper, as if marking footsteps west to east across the Sahara. At the far right-hand side I wrote “Nouria”—the name of the poor Oromo woman with whom I lived in Harar. I connected her to me on the page as older sister, as I did her cousin Gishta. I wrote the names of Nouria’s children beneath hers, precious to me, children I cared for and taught.
But then what of the man I love? I could think of no way of representing this relationship on paper. I left Aziz hanging in the middle of the page, as if he were a lone cloud hovering somewhere over the desert.
“Wait!” Amina exclaimed, picking up the pencil as soon as I threw it down.
I watched as she added her own name somewhere in the blank middle.
“Your co-wife,” she declared. “And your co-wife’s children.” She added Sitta’s and Ahmed’s names.
“But there’s not an ounce of blood shared between me and anyone,” I said.
Amina sighed. “Sometimes you are exhausting, Lilly, honestly. Okay, so yours is not a map of blood. But can’t you see? This is a map of love.”
Amina and I copy the names from each new family tree into binders arranged alphabetically by first name. Perhaps one day we will have a computer, but for now, our resources are limited; most of what we do we do by hand and we’re grateful for the things we have. This office, for instance. It’s an old pantry, complete with shelves lined with paper in the 1920s and a hidden stash of tinned war rations. Beyond a battered and bolted wooden door, Amina grows onions and garlic in a tiny garden she has planted between crumbling bricks.
The building belongs to Mr. Jahangir, who did so well operating a grocery out of the front that he was able to buy the entire building. He and his wife moved off the estate and into the first-floor flat. They offer us this room at the back of the building, behind the grocery, without condition. This is in part because, Mr. Jahangir says (and only half-jokingly), that it is thanks to the crisis in Ethiopia that he has become a rich man.
When Mrs. Jahangir first introduced Amina to her husband’s grocery, she filled Amina’s hands with garlic, ginger and chili peppers and put fenugreek on her tongue. Amina, taste buds deadened by plain pasta and potatoes, was overjoyed at the revival in her mouth, but when Mr. J presented her with a mango, her face froze as if her entire life were flashing before her eyes. Inhaling the skin, she broke down.
Every Ethiopian who has arrived on the estate since has undergone a variation of this ritual.
For the most part this stretch of road is good to us. Mr. J sells halal meat, and two doors down there is the Mecca Hair Salon, with its special enclosed room at the back where hijab-wearing women can reveal themselves without shame. Volunteers offer Qur’anic classes at the back of the church on Saturdays, and while the Brixton Mosque, which draws us to Friday prayers, is only a bus ride away, the Refugee Referral Service just down the road offers a place in the neighbourhood for daily worship, clearing out its reception room at dusk every day to receive the knees, foreheads, palms and prayers of men and women of all colours.
This is where we are reassured of our place in the world. Our place in the eyes of God. The sound of communal prayer—its growling honesty, its rhythm as relentless and essential as heartbeats—moves me with its direction and makes me believe that distance can be overcome. It is the only thing that offers me hope that where borders and wars and revolutions divide and scatter us, something singular and true unites us. It tames this English soil.
There are rooms being similarly transformed, senses being reoriented, everywhere on earth. I know from experience that you can remap a city like this, orient yourself in its strange geography, strew your own trail of breadcrumbs between salient markers—mosques, restaurants, markets and grocers—and diminish the alien power of the spaces in between. You can find your way. You grapple with language, navigate your way on the underground, stretch your meagre allowance, adapt unfamiliar provisions to make familiar food, and find people from back home in queues at government offices, which at once invests you with a new sense of possibility and devastates you with the reminder of all the people you have left.
Ten years ago Ethiopians had no word for diaspora, nor emigration. There was only the word for pilgrimage, a journey with an implicit return—to Mecca or the shrines of beloved Ethiopian saints—but the idea of leaving your country, except for a very educated few who sought higher degrees abroad, was incomprehensible. A betrayal, even.
Amina is an anchor in this small but growing community. While the others moan their longing for injera, Amina sets about making the Ethiopian bread using millet instead of teff. The women are grateful for the instruction, even though the injera lacks the critical bitterness that distinguishes it. But taste ultimately comes to matter less than resourcefulness. Amina locates a Yemeni merchant in Brixton who smuggles in qat from Djibouti twice a week. The men are jubilant. Bread and stimulants. The stuff of life.
Amina is not a spectre in this landscape; she is unusual in putting down roots. She began by washing dishes in the kitchen of a Punjabi restaurant, which she did while taking advanced English for foreigners at Brixton College at night. She soon began taking secretarial courses as well. Now she works from Monday to Friday in the legal aid department of the Refugee Referral Service alongside well-meaning English women with solid names like Marion and Patricia.
While other refugees dream of mountains and hyenas and rivers, Amina takes Sitta and Ahmed to the zoo in Regent’s Park and introduces them to lizards and giraffes. She fashions paper boats out of pages of tabloids for Ahmed to float on the Thames near the foot of Lambeth Bridge. Old England looms large on the other side. Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament would cast shadows over his tiny paper boat if it were to cross the river, but a paper boat cannot span the distance, and we are both alienated by and grateful for the divide.
We know plenty of Ethiopians in London who do not even furnish their flats. What possessions they acquire sit in their cardboard boxes ready for transport. The tower of boxes holding televisions, toaster ovens, microwaves, electric heaters teeters to the left of the door, ready to be shipped at a moment’s notice. They commit to nothing. They float on the myth of return.
When the coffee beans are nearly black, Amina tips them from the plate into a mortar. She brought that mortar with her. Showed up at Heathrow with nothing but Ahmed, a man’s wallet and that mortar, Sitta still in utero. She unwraps a ball of waxed paper pulled from the pocket of her skirt and shakes two cardamom pods into her hand. She rubs these briskly between her palms, adding their silken ashes and brown seeds to the mix, and then passes the mortar to me.
Sitta places her hand over mine as if to help. A twist of the wrist brings a distant yet familiar sting. The suddenly charged senses and the near-primal urge to follow. Everything lifts. The dull hangover of nightmares about bodies ripped from houses and dragged through streets; bodies jailed in terror and left to sleep in their own excrement; bodies stripped of fingernails, expressions and will; bodies raped with rifles, sodomized with sticks, lacerated and mutilated and broken.
Everything lifts with the twist of a wrist. Everything comes alive.
IT WAS A still night in November 1969, the air thick with the smell of overripe fruit and woodsmoke, when Hussein and I disembarked in Harar’s main square. We stepped out of the Mercedes in which we’d travelled from the capital and skulked away. The extravagance of having spent three days winding up and down the miles of scrub-covered mountains in the back of a chauffeured car, complete with an ashtray full of chocolates wrapped in gold foil, had somewhat sullied our arrival. Not only did it seem contradictory to the spirit of pilgrimage, it was hardly representative of the rest of our journey, an arduous overland odyssey of months spent blistered and parched and subsisting on little else than the gritty bread our Tuareg guide baked in sand.
We would repent, we told ourselves, as we stood in the muddy shadow of a mosque and looked up at the stars. Soon, we would be kneeling to pray before the entombed remains of our beloved saint.
We could hear the patter of drums in the near distance, and Hussein gripped my arm. I nudged him on, following him downhill through dark and narrow streets littered with vegetable matter and animal waste. Cats feasting on carcasses scattered as we grasped the walls on each side of us for balance. Before us, we saw a green archway framing the entrance to the compound surrounding the shrine. Through that archway, the movement of hundreds of people sparkled like sunlight on the crests of waves.
I was used to the slow, quiet, uniform ways of the Sufis at the shrine in Morocco, but here, worship was far more colourful: urban Hararis, the men in their starched white galabayas and white knit skullcaps, their wives, daughters and sisters glittering in bright head scarves and beaded shawls; the people of the countryside, Oromo peasants who work the Harari lands, darker skinned and wearing duller hues than the Hararis, and the herders, sinewy Somalis and their butter-scented wives draped in long diaphanous veils. Landlords, serfs and nomads. Conspicuous wealth, backbreaking servitude and drifting poverty—secular distinctions all erased in the presence of God.
In front of the shrine, a small, white, cupola-capped building buttressed against the city wall, a semicircle of men pounded taut-skinned drums with heavy sticks, throwing sweat from their bodies with each beat. The saint’s descendant and disciple, Sheikh Jami Abdullah Rahman, stood in the middle of them, his white turban the only thing visible at this distance, but his huge voice audible over the crowd. He was leading the heaving mass through a series of dhikr, religious chants, some recognizable to me in Arabic, others offered in a foreign tongue.
Women were clacking wooden blocks together high above their heads as they repeated the dhikr over and over. Stalks of qat were being passed from hand to hand, their leaves washed down with water drunk from a hollowed gourd. Mouths were green, lips spittle caked, sweat flying as people bounced from foot to foot. They were too entranced to take any particular notice of Hussein and me. We leaned left and right with the crowd, and stalks of green leaves were passed into our hands. We hadn’t known qat in Morocco, and it was tough and bitter upon first taste; I spat it out onto the dirt at my feet.
The qat fuelled devotion, allowing people to sustain their energy over the hours and taking them to a point of near ecstasy where they began hissing through their teeth and their eyes rolled so far back their pupils disappeared and they spun around in blind circles. When they lost their balance, they were pushed gently back upright by the crowd.
“Like whirling dervishes!” Hussein marvelled.