The Gambian Dream

Lately I have been thinking quite a bit about home. What it is, what it means. Of what materials it is constructed, how to go about building it. First start with an empty space, a place where your heart is at peace, and your mind is at rest. Add a comfortable bed, a warm interior. A living room, a TV. Portraits on the walls - your mother, your father. Dead relatives, pictures of your Serign on calendars. And then the people: a wife (or husband) who believes in you, children who give you pride. The rituals of adult life - the visits to the in-laws, the slaughtering of rams at Tobaski. All what is expected of a husband, and a father (or a wife, and a mother). And from all this, somehow, arising a feeling of contentment, greater than the sum of its parts. Going home sometimes in the car driving and listening to the radio you will imagine your wife waiting to eat lunch with you, your kids home from school, watching cartoons on TV before they go to sleep. And though it may only be fleeting still for a moment you will feel yourself and your place in the world, and the Creation and the part God wrote you to play in it - and all will be well. Is that definition true? And if it is, what of location? Does it matter, really, then? Could you not as well build this in Antarctica as in Timbooktoo?

Today was a long day at school. Ramadan and Calculus 3: two things that do not go well together. The old teacher dodders around the class - his voice seems to come from the past, muffled by layers of age, cobwebs and dusty rooms, grandchildren and world wars. He takes his time talking - his breathing measured and slow, the way everything he says begins as an almost tangible thought, slowly turning before our impatient eyes into his words, the mathematical concepts he wishes to convey. He chuckles at his own jokes, and we laugh politely (his jokes are of this kind: even the funniest ones can only be laughed at politely). What does he want from life, I wonder. Is it the same as what he wanted, once upon a time, when he was young and the road of his possibilities still stretched out before him, billboards on every side, advertising everything he could be. The richest man in the world, the cleverest, the one who discovered the cure for cancer, the one who found world peace at last. All the accolades that awaited him, the praise and envy of his peers. Ah you young people and your energy, a friend of mine told me recently. I had just finished excitedly explaining yet another idea that would change everything, and this was not the answer I expected. Yet it was a sobering answer, and the one, I realized later, that I needed to hear. In a way it was the answer that led to this writing.

The malls, I tell another friend of mine, the highways and the cars and the jobs and the money - all these things are a mask, that hide the true form of this land, that disguises from us the final fact: that we are not made for, cannot let down our roots, here. For us hotter climes, for us the "third world" (our home), for us the electric power cuts and the indifferent fire of the Sun, the thunderstorms and the lack of privacy. I say these things and I sound sad, even to myself. Why sad? Why not a rejoicing, in knowing where I aim to be, where I belong? The truth is I say these things and I do not know what they mean. The words are not of my making - they issue through me only, the aftereffects of an emotion which lies heavy in my heart. A strange thing: an aspiration, the beginnings of a hope, and yet at the same tinged with melancholy and not the soaring joy - I would imagine - of the true salvation. Where are the certainty and confidence that is supposed to accompany the epiphanies, the thoughts that burn bright and incandescent, and light the path into our future. My friend is silent, and does not reply, and I trail off in mid-sentence, and sit there helplessly looking at my hands. My thoughts are intense but nascent still, and I cannot quite articulate them to someone else, not just yet.

Once, when I first came to this country, I went to Washington, D.C., to visit a monument. In the morning, after eating a delicious breakfast cooked by a Senegalese man, who we teased half-seriously about opening his own restaurant chain. I do not remember the name of the place exactly - only that it contained a giant statue of Lincoln. And something else: on all the walls were plaques, and on the plaques there were inscriptions. I followed them from wall to wall, reading what they said. And as I read one after the other, it occurred to me that though they all spoke of different events still they were all part of a larger narrative. The story of America, and how great it was, and remains. The story of the heroic men and women who fought every single step of the way for this privilege. And I found myself carried away by it, this narrative, how inspiring it was, how it made you want to be a part of it. And then later thinking about it I saw past the rhetoric, and beneath it I saw just how profoundly powerful this narrative was, how effective, how it had linked men and women across the vast distances of this land and even across time, so though they worked individually and each in their own time and place still their minds were bent to a single purpose. And in my time here this has been the thing I have noticed most: how this narrative, this story - this idea - of the greatness of America is what lies at the heart of the nation. So central is it that every person who wishes to be successful politically - from Obama with his change campaign, to people like Glenn Beck and Palin with their hate-mongering - deploys it to their own advantage. And it all began with a colony determined to shake off the yoke of their colonial masters, the oppressive British - and ended after much hard work with the land of the brave, the home of the free, the greatest nation on earth. This is the story they tell themselves. And though there are dissenting voices, though it does not correlate exactly with history, no matter - it is sufficient for its purposes. The day of the presidential inauguration I watched Obama speak, and heard how he took this narrative and extended it, showing how it could be further refined, toward creating a "more perfect Union". I watched and for the duration of the speech, and many days afterward I thought, what can I not achieve in this country, under this President? The power of story, what it feels like to be part of a grander design, all in harmony, you and everyone else doing their part towards achieving a common goal, a noble goal.

Some - the lucky few - get to create their own narrative. To sit down and in collusion write the story of their nation, a collective dream, a way of being in the World as a people. Not so for us. "Undeveloped", "Third World", "Rampant Corruption", "Despotic Rule", "Tyranny", "Demagogues". Whether you agree with their descriptive veracity or not still you must realize: these are labels others have bestowed on us, and not ones of our own choosing. The personality of a person is an emergent phenomenon, built from the person's dreams, and the narratives the person has created to explain himself and his presence in the World. A country is no different, except in scale: it is built from the consensual narrative created by its citizens. On my last day in Gambia I went around visiting elders, to say goodbye, to have them pray for me. And without exception every single one of them told me the same thing. Torg fa deh! Bull jegeh waat fee yaip. Do not come back, when you have been fortunate enough to escape. They did not speak with bitterness - no one is bitter. We have learnt to joke about NAWEC, and the price of sugar, and how much faster your passport is processed if you buy "attaya" for the officer in charge. We shake our heads wryly, and chuckle at the state of things, and go on with our lives. This is the story of Gambia, we seem to be saying - what can we do but shrug and move on? And if somehow we manage to escape, who would be foolish enough to come back? Would that not be madness?

During the summer I met with people, and started work on a couple of projects. The digitization of government departments, the re-integration of the youth. I spoke with people about my ideas, and everywhere I was met with support and excitement - from the CEOs of tech companies to sunye boy yi sitting drinking attaya, of an evening. I was greatly moved, and filled with a sense of purpose. The first glimmerings of a destiny in waiting - the re-imagination of my country. Out with Gambia the poor, Gambia the corrupt. In with Jollof, richly cultured, filled with a people whose largesse and kindness of heart knew no bounds, who were willing to work hard for the greater good, for a time when our youth would watch the TV, and see on the news how desperate African youth from other countries tried (and died on) the back-way, and say Alhamdulillah, that I am content in my own country. Thank God, that neither I nor any of my friends would give up the comfort of our homes in order to break into our neighbor's houses, where we are greeted with neither friendliness nor welcoming. It will work, I said over and over about my plans. It will work and the youth will be saved, the country will prosper. Repeating this over and over to people I had already convinced, people who would vehemently agree with me. As if I myself needed convincing, and sought it in the faith of others.

In time our narratives come to represent the truth, until the two are indistinguishable. And then how hard it is to change them. The truth, after all, cannot be changed, but only escaped from. And so once our narratives have assumed this air of truth - because, perhaps, we have heard them so many times repeated we have lost all certainty as to their falsehood, we are filled with doubt - we give up on ever changing them. We settle into them, and define ourselves using them. And there lies the great and the sad and the true danger. For it is our narratives which define our actions, and in what ways we will attempt to leave our mark on the world.

I miss my mother, and my family. I miss my boys at T Road, and my Kombo crew, and my Lancaster youth. I miss walking down the street feeling, if not pride, at least a contentment at who I am, and how I am perceived. We like your writing, people tell me, and I smile and I feel rewarded, and I am encouraged to write more. He knows so much about computers, people say, and though this is an exaggeration still it is one I wish to grow into, to fill, and so I learn new technologies, and give lectures at our local youth computer club. Yet all these, on closer inspection, are not enough of a reason to return, when it comes right down to it. The people I miss I could see as many times as I can afford to come on holidays - many Gambians are "based" in Europe, returning every December to all-white parties and with new cars, and perhaps some more progress on the house they are building, to stand empty and as a promise of home, a placeholder for themselves in their absence. And - note that I do not say this in any mean-spirited way, or as a put-down - it is easy to be the best in Gambia at something. We are small, and have had neither the opportunities nor the experience of other nations. And so to excel in a field - whether it be writing or computers or football - one would be served much better living abroad, where good writers - to take one instance - are a dime a dozen, and the people considered emasters are truly dazzling in their virtuosity. Why come home then? I do not know what I would do in Jollof, is a common - and valid - excuse. Where would I work? Where would I live? And then there is the bigger problem, the unnameable one: our political system, and how rotten it is, and how it has somehow managed to infect every arena of our lives. So there is no such thing as staying apolitical - one must swear allegiances, or suffer the consequences. Silence is opposition, and opposition is bad. People are persecuted day and night for their beliefs. At least this is what sites like Freedom Newspaper would have you believe. The situation is irrecoverably bad, their lurid headlines scream at anyone who cares to read them. Yet this constant fear-mongering and doom-saying about our prospects is more a reflection of the minds of the people who write the articles on those websites than of reality which, as usual, is much more nuanced.

In our heads we are all writing the story of our lives, composing and editing it, imagining ourselves in the way we would like to be imagined by other people. Imagine a para and one of the boys fighting, at a Nawetaan match. The same reality for the both of them: two men struggling with each other, a shirt pulled until it ripped, an increasingly hostile crowd, tear gas, match flames under noses. And yet how differently each writes down the story in the book of himself, in his mind. The Banjul Boy: I am a citizen of Banjul, I have my rights, how dare they bring some uneducated fool from up-country and give him power over me? The Para: These Banjul boys have no discipline, they look down on us, spoilt brats the lot of them; bring one to live with me for a month and see how he fares. And both men feel persecuted, and both men feel great indignation. In the narratives you write of yourself you are always the hero, even your bad actions justified, at increasing levels of sophistication. I saw a news article once that spoke of a society in the American south, which was printing leaflets "proving" that contrary to popular belief the owners of slaves had in fact benefited the men and women under their bondage greatly, causing them to begin to get educations and become a bit more civilized. Our narratives do not start and end with us. They stretch back into the past, running over into the narratives of our ancestors, and all that they did. Or did not do. And at the same time our own role changes, we move into the position of ancestor for a new generation, our actions defining them. Our children, and their children after them, inheriting what we have left behind. Sunye maam yi denye baayorn sehn lohor deh, we say, nunye feheh beh toubab yi nah lehn?

What will be said about us, by the generations yet unborn?

A man is ugly and stupid, and shames himself every time he opens his mouth in public. He thinks, I must dress better, I have too little hair, my hands are too big, if only God had made me more handsome. I must listen to the popular ones speak and parrot them. Yet no matter how long he does this for he cannot ever seem to become happy about himself and his place in the world. He is filled with a resigned envy, at everyone who is more "perfect" than him. He lives out his days like this. Until one day he realizes: it is I who decide whether I am ugly and stupid and uninteresting, and not anyone else. Such a little thing, this discovery. Yet it changes the tenor of his life. It is OK if, sometimes, he says things that people laugh at. He laughs with them, and learns. It is OK if he is not the prettiest person in the room, or the most well dressed. He is himself, and he is imperfect and unfinished, and he realizes this and he works at improving himself. He lives happily after that, knowing no envy and no jealousy. And he notices too, that all that he admired in others he himself possesses, more or less, but that he lacked the most important thing: a confidence in himself, a belief, a narrative of his own making that cast him in the light he wanted to be seen in.

Once I used to be scared of my insomnia. The way it stretched on into the night, a flat and empty road, dull and dreary, filled with despair. Like a metaphor for life -and how heavy the rest of my days would seem, as I lay in bed and stared into the black caverns above me. I would drink sleeping pills, and surrender to merciful dreamless sleep before it was midnight. I studied, I read, I went to class. To what end? I did not ever ask myself this seriously, but only had vague ideas of what I would do. A relaxed daydream of one day opening a tech company in Gambia with Serign. All in the future, all to be approached lazily and at leisure. Sometimes what we lack is a sense of direction, of what we ought to do, now that we are here. There are Gambians abroad who have lived in the exact same apartment for ten years, worked at the same low-level job, slept on the same bed, and never aspired for anything. They may know a peace I do not know. But rather I think it is that they lack a dream, have become stuck in their situation, while time carries them along as they stand still. Living out lives of apathy, an undercurrent of desperation. Sometimes I feel that this is the way Gambia is too. Daf kor nampa, people will say, of behaviors. Might as well say chi kow suuf sim judoe la... We inherit our religion from our parents. And we inherit too their dreams of us, whether these become our guiding light or the thing we struggle against becoming all our lives. And from our country, our homeland, what do we inherit?

Ham sa borpa chi jaamu yaala la borka, our Oustasses say. We as a nation are imperfect and unfinished. How mean that sounds, how jaded. Yet look around you and tell me what nation is perfect and finished. Tell me what nation does not have its problems, qualities that its citizens do not like about it. Everyone who leaves the country to go to Europe or America comes back with the same story. How hard it is there, how difficult life is, unlike anything they were ever trained to expect, by TV, or by the common dream of America. For it goes both ways. People create narratives of us, not as detailed as the one they create for themselves. But still having the power to affect our own self-narratives. Ku nyayp tufli nga torye. If everyone you know believes you are a bad person for long enough, you WILL become one. If your fellow nations see you as poor and corrupt and beyond saving for long enough... And so we admire other nations, and look down upon ourselves.

I do not wish to suggest there is no hope. Far from it. We live in a good time, our country full of more promise than at any previous time. There are more Gambian college graduates - and even PhDs - than ever before. And that is only speaking of the educational side of things. Then there are all the Gambians who have traveled abroad and come back - even if not with new skills - at least with an expanded view of the world. Then there are the skilled and educated within the country, who have never traveled. The only Gambian I know who I would call a genius without reservation went to the University of the Gambia, and could do advanced Math problems which I couldn't solve even with the help of a computer. And then there is our greatest untapped resource: all the fine minds, sharp as whips, that have been labelled part of the illiterate majority, their lack of command of the English language a layer of ice frozen and concealing them and their talents. What if, for a whole year, all these different categories of people came together, and set aside their differences, and subscribed wholly to a new narrative of Jollof, one which traced its lineage back to our proud roots, our empires of old, and from thence made its way into the future, our present. A story of self-belief. A reclaiming of the language used to describe us: "forming" instead of "undeveloped", "sutura" instead of "baadorla", "saaku kaatan" instead of "naywe dorleh"? What if we believed this for more than a year, for five years, for a decade, what if we let this become our national dream, our common vision, convincing the people abroad to come home at last, and the ones here to stay - or leave to acquire what skills and knowledge they could, and then return.

One can spend all night, of course, speaking about dreams and narratives. But daylight throws our reality into sharp relief. We do not have that much money. We are such a tiny part of the world. And this will only work if we all do it together - I'm not going to sacrifice my happiness while others enjoy their lives with their families. All common excuses, all in some way based on "facts". Those outside dread returning, those inside think only of escape. What a way to perceive one's country: as a prison - a prison containing all the people one loves, but a prison nevertheless, the visa issuers at the various embassies the only ones who can release us from it, the all-powerful gatekeepers, elevated to almost mythical status. Sitting behind reinforced glass partitions, deciding our fates. Subjecting us to all manner of humiliations, starting out with the assumption that we are liars and thieves, who will do anything to get into their countries, and be a great burden on their social systems, that they have worked so hard to build, over the years. And though we are a proud people we take all this and more. It is not so much that we hate our country - no Gambian would choose to live anywhere else if what they sought existed back home. But what they seek - a chance at a better life - seems only achievable abroad.

We are a religious people. If I asked any Gambian, can God not make us prosperous, their answer would be swift and not even requiring thought on their part: Of course He can! Yet Yaala yaala bey sa torl, our elders say - and though it may sound trite sometimes it is all we have. To do our best, and to know we have done our best. To leave the rest to God - that which is not in our hands. It is not as if this is a new way of thinking. It has always been our philosophy as a people. Suma haalis b dama kor nyaha!, people say with great (and deserved) pride, fog mu am Barr-keh. This family has Barr-keh, people say. Meaning all in the family worked hard to achieve all they have achieved. The closest word to barr-keh is "blessing". But blessing, the word, does not cover everything barr-keh is. There will be the fruit of our labors: that is prosperity, naataangeh. But barr-keh we do not work for - it arises naturally as the result of our toil. And if we all nyaha for Jollof, how much Barr-keh will that be? For Barr-keh is not just external, something from God. That is only a part of it. A larger part is what is inside us, the ability to look at what we have done and think, we achieved this, and no one else.

There are sacrifices involved, of course. It would be irresponsible to pretend otherwise. The small conveniences - access to wallmart, and movie theaters, and all the other front-facing products of a capitalistic society. And the big ones - better health care, access to better education. These things seem impossible to live without. Yet it turns out that this is not true. There are people who have returned, with their whole families, and they have survived it. We do not live in trees, after all. And though it is a slow process we are always improving. And as with all sacrifice, soon we come to realize that the things we want are not always the things we need.

A nice paragraph at the end, then, to summarize all I have said. If only it were that easy. If only I could write "let us all go home, and work at developing our country", and pretend that because I am thinking along these lines I am a "better" citizen. But though this is tempting, it is not a position that will in the end achieve anything, except perhaps make me feel better about myself, nor is it a valid one. We all have our own lives, and our reasons for what we do, and who among us has the right to decide for another. There are no easy answers. I cannot say, let us do this and it will save the country - no one can. But I want you, wherever you are, to stop for a moment and imagine Gambia, Jollof, our nation that has given us so much and never complained or asked for anything back. And I want you for a moment to think of her, not as ugly, not as a hopeless case,not as others see her. But also do not think of her as what she is not: rich, or powerful. Here is what want you to imagine instead: Once there was a small country west Africa, home to less than two million people. And this country was a young county, and though she did not possess what other, bigger countries possessed, though she lacked resources, still she held her own, and believed in herself, for one reason: her children, spread all over the world, always had her in mind, and would come back to her, and care for her, and change her into everything she was yet to become.

"Africa dream again", Youssou Ndour sings. All we need to start with is a dream. And then who can stop us.

Returning Home #3: Of Mothers

You have had dealings with other women. You have held them, and they have held you, and they have whispered in your ear how much they love you. And you look at this woman, your mother, and though she has never said those three words to you, you see quite clearly: no woman in the world will ever love you like her again. Though you were to meet all the women in the world, though you were to seduce (or be seduced by) all of them.

The other men you know, your friends, all swear by their mothers. When they are angry, when they fight, it is each others' mothers they curse. It has always seemed a bit like posturing to you, when they speak about all they will do for their mothers, once they have the money. And so you have tried, when you are alone, to understand your own feelings for yours. Their roots deep within you, the first person you ever felt anything for. Yet not quite emotions, not exactly. Seeming to exist in a previous state. It occurs to you that what we start with, what exists before emotion, has no name. Only: it is strong, and it is wild, and we barely have any control over it. And it is out of this uncontrollable product of our hearts, this raw material, that we forge what we call emotions, shapes we can recognize, feelings we can begin to describe. The connection between you and her exists in this pre-emotional state. You will go out into the world, and you will come back home, and always it will be waiting, while she yet has breath in her (and you cannot even begin to think about the alternative, coming home to not find her there, you are not yet, perhaps never will be, equipped for such grief…). So when the other men speak of their mothers, you are silent. There are things we hide within us, jealously guarding them, never sharing them with anyone. When you are feeling scientific you attempt to explain it to yourself. The bond between mother and child, how you grew up inside her for three-fourths of a year. But most days you are happy without an explanation, happy only to sit next to her, and talk. To listen to her speak, your mother, how she laughs when you crack a joke. Leaning over you, putting her hand on your shoulder. Moving with a lightness through the world that you have seldom seen in the men of the country, the proud rulers of their homes, full of faida. And you think, even as you grow into a Gambian man, how you would like to be more like her. But you think this in the same way a Gamo-kat speaks about being more like the holy Prophet. An attempt - nothing more - to reach heights you know you will never be able to, levels of goodness-of-heart you cannot even begin to comprehend how to achieve…

Sitting on your bed, she asks you a question, something about your life away. An illness you had suffered from in your absence, and how you battled it. And then she said, but it's over? And you said yes, and she nodded, and then she looked down at the clothes she was folding. Just like that - a nod, a look between you, that lasted only a second.
But in that second you knew. You saw it clearly written on her face, and you did not know how you had missed it, all these years. For what you saw in her face was a special specie of kindness, self-sacrificing, wholly given without expecting reciprocation - no more and no less than that. Later you would expand the act, break it apart into its constituent elements, add degrees to it. But in that moment you did not need to - it was as if the whole of human nature was written in that look, and if this were true you saw how there was hope for humanity after all. In their sermons Imams spoke about the wrath of God, and the wide expanse of its devastation. They spoke of how in the night God looked on the Earth, and saw the evil in men's hearts, and raised His mighty hand to destroy it, destroy all of creation that brought Him such displeasure, once and for all. But then, in His omniscience, God saw a Waaliyu, a holy man, a saint, standing atop a prayer mat, prepared to spend the whole night worshipping his God. And God saw this, and because of this man He delayed the coming of His wrath upon the world, and all of creation was saved once more. You always liked this story, this idea of God taking pity on Man, because of one man's actions. The earth's savior, unknown and unthanked, alone in his room bowing down before God, not knowing what power he held, to alter fate, to waylay destiny. But you think they got one part wrong. You think it wasn't a man praying that God saw. It was a Gambian mother, in bed, tired from a day's work, tired from buying firewood and tending the fire, from cooking and cleaning and washing the clothes and taking them out to dry and the million other things it takes to run a home, and still having time to raise the children. To love them as they ought to be loved. In your version of the story, this is what God saw, and what stayed His hand.

It has always puzzled you, the gender debate that has sprung up around the issue of women in Gambian society, and their position in relation to men. Women are weak, men are superior to them, almost everyone you talk to tells you, man and woman alike. And you think, this must be a very peculiar form of inferiority, for a moment you think, perhaps I do not understand what the word means after all. For in all the years you have lived in this country you have never seen a single woman complain about the work she does in the house, for her husband and her children. You still find this hard to believe, when you think about it. You can imagine yourself, for one day, taking on the duties of the house. You would sweep the floors of all the rooms, and later wash them. You would get into the kitchen, and on your knees on the dirt floor, eyes stinging, light a fire to cook lunch on. You would go to the market, and buy what little you could afford on the small depaas you had been given. And, because this was only for one day, you would do all this without a word. When your husband came home, and complained about how much salt was in the food, you would take it with grace and silence (though looking closely someone would be able to see just how brittle your smile had become, just how close to breaking). One day, you would repeat to yourself, it is only for one day. But you cannot, even in your most charitable moments, imagine doing this all your life, as the days turned into months, the months into years... Every single day, come rainy season or dry, come a chill breeze or the dusty harmattan. You think about what depths of unselfishness it must take, what mastery over one's ego. Doing everything one did, without expecting praise or payment - and for what? You do not understand - what's in it for them, you think over and over, and you can never come up with an answer. And before you ever ask her, this woman, your mother, you realize just how foolish the question is, how foolish and ridiculous, like asking 'when is the moon coming to dinner?'. It is a question that will make no sense to her. And you think about your own self, and how selfish you are. How you want every good action you do to be recognized, to be praised. How even when you claim to people you are modest, and do not want their praise, still in a secret part of yourself you hope they will not stop, they will continue to confirm what you have always believed about yourself and your own talent. What inferiority then, you ask yourself. Certainly not that of character - and what else should a man (or woman) be judged by?

Nights of insomnia, days of grouchiness and an over-bright Sun. You lie in bed in the dark and think, I have never shown her how much all she does means to me. You think, all these years I have taken her for granted, and never thanked her for anything. The best things in our lives we seldom notice, until it is too late, until they are gone… And then what heartache we feel, what regret. Once you saw a mother pleading with two paras. Her son in a knife fight, someone called them. They came to pick him up. She was one of the most quarrelsome women on your street, known for her razor-sharp tongue and her raunchy wit - all the men of the street fearing her. Yet there she stood before the para - who looked younger than her own son - and about her waist her headwrap was tied, and her hands were clasped, and she was almost on her knees. My son, she said, you know I would not do this, it is only youth. Please forgive him - please do not take him away. And the para, resolutely refusing her pleas, and the look of increasing desperation in her eyes. The way she tried to catch their eyes with hers, and the way they continually looked away, so she would not succeed. And you knew why: what you saw in her eyes made you want to forgive every crime her son had ever committed, on her word alone. And for a moment you felt what it must be like. A part of yourself, grown within you. A creature completely dependent on you, helpless, unable to feed itself, or walk, or do anything on its own. The only child in all of creation, the first and the last, the most beautiful thing in the world. Nights filled with its screaming, as red-eyed you sang to it to calm it down. All your days centered around it, sleeping only when it slept, eating only after it had been fed. Its cry getting you on your feet and running to where it was before it ever reached your brain, perhaps even before you had quite heard it… All the sacrifices you had to make, for its welfare - and yet every single one of them worth it, when holding it in your arms it looked at you and grinned - pink gums, eyes crinkled up, face so tiny… Growing up so fast - the first days at school, the scabbed knees and dirty shorts, beginning to discover a world outside of the one you had constructed for it so meticulously, beginning to explore its possibilities. Able at last to stand on its own, yet not ready, never ready, to leave - the world filled with shadows, and dangers, and a cruelty which would crush it - your fears, your worries, wishing you could live its life for it, absorb all the pain alloted to it, all the sorrow that awaited it in the future, and you would suffer it all gladly so it could live, so it could be happy, and nothing would ever mar that happiness…

Lately you have begun to think about writing an essay about your mother, and your relationship with her. How could you write about returning home, after all, without including the person without whom home would not exist, the heart of home, its pulse felt through your life no matter how far you went; and its skin, spread out so it could hold everything and everyone together, no matter what. The best person you have known in your life. But every time you try to get started, every time you sit before your laptop and open a fresh page, you come up with nothing, words fail you. Perhaps, you think, I am not a writer of sufficient skill - perhaps a better writer could do it without even thinking. But the last time you try, looking at the icons on your computer screen, you think, that is not true. For there are things that cannot be written down, that cannot be explained. For sometimes words are not enough, fall just short of the uses to which we would like to put them. And so you close your computer, and you walk away from it. You go into your mother's room, and you sit down on the floor, and lean against a wall. She is sitting on the bed, listening to the BBC world service, the radio held up close to her ear, a look of concentration on her face as she attempts to decipher the words over the static. She turns to you where you sit. Come, she tells you, patting the bed next to her and smiling, get off the floor and come sit next to me.

Returning Home Part 2: Of Age & Time

He walks beside the old woman, down the street - her escort. She walks slowly, laboriously, each footstep seeming to take forever by his reckoning. Because he is young, and life for him is speed, the never-ending rush to somewhere, anywhere, the perpetual next moment. He forces himself to slow down with her, and he does as long as he is thinking about it. But sometimes his thoughts wonder, and he walks ahead. Only to suddenly miss her by his side, only to turn and find her a distance behind him. Her back bent, her gaze on the ground as she measures each part of the road before ever she puts her foot down on it.

They sit on benches side by side - the old woman and the old man they have come to visit - and talk. He sits between them, closer to the old man. She talks about trips to Tunis, riding in boats and the backs of cows, nights in Mecca lying on prayer mats with no pillows, getting zam-zam from a well. The cruelty of the Arabs. How 500 dalasis could take you and bring you back, and still leave you with change to spare, to go shopping with. He fills in the pauses in her story with interjections. Allahu Akbar. Laa Illaha Illalah. Hm! Chey! And he sits there and their words fall all about him, and into him and through him, and in the distance there is the call to prayer being broadcast over a mosque's PA system, and he feels age - not old, not advanced in years like these people he sits between - no, he feels age itself, like the aether, and it is all around him, and it is a slight heaviness in the air and it is in the slow ponderous way they speak, and it is in the way their voices are distorted by their fallen mouths, how their words are measured, how they speak a wolof without slang, untainted by terms from other languages. He has never been in the presence of age like this, has never noticed the way it creeps after him and follows him everywhere he goes, like death, like time. It fills him with a feeling of awe - he has felt like this before only in mosques and at religious gatherings, or in the presence of great art. One day, he thinks, I will be like this. And it occurs to him that these two will be dead, long before then, transformed and no longer themselves.

Again they are out on the street. She asks him to walk her to the hospital. Now the rhythm of his footsteps has become aligned with hers, his heartbeat slowed. One step…. then another… the distance before them seeming never-ending. All urgency gone, a world slowed down. Or rather, the passage through it, the world itself a still thing, a thing of permanence. And in this slower rhythm he discovers a new understanding of time. It captures his imagination. Right at the end, how it is stretched out, how it is no longer a river, flowing, but honey dripping from a spoon. A little left on the tip, and then there will be nothing more, hanging in space. Subject to the vagaries of gravity.

And then there is the other kind of time, the kind between people, existing in the space between them. Again and again she asks him: how long have you been away? And when he tells her she holds her mouth. That long! It seemed only yesterday, when we took you to the airport! And he feels the same way about his time there too - it has seemed to pass in a flash, condensed by a trick of memory into a short series of instances, a place here, a person there, an experience, a thing he has touched, a food he has eaten, an embarrassment he has endured. These are all the artifacts of the three years he has spent abroad, a summary of time. A shortening. What is long, what seems to have taken forever, is the time that exists between them, in a hidden place neither of them are able to observe or scrutinize, except cursorily. This time-between will not be condensed or summarized: it is all the experiences he has missed, all the things that have happened at home in his absence. In conversation people will sometimes tell him of one of these things. Did you hear about such and such happening? Were you aware that so and so died - ndeysaan! So and so got married, so and so's house was sold, and he was evicted. But these are mere drops of water from the ocean he knows he cannot ever submerge himself in again, because it exists only in the memories of those who were here and not away, those who were present for its enactment. This curious (and sometimes merciful, and sometimes maddeningly frustrating) quality of life: that once we have passed a point we can no longer go back to it, that we can never visit a place as it was at a time in the past.

And he thinks, too, about death. (All these thoughts about time have put him in a melancholy mood). He looks at her walking, how old she is, he looks at her sitting, stooped over, her face weathered and worn with the years, her dentures clicking as she laughs. And he thinks, who will be here on my return. Who will be here, and who will be gone. And he thinks, there are people I am seeing now that I will never see again. And he resolves to take each experience he has in this place, to crystallize it and hold it in his head, store it in the deepest caves of his memory where they will forever be preserved. So in the future he will have them to console him. And he knows he will fail at this, he thinks of all the time memory has failed him in the past, how walking past people now they greet him and he does not remember their names, and has to mumble something in reply. His memory will fail, and all that will remain in its place will be grief, and he does not know how he will be able to handle it when the time comes, how other people have lived through it, people who have lost their family, and their friends. He thinks perhaps it would be easier to be the lost one, that the grief would belong to others, that the weight would be theirs to bear.


Crossing the street she is timid, the process of looking left, then right, then walking across the road - something he does every day without thought - slowed down to almost painful meter. Rude taxi drivers honk their horns as they pass. A lone streetlight looks down on the scene, and under it sit the cherreh sellers and the sellers of oranges, their wheelbarrows before them. She greets everyone they pass sitting down. Jaamangenam. Is there peace with you? Perhaps a greeting adapted from the salaam of Islam. Or perhaps - as he prefers to think - one dating back to pre-Islamic times, rooted deep in the past of the culture, this seeking after peace. Jaamangam. Jaama Rek. Mbaa Jaama Nga Fanaanor? Aaga Jamm. Jaama Jamm. It occurs to him that there exists a national pre-occupation with peace, in the same way other nations seek after success, or happiness. We have nothing, but we have peace - how many times has he heard this said. And how many times has he dismissed it as the last refuge of a desperate people, unable to claim anything else as their own. Yet now walking down this road with the old woman, he begins to get an inkling of what it means. The first glimmer of understanding, the beginnings of an epiphany. For Jaama is more than just a state - as peace is - it is a quality, possessed by the lucky, which allows one to move with lightness through the world. Jaama with the neighbors, jaama with friends, jaama with family. Jaama with strangers on the street. And the ones who practise it - for like kindness it is not only possessed, it also must be acted upon - best, at their funerals people will say: Kee ku baah la worn - amorn jaama ak ñep. He wonders if this will ever be said of him. He feels suddenly, inexplicably as if this epitaph is the most important thing he can achieve while he is still alive. That in the end nothing else will, could ever, matter.


When he takes her home she fumbles with the key at her door, before finally getting it open. She takes an age to climb the step, and he stands waiting, and he does not feel a shred of impatience. He follows her into the living room, watches as she takes off her kaala and drapes it over the couch, takes a deep drink from the water cooler she filled before they left. She wipes her mouth, and sighs, and looks at him. She remarks on the rejuvenating qualities of water. And then he takes his leave. Goodnight, she replies, using the English word. Let me lock my door - there are so many mad people in Banjul. He leaves her laughing at her own joke, and as he walks down the street he thinks he can still hear it, and it arouses in him a feeling he cannot quite describe, though it is fierce, and it is passionate, and it seems to have no source nor any goal. A kind of melancholy, a kind of happiness.

Returning Home Part 1

In the beginning there was your country, and you knew nothing else. When was the first time you began to develop a sense of the World, as a place, and World events as a time, in which your country was located? Perhaps it was from the TV, bringing in news of the industrious Chinese, the technological Americans, the warring Ethiopians, the starving Somalians (everything at this age painted with the brush of broad stereotypes - this was all you needed to know). Or perhaps it was from your parents and the other adults in your life, when they spoke about their travels to lands where it is always cold, and people so rich everyone has a car, and holy lands where prophets and great marabouts had been discovered in days of old.

Yet despite all this your spatial apparatus, that part of your brain which situates you in the World and all in relation to you, was filled with the sense of your country as all there was, and all that there needed to be. One of the poorest countries in the World, the encyclopedia claimed - and how surprised you would have been if someone had told you this. What poverty, when you ate three meals a day and every Juli your father bought you a new mbubi juli, you and all your sisters and all your brothers, and all your aunts and uncles came to your house and you killed and ate a ram and celebrated? You went to school, and your cousin in England sent you Nikes, and you watched pirated copies of the latest DVDs, and you played football on the streets, and you were happy. How could this be poverty?

It was in high school that you first learnt about corruption, and accountability, and transparency. You had seen these things sometimes before, in certain of the opposition newspapers in the country, usually in an interview or essay by an opposition figurehead. But now as the port through which you viewed the world widened and you read about your country in books and magazines, and began to see yourself as others say you, you came across the words more and more often. In studies by toubab universities and think thanks and human rights organizations located in faraway Europe and America. You believed them, of course. You never had reason to doubt their statistics, their human rights and corruption lists. And yet a strange thing - in the government of your country, against which they made such grave accusations, the people who worked were your aunts and uncles, and the aunts and uncles of your friends and neighbors. People well known, regular people who showed no outward sign of being evil, or dishonest, in the execution of their duties. A quandary then - how could these same people be the ones in the studies, their primary cause, people who ought to be punished for their excesses, made to change their ways - how could these same people be the people you knew.*

And then you got a chance to travel, to leave your country and go to another one, that by all accounts was more developed, that had its own problems but nothing like the ones your country was reputed to have. You thought leaving - leaving your family and your friends and the country you had lived in all your life - would break your heart. You swore to yourself you would come back as soon as possible, you comforted yourself with this thought of eventual return, and it could not come fast enough. For the first few months in this new country all your thoughts were filled with your own country and your life there, all your speech about what you left behind. You called every opportunity you got, and though already people and the trajectory of their lives had begun to drift away from that of yours still you firmly held on to your memories.

A country is more than the land of its placing, more than the people of its inhabitation. These are all important parts of a country's definition. But there is something else, something intangible, which is necessary - the dream of the country, a quasi-mystical thing created by both citizens and, mysteriously, the very land of the country itself. The dream of your country, the one you had left behind, was a dream of everlasting peace, of a place so blessed by God there were proud recountings of Marabouts who had travelled across Africa to come there to pray. A place where evil was so foreign to the kind souls who inhabited it that the general agreement whenever a violent crime had been committed was that it had been done by a foreigner. A dream in which everyone helped everyone else, and all the doors to all the houses were open all day and all night, and food was everyone's food, and home happened to be wherever you were visiting at the moment. No matter how bad it is in a country under the gaze of external eyes still those within the country, the ones who have to live out their lives there, the ones who have the most stake in the country - these are the ones protected by the dream of the country, for that is its primary purpose: protection. (This is what people mean when they say they are more patriotic than others - they mean they are farther along in the adaptation of the dream, have embraced it more fully. And the ones they accuse of being unpatriotic, these are the ones who have not subscribed wholly to the dream, the ones ready to point out its flaws and just how much it deviates from reality.)

It was not only your country that had a dream, of course. This new country you went to, it had its own version too. A dream which in time came to thrill you, a dream much larger than the one you had left at home, grander and more majestic. A dream, after all, is a magical mirror we hold up to our reality, in order to distort it to our satisfaction. And what reality you came into contact with in this new country: fast-paced, ruthlessly efficient, larger than any life you had become accustomed to. A reality in which it took more money to create a movie - a work of fiction - than the entire GDP of your country in a given year, where the wheels turned with such energy, and people worked with such enthusiasm verve, even to the lowliest of janitors.

You met other people from your country who had fallen in love with this new country, who wanted nothing to do with going back home, and in the beginning you felt a weird pity mixed with contempt for them. How could they have been so brainwashed, you wondered. How could someone give up the rich self-contained-ness of mbahal bu tilim for the shapeless lump of fat that is the American burger, the largesse of our people for the tight-lipped smiles of the toubab stranger on the street, the sense of belonging that followed you around everywhere you went in your country, filling you with warmth and direction, as if the very land had been made for you and others like you. You thought of home as the ultimate destination, to which all roads led no matter how crooked they ran, no matter at what way stations they detoured - and you thought of these people as poor lost wanderers who had lost their paths, who would never fit in anywhere else and yet did not know it. You looked on them and you thought I will never turn into that, I will never become that.

And then an opportunity presented itself for you to go home. An unexpected one, that seemed to come out of nowhere. You became greatly excited. All your memories of home had in truth begun to fade with time, replaced by the harsh reality of your experiences of life in this new country. You had in effect begun to settle in, without ever noticing it, slowly like sediment into a riverbed, while the soft gentle watery flow of life in this new country washed over you. Things that were not in the immediate centre of your attention, but got picked up by your subconscious anyway. The way there were no soldiers walking about town, exercising their powers to arrest and intimidate. The way there was such a greater variety of food, from every culture you could imagine. How even with only a low-level job at one of the supermarkets you could still live a life that back home only higher-level government officials could live, own a car and go full-cart supermarket shopping every week. So even while a part of you pined for home, always at work in the background, your memories of it they became dimmer, as the light of the compelling new experiences you faced became even brighter.

And so while you were excited at the journey you were about to make back, tiny little slivers of doubt began to creep into your excitement. One morning you woke up and the thought occured to you - what if there is a problem with my visa and they do not let me come back, at the end of my trip. And here was an indication of how much you had changed - while in the beginning, immediately after your arrival this thought would have filled you with relief - you could go back, and you could stay home, where you belonged - now it filled you with alarm. You found though you wanted to go back still, you did not want to stay. This was the simple matter of it, despite the excuses you came up with in your head: that you only wanted to come back because there was still a degree waiting for you, that you would go back eventually, eventually, when everything was through and done with, that you would never abandon home. And this reluctance was the truth, and it was perhaps to keep denying it to yourself that you fought with such ferocity over the reputation of your country, deriding toubabs who did not understand it yet spoke up against it, filled with a righteous anger that threatened to choke you with indignation - what country after all did not have its problems.

But your innocence had been lost. Whether you were in the end able to shrug off this new dream that this new country you were in had thrown over your shoulders and over your head so it filled your sight and obscured the dream you had left behind, whether in the end you were able to return or not one thing had changed: you would never be able to look at your country the same again, as when you were a child and it was the only country in the world, or at least the only one that mattered, and its dream filled your head so there was no room for reality, that country-dream-robbing bastard, in collusion with age and experience to work its dark magic against you.


Footnotes

* This is one of the current problems of political thought in Gambia - from the inside, where we see the human face of all the charges made against us, and see that this face is indeed human and not diabolical, we come to the choice many Gambians are forced to make - and they choose either: a) to diabolize everyone who has anything even remotely to do with the government (which is the path sites like Freedom have taken) or b) to ignore everything wrong with the current system and pretend nothing could be better. And yet what we truly need is people who are willing to walk the middle path.