Sweetness in the Belly (3 page)

exile

S
itta 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 the 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 neighborhood 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.

A
mina 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, reenacting rituals, keeping the traditions of home alive in our subsidized 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 anymore 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 specter 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
d
s 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 center 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 room 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.”

A
mina 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 neighborhood 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 colors.