I was homeless for years but didn’t know it. I told myself a story about staying free and decisions unraveled from there. I lived with roommates, in borrowed spaces, rented rooms, arranged derangements, I loafed and lounged and perfected the role of wanted guest. Then, life boomeranged me back to my childhood home, the same one where my little self took hot baths and did headstands on the steep steps covered in mustard yellow carpet. i’m still here, looking out the same windows in the upstairs bedroom, keeping an eye on the neighborhood, including myself looking back at me.
“Waking up we are parted but in the dream world, we are the same.”
I never dreamed in Swahili, though I studied and spoke the language on and off for decades. It’s impossible for me to read a novel or newspaper in the coastal language that functions like a fishing net. But I still have recordings of myself speaking with such fluency as to convince myself I became someone else to speak it. In these recordings, I hear a woman alone and far from home working hard to overcome her loneliness and prove her devotion to love of the other. I hear a woman looking to move into a language as if it were her home. I hear a woman on the front porch of this language, knocking on its front door, peering through the windows.
Some of these recordings appear on tape cassettes from the 1990s, others are voice memos on my phone from the years when I was interviewing folks for stories about mega ports, octopus hunters, the textiles trade.
In my contacts, I have saved the numbers of at least 20 taxi drivers, first names only. I was driven great distances down all kinds of highways and backroads by men who blurred lines between driver and father, brother and friend. Karim used to pick up me in town and drive the hour down pocked, canopied roads to the coast in one straight trip. I sat in the back and read my old New Yorkers while he chewed on sunflower seeds in the front, listening to the radio. But over time, I sat in the front and he began making stops along the way. By the end of it, I was sitting cross-legged on woven mats atop cement floors with his extended family, eating with our hands from communal trays of warm stews with rice.
What is the story I’m trying to tell about Zanzibar by returning to it over and over again? I’ve circled the story that has no center for at least a decade now. Is this a story about faith and forgetting, exile and return, love and regret, heart expansion or intelligence? I say, if you can’t “put the center in the center,” then you have no choice but to begin anywhere and then trace the circle along the perimeter until you arrive back where you entered the story.
“Once upon a time, I took an 8 a.m. Swahili class.”
“Once upon a time, I fell in love with a man I thought was a fisherman.”
“Once upon a time, I packed up my apartment in Chicago and moved across the world.”
“Once upon a time, I flew to Zanzibar to study Swahili at the local university with plans to stay four months, and ended up staying for nearly a decade.”
“Once upon a time, my mother called me home from Zanzibar when she was dying.”
I’m reading the last few chapters of Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.” She writes about how the worst things that happen to us are often the luckiest things, too. Nothing too terrible happened to me in those years I went offline to everyone I loved at home, but self-exile is both a kind of liberation and a punishment, let’s be honest. I like to think that I’m a writer who can “hunt what is hunting her,” but shame is a nasty little beast that slithers more than it stomps. I was a woman who traveled without the company of a man for many years. I’m still trying to conjure—intuit—the feelings that stalked me all that time as silent companions. I'm still making my way back home.
“Waking up we are parted but in the dream world, we are the same.”
I never dreamed in Swahili, though I studied and spoke the language on and off for decades. It’s impossible for me to read a novel or newspaper in the coastal language that functions like a fishing net. But I still have recordings of myself speaking with such fluency as to convince myself I became someone else to speak it. In these recordings, I hear a woman alone and far from home working hard to overcome her loneliness and prove her devotion to love of the other. I hear a woman looking to move into a language as if it were her home. I hear a woman on the front porch of this language, knocking on its front door, peering through the windows.
Some of these recordings appear on tape cassettes from the 1990s, others are voice memos on my phone from the years when I was interviewing folks for stories about mega ports, octopus hunters, the textiles trade.
In my contacts, I have saved the numbers of at least 20 taxi drivers, first names only. I was driven great distances down all kinds of highways and backroads by men who blurred lines between driver and father, brother and friend. Karim used to pick up me in town and drive the hour down pocked, canopied roads to the coast in one straight trip. I sat in the back and read my old New Yorkers while he chewed on sunflower seeds in the front, listening to the radio. But over time, I sat in the front and he began making stops along the way. By the end of it, I was sitting cross-legged on woven mats atop cement floors with his extended family, eating with our hands from communal trays of warm stews with rice.
What is the story I’m trying to tell about Zanzibar by returning to it over and over again? I’ve circled the story that has no center for at least a decade now. Is this a story about faith and forgetting, exile and return, love and regret, heart expansion or intelligence? I say, if you can’t “put the center in the center,” then you have no choice but to begin anywhere and then trace the circle along the perimeter until you arrive back where you entered the story.
“Once upon a time, I took an 8 a.m. Swahili class.”
“Once upon a time, I fell in love with a man I thought was a fisherman.”
“Once upon a time, I packed up my apartment in Chicago and moved across the world.”
“Once upon a time, I flew to Zanzibar to study Swahili at the local university with plans to stay four months, and ended up staying for nearly a decade.”
“Once upon a time, my mother called me home from Zanzibar when she was dying.”
I’m reading the last few chapters of Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.” She writes about how the worst things that happen to us are often the luckiest things, too. Nothing too terrible happened to me in those years I went offline to everyone I loved at home, but self-exile is both a kind of liberation and a punishment, let’s be honest. I like to think that I’m a writer who can “hunt what is hunting her,” but shame is a nasty little beast that slithers more than it stomps. I was a woman who traveled without the company of a man for many years. I’m still trying to conjure—intuit—the feelings that stalked me all that time as silent companions. I'm still making my way back home.
