My ex called me once from Tonga in the South Pacific. He’d flown all the way there via Fiji from Zanzibar, an epic trip that would land him with a best friend who owned a whale-sighting resort on a deserted patch of coast. To celebrate his 50th, he’d made the sojourn alone but confessed he wished I was with him—which felt utterly absurd to me and totally out of touch with reality, because I was spending my days in a hospital room in Sarasota, watching my mother die.
When we move through unfamiliar worlds, we carry with us the familiar world of ourselves inside us, all the old misunderstandings and fragments of our past that form the stories we end up telling to anyone who asks. But so few people I met during the years I traveled asked me much of anything about my life “back home.” I never had to mention that I knew the Shema by heart, God is one, hear O Israel, my Jewish American lullaby. The prayer could be a nightmare if I uttered it out loud.
Strangers keep all kinds of secrets.
I fall easily in love with strangers; I always have, ever since I was a kid. I might have learned this from my mother, who struck up long-winded conversations with anyone she met in grocery lines or rest stops. It used to unnerve me to see her strike up a chat that bonded her to a stranger’s world quite suddenly, but then I also learned to navigate the world with this gift—or curse—when I began to see everyone I met as a sister or brother or auntie or uncle or mother or father, entrusted to guide me to the next station or post.
In Zanzibar, I began to play at belonging as an extreme sport, looking back at the full-immersion method I took to learning language. As the resident director of a Swahili studies program, I enforced the “Swahili-only” rule with my students, promising them that if they abided, they’d pass the advanced tests with flying colors and really know this world they’d visited with a depth inaccessible to the everyday tourist, who had come to look but not to live.
I caught some of them sneaking in English on the bus rides to and from our field trips. Whispering, complaining, asking. Their loss, I’d tell myself. They were locking themselves out of the greatest feeling ever: to feel like you belong here, on the Swahili Coast. These shores have received strangers for millennia—the language is built to absorb the shocks of disruption and grievance that come with foreigners and their many needs. So few ever knew the feeling that they'd finally arrived.
Looking back, it doesn’t surprise me that some of my sweetest friends were kids whose parents green-lit these encounters mostly to keep me occupied and out of their way! In Kenya, I remember a friendship with Irene, in her mint-green dress, who lived behind my dormitory in a makeshift settlement with her brothers and mother. She must have been about 7 years old. She gave me all the time in the world while her family toiled in the shadows, hiding from police who always threatened to tear down their tin house.
Then there was Mohammed, who attached himself to me as a bodyguard, taking me daily by the hand to the coast to watch him float his handmade toy boat on the tiny waves. He must have been about 10. I visited him many times in the coastal village that existed as it had for centuries, in waves of prayer, fishing, and farming. I'd come bearing sacks of sugar and gift them like gold. Before I left for the last time, he gifted me his toy boat—his prized possession—and I still have it sitting on a shelf in my basement.
Transit Slips #17
When we move through unfamiliar worlds, we carry with us the familiar world of ourselves inside us, all the old misunderstandings and fragments of our past that form the stories we end up telling to anyone who asks. But so few people I met during the years I traveled asked me much of anything about my life “back home.” I never had to mention that I knew the Shema by heart, God is one, hear O Israel, my Jewish American lullaby. The prayer could be a nightmare if I uttered it out loud.
Strangers keep all kinds of secrets.
I fall easily in love with strangers; I always have, ever since I was a kid. I might have learned this from my mother, who struck up long-winded conversations with anyone she met in grocery lines or rest stops. It used to unnerve me to see her strike up a chat that bonded her to a stranger’s world quite suddenly, but then I also learned to navigate the world with this gift—or curse—when I began to see everyone I met as a sister or brother or auntie or uncle or mother or father, entrusted to guide me to the next station or post.
In Zanzibar, I began to play at belonging as an extreme sport, looking back at the full-immersion method I took to learning language. As the resident director of a Swahili studies program, I enforced the “Swahili-only” rule with my students, promising them that if they abided, they’d pass the advanced tests with flying colors and really know this world they’d visited with a depth inaccessible to the everyday tourist, who had come to look but not to live.
I caught some of them sneaking in English on the bus rides to and from our field trips. Whispering, complaining, asking. Their loss, I’d tell myself. They were locking themselves out of the greatest feeling ever: to feel like you belong here, on the Swahili Coast. These shores have received strangers for millennia—the language is built to absorb the shocks of disruption and grievance that come with foreigners and their many needs. So few ever knew the feeling that they'd finally arrived.
Looking back, it doesn’t surprise me that some of my sweetest friends were kids whose parents green-lit these encounters mostly to keep me occupied and out of their way! In Kenya, I remember a friendship with Irene, in her mint-green dress, who lived behind my dormitory in a makeshift settlement with her brothers and mother. She must have been about 7 years old. She gave me all the time in the world while her family toiled in the shadows, hiding from police who always threatened to tear down their tin house.
Then there was Mohammed, who attached himself to me as a bodyguard, taking me daily by the hand to the coast to watch him float his handmade toy boat on the tiny waves. He must have been about 10. I visited him many times in the coastal village that existed as it had for centuries, in waves of prayer, fishing, and farming. I'd come bearing sacks of sugar and gift them like gold. Before I left for the last time, he gifted me his toy boat—his prized possession—and I still have it sitting on a shelf in my basement.
Transit Slips #17
