The paradox of paradise—what’s left to say about it, in life or literature? I didn’t move to Zanzibar for the palm trees or the sea breeze, but I learned to seek refuge in it as I tried to dodge the darkness. The place faces paradise pressure beyond measure. Islam and its angels wave in the wind like peace flags. But the daily conundrum is one of culture and clash.
Until I lived in Zanzibar, I hadn’t had any reason to spend so much time in police stations. But during those years, life plucked me from ocean views and fresh fruit smoothies into dimly lit offices where men and women in beige uniforms listened to transistor radios blaring Swahili news, perfecting the art of blank-faced boredom.
I’ll never forget the time I took a taxi to a police station out of town to bail out my ex, who’d been picked up the night prior for fighting at a bar. The taxi driver asked me what business I had at the jail; I clutched my fistful of shillings in the backseat and told him I had boyfriend business. I cranked open the window, let the wind whip my scarf into obscurity, and felt nauseous with shame.
When I arrived, I spotted him in a cell packed with other men, like a can of sardines. He was standing there clutching the bars, wearing his “I heart Chicago” T-shirt—the one I bought for him at Walgreens back home. He thanked me profusely and promised me better days ahead. Eventually, I would file a restraining order against him at a different police station, where the officers all spoke in sideways glances and shuffled their feet—a death dance of doldrum and despondence.
When we realize we’re with the wrong person—that we were the wrong person with them—it is to fall through the cracks of one’s idea of paradise. And in this falling, there’s also the feeling of flying—away or toward what’s real versus what we imagined.
I’m reading an essay by Christian Wiman, his thoughts on reading Milton’s Paradise Lost in Guatemala. In the essay, he talks about the moment in the poem when Eve falls for her own image. I don’t know quite what to make of it, but this line reverberates: “She is everything the will can’t control, an expression of the appetite and passion for a life more intense and eternal than the one that reality offers.”
Talking about this place as a failed paradise is not helpful, to me or anyone else who lives there or remembers what it was like to stay for the duration. But I do think it’s useful to forgive oneself for wanting and imagining so much that you end up drifting very far from the shores of a more solid reality. And sometimes it’s hard to accept that we were never really there the way we thought we were—in body, perhaps, but somewhat unconscious.
And when that happens, “you might find that the hardest things to let go [of] are those you never really took hold of in the first place,” Wiman writes.
One year, a young Spanish couple were on the island for Sauti za Busara, a big live music festival in town. I was working as the interim managing director, doing my best to manage the impossible mayhem of those four days when thousands of tourists flocked and frolicked with total abandon (and disregard for local realities). The couple came to me in a panic; their bag, filled with expensive equipment, had been stolen while they were dancing in the Old Fort. Thieves were afoot, grabbing bags left at the feet of careless foreigners dancing in the thick heat.
They rushed me to the side and begged me to file a police report. The young, tanned man was a self-proclaimed journalist; his curly-haired girlfriend, a sensitive filmmaker. They were there to tell stories and share them with the world. They needed their equipment back. They’d offer a reward to the thieves. I agreed to take a taxi with them to the nearest police station and file a narrative report, written in blue ink that smudged the lined paper. But I knew, as we were filling it out, that this couple would never see their treasures again.
This was the price they paid to play in paradise—things would get lost.
Transit Slips, #23
Until I lived in Zanzibar, I hadn’t had any reason to spend so much time in police stations. But during those years, life plucked me from ocean views and fresh fruit smoothies into dimly lit offices where men and women in beige uniforms listened to transistor radios blaring Swahili news, perfecting the art of blank-faced boredom.
I’ll never forget the time I took a taxi to a police station out of town to bail out my ex, who’d been picked up the night prior for fighting at a bar. The taxi driver asked me what business I had at the jail; I clutched my fistful of shillings in the backseat and told him I had boyfriend business. I cranked open the window, let the wind whip my scarf into obscurity, and felt nauseous with shame.
When I arrived, I spotted him in a cell packed with other men, like a can of sardines. He was standing there clutching the bars, wearing his “I heart Chicago” T-shirt—the one I bought for him at Walgreens back home. He thanked me profusely and promised me better days ahead. Eventually, I would file a restraining order against him at a different police station, where the officers all spoke in sideways glances and shuffled their feet—a death dance of doldrum and despondence.
When we realize we’re with the wrong person—that we were the wrong person with them—it is to fall through the cracks of one’s idea of paradise. And in this falling, there’s also the feeling of flying—away or toward what’s real versus what we imagined.
I’m reading an essay by Christian Wiman, his thoughts on reading Milton’s Paradise Lost in Guatemala. In the essay, he talks about the moment in the poem when Eve falls for her own image. I don’t know quite what to make of it, but this line reverberates: “She is everything the will can’t control, an expression of the appetite and passion for a life more intense and eternal than the one that reality offers.”
Talking about this place as a failed paradise is not helpful, to me or anyone else who lives there or remembers what it was like to stay for the duration. But I do think it’s useful to forgive oneself for wanting and imagining so much that you end up drifting very far from the shores of a more solid reality. And sometimes it’s hard to accept that we were never really there the way we thought we were—in body, perhaps, but somewhat unconscious.
And when that happens, “you might find that the hardest things to let go [of] are those you never really took hold of in the first place,” Wiman writes.
One year, a young Spanish couple were on the island for Sauti za Busara, a big live music festival in town. I was working as the interim managing director, doing my best to manage the impossible mayhem of those four days when thousands of tourists flocked and frolicked with total abandon (and disregard for local realities). The couple came to me in a panic; their bag, filled with expensive equipment, had been stolen while they were dancing in the Old Fort. Thieves were afoot, grabbing bags left at the feet of careless foreigners dancing in the thick heat.
They rushed me to the side and begged me to file a police report. The young, tanned man was a self-proclaimed journalist; his curly-haired girlfriend, a sensitive filmmaker. They were there to tell stories and share them with the world. They needed their equipment back. They’d offer a reward to the thieves. I agreed to take a taxi with them to the nearest police station and file a narrative report, written in blue ink that smudged the lined paper. But I knew, as we were filling it out, that this couple would never see their treasures again.
This was the price they paid to play in paradise—things would get lost.
Transit Slips, #23
