BEAUTIFUL (Independence-Instability)

Independence                  Instability

"And also Abubakar used to come to our street with his troop. All of them with AKs and those who didn’t have AKs had pistols and night-vision binoculars. It was during the day so just binoculars. And walkie-talkies. None of them were using those presently. And I peered through my door. Usually I’d just brushed my teeth, like I did today. They used to be so many with so many killing machines."

BEAUTIFUL

What can you say of a country?

What can you say of a people?

What can you say of a person?

Free like a bird. Is a bird free? Tree-raised, airborne; I take her to be free.

But males squander each other. I found two male chameleons having a go at each other. I mediated two streaky seed-eaters having a go at each other.

And I wondered, what? Are you ‘independent and unstable’ or ‘independent therefore unstable’?

I am a lieutenant. I know these things.

Note, I am a tenant in lieu so all my life I have been a tenant instead.

It’s a beautiful morning. I guess the cycle of the sun- or more precisely the revolving of the earth makes it beautiful. It’s a beautiful span; an orbit. I went to class till grade seven so I know these things.

I also learn very fast.

Never had a wall clock so I’m always missing on the o’clock. I was the top of the class and they gave me a clock as a present. I was happy. I’m Malala Ebrahim. So our teacher said that name. We were only five in our class, under a Huda tree. Beautiful. We used it- the tree- as toothbrush and our classroom as well. Its small twigs; its ever-greenness. When drought came it still remained lush; camels survived by it. And I discontinued class and went to Wajir, as a tenant. With a clock. But it died.

It’s still on my wall but not functional anymore. My friend Salma says that even a dead clock is normally right twice in every twenty-four hours. Beautiful.

This morning I’ve brushed my teeth with a Huda twig. I am Boran by the way but my dad is from Somali. Forget him I never get to see him. He’s out there doing justice or seeking it. Whatever he says. But I’m here and I am pregnant.

Salma went to school. To school I mean college. And she says that Huda tree is an antibio- especially for the mouth. So we had it right from the beginning? I go to her. She checks on me. My unborn child. That is.

She’s the only doctor in town, and sometimes I do her laundry. She pays me for that. I do a horde other laundry washouts. That’s how I survive. As a tenant. And also as a walking launderette. But of late, beginning last week, I’ve been doing a lot of Salma’s laundry. I also cook for her. She takes kisra mostly and meat.

There’s no water.

But I survive.

People say I should start a primary school, a kindergarten; I reached class seven I can do these things. I’m worried of my little baby. I’m unwilling to let her come to this harsh world. But I’ve survived anyway, she must. She’ll follow the steps of her own mother, or maybe she’ll be good and Salma- if she’ll still be alive- will take her and pay her education. She might become an artist, like me and Salma will be her patron. I’m positive.

This is the first time I write since school. Well, I’ve been writing small lines whenever I get hold on some pen and paper. Sometimes I write with coral chalks or on sand or on the ground. It’s completely dry out there. Salma calls these writings haiku. She’s not a writer but she says that our lives have become the very content of some tantalizing book. I prefer horrific or poli-sci. Sometimes she says it’s like a dirge. So many people have died in her arms, or even before they came to her little dispenser. She has no medics.

Only paracetamol.

Penicillin for rare cases.

First-Aid box for emergencies.

She’s out of bandages. Here the cases of injuries are more than those of diseases. Even maternity is very rare. I am the only one pregnant. And my man died at the hospital. At least I saw him at the hospital; black and red as bile.

But I survived. Beautiful.

And so in order to write, I’ve borrowed old, used full-scups; on them is printed names and an abstract. I think it’s what they call police abstract but now this time it’s an abstract of many people. I don’t see his name, Abubakar, in there. That consoles me.

Only humorously. Sadistically- yes.

I’ve come all the way down to Lagh Bor stream and I am under a Candelabrum Spurge; it’s like a monument. It’s been scored with all these names. They are all male names. Whoever wrote them made sure to inject his stick into this tree with rage. Perhaps he was wailing when he did this. Our men rarely weep and even when they do it’s only when most of them die. Or when incising a Candelabrum Spurge or Fever tree and the milk forms and flows from its layers. I guess that’s how their tear glands are activated. These names—forget about them. Maybe Abubakar is in there. On the back of this tree. Just forget it.

I may want to write about a war and everyone in it and the collateral damage of course. I’m afraid these pieces of paper will not be enough to bear all that rant. Forgive me. I’ll be a little selfish and write about me. I’ll also try to forgive myself and write a little of myself. That’s what history is.

A Patrick Langrage’s uncertainty world where things are happening. Memories are inaccurate. Documents are inadequate. People are dying. I don’t know what name I’ll give to this unborn. Not Abubakar, I fear that will be a taboo. If she’s a girl, I’ll choose Salma.

Beautiful.

She’s a daughter of a lieutenant. Not me. Her father. He was a lieutenant. That’s what he said.

He wore uniform; that cannot lie. I once tried on his boots. They were heavy. My feet were small dates inside there. By the way all Desert dates are dry.

And people... other lieutenants, wear one piece of uniform the whole month. So were it not for Salma... me, my child and I... Dead.

When they first came here it was bad. Or moderate. It wasn’t that bad... I mean terror. They once attacked us, me and Salma. The AKs were extremely frightening but we knew not to take fright because then a bullet would escort us to hell. I prefer death. Hell? No. It’s il haj; they kill. At least I heard that.

My teacher, in primary school taught us the Arabic alphabets but I’ve conversed in Boran all my life so, forgive me.

They first attacked a church from nearby. My customers died there. People I knew. People we walked hungry with. To distant springs. Or the oasis off at the Chalbi. We went, there, a twelve-hour walk. That way we know there’s drought. When water is not enough even in camel heads. We know it’s famine when the spring has a little but when it’s all dry, that’s drought. Those days we barely have food. Salma tells them not to bring starving children to her dispenser. They are stunted. They need food. And hospitals are not for food.

Government is. Really?

They bring relief. They say it’s American corn but well, it’s beautiful; keeps us going. That church. A priest died in there. People died. I see flashes of them; their ghosts. With scratches, but mostly holes. AKs. The priest had seven. And all the others were distributed among the congregation. AK 47. So my friends were shot forty times.

I am forty.

This child means a lot to me.

She is six months. I want her to be a she.

Why? That night when they attacked us they mostly killed our males. I had a boyfriend. It’s seven years ago, and I blush at the memory. He was good. Handsome. A warrior. So he told me that he was on a quest. Nothing to worry. But he said that he and his colleagues were going to change the cause of history. And of the world. He kept on saying eleven, eleven, eleven but I thought he was playing around with numbers. I know them; who doesn’t. When Salma told me of 9/11, I got scared. That’s recent.

My boyfriend, I won’t say his name lest... well, my recent is also dead so nobody cares. My boyfriend was an AL but he didn’t have an AK.

He was good, though.

One day he’d travelled to a meeting, he said. And things had gone so well that he came home in triumphant joy. They’d killed men in uniform. In Somali. And then he’d come back to Kenya.

“You killed Kenyans?” I asked him indignantly.

“Yes,” he said. “They are so independent that they seek instability. That’s what we are here for.” He raised his eyebrows in witty glee.

So simple.

So clear.

Cryptic.

Hell no! I didn’t like it that he was among them, the terrorists.

But he said, “Terrorists?” scowling in bedazzlement. “Terrorists?” he looked puzzled, but he knew what he was saying. “Terrorists?”

I didn’t say a word.

“Well, it’s a two-way crossword,” he said thoughtfully. “They are terrorists. They bring terror to us. To our community. They think they can rule us. That we are incapable of ruling ourselves. Our own people. That we are unstable. We’ll bring the world to an end.” He paused hysterically. “We are not terrorists, we bring peace to us. And in their language we speak of terror. Terror is their language.”

Somebody informed on them. And the lieutenants came and killed all these terror suspects. I didn’t have a chance to get to see him. It was bad. I was in a closet racket. Salma has a closet. And she was in a First Aid box. Not to worry. They make them big. Those boxes.

To push through years before the next replenishment.

I didn’t carry his child. We barely use contraceptives but Salma has a few. In fact five condoms. But then I... my boyfriend we just went bare. I went to school. I didn’t know the in-depth of menstrual cycle. FP neither. But well, at least he didn’t make a child inside me. I was thinking of a terror epitaph. AL Terror Suspect. No. I don’t know. The male of the species bring terror. The female carry its indelible marks. We carry all that is bad, refuse. All the litter.

Salma, she...er... she had an excerpt of a newspaper with an onset of Wangechi Mutu, an artist who said those things about Kenya, and women. I hope my child will grow to be a Kenyan, a real Kenyan, and not here. Because here is not Kenya.

Radically not Kenya.

That’s how I met my lieutenant. My lieutenant killed my boyfriend. We had just slept and they came like wise dogs, or elephants; jackals. I never kissed him goodbye. In our house there’s a door that connects to Salma’s so I went through it and he was buying time by barricading the door.

The event at the church earlier, it had been my boyfriend and his colleagues. He had killed my friends and had come to lay on me. What irony, mockery.

My lieutenant killed him.

They didn’t enter Salma’s house. Our landlord; he helps the army, the AU; I see their elephantine automobiles, artillery and mortars.

And so I started seeing Terror himself.

He was good. Handsome.

He blew up the door and entered. My boyfriend, who didn’t have an AK, was on his prayer mat thanking Allah. I think he died religious, nobly. For that I’ll choose a better epitaph.

My second boyfriend, I don’t know.

Forgive me, you’ll find that I will lean much on pleasure. You should know it’s really not that crucial.

“Ebrahim!” I hear someone calling. It’s Salma’s daughter, Rehema. She’s come all the way here maybe she wants us to go fetch water. Salma is from Malindi, you’ll find our names do not relate.

But Ebrahim, he went. He said he’d been called on duty. And he left us here. Mum died of typhoid. It’s a pity, Salma says that we are killed by that which we lack. Water. With typhoid. She, my mother, told me to take care but it’s very difficult to do that in the middle of a pandemic.

So I can write sad. Loneliness. Aloneness.

“What are you doing?” Rehema asks me.

I’m reading out some of these names to historians.

Abubakar. He didn’t have a badge. They threw him here urgently and in the process forgot to recruit him. Have a little of his details. Whether he had HIV, or whether he was a carrier of typhoid, a malaria host. His family, whether they were involved in the war. His past. Where he’d schooled, trained. He said first he was NYS then a friend of his in the army threw him a hand- that I remember. He had plans I was to go to Gilgil and train. I was thirty-five so even this child is a blessing. Sara. She was the wife of Hazrat Ibrahim. She conceived at an old age.

Abubakar. I told him there was no need, in any case he would train me. He trained people. But not women. So once I was tempted to wear his own spare uniform, get rid of my hijab and match in front of them all. Clean shaven. Ignoble.

My hair has grown. I feel it on my shoulders. In the middle of my butt. This is what complacent people say, right? My hair, my perm, my boyfriend, my education, my career. It’s beautiful. I also talk about these things. I haven’t had a shower in a week. I can’t believe I said that! Well, its Rehema. Not me. She has dreams, she will survive through this. Dadaab is an oasis. I will probably leave her with my child. Maybe she’ll be called Sara of Quran. If it’s a boy, Isaac.

Abubakar. Again, he rarely came to me but he spared my life- that’s a gratitude I was going to bear for the rest of my life. He had orders to kill even me: Kill the terror suspect, his wife and children. There was only a wife, in a closet. He could have trailed me, but he didn’t. He let me live.

As a child, I’d drawn a picture of Osama. I think that’s why I landed on a boyfriend in the AL. So when I was spared, I rid all of them. All the drawings and newspaper excerpts. At least we have matchsticks. For that kind of erasure. Resurrection. Reincarnation. I’m being religious.

And so Abubakar. I told him everything about AL; all I knew as a wife. Their wife. It’s funny how little I knew of them. Yet I’d lived with them. Slept with one of them.

All I want is life.

And they supposedly were fighting for it.

Is that radicalisation?

“They are terrorists,” said Abubakar. “Look at what they’ve done!”

I was quiet.

“They want to rule the world. They claim it’s theirs. And they do that! They provoke governments. By killing their innocents! Outrageous!” he said.

“They...” I wanted to say, “They say the military also killed their innocents.”

“They say they are in search of peace.” I said instead.

“You see!” he said calmly. “That’s the problem.”

Now I see them on a see-saw. My teacher in primary school, she made us one on a stump of a hooked desert date. It was fun. A pole was placed at the centre of the hook and my friend... she is dead... would sit on one end of it and me on the other. We would go one up, the other down, up and down. When I was up she was down. I miss it. I’ll share this idea with Rehema. I want my unborn child to share in this happiness.

When I got off, if I was down, my friend would fall down in a thud. Moderately hurt. That was our kind of fun. Fun with bruises. Fun with fatal. Beautiful.

“Why don’t you just get off the see-saw? Go your own way. See what will happen to them. Their motive. Maybe they are up for good.” I said. That was a haiku. Of life. “Who knows? Maybe the world needs them. It cannot do without them. It’s void without them.”

“You speak of them,” he said curtly.

“I’m not one of them. I’m just me. Malala. Ebrahim? He died.” I said of my father.

“And you want to live,” he said.

“No. I live. I don’t want to. But I live.”

“They choose not to,” he said.

“And they still live.”

You child, you’ve chosen to live. At least in me. Please live. (You’ve not chosen, that’s an understatement.) But please live.

Abubakar died. They attacked them in the night. At their camp off in Somali. They brought him here, he said one-seventy-five of them died. The lieutenants. That is. I wanted to cry. The TV at Salma’s said they were nine, and seventy ALs. But my lieutenant was there, he ran, no, crawled in the dark for his life. His jacket is in tatters. His bag in holes. And his boots, well, he came barefoot. He was all torn, mourning his friends and partners who died there.

And I am here. Still.

Rehema tells me to write more of my lieutenant (how he managed to come out of it with a heartbeat, though frail), my landlord (how they butchered him at the AP station) and where I get the hundred shillings to pay my rent. She says I’m not a good writer. There’s no way we can preserve history this way.

I say that’s all I got.

And also Abubakar used to come to our street with his troop. All of them with AKs and those who didn’t have AKs had pistols and night-vision binoculars. It was during the day so just binoculars. And walkie-talkies. None of them were using those presently. And I peered through my door. Usually I’d just brushed my teeth, like I did today. They used to be so many with so many killing machines.

But today.

I wrote a haiku; it said:

‘They roamed down the street; and I was the only one watching.’

Beautiful.

The chameleons died.

The two streaky seed-eaters died.

We live.        

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