Inside Out

Elephant Grass

June 11, 2014

In the evening, the lonely tractors near our house
smell cold, and remind me of money that goes clink clink clink,
and that place daddy takes the car on quiet sunny mornings.

I pull myself up the side and climb unto the broken leather seat.
The wheel is as big as a mountain you can pinch from far away.

Up. Down. Left. Right.

The stick does not listen, but the round ball feels smooth like mommy’s dress.

Up. Down. Left. Right.

Don’t mess with me ‘cause I can run you over.

The grass in the distance is so tall
they call it elephant. Elephant grass.

Don’t walk in elephant grass at night! Snakes will find you!

I am afraid of snakes, and so are chickens,
but I saw a chicken die once.
Daddy took a knife to its throat and sliced it sideways.

It melted like butter.

One afternoon, I saw what a rock did to a man’s head.
He was naked on the side of the road with his arms stretched out like Jesus.

No one cried the way mommy cries sometimes,
but she doesn’t know I see her through my fingers.

Fireflies fill the air like mist.
Their tiny bellies flicker in the cool air,
and I know it’s time to go home.
Teacher

June 6, 2014

This was one of my teachers from primary school. He was a kind soul, and would sometimes invite me to have a snack with him during break. To my right (in the sweater) was my friend I wrote about in my first entry.
My brother, My Sister

May 24, 2014

Memory

life is but memories unborn

the world revolves

like a cranium
on the neck of time
we remember; we forget
then we die
hoping to become eternal
memories yet unborn.

between the begetting
and the forgetting,
in memory lies life.

— Barolong Seboni

I returned from school one afternoon and found the front door had been left open. I heard voices coming down the hallway. Two men emerged carrying my mother’s unconscious body. As they walked out of the house, a friend of my mother’s came out of my parent’s bedroom holding a purse and a bag full of my mother’s clothing. She told me that my mother wasn’t feeling well and that they were taking her to the hospital.

They placed her in the car and drove off leaving behind a trail of dust. I sat on the front steps of our house watching the dust settle, not knowing what to do or where to go.

My father came home that evening but didn’t say much. The next day, we visited my mother at the hospital. They were both forlorn, distant in their own way. Later that day we went back to the house, and as the week progressed the house gradually became a reflection of my parents’ sadness.

I have vague memories of a funeral I never attended and prayers being offered. People, many of whom I had never met before, began to bring food to our house. The kitchen soon became cluttered with an assortment of pots and thermos containers packed with different types of foods and delicacies. It was as though our neighbors had channeled all their sympathy and grief into the food they gave us.

I don’t know if it was because of the routineness of death, but in Cameroon, mourning took place within the context of lavish death celebrations in honor of the deceased usually accompanied by heavy drinking and dancing and occasional gun shots. Sometimes I would lay in bed at night listening to the singing and the gunfire in the distance, and then later to the droves of people as they stumbled through the streets laughing and shouting.

I thought about the sister I never met and wondered what people did for children who had died, and if they still sang and danced for their young spirits. Was their journey home any different, any less worthy of the same pageantry?

People ask me what it was like growing up as an only child and, honestly, I never know how to answer that question. We are limited by our own experiences. If the world continues its current trend, it is only a matter of time that we’ll one day be asked how it was growing up on a planet with 10 billion other people. How will we answer that question I wonder?

But, I too find myself wondering what my life would have been like if I had been dealt a different hand.

There was a German man who lived just up the road from our house. He was a tall lanky fellow who built highways for the government and was often away for long stretches of time. He’d sometimes visit my parents and they’d talk for hours in our living room. One day he brought a girl with him whose skin was as brown as chestnuts and whose hair was tied up into a curly ball. She didn’t smile when he introduced her to us as his daughter.

He must have hoped I’d get along with her especially since he was often away on his long work trips. He hired a nanny to take care of her and sometimes the nanny would bring her over to our house. Other times I visited her at her house and we’d watch American films that had been dubbed into German. She tried to explain the plots to me, but her German wasn’t as good as her father’s, and after a while we just watched the films in silence.

One thing she never did was smile. Instead, her eyes would come alive whenever something excited her, but there was a seriousness to her that prevented us from becoming better friends. It annoyed me when she would come to my room and take over my Lego set and start redesigning everything I had so meticulously engineered as though she was completely oblivious of my feelings.

Sometimes I didn’t see her for months at a time. I’d go over to her house, but the gate would be locked and the curtains drawn shut. Then one day she’d return again as though time had stood still and it had only been yesterday since we last saw each other. She later told me that she had been with her mother’s family. I wondered why her mother wouldn’t come and live with them, but I knew better than to ask her those kinds of questions. There were questions that, even as children, we knew had no easy answers.

One evening, not long after that, her father came over to talk to my parents. They spoke at length in the living room and when finally he left my mother came to my room. She sat down on the floor next to me and told me that he was going to be moving back to Germany very soon. I asked why and she told me that he could no longer work in Cameroon.

“He’s going back alone,” she said, unable to hide the sadness in her voice.

I remained silent, not knowing where the conversation was heading. “He doesn’t want to take her?” I asked.

“No,” my mother said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“He thinks Germany is different. He said Germans won’t understand.”

We sat in silence for a long while and my attention started to drift to my Lego set.

“Would you like to have a sister, joonam?” she finally asked me.

There were many questions I imagined my mother asking, but this was not one of them. I had questions of my own running through my mind. Did I really want a sister? Could a friend be a sister too? What won’t Germans understand?

“Yes,” I finally said as I tried to focus as much attention as I could on the Lego pieces in front of me.

When my mother left I thought about the idea of foreverness and how some things last forever and other things don’t. I knew that this was one of those sacred promises that could never be broken, and I was scared.

A few weeks later I walked over to her house, but their car was gone and the gate was closed. It wasn’t locked the way it had been before and when I unlatched the gate and went in, I saw that all the curtains had been removed and the living room emptied out. I turned the door handle but it was locked. I ran to the back of the house and tried the kitchen door and it, too, wouldn’t open.

It was late in the afternoon and the eucalyptus trees that lined the fence cast long shadows across the back of the house. I sank to the ground and gazed up at the trees. There was only the sound of the birds and the distant barking of dogs. I looked around for something I could take, something of hers that would stay with me forever.

Forever was a long time to never see someone again. As I grew older and became more conscious of my own mortality I knew we would all eventually get a shot at foreverness. I learned that love grows in new directions and does not lessen with the marching of time or the widening of spaces. I didn’t find anything of hers to take with me that day except the ever-growing curiosity of a boy who, for a short time, got to taste something almost sacred.
Time

May 2, 2014

Many friends I have lost
in those pacific waters of my mind,
where memories and moments intertwine,
a thousand miles below.
And where I fear I will drown.

Days turn into nights, nights into days.

I, under the bright red horizon
of the southern hemisphere,
can see for miles as I gaze from my vessel,
scanning for life,
a thousand miles below.
Mami Wata and Rambo Fistfight in Heaven

April 21, 2014

There were many afternoons we spent in the wooded area near our school. As we passed through the brush that separated it from the dirt road, we would drop our backpacks and be delivered into a world that we knew only in films. It was where dead branches and discarded pieces of wood became our weapons of choice, and where we all became Rambo.

Rambo, that legendary one-man army who with a single serrated knife took out entire legions, defined much our pass time in primary school. Children would huddle together in front of television sets in living rooms across the nation to watch Rambo take out an entire police force in First Blood, then the Vietcongs and Russians in First Blood Part II, and then the Soviets in Rambo III. Of course, none of us had any contextual understanding of the Cold War, and the not-so-subtle image of America that the film portrayed. Nor did we really care. The important thing was that Rambo was kicking ass everywhere he went, no matter the obstacles he faced.

We all wanted to be like him. He was the epitome of manhood for every 10 year-old boy who had been blessed by watching his films. The poster of Rambo holding his rocket launcher and M60 with a satchel of bullets wrapped around his neck appeared along street corners, on bar-room walls, convenience stores, and market stalls across town, and his stoic face was forever plastered indiscriminately onto our subconscious. In fact, countless barbershops and street-side vendors throughout the country adopted the name Rambo. Even taxi drivers began to don the name in bright flashy colors on the doors and hoods of their yellow Corollas and Camry’s. The trilogy really took the country, and the world by storm, and families and neighbors shamelessly watched it over and over again.

My parents had avoided owning a television set for the better part of my childhood, and much to their consternation, I ended up watching all the Rambo movies at my friends’ homes. They were probably worried when they saw their child running out of the house with a ripped piece of cloth tied around his head, a vague semblance of Rambo’s own black headband.

As we banded together in the woods, we used all the tactics and knowledge we had learned from Rambo to wreak havoc on each other. Armed to the teeth, we split ourselves into opposing factions, and moved with stealth from tree to tree hoping the enemy wouldn’t spot us. Our hearts pounded like drums as dead leaves and branches crackled with each step we took. In the end, we were all invincible as we dodged each other’s bullets and grenade launchers, diving for cover behind bushes and old discarded wheelbarrows.

Not too far from where we gathered each afternoon was a brook that cut through the woods. In the rainy season when the land became green and fertile again, the brook would also come back to life, and with it would come the promise of darker forces.

We didn’t know much about what was beyond that brook, but there was a widely circulated story of an old spirit lady who wandered the rivers and waterways, abducting children whenever they came too close to the water’s edge. She had long straight hair like straw and a serpent wrapped around her neck. She carried combs and mirrors, and would often be seen grooming herself by the water. She was known as Mami Wata.

For years we heard stories about Mami Wata, and the children she had abducted or simply killed, but her wrath was not just limited to us children. There were adults whose mysterious deaths were also attributed to her. Every once in a while someone would see her, and word would spread quickly to the rest of the class. Before long, we were all talking about what happened as though we had been there ourselves.

Just the mention of Mami Wata would strike fear into our hearts and send us running for our dear lives.

In the woods, I avoided the creek as best as I could, and I assume most of my friends did too. Rambo or no Rambo, you did not want to tempt the spirit world by getting too close to the water. We all knew that when it came down to it, Rambo’s superhuman tactics would be no match against Mami Wata’s supernatural powers. After all, Mami Wata was from another world, a world where physical rules did not apply.

One day as I was dodging one of the enemy’s grenade launchers, I got too close to the edge of the creek and fell onto the embankment on account of some wet leaves. The earth was a muddy red paste and before I was able to get back up, someone shouted, “Mami Wata!”. Those words rang through the trees, and paralysis took over me. I knew then that my life as I knew it was over. There followed a scampering and shuffling of feet as everyone retreated and started running back towards the main road. It was then that out of the corner of my eye I saw a girl many years older than I was standing half naked by the embankment. Wrapped around her waist was a sarong made of straw.

As the weight of my paralysis lifted, I was able to move again. I don’t think I ever ran faster than I did that day. It felt as though all the forces of the universe were pushing me forward. I had all the energy of Rambo channeling through me as I ran down the hill that afternoon. As I passed my teacher’s house I knew that even he wouldn’t be able to stop me.

If it was our fascination with Rambo that brought us to those woods, it was our inherited fear of Mami Wata that drove us out of it. Many years later, I think back to that girl by the creek, and the little white boy she saw staring back at her, if only for a few seconds. I imagine how relieved she must have felt that Mami Wata saved her from further embarrassment.

.
Black as me

April 14, 2014

I grew up in what is probably one of the least racially diverse places on this planet. Until I graduated from high school, I never had a white classmate. In fact, I did not know I was white for a good period of my childhood, despite the unmistakable fact that my family stood in stark contrast to the world around me.

My mother is ethnically Iranian but grew up in Iraq, and my father is [white] American from Baltimore. As all good stories go, my parents met at an obscure conference in Cameroon during the late 1970’s, fell madly in love, and decided to spend the rest of their lives in a country they knew nothing about.

Growing up, I was called many things that helped shape my identity as a young adult. I was very young when the neighborhood children started calling me white man, which I found stupid since I was still a boy at the time. What made it even more unbearable was the song that accompanied the name calling – white man, white, white man. White man with your long nose. Since my motha born me, I’ve neva seen a white man. I imagine that there would be something amusing, even cinematic about a little white boy being escorted by a dozen or so black children chanting that song in unison. I would sometimes turn around abruptly without warning, and they would all scatter away like pollen on a windy day.

It’s a mystery where that song originated, but it was sung in every neighborhood and quartier I set foot in. It must have belonged to that class of communal art forms that took multiple generations to perfect through intermittent interactions with those poor white souls who provided the right amount of ammunition and inspiration for its continual evolution. It didn’t matter if one’s heritage was Indian, Chinese, Persian or Iraqi, one was considered white by reason of not being black. It was a simple, and maybe even more accurate way of categorizing the world.

In their awe, children also called me sarra. They would see me coming in the distance, and call out, “na sarra! na sarra!” and more children would start emerging from behind the trees and houses along the roadside. Very soon, a large contingency of children would form around me, and a few courageous ones would reach out to touch my hair or run their fingers down the sides of my arms. I was theirs to keep, and I usually gave in to their curiosity for a short while before scaring them away with my sudden movements.

As an adult, I can’t disparage any of the gross attention I received, and even as a child, despite my own angst towards it, I recognized that there was an innocence to that sort of attention that transcended racism, and even alienation. After all, I was an anomaly for most people, not only because of my skin color, but because I was born in Cameroon. I was delivered in the same dilapidated government hospital as many of my friends, went to the same schools, ate the same food, drank the same unfiltered and over-chlorinated water, used the same latrines, and shared in the same awe whenever encountering one of my fellow whities. I, too, felt a similar degree of foreignness that many of my friends experienced with me whenever I encountered other white children who had come to Cameroon as “expats” with their parents. Despite our non-blackness there was little we had in common, and I had a hard time understanding why they would sometimes speak in condescending undertones about the people I considered to be my friends. It’s clear now that my own identity was rooted in the very people who saw me as an anomaly.

I hadn’t always seen myself as being white. In fact, it took a few years for that consciousness to be planted in my mind. I remember coming home one day after school, and staring at myself in the mirror of my parents’ bathroom. I must have been around six at the time. It was the middle of the dry season, and my entire body was covered in dust. I would get so dirty that time of year that my bath water would literally turn brown. My mother entered the room at that moment, and I think she must have been perplexed as to why I was looking so intently at myself. She asked if I was feeling okay. When I didn’t respond, she asked again, and in a voice that failed to conceal my great disappointment, I said, “They are right. I am different.”

I can’t remember exactly how that moment changed the way I related to the world around me, but I know that it did. As a child, I navigated multiple cultural realities with ease, not caring so much whether I fit in or not. However, as I grew older, I craved for that elusive sense of belonging. Many of my closest childhood friends were other anomalies like me, children of Indian, American, Persian, German, and multi-racial descent, but, nonetheless, we were all Cameroonian to varying degrees – one foot in, one foot out; half foot in, one and a half foot out. As my teenage years crept by, my identity became increasingly rooted in an awareness that I never truly belonged anywhere.

As a child, my parents and I would spend our summers in Baltimore with my grandparents, who were originally from the south. In America, I was also an anomaly, but in a different, more subtle way. In America, children didn’t notice me like they did back home, but when they heard me speak, they would immediately ask me where I was from. They would ask if lions roamed the streets, and if people lived on trees. I’d tell them about the lions I’d seen at the Baltimore zoo, and that from the top of my tree, I could see for miles and miles, and all the faces were as black as mine.
Yesterday I was a boy

April 7, 2014

I first learned about fear in primary school. For years, my friends and I lived under the constant threat of the teacher’s cane. The cane was a teaching tool, a way to inspire fear to ensure that we did our homework, wore our uniforms properly, swept the classroom floor, and maintained our desks at near perfect alignment. Some teachers carried their canes proudly under their arms, along with their other teaching materials and boxes of chalk.

In a way, fear made every day an adventure, for no one knew his own end, and no matter how hard one tried it was always possible to miss a question on a homework assignment or have one’s desk slightly unaligned. Failure on an assignment was equal to a minimum of four lashings either on the hands or the back, all of which we took without apology or remorse. Anything less would have been a sign of weakness.

So much of what we did was driven by fear. Whenever it was my turn to sweep, I’d leave home right after daybreak and walk the three kilometers to school. During the dry season when everything was caked in dust, the classroom would erupt in a dense cloud of dust as we swept the cement floor with brooms made from dried banana leaves. In order to avoid creating that unbearable dusty haze, we’d sprinkle the floors with water.

During class there was always an incredible blend of emotions when one heard one’s name called out. It was as though one was hanging off a giant cliff with only a piece of thread to hold on to. And when the answer was wrong, that thread broke, time stood still, and the universe was reduced to that short distance from where one stood, to the front of the classroom where the teacher waited, cane in hand.

“Please, sah! Please, sah!” one pleaded.

“Get here you fool!” the teacher retorted.

There was always that initial sting that penetrated you like an electric current, dissipating gradually, only to return in full force with each strike, and then again, and again.

As one can imagine, there was also a profound sense of relief when one answered correctly, and the overwhelming feeling that one had in fact dodged a bullet. The thread became a sturdy rope, and one knew that the rest of the day was going to go infinitely better because it was much less likely that the teacher would call on same person twice in the same day.

It was always with expectation that everyone listened to each other’s responses to the teacher’s questions. After all, lashings provided morbid entertainment for the rest of class who looked on as though one of their peers was marching to their own funeral. For all practical purposes, that was the greatest suffering known to us at that age. I have no delusions that many of my friends also suffered the same fate at home with their parents, and there must have been a normalcy to that kind of suffering for many. In the classroom however, it was public.

Each of us responded in uniquely entertaining ways when it came our own turn to face the teacher’s scourge, although there were some stark similarities. Some were quiet- tiptoeing like mice to the front the classroom. They suffered their pain quietly, their anguish unspoken. Their silent tears, however, told a different story. Others started begging and the more they pleaded their case, the more everyone laughed at them. Theirs, however, was a loud and prolonged suffering as they kept dodging the cane with their hands. When the teacher finally lost his patience, it was their backsides that ultimately felt the sting of the rod. Some even attempted to dodge that, and the class would laugh furiously as they gyrated their hips away from the teacher’s swinging cane. In the end, it was each person’s unique and distinct cry that would send us all rolling on the floor laughing.

There was one teacher we found particularly sadistic. He lived down the hill from our school, and many of us passed by his house on our way to class. It was always with a sense of trepidation that we’d walk by, secretly wishing we wouldn’t run into him. When we did, it was usually with cheer that he would greet us. He had children who were our age, and I often wondered if they feared him as much as we did. It was impossible for me to avoid walking by his house, which was only a stones throw from the road, as the only other way would have taken me an hour longer. Whenever I approached his house, I made sure to walk a little faster and never look in his direction. This usually afforded me the chance to avoid any unnecessary interaction with the man.

This teacher had a tendency of forgetting his canes at his house, and it was not uncommon for him to call upon one of us, usually the hapless victim himself, to go and fetch them.

What misery to have to go and find the cane that would ultimately be used to inflict pain on your body!

I remember having to go to his house one time. His wife was sitting outside on a stool cleaning rice while her toddler played around in the mud by the front door. I told the wife that the teacher had sent me to collect the canes, and she gave me a nonchalant wave to go inside and get them myself. The interior of the house was small and immaculately clean, and just as he had told me, there were three long canes resting on the dining room table by the front door. They were freshly stripped branches, and had the suppleness and flexibility to really inflict some pain.

As I held them in my hands I imagined all the time that went into making those canes. After all, it was someone’s responsibility to go out, select the best branches, and then cut and strip them with a knife. As I walked back to class, I wondered which of his children had cut and cleaned those branches, and if he had taught them how to make perfect canes like the ones I was carrying.

The world is a much grander and ominous place when one is young. So much of our childhood is out of our control. Back then, none of us had considered not going back to the teacher with those canes. Maybe we had thought about it, but we certainly didn’t act upon it, for such an action would have appeared cowardly. I guess we are always, even as adults, limited by the social order in which we are born. We certainly do not have control over choosing our parents, or what part of the world we are born in, although as we get older we gain a much stronger ability to shape those familial ties we inherit, the places we choose to live, and how much suffering we wish to endure.

One unfortunate aspect of living in a cruel system is that it breeds cruelty in the hearts of those who inhabit it. I had a good friend during my first years in primary school. At that time, we attended the largest primary school in town with hundreds of students. His mother was a teacher at the school, but we were never assigned to her class. He and I were inseparable, and would spend our breaks at the canteen, which was less a physical structure than an open market where merchants and hawkers would come and sell snacks to the students. Whenever one of us did not have enough money, we’d share whatever we were able to buy, which usually amounted to a couple of beignets or some fried plantains.

It came to pass one day that during one of our breaks, for reasons unknown to me till this day, I told his mother that he had stolen some money from me. I knew full well what I was doing, and the horrible repercussions that would result from that lie. When she asked me to go and fetch him, I did so without the least bit of hesitation. I found him at the market place standing with a group of friends. I told him that his mother had sent for him, and as we walked back together in silence, I think he must have known that something was wrong.

I watched as she questioned him in that loud rhetorical way that demanded no answers from him. He was a quiet person by nature, which did not bode well for him at that moment. He could have called me a liar or pleaded his innocence. Instead, he took those beatings to the hand in the only way he knew how; with a quiet resolve that sealed my own guilt for years to come.

There are certain social norms that surprise us as adults, but that as children might not seem that unusual. How often do we see children hitting each other, and minutes later are happy as can be. I don’t know what my friend thought of me after that, but I do know he never stopped being my friend. Our lives eventually separated when my parents transferred me to another school, and I never saw him again.

Years later, I ran into the teacher who lived at the bottom of the hill. He was delighted to see me, as only an old friend would, and I imagine anyone looking at us would have seen exactly that. We spoke for a bit. He asked me how my studies were going, and how long I was in town for. He seemed truly proud of me, and of the progress I had made. There were many things I could have told him, but chose not to. I could have told him about my friend, and asked if he felt as guilty as I did.