My Mother Lived on a Farm in Africa

"My mother lived on a farm in Africa," she heard her daughter Khadija say. She preferred to be called Kadi, especially in front of her friends, and Munah tried her best to remember. She and her friends, the usual two, Clare and Amy, had been watching Out of Africa on the video that afternoon. They did that most Sunday afternoons, took turns to go to each other's houses to watch videos. It was video in their house anyway, DVD in the others.Then when the film finished, and in the brief silence that sometimes follows the end of a story, Kadi said that. It was an echo of the film's repeated dirge, I had a farm in Africa, spoken like a hoarse lament over the landscape, to make Karen Blixen into a tragedy. Lost love, lost farm, lost paradise, the Fall. Then Kadi said that: My mother lived on a farm in Africa.Munah wanted to rush in there and tell them that it wasn't like that. It was nothing like that. But she heard someone snigger just a second after Kadi spoke, and that made her hesitate and retreat. It was Amy, she thought, giggling with surprise or pleasure. Did your mum really!? Perhaps Kadi's remark was nothing more than a boastful exchange between adolescent friends.It was one of the stories of her childhood back home. When the children were younger, they loved to hear the stories. They would sometimes prompt her to tell one, as if they had recognized a cue in something she had said. Jamal, her elder, used to remember them in detail, and speak about the people who appeared in them as if he knew them. Oh, Uncle Abdalla is always like that with money, isn't he? Really mean. Now Jamal was old enough to answer back and stay out all night, sleeping over at a friend's house but really doing who knows what. His clothes had the slightly nauseating smell of sweat and smoke and cheap food that she associated with the places young people went to, but he shouted and sulked at her if she went into his room to sort through his clothes for the wash. He liked them as they were. He walked in a disjointed shuffle, as if his legs and hips were dissolving slowly under him. In any case, he no longer had any interest in her childhood specters. Or when he had no choice but to show interest, because she had reminded him of someone he once used to speak about with some familiarity, he nodded his head constantly, eager for her to finish, anxious for her not to allow the story to sprawl as she used to.Kadi did not remember with the same fidelity, and often had to be reminded. Yes, you do know who he is, my Uncle Omar, who owned the farm where I went to live for several weeks when I was fourteen. Then unexpectedly, at times she would remember. Like now, after watching some empire nostalgia and passion, she remembered the farm and told her friends, My mother lived on a farm in Africa. Only it was nothing like that, no sweeping drive and horses and crystal glass, no servants, no subject people to save from themselves. She was the subject people, subject to life and to others, sent from here to there and back by those who loved her and owned her. That was what made Kadi's friend snigger. She knew very well it could not have been anything like the beautiful life they had just seen on the television. She would have known without reflection that Kadi's mother could not have lived on a farm in the real Africa of open skies and deep shadows, and avenues of acacia and lamplit verandas. More likely, Kadi's mother's Africa was the other one that you also caught glimpses of on television, streets crowded with people, and dusty fields full of children clinging to their mothers.Perhaps Kadi's friend did not know she thought like that. Perhaps she did not snigger. It made Munah feel foolish that she had even considered rushing in there to rail at them. She wondered at the bitter taste the feeling left behind. Was it her age? She had heard a plea in what Kadi said. Please pretend that my mother looked like that when she was in Africa, and that I look like you. Perhaps it was not a plea at all, and Kadi could only think of Africa as the pictures she had just seen and could only see her mother living like that.They were fourteen years old, and she would have embarrassed them, and Kadi most of all, if she had gone in there and told them that the farm she lived in was nothing like that make-believe luxury, that it was small and paltry and human, that it was not in Africa, but in a real place with names for everything, from the smell of grass and leaves to the smallest change in the weather.She had not moved since her daughter spoke, paralyzed by the rage she felt. Then slowly the rage receded, and was replaced by regret and spreading guilt. What was there to feel such rage about? They lived in different worlds. Her warmhearted daughter and her kind friends would weep over the fate of a wounded turtle or a stranded seal, but would turn away with indifference from the mean suffering of those they had learned to think of as deserving of it.Memories troubled her. She could not forget. She did not even know why some things would not leave her. She wondered if that was how it was with all those people she saw in the streets who were far away from their homes. She wondered how distance made remembering different.The arrangements were made in her earshot, but as if she was a casual listener rather than the person whom they concerned. Her father was absent, away for some months already and not expected in the near future. When she was a child, she never wondered at these long absences of her father. She became so used to them that she did not really notice, or rather only became aware of them when their father was living at home. Things happened when he was living with them, as if their mother waited until he was back before making any decisions or carrying out any big task. Maybe this was how he liked it too, or maybe they had to wait for the money he brought back from his long absences before they could get anything done. In later years, Munah thought her mother slowed down in his absence, and that the life she and her sister lived with her was subdued.The weight of things became too heavy for her at this one time, and she became unwell. She sat for lengths of time with her head in her hands, complaining of headaches and unable to do the simplest things. Munah and her elder sister Hawa tiptoed round her, sat with her when her slow breathing was the only sound between them, tried to keep their bickering down. They were helpless with her tears. When they started, nothing could stop their mother's tears until, so it seemed, she had shed all of them. Sometimes she cried all day long over a petty offence or a small hurt, until in the end all three of them were paralyzed with weeping over their incomprehensible pain.One day their Aunt Amina came to visit, and it was then that Munah heard the arrangements that would take her to the country. Aunt Amina, who was their mother's elder sister, said that the two of them were too much work, and that she would take Munah away with her until their mother was feeling less tired. "Hawa can look after her mother and allow her to rest and get her health back. You come to the country and we'll find work for you."Later she could not remember if anyone said anything about missing school, but it was one of the first things Munah herself thought. A few days off school. Within the hour Munah had made a bundle of her belongings for a few days' stay and was walking beside her aunt to the bus halt, wearing one of the new silky shawls her father had brought as a gift the last time he came home. She remembered that, because it was the first time she wore it. The farm was only fifteen miles out of town, and she had visited several times as a child, and she saw Uncle Omar four or five times a year because he sometimes called on them when he came to town. She had no idea that she would spend weeks there.Uncle Omar did not smile much, but you knew it was not because he was annoyed or unhappy. He just did not smile, although he did when he saw Munah walking up the footpath to the house. He was sitting on the covered porch, weaving a basket out of palm leaves. Then he looked up when he heard them walking from the road, and his face turned into a speechless smile.The house stood on a slope, at the bottom of which ran a small stream. The farm ran behind the house for six acres on both sides of the stream. She always remembered the first night she spent on the farm, and the deep silence of the country. It was not really silence, because there were scratchings and rustlings and an indescribable suspension of the inaudible noises of night. It was a silence that leaped at her with a muted roar when she went out to the outhouse. In her sleep she heard raucous yells that were gone when she opened her eyes, and she heard the thick breathing of the frogs in the stream.They gave her a room of her own. "You'll be here for a few weeks," Aunt Amina said, "so make yourself comfortable." The house was small, just two rooms and a store, not a shack but a small farmer's dwelling. At various times in the year, the room she slept in was also used as a store, so there were splash marks and plant juices which had soaked into the whitewashed wall and could not now be removed. The small window was barred and looked away from the stream, up the slope towards a grove of banana trees.In the day, she was expected to stay close to Aunt Amina, and wait for chores to be given to her. She understood it was really to keep an eye on her because she was fourteen and a girl. She helped with sweeping the yard, with cooking, with washing clothes and with cleaning the fruit and packing it in the baskets for transport to the market in town. It was tiring at first, but she settled into a dull routine that she found surprisingly pleasant. In the afternoons, if she was not too tired and Uncle Omar was in the mood, he showed her the work on the farm, and sometimes took her out to the road where they walked as far as the huge mango tree where people waited for the bus to town. There was also a little shop there, and the shopkeeper made coffee for them while Uncle Omar stopped to exchange greetings and news with the people sitting on the bench. "Go and greet the people inside," he said the first time. After that she always went to greet the women in the house and sat with them until Uncle Omar had finished his conversation with the men sitting under the tree.One day, another man rose from the conversation and walked with them. He was many years younger than Uncle Omar, perhaps in his early thirties, with a smiling face and bright curious eyes. His name was Issa, Uncle Omar told her, and he was their nearest neighbor. She walked behind them and could hear from the tone of their voices that they liked each other. Issa usually called on them often, she found out later, but he had been away accompanying his wife and children on a visit to their relatives in Pemba. When he came, he sat with Uncle Omar in the porch, chatting and laughing and drinking coffee. Sometimes Aunt Amina sat with them, he was such a good friend. She asked after his wife and children and sometimes called him son.He always asked for Munah to come and greet him. Munah could not help noticing that he glanced at her when no one was looking. She could not help noticing his interest. It went on like that for many days, and as time passed his visits became daily, and her body became heated under his scrutiny and his stolen glances. His looks became less hurried, and one day he gave her a secret smile. She smiled back and looked away, pleased.It was impossible to mistake what was going on. Uncle Omar looked nervous and uncomfortable when she appeared while Issa was there. Aunt Amina always had something for her to do. Neither of them said anything to her. His smiles and glances thrilled her but also frightened her, but since he said nothing and her uncle and aunt were so vigilant, she felt safe, as if in a game.One night he appeared at her window. Perhaps it wasn't the first time, perhaps he had done so before. The window was high in the wall, and had two wooden shutters. When she first arrived she was afraid of the country darkness and shut both shutters. Later she took to keeping one open. She woke up with a sense that something had happened, and her eyes went directly to the window. There was enough glow in the night air for her to see a silhouette of a head at the window. She could not prevent a frightened gasp before she put a hand over her mouth. It took only an instant, and then she knew it was Issa. She steadied herself, as if she was still asleep, and after a moment she heard his breathing. She realized that some straining quality in it must have been what woke her up. The head disappeared after a while, but she dared not shut the window, in case he reached in for her when she went to shut it. She lay awake for most of the night, dozing and waking, her face turned towards the window.The next morning she went to look outside and saw that there was a small mound of hard earth that he would have stood on to look in, although even then he would have had to hang on by the bars on the window. When Issa came to visit that afternoon, she stayed inside the yard and heard a tremor in her voice as she called out a greeting. That night she shut both shutters and lay awake, waiting for him. She heard him when he arrived, and sensed his hand on the shutter, pushing at it. "Don't hide from me," he said softly, pleading. She lay in the dark, listening to his breathing. After a moment she heard the soft thud as he let go of the window bars. She could not bear the fear of it, and told Aunt Amina when she saw her in the morning. Aunt Amina said nothing for a moment, just looked sad, as if Munah had given her news of a terrible loss. "Don't say anything to Omar," she said.She told her to get her things ready, and within the hour they were on their way to the bus halt under the mango tree. Uncle Omar could not understand the rush. "Has something happened?" he asked."No," Aunt Amina told him. "I just forgot that I'd promised to take her back today. She's been here for weeks, you know."Munah heard Kadi calling for her. "Where are you?" she called out.She came into the kitchen, fourteen and smiling, safe as houses, and came to where Munah was sitting at the table with her memories. She leaned over her mother from behind, her long hair falling round her mother's head."What are you doing?" she asked, kissing the top of her head and then retreating. Without waiting for an answer she said: "We're going round to Amy's. I'll be back in a couple of hours.""It wasn't like that, the farm in Africa," Munah said."Oh, you heard," Kadi said. "I was just winding them up, trying to make them jealous."