It heartened us to know that eight years had done nothing to diminish her love for her birthplace. In her first year away, we had fretted that America might do something to make her forget Kosawa, perhaps by offering her things we couldn’t. In her second year away, despite her letters and the money she sent, we worried still, for we could see Austin had entered her heart and altered it. In one of her earlier letters, she’d written:
The other night he and I went to a party at one of his friends’ apartments. He knows dancing is not my thing but he still led me to the dance floor, saying I needed to learn how to dance my way through life. Before I knew it, I was dancing, and enjoying it. I can see the shock on your faces as you read this. Thula, dancing? Turns out in this country, unlike in Kosawa, dancing does not have to be done a particular way. You can move your body any ugly way, even the way I do, and nobody’s going to tell you to please sit down lest you hurt yourself. Even though I did have that thought while looking at one man at the party. He was a heavy man, but his size was of no matter—he was banging his head and spinning and smiling as if the world were boundless with bliss. When I pointed him out to Austin, Austin chuckled and said everyone alive should be that uninhibited. He said the man reminded him of a colleague of his uncle’s who was just as fat; the colleague was one of the best dancers he’d ever seen—any party this man was invited to was destined to be unforgettable; the man was full of jokes and crazy stories; people like him were what he missed the most about Bézam…He would have gone on reminiscing if I hadn’t told him that I did not care to know any more about this person, certainly not in the midst of my fun. He stopped talking and spun me around, laughing hard as I shook and twirled in all the worst possible ways.
I never dreamed that I’d become one of those people who count down to when next they’ll see their beloved’s face, but here I am, Austin makes sure of it. He’s perfect for me. Every day with him is as if the world has conspired to make me happy. He sings to me. He takes me to try all kinds of foods across the city. Last weekend the weather was warm, so we laid a blanket on the grass in a park and spent the day reading to each other. After that we bought and ate food on the street, then strolled hand in hand to a river to watch the sun set. The next day, he took me to see the ocean for the first time. I’d love to tell you about it, but I would need a whole book to describe its beauty and majesty, how it felt when the waves crashed against my feet.
In every way our spirits are one, except when it comes to Kosawa; he has no sense of loving a place the way we love our village. He doesn’t understand how Kosawa is the beginning and end of everything we’ve ever had. I try to explain to him that I cannot give up on the struggle for which Papa and Bongo gave their lives, and he says he understands, we should never forget our people, but when he begs me not to leave him, I know he doesn’t understand. How could he, when he didn’t live our brand of fragile innocence? When his childhood didn’t end with friends dying in succession? When he never went to sleep wondering if he’d live to see the next day, wondering if soldiers or drinking water would be his demise? How can he appreciate our resolve to give to the children what Pexton stole from us?
He says he doesn’t need to have experienced what we went through to see our viewpoint, but I don’t believe him—no one who had a childhood like ours could ever be at home in another man’s land. Even those who, unlike me, cannot physically return home, do so with their spirits—their sanity demands it. No matter where they go, they carry their birthplace, never apart from all that it gave and took away from them. They seek its warm air on cold days, imagine its sunshine when clouds cannot be subdued. They see long-lost faces in a sea of strangers. They hear a voice and remember a story from a distant evening. A love song breaks their heart, for they yearn for their motherland to hold them, caress them, whisper in their ears. It will never be so again; those days are far gone. But the nostalgia, it makes crybabies out of grown men on the darkest of nights—many of them will never be whole again. They’ll be forever poorly patched and existing in a world that has little time to ask them to tell their stories—who cares for their stories? I don’t want such a life for myself. I want my spirit and body to dwell for all the years to come in the place where my ancestors once proudly strode.
Sometimes I fantasize that Austin will return with me. He speaks often of how his years spent in our country were his happiest after his mother died and before he met me—his uncle was good to him, he made great friends in Bézam, he loved writing about our country. But it’s unlikely he’ll ever come back. After he dug up his uncle in Kosawa, and once his uncle had been reburied and his uncle’s wife had accused him of being complicit in his death and some of his cousins had stopped speaking to him, he began packing his things to fly to New York for a few months to take a break, only to have His Excellency’s soldiers show up to deport him to America and make his trip permanent. All these years later, though, he finds no comfort in his homeland.