—
Years came, years flew. The faces of Kosawa faded away, my old papa’s among them. My new friends, when they came over to play, could see that Mama still lived in Kosawa, dressing as if she’d never left. She couldn’t speak English, unlike their parents, most of whom worked for the government. Mama thought often of her former life, asking me if I remembered this or that person, or the day such and such happened, making up songs about the hut in which we once lived with my old papa, sad songs that ended whenever my new papa returned from the office. When she heard my new papa’s footsteps, Mama’s melody abruptly turned joyful. Her voice rose as she set his food on the table. She did to him as she used to do to my old papa—she pulled out a dining chair for him and watched, smiling, as he ate and said a more delicious meal had never coated a man’s plate. She brought him water to clean his hands at the table, and helped him settle on the couch after his meals, so he could be as relaxed and content as a man ought to be.
Papa made sure Mama’s purse was never light. He gave her all she would need to keep the house clean, the food abundant, and retain for herself enough cash to travel to other parts of the city and laugh with women from her area, women she had overheard chatting in the market not in any of the lingua francas of our country but in the language unique to Kosawa and its sibling-villages. That sufficed as a basis for friendships.
After her visits to friends, Mama got off buses stuffed with brash city people to find Papa waiting for her, his trophy, in the living room. He stood up every time to kiss her, his eyes aglow. Even though his hair was gray, he could still lift her, which made her giggle as he carried her to the bedroom, telling me to go to sleep as he shut their door.
* * *
ALONE IN MY BEDROOM, I thought about the night I had returned from the dead. I lost something that night; I don’t know what. I gained something; I don’t know what. I remember everything about the journey except what I lost and gained. My old papa handed me to Mama after my eyes opened. He needed to hurry to the back of the hut to hide his tears—he couldn’t contain his pain. Mama held me as she cried from relief. Yaya cried. Thula cried. They caressed me, asked me how I was feeling. I gave them no response as I looked around the parlor, searching for the thing I’d brought back from the forest yonder. I wanted to tell Mama about another thing, the thing I’d left behind, but I couldn’t recall dropping anything before jumping over the river everlasting. It seemed plausible that I’d traveled with nothing but my body and returned with nothing but my body. Yet even now, decades after that day, I twitch and sweat in my sleep, searching. During the day, I’m overcome with worry, a suffocating urge to look for it, this thing I brought back. It has to be somewhere, the thing I lost, what was it? How could I live without it? I’ve accepted, after years of pondering, that I’ll always be dead and alive, both and neither.
I wanted to ask my old papa to help me understand what happened that day, how Jakani managed to find me and guide me back home—Papa had a way of making the inexplicable logical—but he left for Bézam soon after I returned. I honor his sacrifice, dying so I might live long, but I wish I’d told him before he left that if Jakani hadn’t called me back I would have gladly continued walking toward the ancestors. I’d beheld their hilltop city, glimmering in the distance, and I was eager to get there.
* * *
—
As a child with few friends, a burdened mother, an oft-distant sister, a broken grandmother, I watched life carry on around me after Papa and Bongo died. In a corner of the parlor, I sat and filled notebooks with drawings. The urge to draw came upon me not long after I returned to life. I’d never drawn before, but one evening I picked up Thula’s pencil and a piece of paper. Images took form as my hand moved over the page. After the massacre, I felt no urge to cry, only to draw what I’d seen.
I wish I could spend my life drawing and painting the world around me.
Were it not for the duties love has placed upon me, I would find a way to move to Europe, where my favorite artists are from, and see what sort of life would avail itself to me. Only when I sit down to draw do I find answers to my questions, answers language cannot relay. Only in my illustrations does it make sense to me, what happened in Kosawa, the absurdities of humanity. It is my sole escape from the senselessness of existence, rendering the world as I see it. A world where real turns surreal before my eyes—that is how I began experiencing life the day I returned. At work, a colleague’s head morphs into glass while we’re chatting. A book flies off my shelf and burns in the air. A crown descends on Mama’s head. My beloved’s skin turns translucent, I see her blood flowing. None of it frightens me, though I developed a fever the first time it happened, when Woja Beki was speaking at a village meeting and his tongue turned into a dog’s tail. These days it happens at random, but when I close my eyes and attend to my breath, all is real again. I can tell no one, not even Mama and Papa, not even the woman I love—they might consider me deluded. I accept it as the price I have to pay for two lives.