* * *
—
My best nights of sleep in my adult life were the four nights before my sister returned from America. I was finally ready to tell someone about my affliction, and it could only be Thula, the one who had fed and bathed me after our father vanished and our mother could do nothing but mourn for him and the baby who had died in her womb.
I imagined Thula would laugh at my confession and tell me that my condition was ordinary, all humans lived in a land between life and death, the world was just too chaotic for most people to notice. Perhaps she wouldn’t say anything. It wouldn’t matter. I just wanted to sit beside her again at the dining table and finish her leftovers. I wanted her to recount to me the conversations she used to have with our old papa about the whys of the world. I wanted to walk next to her, in awe of her singularity, like I used to in Kosawa.
I still remember our embrace at the airport the day she returned.
She looked at my bearded face, laughed, and said: Hey, what happened to my handsome little brother? It was for Mama and me that she left Austin and America. For Kosawa, yes, but for her family too. It was for us she took the job teaching at the government leadership school, though she had rejected their offer time after time, wanting nothing to do with people she deemed soulless. The government persisted, promising her she would have the freedom to teach whatever classes she wished—brains like hers were rare, and the sciences she’d studied would be vital to the well-being of the future children of the republic. They offered her a car and a driver and more money than she would ever need, money Kosawa needed, money her movement would need.
So, just as Papa joined forces with Woja Beki and went to Bézam though he hated Woja Beki and Gono, just as Papa did what he did not care to do, my sister shook hands with the government and went to work for them after she returned from America.
* * *
—
We lived and worked in different parts of the city, but we were together on many evenings, especially in those first years after her return, when she needed me to introduce her to the city. She had stopped eating animal products in America because Austin did not eat them, but in Bézam she began eating fish again. On some evenings, she and I would drive around the city in my car, searching for women roasting fish on street corners. My sister enjoyed our evening visits with Mama and Papa in their house—she loved how they fawned over her and asked her please to eat more, a mighty wind would be the end of her with so little flesh stuck on her bones—but she also relished Bézam street food. She loved the roadside banter with the other roasted-fish customers, conversations about the heat, the proliferation of stray dogs on the streets, the country’s football team, which had just won a match—finally, something to be proud of about our country. Sometimes, if the roasted-fish lady had a boombox, my sister stood up and danced to the music with other patrons, her moves as unsightly as they were in Kosawa, her spirit unburdened, if only for a few minutes. Once, as I was dropping her off, she said that she hadn’t thought she’d ever say this, but she loved living in Bézam.
Just not enough to forget Kosawa.
In the months after Carlos filed the lawsuit, she talked about the struggle daily.
I listened to her and tried, as gently as I could, to tell her that she’d done her part to save our village, no one would blame her if she decided to step back and just await the verdict from America. She did not agree with me: fighting for Kosawa was her birthright.
* * *
—
Fighting for Kosawa was not my birthright. Which is why I made up my mind, after Liberation Day, to start disentangling myself from my sister’s dreams. I was weary of it all, the traveling, the waiting, being away from my beloved, my sister’s constant agonizing over strategy, the seesawing of hopefulness and despair. I’d done everything I could for Kosawa. I’d done everything I could to help her. I could not make my life one of service to another human’s cause, not even if that human was my sister. I never explicitly said anything to her—we still went to eat roasted fish, I still visited her in her office, she was my sister—but I knew I couldn’t be part of her revolution anymore. I wasn’t her; I would never be like her; I had to go my own way. I found solace in the fact that she had the Five, and her devotees from her Village Meeting, which I never attended. Looking at her on days when she couldn’t get off her couch from exhaustion, I wished she’d chosen another way of life. I wished she’d chosen Austin over Kosawa. I wished she wasn’t sacrificing so much for others, not after what our family had endured.