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IN A LETTER I SENT her months before her return from America, I told her how happy I was that she was coming home. We would get to be a complete family again—she and I, Mama and our new papa. I told her I was certain she and my girlfriend, Nubia, would love each other. She was enthralled by the prospect of loving my girlfriend, the idea that she would have someone akin to a sister. She enjoyed the story I’d told her about the day Nubia and I met, how I’d said to Nubia, “Is your name really Nubia? Unbelievable, my uncle and my sister, when I was young, they used to read a book about Nubia, they showed me pictures in it.” Thula had sent Nubia a card thanking her for loving her brother. Just before Thula returned, she wrote Nubia saying how eager she was for their meeting. When they finally met in person, though, and saw the full extent of each other, it was clear a friendship would never be—they were as alike as a mountain and a valley.
It did not change what I felt for Nubia.
I’d made up my mind to travel the remainder of my life with her the day she said to me, by way of telling me her story, “Fathers—doesn’t our pain begin and end with them?”
Nubia’s father had a dream for our country and he named her after that dream, so her name would serve as a reminder to him, to everyone, that, as surely as the ocean’s waves are born and reborn, gentle and mighty, everything that once existed would return to take its rightful place, be it where it was before, or wherever it finds suitable upon return. By naming her Nubia, he declared his belief that no ends exist, only new beginnings, like the seeds that fall and bear trees that drop seeds that bear new trees, like the water that falls from above only to be pulled up from below and sent back whence it came. Nubia was, Nubia would return.
When she was a child, her father told her of the land of Nubia, and a time too long ago for her to comprehend. He said the women of Nubia rode black panthers on streets covered with rose petals, and men there walked with high shoulders. He told her these stories sitting by her bed, on nights when she couldn’t sleep. He spoke to her in English—the only language they spoke at home, so she and her brothers and sisters would be ready when the time came for them to go to America. “Why did our people leave Nubia, Dad?” she asked him. “They were men of zeal,” he said. “They wanted to create a new Nubia, spread wide our greatness.” “Why did they fail?” “They never failed,” he told her, “they forge on through us.”
One day, when you wake up, he said, we’ll be back in Nubia. You’ll be a Nubian princess. You’ll live in a kingdom.
He was gone by the time she woke up, to work in the presidential palace. He was one of a dozen men tasked with guarding the life of His Excellency under the leadership of the Captain. It was from the Captain that he had learned about Nubia; it was for the Captain’s vision that he would lose his life. Did her father ever ponder how ridiculous that tale was? She doubts it. On the night when the Captain stormed the palace to kill His Excellency, take his place, and rename our country Nubia, her dad was there, a guard turned traitor. He killed two men as he searched for His Excellency alongside the Captain, a man who, having seen enough madness in the palace, had decided to rewrite our nation’s story and free us from our abductor. Nubia’s father and the other five guards wanted the same thing. For a new country named Nubia, they were willing to lay down their lives. Lay them down they did, all seven of them. They were captured and executed by the palace gates, their bodies left for crows to feast on, for His Excellency to smirk upon during his comings and goings. The bodies remained on display for days, so that every soul in the nation could see the folly of coups. Nubia saw her father’s body, though not with her eyes—her family shut themselves up in their house. She sees her father’s body still, in her mind. She hears his voice every time His Excellency appears on television to speak.
It all ended that day, their lives as America-bound children with skins glowing from wealth. Their lives as a family hanging in the highest circles of Bézam, lounging by swimming pools. Her dad’s relatives arrived from the village with a message: her mother had to leave the house, which now belonged to her father’s eldest brother, the head of the family. Her mom did not beg. She did not tell them that His Excellency had taken all of her husband’s money, so they had nothing, only the house. Her mom packed her children’s things, hiding her tears. She took them to a friend’s house and listened as the friend explained why she couldn’t let them stay. The friend said everything but the truth about why she could no longer associate with them, the family of an enemy of the republic; she couldn’t say she had privileges to safeguard, a husband’s job to protect, children whose bright futures she had to ensure. To the next friend they went, and the next, until they had no one, until Nubia learned that the world abounded in women who were afraid to be bitches. She promised herself she’d never be like them.