Temple of My Familiar (33 page)

“‘She died, after a lingering illness, when I was sixteen. Probably from cancer. Or heart failure. Or heartbreak. The cause of death had no name, in the village. Only the reasons. She was very tired, the villagers said, very lonely. There was not enough for such a woman to do, now that there was peace, and black men ruled the country. They did not say this with the irony my mother would have.

“‘In any event, my father and I had by then become colleagues; our bond was the struggle to improve the country. He was writing skits about the proper behavior of workers in the work place and the importance of a high level of production. I would go with him to the factories where his work was performed. Because he was sincere and his work easily accessible—and, at times, very simple-minded—the workers liked him. He remained, among government officials and workers alike, very popular. And by then I was his little darling. I was very proud of him!

“‘But even before my mother’s death he was changing. Becoming less comfortable with being adored. He never saw her anymore, except perhaps once or twice by accident, when business took him back to the village. My father was responsible for getting a water line laid from the river to the village; the villagers, who had always carried water from the river on their heads, praised him highly for this. Yet I honestly think that in her absence, and over time, she became powerfully present to him. Perhaps this is simply the way it is with writers. It is when they don’t see you that you matter. Because then you can belong to them in a way that permits them complete possession. You are determined by them. You are controlled. You are, generally speaking, exaggerated.’

“Nzingha, who had been sitting back on the couch with her legs straight out in front of her, shivered, and drew them up under her. The room was getting chilly. I drew my own legs up and draped my long skirt over them. She reached for a large, striped, earth-toned woolen shawl on a stool beside her—of the kind made in the cooperatives run by the Ministry of Culture and sold in the shops to the tourists—and spread it over our knees. The coffee had made me alert, but calmly so, and passive under the sound of her soft, familiar voice. At times I felt I was talking to myself.

“‘Writers,’ she mused. ‘Does anybody else cause as much trouble, in the long run? But I can tell you what my father would say: Writers don’t cause trouble so much as they describe it. Once it is described, trouble takes on a life visible to all, whereas until it is described, and made visible, only a few are able to see it. Still, there is something about writers ...’ Nzingha laughed. ‘As the Russians are finding out, they’re damned hard people to re-educate. I think it is a kind of curlicue they have in the brain. They come into the world with a certain perspective, and the drive to share it. This curlicue is totally lacking in other people; I don’t know why.

“‘It was my father’s play about my mother that completely dissolved the government’s confidence in him and separated the people from the government. Maybe this was because “the people” contained men
and
women; the government, only men. Not that there wasn’t a struggle among the people, in the cities as well as in the villages, about the issues raised in the play. There were enormous controversies, arguments, brawls. Though the play unmercifully criticized some of the people’s ways, they did not take this as an attack on them, as human beings, singled out for abuse. Besides, they knew my father’s work too well to take that view. They were seeing themselves, in my father’s play, for the first time as they more or less were, without the patina of revolution, the slogans of imperialism, or any concern for production quotas. They responded, really, as if they had been in a fit of hysteria, and someone they knew well and liked very much hauled off and slapped them. The things that they then revealed about themselves were interesting in the extreme. For instance, it was as if they’d never before thought of women or the possibility that women were human beings in their own right at all. This was the greatest sting in the slap. My father’s insights into the oppression of women, black women by black men, who should have had more understanding—having criticized the white man’s ignorance in dealing with black people for so long—made many of the people uncomfortable, but they were also, eventually, stimulated to change. My father’s plays were always somewhat didactic; whatever understanding he gained about life he did not hesitate to share. The people saw—as my father himself had eventually seen—my mother’s struggle to be a soldier in the army against white supremacy and colonization, then her equally difficult battle to be a wife and mother, with no models for the new way of life she herself was helping to develop, followed by her complete disillusion with the government of men who took over control of the country after the triumph. My father was pitiless in depicting his own failures. There were his Swedish lovers, one of whom was left with a child, his big car, his grandiose European-style house. His cronies in power and their absorption in beer drinking, women, and soccer. His maid, a meek girl from the village, who acted like he was God, and who reminded the audience of his discarded wife. I found the scene in which the child, who was conceived in the passion of revolt, is taken away from the totally devastated mother unbearable to watch. How he could write it, as well as a scene depicting the mother’s decline and death, was a mystery to me. Paradoxically, during the writing of this play, and after, as it was being performed, he became progressively joyous, calmly rebellious, one might even say radiant.

“‘The play was dedicated to my mother, whom he at last publically claimed as his wife. For the first time, I began to feel it possible to imagine them together, in the same room, eating at the same table, sleeping in the same bed. I began to realize there might, indeed, have been love.

“‘
Well.
It was the first of my father’s plays the government banned.

“‘He laughed until he cried when he was informed of this. His response to being hurt was always to laugh like a lunatic. Then he took the play to the villages and performed it one night in each village until the government caught up with him. They fined him, tossed him in jail for a week, and took away his house. It was the beginning of the end. But at least, as he used to say, it
was
a beginning.’”

“It was very late when my sister finished this story, and so she improvised a bed for me on the couch. She placed an embroidered pillow under my head and the woolen, earth-toned shawl over my legs and feet. Best of all, as she left for her bedroom, she leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. As if enchanted by her kiss, I fell almost instantly into a deep, restful sleep, interrupted only by Metudhi’s return, early in the morning. After he was settled, I drifted off again, and the next thing I knew it was ten o’clock in the morning and I was alone in the apartment. The boys were at school and Nzingha and Metudhi were already at work.

“O
UR FATHER MADE MANY
, many blunders, out of ignorance, mainly,” said Nzingha, “but in his heart of hearts he was fearless.”

They had been picnicking that day on the shores of Lake Wanza. There were low bluish hills off in the distance, and on the lake weathered fishermen’s boats bobbed complacently, their ochre-colored sails flapping in the wind. It was a warm, pleasant day, with large birds wheeling overhead and with that sound of stillness that is like a hum.

Earlier, Fanny had been speaking about what it was like growing up without a father, and without even mention of one. About her two grandmothers, Big Mama Celie and Mama Shug; about the coziness of being loved by two such emotionally giving women. They laughed at Fanny’s description of the way her mother told her she had been named. Mama Celie had named her Fanny, because it was the name she wished she herself had had; if she’d been named Fanny, she’d have had a sassier life, she felt, one with travel and adventure in it. She thought the sound of “Fanny” an adventure in itself. And Fanny thought that, for her, it had something mildly scandalous, rebellious, in it. That turning her “fanny” to someone, or “shaking her fanny in someone’s face,” was an action she’d always wished she could take, especially when she was a child, and a young woman, and suffering abuse from all around her. So she’d said, “Fanny!” as Fanny was born. And Fanny’s mother, Olivia, said she was so surprised and afraid that she’d come out with some other peculiar name to follow it, like Lou or Jean, that she forgot how weak she felt from giving birth and practically yelled out “Nzingha!” To which Mama Celie and Mama Shug had said, in unison, “In
what
?
”
And then Olivia had told them about Anne Nzingha, the ruler of Angola, who fought the Portuguese for forty years; the woman who refused the title Queen and required that her subjects call her “King”; the woman who, like Joan of Arc, always dressed as a man and led her troops in battle. At once woman, man, king, queen, master strategist and fighter, daughter, mother, pagan and Catholic, supreme ruler and wily female. Of all news brought home about Africa, Fanny’s mother had told her later, this was the most interesting to Celie, though she was never to pronounce Nzingha correctly. She called her “Zinga” when she used the word at all, and only when she was reprimanding her, which she occasionally did in the mildest possible tone. Generally she called her “Fanny.” As in “Fannnneeee, darlin’, come here to Big Mama. Where you been, dumplins? Give me some sugar!” This would be followed by a hug and a resounding smack on the cheek.

“I have heard this is the way some of the black people in the United States speak,” said Nzingha. “Is it really true?”

Fanny assured her it was, and proceeded to carry on a monologue in Mama Celie’s voice.

“I can just see her,” said Nzingha, laughing. “There is so much character in how she says things. My mother was the same. When she spoke, you felt there was no greater integrity in language anywhere.” She had broken out a chilled bottle of locally made palm wine, which she assured Fanny was the only intoxicant in Africa that made you feel great after drinking it, with no possibility of a nasty hangover.

Fanny chuckled at this news.

“My father had such ideas about education, you know,” Nzingha continued, taking a sip of her wine and smacking her lips in loyal appreciation, “and it was hard for him to understand that being educated by people who despise you is also conquest. He understood this, to a degree, in his own life, but when it came to me—well, as he put it, he must always shift among alternatives, and the education offered here in Olinka, after secondary school, left much to be desired. I recognized this myself.
However.
You will never know what misery is until you’ve been an African student sent off to study in the West.”

Fanny imagined her sister, small, black, alone, headed for that mythical location. Probably none of the clothing she’d carried with her was warm enough. She swallowed a large gulp of palm wine to banish the vision.

“I was sent to France,” Nzingha said, “to Paris, to the Sorbonne.” She made a face. “I am probably the only woman in the world who hates Paris! It was a cold place, in more ways than one. The people were so jaded, so played out spiritually. Nothing seemed to move them from the heart. They were only animated by artificial events—hopelessly abstract plays full of even more abstract ideas, for instance. Fashion excited them. Nothing whatever made them smile. I remember one day walking along the Champs-Elysees and watching each face I met to see if one would have a smile. Not one did, and I looked at hundreds of people; and it was a warm, perfectly lovely day. I couldn’t stand the grayness, the heaviness of the architecture, the absence of wild trees. I couldn’t abide the
pieds noirs
in the shops or the other little shivering Africans selling trinkets in the Bois. I made a few friends among the Dogon. There was a little Dogonese restaurant near the Rue des Trois-Portes not far from Notre-Dame. I used to go there whenever I could. And there they were: the smiles, the warmth, the courtesy, the edible food I’d come to Paris expecting to find. For, believe it or not, I didn’t like French food! Which everyone at home, especially those who’d never tasted it and who had only heard about it from others who had been to France, spoke of as if it were food for the Gods. I detested the heavy sauces, and even the light ones. I had no physical tolerance for anything made of milk or cream. This is an African characteristic, by the way; I didn’t know that, though. I just knew almost everything I ate made me ill. I felt sticky internally all the time. And I was! Ugh! And the superior attitude the waiters took when you ordered. I’ve sat in many a Parisian restaurant too angry to swallow a bite.”

At this point, Nzingha refilled their glasses, had a sip of her wine, and smiled blissfully at its home-grown taste.

“I hated everything,” she said somberly, coming out of this happy state. “I was as unappeasable as a three-year-old. I hated the Louvre! There was all the booty from other countries on display, because, really, that is what most museums are for. Instead of these looters stealing just for themselves and their own houses, they steal for their countries, their continents, their race. I couldn’t stand it. And I got lost, there in the Louvre. I couldn’t find my way out, and the guards were as unhelpful as any other Parisian. At last I found an open window, two stories off the ground, and I climbed out of it to a ledge and was going to jump. I couldn’t stand being inside another second. But one of the tourists ambling by, an American, a man, just casually stuck his head through the window too and, as I stood there pressed against the wall looking down, he said, ‘Phew, this place sure is short of fresh air.’ It stank, in addition to everything else! All those dead things. All those thwarted spirits who never dreamed their physical remains would wind up in Paris under glass. The Louvre smelled like what it was: a grave. So I laughed. And he said, looking about for a way, ‘How do you get out there?’ And I certainly didn’t want to share the ledge, or the jump, with him, and so I said, ‘Let me come in first.’ He was one of those tall, rangy fellows you see in American films set in Texas or Montana. But he turned out to be from Georgia, in the South, about which I knew nothing I hadn’t learnt in the cinema watching
Gone With the Wind.
But that wasn’t the Georgia he knew. He was poor; his family always had been. This is hard for Africans to believe, you know—that there are Southern whites who have been or are now poor. We look at them oddly when they tell us this, and mentally we are going: ‘What?
Poor?
And after all that!’”