father tongues: lessons from my father(s)

 

 

 

 

 

in his image.

 

saturday was market day;
my father and i, a rare sight.

 

the sun high against a cloudless sky,
warming our bare faces
in spite of the icy winds.

 

my mom’s bread merchant
bundled up behind his stall,
full of jokes as usual.

 

in his flemish accent,
steam escaping his lips:
“elle est votre portrait craché”

 

it made me proud.
it made him happy.

 

these feelings
rarely lasted.

 

 

kinship i.

 

my father taught me
no one comes from no one.
i carry fears i have no name for;
anxiety, a familiar shadow

 

blood steadily boils
carving veins
as your voice rises
and my forehead creases

 

wrinkles drawing maps
unveiling life’s past
and yet to come betrayals.
how do i see you so clearly?

 

kinship is daunting

 

i get you
oh too well
pride, pain, ego
name it how you will

it frightens me
more often than it reassures;

 

the ability to see the threads
that weaved you into being:

 

seeing patterns

 

your shattered dreams,
my propensity to cave in
too soon

 

 

 

 

iwacu / living(room) couch.

 

the world has been beating

 

sighing relief, he sits holding a beer,
a different kind of bitter

 

 

public housing

 

 

outside
the coldness of asylum

 

inside
the warmth of home-
cooked meals on a gas stove
isombe, igitoki, ihene, ibishyimbo
grilled onions and white rice crackling in a pot
soon flooded by salted water boiling

 

 

it’s been a long day

 

 

full of boiling
of speaking the tongue
yet there is loss in translation

 

 

the world never ceases
beating the day long,

 

his body sinks into the couch

 

 

it’s nice to be in this living room
nice to sip on this beer
a different kind of bitter

 

 

international calling card

 

 

“lo, gwino hano”, he calls for me
“jya kungurira ikarita ya terefoni”

 

 

i head up the street to the store

 

 

the living room couch

 

 

wherein his body sinks
he dials numbers that will bridge

 

ten thousand kilometers

 

 

between asylum and home

 

 

his face lights up when cadence, voices,
remnants of home pour through the handset

 

 

there will be no loss here
from this room of living, this couch,
he is held together by

 

those who remember him,

 

 

he eases into

 

 

home

 

 

here-too has its hands all over us.

 

I. i dream of calling my ancestors’ hills home. 

 

for my father, there is no question 
that/ his exile extends into my own,
yet my dislocation haunts me differently:
here-too is my home/ its ugliness too.

 

 

II. exile is 

 

the name my life is given 
when i am constantly asked where i’m from 
in the streets i am most familiar with. 

 

the closest name to this relentless 
feeling of in between-ness.

 

the betrayal: i am a daughter gone too long.

 

a shaman holding my heart 
as i learn to live fully in between.

 

a friend telling me it’s okay 
to be full of myself.

 

 

III. the cost

 

my parents name themselves from the thousand hills. 
they witness their children 
become black in white country,
at a cost they did not expect: 
their lives,reduced to what happened to them.

 

did they realize how much it would cost us? 
to find asylum and its shadow:
exposure.
shrink—allow—push back—repeat
how inside their four walls, 
they raised us but outside, 

 

here-too had its hands all over us.

 

 

IV. distractions

 

how convenient is it for western europe
 that we call ourselves black?
a monolithic mass.
in place of carriers of the long memory 
of whom and where we come from.

 

what purpose does the spectacle of black pain serve—
for white audiences?
for black audiences?

 

 

 

 

hard.

 

i have been wondering about how we name things:

 

naming your fistshard

 

 

because i recoil

 

on the receiving

 

end.

 

i call themhard

 

 

but to you

 

these are

 

the softest parts:

the tender tissue

exposed by bitter.

 

what you have bottled in,

now unleashed,

triggered,

 

as if unable to hold in
something primal,
an instinctive growl,
your hands

 

trapped.

 

this is the only place you know

your hurt will be forgiven.

 

i have been wondering about how we name things

 

as ifhard

 

 

didn’t start soft.

 

 

purple car.

 

we were in our early teens. i remember you coming home and calling for us to meet you in the parking lot of our public housing. my brother and i raced downstairs, slid our feet whole into sandals, half into sneakers and rushed outside to meet you, wondering what you were so eager to show us. wondering what couldn’t wait. you are not an eager person. i stopped mid-run, stunned by the unexpected color. purple. loud. cheap. i remember how proud you were to finally own a car again, a good bargain too. finally back in the driver seat. no longer needing to phone friends or acquaintances, to inquire about available seats in their vehicles to attend weddings, christenings or simply to pick and drop us off to camps. your own car. you eagerly asked us to jump in. we sat in the back. shame and guilt competing on my face, both making me work for composure. something sneaked out of my lips: “tu es sûr que tu peux conduire?”¹ i asked you. i had yet to learn not to speak into existence things uninvited. i remember feeling the air weigh down. a look i interpreted as anger, but i now sense was hurt, washed over your face. i think you asked me to get out if i didn’t feel safe. still. i know you knew how i came to ask. then, most people that i remember driving us were white. white nuns. other kids’ white parents. as young as i was, i understood my question carried weight. a testimony to how exile deprives men and women. quietly still, you recalibrated your body behind the wheel, started the car and we took off.

1. “Are you sure you can drive?”

 

 

 

 

an ode to lore / what she remembers.

 

my father grew up on a hill,

close to the western border

his kin scattered across endless hills;

 

you could map the family tree across

the sinuous roads forged in ochre dirt.

 

as a young married man,

he migrated south

toward better opportunities.

 

most of his siblings stayed,

his eldest brother teaching

at the local school.

 

each built a life, got married,

gave birth to small or large families;

lives not unlike their neighbors’.

 

until the day the land quaked.

uprooting both the ones

sentenced to stay and

the ones able to leave.

 

in waves, families walked,

drove, flew across borders

both my father and his brother drove

their wives and kids out of home.

 

at first, finding shelter with family and friends

before opportunities arose in UN camps

and my uncle moved his kin inside them.

 

before institutions recruited my father

and with them a small house

so he moved us inside it.

 

My mother took on organizing life

in a foreign fast paced world

where we’d become

   - bakimbizi -

in a landscape rapidly being reshaped

by NGO managed camps erected

to host

  - bakimbizi -

 

chores still needing to be tended to

from hiking to food distribution points

to getting children to and from school

 

my mother - alone for the first time

her brother in law with a family of nine

 

in the same way it happened back home

my aunt and uncle entrusted us with

their eldest daughter

 

Twenty-seven years later

she tells me:

 

“mom and dad sat me down

and told me i was moving in with you.

so i moved in.

 

when you’re living 

these changes, 

you do as you are told,

go where you are told

 

i have forgotten so much. 

Today, when i see the images 

of refugees from Afghanistan or elsewhere, 

i am reminded of my own uprooting. 

 

and i think of the trauma. 

 

the trauma that 

my memory keeps at bay 

to allow me to live on.”

 

 

 

the land quaked / what he remembers.

 

my family is gently

boisterous.

louder with every joyous reunion

romanticizing home.

 

my family is deafeningly quiet /

quieter with every layer

i attempt to peel back.

 

like the ordinary day of our uprooting

long rainy season 1994

when the land quaked

 

like the ordinary day of our uprooting

long rainy season 1994

when the country stood still.

 

long dry season 1994

stunned in collective expectation,

mom and dad waited before

 

they pushed the small of our lives

into suitcases, shelved their dreams,

and crossed the western border.

 

the night before, we layed

in my uncle’s living room

my aunt’s furniture still in place

 

twenty-seven years ago

my dad asked his brother

to entrust him

with his daughter:

 

“she can come with us. 

she is the eldest, 

we don’t know what tomorrow is made of here.”

 

twenty-seven years later,

sitting at the dinner table,

my father tells me:

 

“she was a bright student, 

i trusted she would make something 

of wherever we would land.”

 

as i probe into how she reacted

to the news she was soon

to be separated from her family,

 

he matter of fact-ly answered

“umwana se niwe wabibaza?”

the land was still quaking, more borders needed to be crossed.

 

twenty-seven years later,

sitting on the couch

inside her apartment

 

i ask my cousin:

 

“how did you feel?”

 

she quietly replies:

 

“what do you mean how did i feel?”

 

as i watch her gaze retreat behind her glasses.

 

 

 

 

Illustrations by Rabiatou Bah

 

I set out on a journey towards naming myself and it resulted in father tongues; a poetry collection born out of the necessity to name the violence that was imposed upon those I come from. Exploring the sense of belonging and how we can return to ourselves when we are unable to return home, is at the heart of father tongues. The poems that make up the collection are tales of exile, of the ruins that we inhabit from our ancestors, of what is unspoken or could not be.

Copies of the poetry collection father tongues:lessons from my father(s) are available at  Ici Sont les Lions, a wonderful bookshop located in Brussels. If you're based elsewhere, feel free to reach out on instagram: bahati_kam.