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 wellpride, 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.