The Sound of the Waves
“It felt as if, the university having collected us, we were now on display, exotic specimen there to perform. And so we performed.”
OCTOBER 10, 2024
When I think of America, I remember the flags. They were everywhere — the national flag, state flags, college flags, and flags that indicated the flag bearer’s political beliefs: BLM flags, and ALM flags, and LGBTQI flags. I didn’t know people could care so much about flags. And, because it was the fall, the wind was brisk, and the flags all flew vigorously, so they looked very serious, whether on official flagpoles, or hung from people’s houses, or on their bumpers. One afternoon in September, one of the graduate students assigned to the program (a black woman in her forties who herded us like we were her children) drove three of us to Wisconsin to watch a production of “Hamlet” that was being staged in a clearing in a forest, and we passed by a house — tall and with faded paint and built in a dying stick style — from whose porch flew a red Confederate flag. Our minder reacted with fury as we drove past, her face ballooning in anger, her voice crescendoing into a diatribe about race and America, and about the Midwest where she lived and which she loved, and how, in moments like this, it infuriated her. None of us said anything. We didn’t know what to say. I felt removed from it all — of course I knew the history, and of course I was black, like her. But I wasn’t American, which meant that any anger I communicated would be little more than artifice, for my instinct was to think about how it all made sense, that of course this was America, and in America racism was communicated through a flag. But thinking about America was what we were there to do, 15 writers from 15 different countries invited to America as part of a program that was a vestige of Cold War propaganda battles, there to understand the country, and to fall in love with it. And I was falling in love with the flags. I had never been around people who cared so much about them, and I took a craven delight in the rules around them: the specific way they had to be folded, that they couldn’t be dropped on the ground, and that every year hundreds of millions of flags were sold in the U.S. During my first weeks there, I would close my eyes and dream of flags.
Then the days grew shorter and colder, the sun disappeared, and the wind began to blow with a ferocity that meant you had to clutch at your coat to make sure you weren’t lifted off the ground. Some of the writers in the program, having come to the U.S. from gray European countries, knew what to do when it got so bitterly cold, but the rest of us — from African and South American countries where winter was a fairytale you told your children — despaired, and a brooding melancholy spread among us like the flus the changing season portended. The musicians who played jazz at the corner of Main Street and Jefferson Street grew scarcer, the flowers and butterflies grew scarcer, and giant pumpkins began to appear in the supermarkets.
The Pakistani cooked, the Haitian poet sang a long mournful song for us, the Spanish screenwriter spoke about Barcelona and how colorful and joyous it had been that summer. Michelle and I sat in the corner talking about how similar our childhoods had been, hers in Adelaide and mine in Nairobi.
One evening in early November, the week before the first snow fell, Michelle and I stood at the street that marked the boundary between downtown and the suburb where most of the university professors lived. To our left was the Baptist church, large and brown and foreboding, but we stood looking at the other side of the street. The bur oak trees that lined that street had grown golden and their leaves lay scattered on the ground like a sheet of yellow confetti. Behind them the houses stood yellow and blue and red. All was still, the distant cry of a baby breaking through the air, and the smell of baking wafting from one of the houses. Michelle sighed and said that if she never came to America again, this was the image she would always hold of the country.
When the snow began to fall, I was asleep in my room, and when I came out, a brilliant blanket of white had settled over the town. In the WhatsApp group, someone suggested going out to make a snowman, but then another writer, a grizzly, confident poet who had fled Syria because he had appeared on one of Al-Assad’s lists, advised caution. In his experience, he texted, the first fall of snow was dirty and brought with it months of carbon and nitrogen from the polluting cows that were all over the state, and so it was best to wait a few days before playing any games with the snow. The Syrian poet had a habit of feeding us false tales that no one knew enough about to question, and again, I was overwhelmed by my ignorance and said nothing. Instead, scrolling upward through the texts I had missed when I was asleep, I saw an offer by the Pakistani filmmaker to make us all a special Punjabi egg dish, and I decided to go down to the communal kitchen we all shared.
The egg dish was wonderful — filled with cream and cheese and rosemary — and filling and huddled in that room together we felt a powerful love for each other and for the moment we shared. The Pakistani cooked, the Haitian poet sang a long mournful song for us, the Spanish screenwriter spoke about Barcelona and how colorful and joyous it had been that summer. Michelle and I sat in the corner talking about how similar our childhoods had been, hers in Adelaide and mine in Nairobi. Then the Bangladeshi, a short stocky man who had written his first novel in the seventies and who, when he first met me, asked me what I thought of Ngũgĩ, got up and thanked the Pakistani for her cooking. “You are as warm and loving as an Indian mother,” he said.
She had been removing something from the stove, and she paused, her hand suspended comically in the air like a scythe. I too froze, as if by moving I might be expected to say something in response to what he had said. Michelle was grinning wildly, looking at the Pakistani.
“No, you have to stop trying to provoke her,” the Italian writer, a tall striking woman with black hair, said.
“But we’re all from India,” the Bangladeshi said. “Or have you ever heard anyone say Pakistani civilizations? Bangladeshi civilizations? They are all Indian civilizations.”
“That’s not what you are doing,” the Italian said. “You’re just picking on her.”
“I’m not picking on her,” the Bangladeshi said. “All I’m doing is complimenting her cooking.”
Later, while we took our evening walk through the town, Michelle and I talked about this interaction. She shrieked. “Indian mother! How bloody,” she said.
“Right?” I said. “And he’s in his seventies, so he remembers the East Pakistan war. And he’s written about it on his Facebook wall, long posts where he talks about what he calls the Indian oppressors. It’s not accidental, what he says to her.”
We stopped by the church that stood at the end of North Madison Avenue. It was white, with brown shingles on its roof. In front of the lawn — a dirty faded green with bits of orange leaves and snow on it — was the national flag on a flagpole. I stared at it, wondering when the flag would be taken down for winter. Wouldn’t it tear apart in the moisture and cold?
✺
Michelle’s knock on my door was always soft and quiet, like she was afraid of announcing her presence. Every evening she came, and I’d put on my coat and walk with her down to the Indian restaurant on Bond Street. I asked her if she ever thought of knocking louder. What would happen if I was on the phone or playing music loudly or had fallen asleep and couldn’t hear her knocking? She looked at me and said, “If you don’t hear me, you don’t hear me. I’ll go to Bollywood Grill by myself. But it hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t think it will.” She turned away and held her face up to the sky. She hadn’t worn a hat, and there were flakes of white on her black hair which had been tied into a bun. Now the snow fell onto her face, and she opened her mouth to taste it.
The first night we’d eaten together at Bollywood Grill, back in September, I talked about Kenya — the recent elections and how I felt the new president would drive us back into dictatorship, about how indebted we were to China, about the train to my house which I took on Mondays after tennis, whose route swung through the national park. Michelle told me about her parents, and how they had moved to Australia from Hong Kong, and how now they couldn’t go back — their cousins and brothers were being arrested — and how in Adelaide where she had grown up she was forever the outsider: neither Australian enough to fit in at school, nor Cantonese enough to fit in with the kids at the church her parents took them to. The owner of the restaurant, hovering, asked us about cricket. Who did we like? Who was going to win the Ashes? What happened to Odumbe? He had loved Odumbe, he said.
Afterward, we walked back to the house we were staying in. It began to drizzle — a slow steady rain that tickled the skin — but despite this the students were out in full color, loud and smelling of alcohol. There was a crowd of them at the intersection of East Washington and East Burlington, and I envied them their gaiety and tight shorts and short bright dresses and happy voices. A group of them was huddled around the statue next to the bus stop. The statue was a yellow hawk dressed in black — the school mascot — and one of the students put a scarf around its neck while the others cheered and gawked at the bird. We walked past them and into the park. The Old Capitol Museum was lit up that night in black and yellow, and on the pole from which the national flag usually flew was the school flag. It stretched itself taut in the wind, then dropped, as if our attention had made it bashful. Around the museum were more students, these ones quieter, lying on the ground with earphones in their ears, despite the drizzle.
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The morning after the Bangladeshi’s comment to the Pakistani writer, I sat at the breakfast table with him. He talked about Ngũgĩ, whom he liked; Achebe, who had deserved the Nobel more than anyone else; and Gurnah, whose Nobel win surprised him even though he had admired him ever since they met at a literary festival in Edinburgh in the nineties. He asked me what I thought of Rushdie. “Isn’t Midnight’s Children the greatest novel ever written in the English language?” he asked.
In the theater of tragedy, we, Kenya, had nothing to contribute. My childhood had nothing to it apart from an obsession with Harry Potter, hours spent playing soccer, and the boredom of academic brilliance. If forced into conversation I’d talk about Obama, or about lions, or the hippos that were numerous in the town I’d grown up in.
This was the way he was, the Bangladeshi. He loved to talk about writers and would offer opinions for the sake of riling people into conversation. I liked him, and enjoyed talking to him, as did most of the other writers in the fellowship. At the dinners we had with the funders of the program, attention gravitated to him. The old white men at the dinners enjoyed the worldliness they acquired by proxy. They could talk to him about Rushdie, and about Marquez, and about Ishiguro, and about the time they had gone to a market in Dhaka and been tricked into buying a sickly chicken.
These dinners would start with an introduction where we all stood up and identified ourselves by where we were from. It felt as if, the university having collected us, we were now on display, exotic specimen there to perform. And so we performed. The Rwandese essayist spoke about the genocide, the Bangladeshi about the war with East Pakistan that he’d lived through, and the Spaniard about the unions in Catalonia and how they had been betrayed in their resistance against Franco’s fascists.
I stayed away from it all. I had nothing to contribute. In the theater of tragedy, we, Kenya, had nothing to contribute. My childhood had nothing to it apart from an obsession with Harry Potter, hours spent playing soccer, and the boredom of academic brilliance. If forced into conversation I’d talk about Obama, or about lions, or the hippos that were numerous in the town I’d grown up in. But even then, I could feel attentions waver, and eyes glaze over. What was a faraway lion compared to bloody insurgencies or life spent in a refugee camp or fascism? Neo-colonialism was too intellectual a subject to keep the funders’ attentions.
At the second dinner we had, at the end of September, a man came over to the corner where Michelle and I stood, alone. He greeted me in Swahili. I looked at him in shock. I hadn’t expected to meet another Kenyan this deep in rural America. He introduced himself. His name was D’Souza, and he had grown up in Eastleigh in Nairobi, a neighborhood I had never been to. He left Kenya in the seventies on a scholarship and had just never gone back, except for periodic visits that dried up after the deaths of his parents. He hadn’t visited in 20 years. I listened to him as he spoke, feeling a strong warmth toward him. I was conscious that I was ignoring his wife, but she wasn’t Kenyan and had never visited the country, so it didn’t matter. He, on the other hand, was one of us.
Then it was November and snowing, and we would soon leave to go back to our home countries. And so farewell dinners were organized. We performed some more and talked about how we had fallen in love with America. When asked, I’d mention the flags, but Michelle, she’d never say what she had become infatuated with, or whom. It was the Syrian. At the end of month, at the last dinner, she told me what she loved about him. The caramel of his skin. The ruffled softness of his beard. The way he spoke passionately about the bombings in Damascus. The way he’d lean forward when listening to someone, bending so much that one worried that his tall and lean frame would buckle. The innocence of his gaze. “You certainly don’t sound like a Westerner salivating about the oriental,” I said.
“Ah fuck off, Dusman,” she said. “I’m not a Westerner.”
I looked across the room at Abbas. He was always so serious, even now as we stood in the room with the funders fawning over us, wine glasses in our hands. He was reading one of his poems. It was a poem about the beauty of the beach in Samra, and the sounds of fighter jets in the background. “Even in the blood, there was always the sound of the waves,” he read.
Had we fallen in love with America? I didn’t know. I certainly had fallen in love with the malls where you could get cheap massages, and the wide boulevards where cyclists ruled, and the huge portions of food served in the restaurants, and the flags on the streets.
He shifted and began to walk on the spot as he read. He walked with a slight limp. Michelle and I had wondered if something exciting had caused it — a bombing, or the efforts of one of Al-Assad’s soldiers — but the explanation was more moribund; an accident from a time he and his teenage friends had hotwired an uncle’s car and crashed it into a lamp post. He’d told Michelle about this when they’d gone to the mall together, just the two of them in what Michelle hoped was a first date.
“He’s so lonely,” she said, watching him pace the room. “He’s gone through so much.”
“A lot of us have gone through a lot,” I said. I nodded my head in the direction of the woman from Rwanda.
“Yes, but with Abbas, you sense that he hasn’t talked about what he’s felt with anyone, that he’s had to keep it locked up inside him.”
I said, “And are you the one he’ll talk to? Are you his white savior?”
“Ah, fuck you Dusman, I’m not white,” she said. She smiled. She got up and walked to the drinks table. I watched her go, then turned and swept the room with my eyes. Most of the writers had been grabbed by the funders, and they talked in groups of twos and threes about their art, or about Trump, or about whatever tragedy they had escaped from. I looked around. On the walls hung photos of fellows who had attended earlier iterations of the program, back when it had been funded by the CIA. Had the mission been a success? Had we fallen in love with America? I didn’t know. I certainly had fallen in love with the malls where you could get cheap massages, and the wide boulevards where cyclists ruled, and the huge portions of food served in the restaurants, and the flags on the streets.
Michelle and I had made a game of the flags whenever we walked through the suburbs north of the university. A house with a BLM flag was one we could walk to and ask to use the bathroom, so was one with a queer flag. A house with a Confederate flag was a no-go, but one with an ALM flag could only be entered if both of us were there at the same time: her Asian-ness would cancel out my black-ness and we wouldn’t be read as a threat.
A white woman plumped herself into the seat Michelle had vacated. She was in her seventies, with hair that dropped like a waterfall over her shoulders. She asked me if I was having a good time. I was, I said. She sighed. She was tired. She had been up till five in the morning. Her kale and cabbages were due for harvest, and herds of deer had appeared on her farm, eager to eat her crops. Attracted to the deer were coyotes, and she had stayed up with her gun to scare the deer away from the vegetables, and the coyotes from her cats and dogs. It was tiring work, she told me. She said, “Do you have this problem in, sorry, where are you from, honey?”
I said, “Well, I’m from Kenya, and the only animals that invade farms are elephants, and you can’t quite shoot those.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“They are heavily protected,” I said.
She shrugged. Yes, she’d heard about that. It was unfortunate, given the need to control elephant populations. But it was politically correct, so now these huge beasts wreaked havoc on unfortunate natives. A waiter came to the table, and she took a glass of wine from his tray. She took a huge gulp. “What other big animals do you have in Kenya?”
I could tell she wanted to call out my bullshit for what it was, but I could also see her wondering if her rejection of my story would be construed as racism. I was from Africa, after all. I could have a pet rhino.
“We have the usual — lions and leopards and giraffes — but we also have hippos and rhinos.”
“Have you ever seen any of them up close?”
“Yes,” I said. I took a deep breath. “In fact, I have a pet rhino,” I added.
“Really?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Do you want to see pictures?”
She did, and so did the people at the next table. I flicked through my phone’s gallery. I had gone to a rhino sanctuary a few months earlier, and I had photos of myself petting one of the rhinos there, and feeding it sticks of bamboo. These were what I showed them.
The woman looked at the photos, and then looked at me, suspicion in her eyes. I could tell she wanted to call out my bullshit for what it was, but I could also see her wondering if her rejection of my story would be construed as racism. I was from Africa, after all. I could have a pet rhino. Eliana, a Greek writer at the next table, was in awe. She swooned at the photos and said it was the coolest thing she had ever seen. “What’s his name?” she asked.
“Her name,” I said, “is Alhamisi, and she came into my care after her mother had been killed by a gang of poachers three years ago. She was so weak when we found her. We all thought she was going to die.”
Eliana whimpered.
I said, “But she’s fine now. She pulled through. She’s a trooper. She’s doing well, too well in fact.”
“How so?” the funder I’d been talking to asked.
“Well, she eats around 120 pounds of grass every day, and grass is freaking expensive, especially when there’s a drought, and so I have to do all sorts of jobs I don’t enjoy in order to feed her.
“But it’s totally worth it, isn’t it?” Eliana asked. “To know that you’re doing all this in order to save such a wonderful creature?”
“Totally,” I said.
When I told Michelle about this conversation later, she convulsed on her bed for a full minute, laughing her lungs out. “Wonderful creature!” she screamed. “I am dying!”
We were in her room, sharing a bottle of wine, the two of us and Abbas. She dropped to the ground, still laughing. Abbas and I looked at each other. He was smiling. Michelle laughed some more.
✺
And then it was December, and our time there was done. The town had turned white from the snow in a way that would have been beautiful if I hadn’t been depressed by the lack of sunlight. Our last night, Michelle and I walked to Bollywood Grill. We talked about cricket with the owner of the restaurant. We laughed at how he had still not learned to pronounce my name. Michelle told me about the book she was planning. She dreamed of writing very personal essayistic fiction, and now that Ernaux had won the Nobel, she had a model to which she could point her publisher. “And what about you?” she asked me. “What next after you go back to Kenya?”
I didn’t know what to say. I had nothing. I had written nothing for almost half a year. I had spent the entire fellowship thinking about flags and rhinos, and complaining about the parties. The day before, we’d met the ranking State Department official in-charge of funding the program, and she’d told us that the American government would always take care of us. “What does that mean, ‘take care of us?’” Abbas asked. She paused. It meant, she said, that if we ever found ourselves in difficult political conditions in our home countries, the State Department would come for us. Organize visas and asylum. Find us jobs. Fly us out. The American flag was our protector. So maybe what was next for me was going back to Nairobi, and producing politically incendiary writing, basking in the fact that I had a protector.
We paid the bill and got out. I would never see this restaurant again, I thought. Outside, there were strings of students walking in the cold. They were silent, as if, with the snow, all the gaiety and color of the previous months had left them. We clutched our coats, fell in step with the students, and walked back to the house.
PHOTO: Aurelien Guichard (via Flickr, License CC BY-SA 2.0)
✺ Published in “Issue 21: America” of The Dial
