How Beautiful We Were(110)

So, just as Papa joined forces with Woja Beki and went to Bézam though he hated Woja Beki and Gono, just as Papa did what he did not care to do, my sister shook hands with the government and went to work for them after she returned from America.



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We lived and worked in different parts of the city, but we were together on many evenings, especially in those first years after her return, when she needed me to introduce her to the city. She had stopped eating animal products in America because Austin did not eat them, but in Bézam she began eating fish again. On some evenings, she and I would drive around the city in my car, searching for women roasting fish on street corners. My sister enjoyed our evening visits with Mama and Papa in their house—she loved how they fawned over her and asked her please to eat more, a mighty wind would be the end of her with so little flesh stuck on her bones—but she also relished Bézam street food. She loved the roadside banter with the other roasted-fish customers, conversations about the heat, the proliferation of stray dogs on the streets, the country’s football team, which had just won a match—finally, something to be proud of about our country. Sometimes, if the roasted-fish lady had a boombox, my sister stood up and danced to the music with other patrons, her moves as unsightly as they were in Kosawa, her spirit unburdened, if only for a few minutes. Once, as I was dropping her off, she said that she hadn’t thought she’d ever say this, but she loved living in Bézam.

Just not enough to forget Kosawa.

In the months after Carlos filed the lawsuit, she talked about the struggle daily.

I listened to her and tried, as gently as I could, to tell her that she’d done her part to save our village, no one would blame her if she decided to step back and just await the verdict from America. She did not agree with me: fighting for Kosawa was her birthright.



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Fighting for Kosawa was not my birthright. Which is why I made up my mind, after Liberation Day, to start disentangling myself from my sister’s dreams. I was weary of it all, the traveling, the waiting, being away from my beloved, my sister’s constant agonizing over strategy, the seesawing of hopefulness and despair. I’d done everything I could for Kosawa. I’d done everything I could to help her. I could not make my life one of service to another human’s cause, not even if that human was my sister. I never explicitly said anything to her—we still went to eat roasted fish, I still visited her in her office, she was my sister—but I knew I couldn’t be part of her revolution anymore. I wasn’t her; I would never be like her; I had to go my own way. I found solace in the fact that she had the Five, and her devotees from her Village Meeting, which I never attended. Looking at her on days when she couldn’t get off her couch from exhaustion, I wished she’d chosen another way of life. I wished she’d chosen Austin over Kosawa. I wished she wasn’t sacrificing so much for others, not after what our family had endured.



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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.”