My mother gave birth to me in Keren, but I rebirthed myself in London that spring night as I topped Bina-Balozi on a bench in Fitzroy Square. It was as if a lantern was attached to the tip of my strap-on so that as I entered him, I saw my reflection in a world inside him that was familiar and unfamiliar, beautiful and disturbing, disruptive and reaffirming. Hannah, Bina-Balozi screamed my name. I have never felt more present, surrendering as I did to my sexual power, inflating the force of my desire to breathe inside him with new ways of seeing and being seen. The O on Bina-Balozi’s backside opened like a rosebud in the middle of the night. O Bina-Balozi, the fragrance of my garden. O. B. B. That night, as I tightened my grip around Bina-Balozi’s waist, I whispered my story into his ears, into the London sky, a story uncensored and more truthful than my asylum application, which was gathering dust on the Home Office’s shelves. And it went like this: my mother was born in Keren at sunrise on 27 March 1941, when British troops defeated the Italians who had ruled over our country for half a century. The birth took place in a house at the foot of the mountains of Keren, which had witnessed three months of battle, three months of Europeans fighting over our land, three months during which my then pregnant grandmother had bound her stomach with flower- and butterfly-print fabric as the violence of artillery fire raged nearby. To no avail. My mother came into this world and lived through it with a volcanic potency. When the child was born, the family helper searched for my grandfather, but he was out on the street celebrating another kind of birth. He waved flowers and sang his gratitude to the British soldiers who had liberated his country from fascism. A British officer turned to him and everyone around him and said: I didn’t do it for you, nigger. I Didn’t Do It For You. Nigger. My grandfather cried, not at his daughter’s birth but at the end of one humiliation and the beginning of another. He and his country were passed from the hands of fascists into another form of European oppression. This anecdote stayed with me. It seeded my bitterness towards the British in my childhood. The Brits drew my grandfather’s attention away from my mother’s birth, centring themselves in his mind instead. My mother was orphaned by a man who devoted his time to everything English, from books to food, studying their way of life, as if the way to mend his shattered pride was to mirror them in style and behaviour. He used to own flat caps, but with the arrival of the British, the fedora became his favourite headgear. He bought grey suits, wearing the English weather around sunny Keren. His shirts came with cufflinks, and his waistcoats had two pockets which he filled with silk rose petals after he learnt that the rose was England’s national flower – and I crooned when I unearthed the rose on Bina-Balozi’s back. O Bina-Balozi. My grandfather spoke English to my mother so that it became one of her many languages. My grandmother was so enraged by my grandfather’s absence from her side during labour that she gave her daughter an Italian name: Mary Malinconia. I often think about the fighting both in the mountains and at home between my grandparents, and whether the violence my mother experienced as a foetus in her mother’s womb played a role in the violence she inflicted on my father, a violence that would trickle down to me and lose its teeth inside Bina-Balozi. O Bina-B, give me more of the peace inside you. This sense of a family suffering from humiliation became like a hereditary disease that had been passed down to me. When I was two, my mother was killed by the Ethiopian army, who had taken over from the Brits and colonised our country ever since. I have no memory of her. All I have told you so far was passed down to me. Like second-hand clothes, some of us march through this life with stories full of holes and gaps. But, as the Eritrean proverb taught to me by my father goes: ኵሉ ይሓልፍ ፍቕሪ ትቕጽል – kullu yihalif, fiqri yiterif – everything passes, love remains. O Bina-B. It was at Diana’s in those early days of my life in London, when I wasn’t allowed to go to school to learn English and my application for asylum was still under consideration, that I connected with the language of my interior. In that room at Diana’s house in Kilburn, I too was shelved as I imagined my file at the Home Office to be: vertical, stacked among stories from around the world, from places this country had once occupied. I imagined our files leaning to one side, about to collapse, a waterfall of words pouring onto the floors of the Home Office, the building flooding with words. In that room at Diana’s, my journey of discovery to my inner world launched my increasing flirtation with the deepest desires of my body and mind. In London, and in those early weeks, I owned nothing except time, so much that I believed the Home Office was giving me time in bucketloads to drown me in it. And on that bench in Fitzroy Square, as I pushed into Bina-B’s recesses, through the rules, roles, norms, fears, doubts, I found his native language. O. B. B. Bina-Balozi turned around and threw his arms around my neck. His eyes became my mirror – seeing your reflection in the eyes of a wild lover roaming the fields of your imagination is the most sensual act. O. B. B. BB’s cries of pleasure alerted a woman walking her dog. What are you doing? the woman shouted. I yelled back: What’s your problem? Don’t you have sex at home? That wasn’t dogging. The streets of London were my home – they were where I slept, ate, washed, cried, defecated, had sex, and where I recorded the events from the point of view of my eyes… EYES: Hannah gets up from her cardboard-box bed under her tree in Tavistock Square… a tree that has become her home following her release from her stint in prison… she yawns… the 100 dead poets of Bloomsbury sleeping rough around her scatter with the daylight except one… and she stretches in front of E.E. Cummings showering in his affirmation (i like your body / i like what it does, i like its hows)… Hannah feels hot… she twirls… takes a few steps… then… she turns around… people are dotted around the park… people eating reading crying thinking laughing looking talking… death is in town today with a bench being installed in memory of someone who has just died… but why don’t memories die? Hannah asks… she remembers her family back in Eritrea waiting for her return as a fully-trained engineer… ha… ha… ha… she laughs at the thought… then cries… her breath smells of disappointment… the morning feels gloomy… London’s optimism is eluding her today and Hannah thinks it’s acting like a black cab that doesn’t stop for black people… it’s quite a job being Hannah’s eyes… living under a tree… but even if she loses her sight and loses us we’ll still be here because we feel with the same power and intensity as we see… we’re stuck… no way out for us… ha… never mind… now more than ever it’s interesting to be Hannah’s eyes… (our stoic expression breaks into a brief smirk)... O Bina-Balozi. I remember that evening when I was thirteen, the end of another day spent under foreign rule. Instead of the Brits, Eritrea was now governed by Ethiopians. My mother was dead, my country a colony, and my father was living but not alive. His mind and heart had left along with my mother. Eritrean freedom fighters armed with Kalashnikovs besieged our town. As Ethiopian fighter planes circled above that evening, my father was in our garden. I was inside our concrete home with its green ceiling and walls covered with pictures of my mother in varying poses. My father had raised me alone, refusing to remarry, electing to live in my mother’s memory. He was an encyclopaedia of her history: he taught me how she spoke, ate, drank, laughed, and how she gazed into the distance as if her thoughts gathered layers in spaces that stretched into infinity. He’d even encouraged me to mimic her routine of taking showers. My mother showered twice a day in our bathroom with its open roof at the cusp of dawn and dusk, so her skin was ready to receive light and darkness. And I can imagine now the sun rising and setting, leaving time-prints on her body that became as magical as the curves of Keren’s mountains. My mother became a woman who was possessed by nature, its poetry and destructive power, its silences and roars. My father would often take me to our town’s garden at night and ask me to walk through it without a torch, and I’d feel my path by tracing the scent of flowers and fruits drifting in the air. This was my father’s idea of living in a war zone, one that he inherited from his family, who had lived through similar destructions: seeing through feeling beauty was necessary for those living in a country prone to cyclical violence like ours. I found affection and friendship in things other than people. I grew up attentive to the languages of nature, just like my mother. And he insisted I inherit her love for books too. And though he couldn’t read or write, he collected books after her death and became known as the illiterate book collector. His mantra was ኵሉ ይሓልፍ ፍቕሪ ትቕጽል – kullu yihalif, fiqri yiterif – everything passes, love remains. I talked to my mother’s picture on my father’s wall now as the Ethiopian planes flew above our town. I told her I hated the dergue army that had killed her as much as she hated the British colonists and as much as her father had hated the Italians. This hatred became a hereditary disease so virulent that years later I’d decide to bear no children. My father came inside. He pulled out his handgun and placed it on a table next to his bed, on top of which was a large empty box that he began to fill with books. I went to the garden and was watering our pots of herbs when my father came out of the room with a pickaxe and the boxes of books. He had told me that my mother was now a star. We looked up, our eyes combing the sky. The occupier’s fighter planes flew in pairs over our town, their fume trails adding layers to a clouded sky. There were no stars visible. He dug a grave-like hole. My father had collected the books of people killed in the war or those who fled to safety, leaving their belongings behind. It became his instinct to save books like some rescued abandoned pets. He didn’t see the contradiction in an illiterate man stockpiling books, as pointed out to him by many in our town. He imagined himself to be like our library built by the Italians: a building with the tenderness to embrace thousands of books. He, too, would be a safe home for words, ideas, history and stories. But unlike the Italian library, by-whites-for-whites, his would be as open as the moon. I remember those evenings when our garden was packed with adults and children who had come to read my father’s books whenever there was a lull in the bombardment, when women who couldn’t read or write would arrive with their bun sets and make coffee and popcorn in exchange for stories, when poets would read their unfinished work to gauge their audience’s reaction, when, having read some of my father’s books, debates would break out among intellectuals. It was on one of those evenings, when oil lamps were scattered among our flowers, when the smell of coffee wafted through the air filled with laughter, arguments, theories, opinions, poetry, when popcorn popped under lids, that my father gave me my mother’s diary and said: ኵሉ ይሓልፍ ፍቕሪ ትቕጽል – kullu yihalif, fiqri yiterif – everything passes, love remains. He couldn’t have imagined that I’d be reading it for the first time in London, in an English woman’s home. But in Eritrea, I read the books he’d found and now carried out of his room. Each book was preserved in me before he placed them into boxes that he buried in holes, into which he also transplanted a hibiscus, a bougainvillaea. Our garden and I became twin cemeteries for books. I was surrounded by destruction but life bubbled beneath my bones, as if my insides were the walls of Babylon. The poets of Persian civilisations whose work I feasted on entertained me throughout my insomniac childhood. I consumed so many texts on Arabic architecture that when I strolled around our neighbourhood after bombardments, I’d be rebuilding destroyed homes and schools in my head. Each building I revived in my fantasy was as radiant and colourful as those of the Andalusian era. I became a coffer for words, characters and phrases that journeyed in books from far-off lands. I empathised with Oliver Twist before I came to his country and endured poverty in London, living under my tree in Tavistock Square. I launched metaphorical avalanches of snow, which I encountered in a geography book my father saved from a burning house that belonged to an Italian teacher, onto the childhood companions I had despised. I screamed the language of Russian writers at the Ethiopian soldiers, firing revolutionary words as if my mouth were a catapult. Literature could be a weapon too. But did it influence my fondness for asses? I don’t know, but I was unfiltered, and my mind as uncensored as some of the writers I read, like the Abbasid Caliphate poet Abu Nuwas, who wrote poems about his love for men’s buttocks, the mysteries hidden inside trousers. All is love, the poet said. All is love, I repeated. I look back and convince myself that by making me read all these books, my father assigned me to an orphanage of literature. The written words would sculpt themselves into a human-like presence that would allow me to continue to feel the love of the family I lost to war. ኵሉ ይሓልፍ ፍቕሪ ትቕጽል – kullu yihalif, fiqri yiterif – everything passes, love remains.
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From The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia. Used with permission of the publisher, Prototype Publishing. Copyright © Sulaiman Addonia 2024.
