Admiring Silence Read online

  She took me into places I had passed with only a sideways look of misgiving: specialist second-hand bookshops, vegetarian cafés, jewellers, jazz clubs – places I expected to be evicted from with guffaws of derision, places which intimidated me with their undisclosed rituals. Even my alienness seemed heroic to her, in the first place because I was a victim of historical oppression, which earned me automatic sympathy, and in the second because (so she said) I was calm in the face of all the provocation, unperturbed and clear-headed about the seductions of scapegoated radicalism. She even made me feel that I was calm, unperturbed and clearheaded rather than feeble and unnerved, as I suspected in my weaker moments. She drew me into her circle of friends so completely that at times I forgot myself, and I imagined that I looked as they did, and talked as they did, and had lived the same life that they had lived, and that I had always been like this and would go on unhindered way beyond the sunset. But this was only at times, as a kind of fulfilment of the moment of communion. For my alienness was important to all of us – as their alienness was to me, though it took a long time for me to say that even to Emma. It adorned them with the liberality of their friendly embrace of me, and adorned me with authority over the whole world south of the Mediterranean and east of the Atlantic. My word, unless it was utterly implausible, superseded all others on these regions. It was from these beginnings that it became necessary later to invent those stories of orderly affairs and tragic failure. I was allowed so much room that I could only fill it with invention. I did not think that the messy contortions of my own experience would do the trick in the way that stories of strangers on a moonlit terrace could.

  In those first months, Emma hardly mentioned her parents, though I knew they lived in Blackheath because she went to stay with them for some special family events. She waved them away when I asked. No, it wasn’t them she was interested in, but my parents, my friends, my country. And I was only too happy to oblige, to retell stories, dwell on them, elaborate. In my stories I found myself clarifying a detail, adjusting it so that its impact was unobscured, even at times adding a variation that added irony and a note of bitterness to what might otherwise have seemed banal. I found the opportunity to rewrite my history irresistible, and once I began it became easier and easier. I did not mean to lie to Emma, dupe her out of contempt or disregard while I exploited her for her affection. I don’t exactly know why I began to suppress things, change other things, fabricate to such an extent. Perhaps it was to straighten out my record to myself, to live up to her account of me, to construct a history closer to my choice than the one I have been lumbered with, to cling to her affection, to tell a story which would not bore her. Later, she would sometimes catch me out in an inconsistency and would give me a long stare while I flopped about like a beached creature, wriggling in a tangle of my own making.

  Uncle Hashim and my father came to me out of the midnight air, when my voice had hit a weary timbre and found its echo in the story of love’s petty failure.

  I must have been in school for a few years when Uncle Hashim built himself another house on the other side of the road, with a large shop-space on the ground floor and an airy apartment upstairs with a stone-balustraded balcony looking out on the main road. One window in the reception room of the old apartment looked towards Uncle Hashim’s new house, though at something of an angle. People began to talk about Uncle Hashim planning a wedding, but it was as much for business reasons as for anything else that he decided to move. He opened his electrical-goods shop first before proposing marriage to a daughter of another merchant called Nassor Abdalla, a man for whom Uncle Hashim felt respect and friendship. It seemed only a very brief time before Uncle Hashim’s new wife had a son and a daughter, one after the other, by which time her husband was acquiring a reputation for a new restlessness when women strolled by. People smiled at the appetites his wife must have awakened.

  My parents lived in the old apartment rent-free. My father was a teacher of history at the school I attended, the largest primary school in the town. He taught the senior forms, Standard Seven and Standard Eight, and at the time when Uncle Hashim moved out I was still in Standard Six, so I had not yet come under his tutelage. He was a serious and stern teacher where work was concerned, although he also had a reputation for being indulgent with his favourites, who were always the quiet hard-working students. The two always seemed to go together then, the clever ones were quiet and small, and the difficult ones were big and loud. I was quiet and small. There was talk that my father would be sent to the university in Makerere for in-service training so he could be promoted to teach in a secondary school. It was then only three or four years before Independence, but the majority of the secondary-school teachers in the country were European, mostly British, but a handful were from the settler colonies in the south. They had the necessary expertise, it was thought, and the lads and ladies had to have jobs, or what was the point of having an Empire? Their salaries were levied on the colony, of course. So the Colonial Office despatched scores of genial (so they thought themselves), mostly Oxbridge graduates to the far corners of the globe, to awe and succour the natives with simultaneous equations, Shakespeare and Romans in Britain. My father never did get to go to Makerere, but he did get to teach in the secondary school.

  Our family spread itself after Uncle Hashim’s departure. The three of us – Akbar, Halima and me – shared Uncle Hashim’s old room. It was unusual to allow a girl to share with her brothers but Halima was very small, only three, and in any case thought she was a boy. My father bought himself a transistor radio, which occupied a new corner table in the reception room. He also brought out some of his books and hung a framed print of the Kaaba and the mosque at Makka. In the evenings he occupied this room in solitary splendour, trawling the short-waveband for any likely items of interest, reading his books, marking school work. He would sit there alone all evening. It was what we thought he wanted. If he was out for some reason or was late at the café, we profaned this solemn space by listening to the local radio, which at that time of the evening played listeners’ requests and repeated the serialized story broadcast earlier in the day.

  My mother sat with us then, though she never sat in the reception room in the evenings. When she had cleaned up after supper, she did other little jobs for a while – mending, soaking clothes for the morning wash, ironing our school uniforms at the beginning of the week. After that she went out on the terrace and stretched out in the gloom as she always used to. The roses and lavender bushes were gone. A blight on the roses and the presence of little children had combined to kill them off. The rusted kerosene tins were still there, still full of soil but now dried up and caked into bricks, and one of them contained a spiky and bitter aloe which my mother had planted from a cutting years ago and whose white sap she had later rubbed on her nipples when she needed to wean us from the breast.

  She was always deliberate and soft-spoken, with a bubble of teasing humour in her voice, and a way of pressing her lips together which made her seem as if she was suppressing a smile. When I was smaller, I loved this calm in my parents, the silences they carried around with them, the way they shuffled around each other so accommodatingly. It was only later that I realized that they rarely said very much to each other, and just as rarely sat anywhere near each other, that they avoided each other to keep the peace.

  As a government employee, my father could not openly join a political party or be an activist. Since politics consisted largely of agitating for the departure of the colonial authority, it was not hard to see why the administration thought it right to act in this headmasterish way. It did not make that much difference. Politics was what everyone did and talked about: in the streets, at the café, at school, at home. Some people blustered and gloated gleefully at the colonizers’ diminishing manoeuvres, shouting obscene remarks when European officials drove stonily by. It was not treatment the officials were used to, and both they and our European teachers dealt with this hostility by ignoring it with set faces
. Even the few tourists from the cruise ships making their customary one-day stop caught some of it, being followed around the streets by jeering boys and meeting stroppily unhelpful natives when they stopped to ask their smilingly ignorant questions. Others, like my father, were always at hand to offer a more considered opinion. My father liked to say that you had to retain a sense of history and see what lay behind all this, rather than just assume that a bunch of noisy marchers and loud-mouthed café lizards were going to drive away armies with guns and warships and jet planes. He did not say this at the café, for there he would only have received derisive howls of laughter for reply. What was happening in Algeria then? What else did he think was driving the oppressor away if not the determined protests of the oppressed? Did the French look as if they wanted to leave? He said his cautious words about a sense of history at home, when something he had heard elsewhere would return to him and make him indignant.

  We kept track of other colonial departures like keeping score in a game: Ghana, Nigeria, Somalia, the Congo, Senegal, Mali, then much nearer home: Tanganyika, Uganda – many of them places where spectacular disasters were waiting to happen. In the streets people bickered over the details of constitutional conferences, with their special clauses on this and that, over new flags and anthems, over designs of stamps. Heroic leaders indiscriminately filled the imagination: Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Patrice Lumumba, Jomo Kenyatta. There were new maps to be studied, new names, new countries that seemed to surface with incredible solidity out of the featureless mass that had previously been Africa.

  But politics also brought shocking things to the surface. We liked to think of ourselves as a moderate and mild people. Arab African Indian Comorian: we lived alongside each other, quarrelled and sometimes intermarried. Civilized, that’s what we were. We liked to be described like that, and we described ourselves like that. In reality, we were nowhere near we, but us in our separate yards, locked in our historical ghettoes, self-forgiving and seething with intolerances, with racisms, and with resentments. And politics brought all that into the open. It was not that we did not know these things about ourselves, about slavery, about inequalities, about the contempt with which everyone spoke about the barbarity of the savage in the interior who had been captured and brought to work on our island. We read about these things in our colonized history books, but there these events seemed lurid and far away from the way we lived, and sometimes they seemed like self-magnifying lies. So when the time came to begin thinking of ourselves in the future, we persuaded ourselves that the objects of this abuse had not noticed what had happened to them, or had forgiven and would now like to embrace a new rhetoric of unity and nationalism. To enter into a mature compromise in everyone’s interest. But they didn’t. They wanted to glory in grievance, in promises of vengeance, in their past oppression, in their present poverty and in the nobility of their darker skins. To the nationalist rhetoric of their opponents they proclaimed a satirical reprise of their despised Africanness, mocked the nationalists for their newfound conscience, and promised them an accounting in the very near future. All of which came to pass with incredible promptness.

  Before then we still had to go through our own constitutional conferences at Lancaster House, our finely tuned protection clauses for every vulnerable minority, our debates about the possible dates for our release, and in the far future (as it then seemed in our impatience), the ceremonies of the great day itself. There were still election riots to take place, commissions of inquiry to be held into the causes of the riots, conspiracies to uncover, trials for sedition to take place, elaborate handover plans to be made, and a new flag and an anthem to be created, both of which appeared miraculously from an office in London.

  My father secretly donated money to the party of the nationalists, afraid of doing so openly in case he was dismissed from his job. My father’s sister became one of the stalwarts of the women’s wing of the party, organizing, haranguing, getting people out, leading the chanting and ululations, and, as rumour had it, having herself a thoroughly good time in every way. Actually it was more than rumour, as I found out for myself. My mother sent me to her house with a message one afternoon, not the one room in the poor quarter where she and her husband used to live, but a third-floor apartment in a quiet area of the town to which they had recently moved. Time had been good to both of them. And as the custom was never to lock the front door if you were in, I walked unhesitatingly into her apartment calling out the word for seeking admission, hodi. She could not have heard me, so with another cry of hodi I pulled aside the curtain to her bedroom. As I did so she leapt naked off the bed and I dropped the curtain, but not so quickly that I did not see the coach of our local football team lying on the bed with nothing on. I also saw how unexpectedly graceful my aunt was in her nakedness, how flowingly curved and full her body was. I ran away before she came out, and told my mother that she was not in. Until I told Emma about it, I kept her secret.

  But despite her busy life, my aunt did not ignore my mother, who with her insistent encouragement attended every rally the nationalists held in the town, which was more or less once a week. My mother joined a crowd of women who would walk singing to the opposition’s deepest stronghold if that happened to be the rally’s venue. And it often was, more to aggravate and provoke the enemy than to recruit or seduce. It was a wonder that it did not lead to violence. My mother did this as she did everything else, with an unhurried, stoical air. It wasn’t fun but it was necessary. She listened to the endless speeches with the same unflurried air, clapped at the abuse of opponents, and abuse is mostly what it was, and laughed her silent, bubbling laughter when some meanness had struck home.

  Two evenings a week she attended literacy classes organized by the party, and on those two evenings my brother and I were required to volunteer our services as teachers at the branch office where the classes were held. So at last my mother had her chance to go to school, to be taught how to write her name by children the same age as her own. Her enthusiasm diminished once she had learned to write her name, especially when it became obvious that literacy was not to be a condition for the vote. This was just as well, as I was about to go to secondary school and I found my affiliation with the branch school embarrassing. Secondary-school boys were supposed to be serious and above such things as politics.

  That’s where we were, a year from where we weren’t, a year from the brutal climax of our self-deceptions. At that year’s end, there was the midnight drama of the lowering of one flag and the raising of another, the handing over of a rolled-up parchment, and the playing of a brand-new anthem – smug ceremonials conducted with practised hauteur after the rehearsal of all those other colonial departures. For our departing masters it was just a bit of fun, really, even if slightly embarrassing. There was hardly time to get used to the flag before the uprising, a matter of weeks. All the lurid promises of an accounting suddenly came true: murder, expulsion, detention, rape, you name it. Weeks and weeks of it, months, years, some of it. The bits of paper with their protection clauses and their defence agreements and their assurances on pensions and other such civilized paraphernalia were as quickly forgotten as the anthem and the flag. Instead, the radio blared mocking, gloating speeches, issuing detailed prohibition after detailed prohibition like a demented bully: six-o’clock curfew until further notice, public gatherings of more than three people are illegal until further notice, cafés, schools, cinemas are closed until further notice, all passports are invalid, all travel is illegal, all land is nationalized. Gangsters roamed the streets with gleaming guns they had liberated from the riot-police arsenal, plundering where they chose, demanding a display of timid submission from everyone, seeking out those with whom they had scores to settle, making a point of calling on the proud and arrogant to humiliate and abuse them. And we had to learn to get used to another new flag. In the centre of this flag was an axe, to intimidate and cow with its threat of brutality.

  Where my father had given his support to the nationa
lists secretly for fear of dismissal, Uncle Hashim had done so openly and prominently. On occasion he had even sat on the platform at branch meetings or had been part of a welcoming delegation when a party notable came on a campaigning visit. He did not do these things with any great enthusiasm, but he was one of the eminents of our community, and it was his part to share in its undertakings, and to do so conspicuously. His display was remembered now, and within days of the uprising, after the ministers and the deputy ministers, the party leaders and their advisers had been taken in and humiliated before being summarily sentenced, it was the turn of the lesser notables. Three men dressed in plain clothes and carrying guns, who did not bother to identify themselves because Uncle Hashim already knew who they were, took him away to detention. They roughed him up a little, but nothing remarkable for those times, just a few slaps and a tongue-lashing. It was difficult to imagine Uncle Hashim’s solemnly stern person being misused in this way, but his wife witnessed it all and reported it tearfully when my mother went to visit her at her father’s home. Uncle Hashim’s house, its contents and his electrical-goods shop were expropriated with immediate effect. That meant at once. On the following day someone moved into the upstairs apartment, and a truck arrived to empty the store. He was to spend eighteen months in detention.

  On the same day that Uncle Hashim was arrested, my father’s sister came to our house. My father had wanted me to go to her apartment to see that she was unharmed, but my mother would not allow any of us to go out, not even my father. We had enough food for a few days, she said, and we’d just keep our doors locked for as long as we could. She even thought the terrace was risky, in case someone should see one of us from the road and demand entrance. My father rushed downstairs to open the door when my aunt knocked and called out. He recognized her voice. Even before she had climbed the stairs, the house was filled with her wails. She sat on the floor at the top of the stairs, sobbing as if her heart was broken, her face streaming as she wailed. ‘They’ve killed them all,’ she cried, and began heaving with sobs again.