Sweetness in the Belly (4 page)

This is where we are reassured of our place in the world. Our place in the eyes of God. The sound of communal prayer—its growling honesty, its rhythm as relentless and essential as heartbeats—moves me with its direction and makes me believe that distance can be overcome. It is the only thing that offers me hope that where borders and wars and revolutions divide and scatter us, something singular and true unites us. It tames this English soil.

There are rooms being similarly transformed, senses being reoriented, everywhere on earth. I know from experience that you can remap a city like this, orient yourself to its strange geography, strew your own trail of breadcrumbs between salient markers—mosques, restaurants, markets and grocers—and diminish the alien power of the spaces in between. You can find your way. You grapple with language, navigate your way on the underground, stretch your meager allowance, adapt unfamiliar provisions to make familiar food and find people from back home in queues at government offices, which at once invests you with a new sense of possibility and devastates you with the reminder of all the people you have left.

Ten years ago, Ethiopians had no word for
diaspora,
or
emigration.
There was only the word for
pilgrimage,
a journey with an implicit return—to Mecca or the shrines of beloved Ethiopian saints—but the idea of leaving your country, except for a very educated few who sought higher degrees abroad, was incomprehensible. A betrayal, even.

Amina is an anchor in this small but growing community. While the others moan their longing for injera, Amina sets about making the Ethiopian bread using millet instead of teff. The women are grateful for the instruction, even though the injera lacks the critical bitterness that distinguishes it. But taste ultimately comes to matter less than resourcefulness. Amina locates a Yemeni merchant in Brixton who smuggles in qat from Djibouti twice a week. The men are jubilant. Bread and stimulants. The stuff of life.

Amina is not a specter in this landscape; she is unusual in putting down roots. She began by washing dishes in the kitchen of a Punjabi restaurant, which she did while taking advanced English for foreigners at Brixton College at night. She soon began taking secretarial courses as well. Now she works from Monday to Friday in the legal aid department of the Refugee Referral Service alongside well-meaning English women with solid names like Marion and Patricia.

While other refugees dream of mountains and hyenas and rivers, Amina takes Sitta and Ahmed to the zoo in Regent’s Park and introduces them to lizards and giraffes. She fashions paper boats out of pages of tabloids for Ahmed to float on the Thames near the foot of Lambeth Bridge. Old England looms large on the other side. Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament would cast shadows over his tiny paper boat if it were to cross the river, but a paper boat cannot span the distance, and we are both alienated by and grateful for the divide.

We know plenty of Ethiopians in London who do not even furnish their flats. What possessions they acquire sit in their cardboard boxes ready for transport. The tower of boxes holding televisions, toaster ovens, microwaves, electric heaters teeters to the left of the door, ready to be shipped at a moment’s notice. They commit to nothing. They float on the myth of return.

W
hen the coffee beans are nearly black, Amina tips them from the plate into a mortar. She brought that mortar with her. Showed up at Heathrow with nothing but Ahmed, a man’s wallet and that mortar, Sitta still in utero. She unwraps a ball of waxed paper pulled from the pocket of her skirt and shakes two cardamom pods into her hand. She rubs these briskly between her palms, adding their silken ashes and brown seeds to the mix, and then passes the mortar to me.

Sitta places her hand over mine as if to help. A twist of the wrist brings a distant yet familiar sting. The suddenly charged senses and the near-primal urge to follow. Everything lifts. The dull hangover of nightmares about bodies ripped from houses and dragged through streets; bodies jailed in terror and left to sleep in their own excrement; bodies stripped of fingernails, expressions and will; bodies raped with rifles, sodomized with sticks, lacerated and mutilated and broken.

Everything lifts with the twist of a wrist. Everything comes alive.

part two

harar, ethiopia

1970-1972

al-hijrah

I
t was a still night in November 1969, the air thick with the smell of overripe fruit and woodsmoke, when Hussein and I disembarked in Harar’s main square. We stepped out of the Mercedes in which we’d traveled from the capital and skulked away. The extravagance of having spent three days winding up and down the miles of scrub-covered mountains in the back of a chauffeured car, complete with an ashtray full of chocolates wrapped in gold foil, had somewhat sullied our arrival. Not only did it seem contradictory to the spirit of pilgrimage, it was hardly representative of the rest of our journey, an arduous overland odyssey of months spent blistered and parched and subsisting on little else than the gritty bread our Tuareg guide baked in sand.

We would repent, we told ourselves, as we stood in the muddy shadow of a mosque and looked up at the stars. Soon, we would be kneeling to pray before the entombed remains of our beloved saint.

We could hear the patter of drums in the near distance, and Hussein gripped my arm. I nudged him on, following him downhill through dark and narrow streets littered with vegetable matter and animal waste. Cats feasting on carcasses scattered as we grasped the walls on each side of us for balance. Before us, we saw a green archway framing the entrance to the compound surrounding the shrine. Through that archway, the movement of hundreds of people sparkled like sunlight on the crests of waves.

I was used to the slow, quiet, uniform ways of the Sufis at the shrine in Morocco, but here, worship was far more colorful: urban Hararis, the men in their starched white galabayas and white knit skullcaps, their wives, daughters and sisters glittering in bright head scarves and beaded shawls; the people of the countryside, Oromo peasants who work the Harari lands, darker skinned and wearing duller hues than the Hararis, and the herders, sinewy Somalis and their butter-scented wives draped in long diaphanous veils. Landlords, serfs and nomads. Conspicuous wealth, backbreaking servitude and drifting poverty—secular distinctions all erased in the presence of God.

In front of the shrine, a small, white, cupola-capped building buttressed against the city wall, a semicircle of men pounded taut-skinned drums with heavy sticks, throwing sweat from their bodies with each beat. The saint’s descendant and disciple, Sheikh Jami Abdullah Rahman, stood in the middle of them, his white turban the only thing visible at this distance, but his huge voice audible over the crowd. He was leading the heaving mass through a series of dhikr, religious chants, some recognizable to me in Arabic, others offered in a foreign tongue.

Women were clacking wooden blocks together high above their heads as they repeated the dhikr over and over. Stalks of qat were being passed from hand to hand, their leaves washed down with water drunk from a hollowed gourd. Mouths were green, lips spittle caked, sweat flying as people bounced from foot to foot. They were too entranced to take any particular notice of Hussein and me. We leaned left and right with the crowd, and stalks of green leaves were passed into our hands. We hadn’t known qat in Morocco, and it was tough and bitter upon first taste; I spat it out onto the dirt at my feet.

The qat fueled devotion, allowing people to sustain their energy over the hours and taking them to a point of near ecstasy, where they began hissing through their teeth and their eyes rolled so far back their pupils disappeared and they spun around in blind circles. When they lost their balance, they were pushed gently back upright by the crowd.

“Like whirling dervishes!” Hussein marveled.

At some point in the early hours of the morning, the sheikh’s voice suddenly vaporized and people’s movements began to slow, until their feet were leaden, still, and they took deep breaths and began to drift homeward. I looked at Hussein and implored him. Speak to the sheikh. It’s time.

W
e had come to Harar to honor Saint Bilal al Habash and seek his blessing and protection, for this is the city that houses the original shrine in a series of shrines in his honor strung like pearls on a necklace across the sands of North Africa. The shrine in Morocco where we lived and studied with the Great Abdal lay farthest west. The Great Abdal had once made this pilgrimage, and like all his students, Hussein and I had been raised to believe in this journey as our duty, and our desire.

“You will go when God wills it,” the Great Abdal used to say to us.

But first, Hussein had to fully recover. I never knew exactly what ailed him, only that he had spent some time in a cave in the desert and returned a broken man. When I first arrived at the shrine, I noticed him because he sat apart from all the other Sufis. He hid under his woolen cloak clutching a string of prayer beads and remained still for days at a time.

But one day, while the Great Abdal and I were having our morning lessons, something compelled Hussein to look up. His expression was utterly blank. His teeth were black, the whites of his eyes yellow and his hair a mop of greasy black strings. He looked so old to me, though he was probably only in his early twenties. So old and so sad.

From that day on, Hussein made feeble attempts to move. By the time the Great Abdal and I had reached the twentieth chapter of the Qur’an, several months later, Hussein had managed to push himself upright onto thin, quivering legs. He was a white spider, all limbs poking out of a brown wool sack. He stood staring at his dirty feet, his face contorted with the effort of considering what he should next do. I worried he was going to topple over and asked the Great Abdal if I should help. “Go on, then,” the Great Abdal encouraged.

Much to my surprise, Hussein let me take his limp, bony hand and place it upon my shoulder. He then slowly raised his leg, but he couldn’t put it down. I suggested he try stepping backward, the way my mother used to do whenever she’d lost something. A key, her cigarette lighter, me.

Hussein looked up at the sky and considered this, taking a long, deep breath through his nostrils. He leaned his bony weight deeper into my shoulder and raised his leg again. “Steady me,” he said weakly.

Then a dog barked in the distance, and Hussein’s foot came down and touched the ground behind him. The Great Abdal gasped. So did Hussein. “Subhaanallah,” he said. Glory be to God. “It
is
easier when I cannot see where my foot will land.”

“You have to concentrate more when you don’t have your eyes,” I offered.

“Yes. Vision is a distraction,” Hussein agreed, and with that, he closed his eyes.

For Hussein it was a question of retreating backward to where he had lost his way; for me it was a question of moving on from the loss of my parents. I suppose we met somewhere in the middle. Took each other by the hand and stepped forward into a life of prayer and learning and companionship.

My Qur’anic study with the Great Abdal was supplemented by monthly visits from Muhammed Bruce Mahmoud. He would bring me volumes from the library he slowly dismantled over the years. He was rather peculiar and certainly very pompous, but I adored him. “For your edification, mademoiselle,” he would announce, bowing dramatically and presenting me with a new stack.

Muhammed Bruce told me stories about Bilal al Habash’s home-land, where he boasted having long-standing connections. He was particularly proud of his association with a man named Sir Richard Burton. He claimed the famous British explorer, who had been the first European to visit the city of Harar, was his great-great-uncle. Muhammed Bruce also knew the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, the King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. He told me they’d played polo together.

Ours was a rich and good life in a small and peaceful place, a self-contained universe hooked up to its own generator. But after seven years of devotion—measuring the weight of every word, savoring the hard edges, feeling them dissolve in my mouth as I stood, as I kneeled, as I pressed my forehead to the ground—the insularity of our bubble burst.

In the late 1960s, a new king came to power. He felt the shrines and brotherhoods had grown too powerful; they were a challenge to the way he wanted to govern now that the French had let go of the reins. The king’s army soon broke down the doors of the shrine in the nearby town of Tamegroute, sending its brothers into flight. Some of them landed on our doorstep, seeking protection from the Great Abdal.

He worried our shrine would be next, since we received funds from the brotherhood in Tamegroute for taking in the local poor. We were dependent to a large extent upon them, just as they were dependent upon a larger brotherhood in the north, the leader of which had unfortunately tried to assassinate the king. Our beloved sheikh suggested that perhaps it was time for Hussein and me to make the journey to Harar. And then suggestion became insistence. Suddenly it became
now
rather than
when
, hijrah as well as hajj: as much a flight as a pilgrimage. He would follow with the rest of the Sufis, he promised, if the situation necessitated it.

So in February of 1969, Qur’an in hand, and a letter of introduction from Muhammed Bruce to the emperor of Ethiopia (signed “Your supplicant, Your servant”), our hajj and hijrah began. The Great Abdal drained the coffers in order to send us across the Sahara in search of refuge in Ethiopia, just as the Prophet had sent his family and followers to what was then Abyssinia thirteen centuries before. I was sixteen years old.

It made a noble and self-sacrificing story if you omitted the fact that we had spent just over a week living in luxury at the emperor’s palace in Addis Ababa, courtesy of an introduction by our friend and my guardian, Muhammed Bruce Mahmoud. From there, at the emperor’s insistence, we had been driven to Harar by a member of the palace guard. And omit, Hussein did, for it was a crime for a Sufi, meant to fulfill himself on a diet of devotion, to have indulged.

Hussein returned from his conference with Sheikh Jami to find me sitting in the bark folds of a giant tree. He was glowing with rare giddiness, and smiled sheepishly, gesturing for me to follow him through the tall carved wooden doors of the first in a row of three identical whitewashed buildings.

Inside, a weary and sweat-stained crew of the sheikh’s friends and relations were strewn across the red-earth platforms of a large room with shiny turquoise walls adorned with baskets and wooden bowls and tin plates from China and gold-lettered Arabic proverbs hanging in frames. Fatima, the sheikh’s senior wife, somewhat taciturn but gracious, offered us a seat in a corner. We leaned back against silk-covered pillows and huddled under a blanket, and I soon fell asleep against the pitter-pat of women’s conversation and the hearty bass notes of men’s snores.

It was just after sunrise when Sheikh Jami’s full figure nearly filled the doorway. My head snapped from the platform as his booming voice pounded the muted din. It was a terrifying sight: he was huge and ugly. His blue eyes were swimming in protruding ocher bubbles, his tobacco-stained teeth hung from his mouth like stalactites, his red hair cascaded from his turban to his shoulders, and his beard was so sharp it could have sliced bread.

At first sight of me, Sheikh Jami bellowed angrily: “Yee min khowraja? Farenji?” Terms of insult in an unintelligible tongue.

Hussein leapt forward, threw himself at the sheikh’s feet, grasped him by the ankles and begged his understanding.

“Yes, of course!” bellowed the sheikh, switching to Arabic. “You, fine, but what is
she
doing here? A European! In my house!”

I reached up gingerly and tried to recover the veil that had slipped to my shoulders while I’d been asleep.

“The Great Abdal has sent us both,” Hussein said.

Sheikh Jami’s barrel of a chest subsided at the mention of the name. “My brother,” he said. (Or rather, as we would figure out later, his third cousin, some dozen times removed.)

Hussein continued: “She is the charge of a friend who once visited your greatness, a man named Muhammed Bruce Mahmoud—”

“Stop!” the giant sheikh roared. “That man is the last farenji I had the misfortune to encounter! A charlatan!” he shouted, and spat on the floor just next to Hussein’s knee.

I wondered what Muhammed Bruce could possibly have done to cause such a reaction. He had claimed to love Harar and its people.

For all his usual timidity, though, Hussein offered a Sufi proverb as if asking the sheikh to excuse Muhammed Bruce. Or me. “Enlightenment must come little by little, or else it would overwhelm,” he said.

Sheikh Jami pursed his lips as if he were sucking a lemon. Slowly, he spread his arms, inviting Hussein to stand up and come and join him in his breakfast, an enormous platter of meat and rice topped with fried onions that Fatima had just set down on one of the platforms.

Gishta, the sheikh’s plump and dimpled youngest wife, held a bowl in one hand and poured a slow stream of water from a jug over her husband’s hands with her other. He rubbed his palms together vigorously and mumbled something to her. She nodded and stepped over to Hussein, and poured water over his hands as well. She handed the bowl to a young girl at her side and then reached for my forearm, though not to wash.

“Where are we going?” I stammered in Arabic as she pulled me to my feet.

She led me wordlessly to the door.

“But why?” I pleaded.

“It is just a small confusion, Lilly,” said Hussein quietly, as if something might break. “Everything will be fine, insha’Allah.”

Gishta led me across the threshold. I clutched the outside wall of Fatima’s house. Hussein and I had come all this way together through hostile lands in search of refuge. He had been my shadow for years, my brother, beholden to me for his recovery. I couldn’t ask him not to stay; it was what he had always wanted. Tears spilled down my face, but Gishta only nudged me on with her knuckles pressed into the small of my back.