What was she doing in Cape Town among people with whom she had nothing in common? Their language seared her tongue. The taste of their cooking insulted her palate. Their music was no music to her ears. Everything was foreign to her. Suddenly, she couldn’t understand herself. Her faithfulness to Stephen’s memory and her intention to remain at his side seemed absurd. Mrs. Hillster was right: “The dead are always alone.”
After a while, Olu reappeared and announced:
“Cheryl would like you to stay for dinner.”
Rosélie refused straightaway. She didn’t want to intrude. She just wanted Chris Nkosi’s address. A mask of hostility immediately covered Olu’s face.
“Why? What do you want to know?” he asked.
Rosélie hesitated. What did she want to know?
“He was a good, hardworking boy,” Olu continued. “Quiet and obedient, until the honorable doctor, your husband, came and filled his head with stupid and dangerous ideas about the theater. Afterward, he liked to think himself as an artist. We didn’t know what to do with him. He almost failed his exams. He wanted to leave the country. Go to London. Did he have any money? Was he forgetting his color? He’d become a filthy immigrant, parked in a slum, the prey of skinheads. Who knows if he wouldn’t end up in jail? Or else convert to Islam and become a terrorist.”
It was obviously a joke. Rosélie gave a faint smile.
“It was in England I met Cheryl,” he continued. “That’s where we got married. I know what I’m talking about. What city is more racist than London? Its reputation as a multicultural paradise is an invention of intellectuals like Salman Rushdie, who, besides, emigrated to the United States.”
“I’d like to have a talk with Chris Nkosi,” pleaded Rosélie, who, despite the meandering conversation, had not forgotten the purpose of her visit.
“Talk about what?” he shouted angrily. “Leave him alone, for goodness’ sake! He’s deserved it.”
A worried look flared up at the back of his eyes. But she looked so unhappy that he sighed, went into his study, and came out grudgingly brandishing a piece of paper.
Chris Nkosi,
Govan Mbeki Primary School,
116, Govan Mbeki Street,
Hermanus, CO
“His wife’s pregnant,” he announced as if it were something important. “By this time, she might have given birth.”
Thereupon he dived back into his study. In short, if for Olu, Stephen’s bad influence boiled down to encouraging Chris, then it wasn’t anything very serious. In N’Dossou, a class of twelfth-graders had made a name for themselves performing brilliantly The Importance of Being Earnest on the occasion of the twenty-third birthday of the president’s fifth wife. (He had repudiated the first three. The fourth, who had opened a center for handicapped children and a maternity clinic, died in childbirth and was christened the African Evita Perón, the Holy Mother of the Nation. Way out in the bush, a thousand workers labored on the construction of a basilica in her honor that was to rival St. Peter’s and Yamassoukro’s in Côte d’Ivoire.) Some jealous folk had criticized this Westerner, this Stephen Stewart, in L’Unité, the single party’s single rag. In their opinion, staging The Importance of Being Earnest was not along the lines of Authenticity, but rather those of Alienation. Rosélie felt oddly reassured, without, however, admitting what she had feared.
She was deep in these troubling thoughts when Cheryl Ogundipe, draped in a black kimono and wearing a somewhat doleful expression, emerged from her bedroom.
O Love, you are a mischief maker. You’re rightly depicted as a blind god. You pounce without distinction on your prey and light the fires of passion.
Looking at Cheryl, even the keen eye of a Caribbean, apt at distinguishing the most subtle shades of color, would have hesitated. You could have mistaken her for a Scandinavian, given her fawn-colored torsade, her eyes the color of seawater, and her Cleopatra nose. She had a face studded with freckles. As if she had looked at the boiling sun of her native island through a sieve.
Rosélie reproached herself for being so surprised. Such contradictions are frequent. The brain, the heart, and sex, each goes its own way. Olu’s brain had followed the path of black activism. His heart and sex had led him into the trap of a mixed marriage. For Cheryl was the daughter of a white Jamaican Creole, descended from planters who had lost all their possessions, and an Irish mother whose family had never had any.
Outside the Caribbean, islands and continents drift to and fro. Borders lose their meaning. Differences become blurred. Languages no longer matter. Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba fit into one another like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle finally put together again. Immediately the conversation between these two Caribbean women took on an intimate tone.
“Olu says you don’t want to go home to Guadeloupe?” Cheryl inquired.
She too said “go home.” Go home to the island like going back into your mother’s womb. The unfortunate part is that once you’re expelled you can never go back. Go back and curl up. Nobody has ever seen a newborn baby turn back into a fetus. The umbilical cord is cut. The placenta buried. We have to walk bent double, but walk even so till the end of life.
“In some respect I can understand you. I swore I would never set foot again in Jamaica. When I was little I suffered agony. Because of our color, my brothers, my sisters, and me, the “guava whites” as you say in Guadeloupe, we were excluded. There was no place for us in the country of the Maroons. Twenty years later I return with a black husband. They find him too black. They make fun of his accent. They call him “alien.” But you can’t be serious about staying here. However much I adored Nigeria — we lived in Ibadan, I buried my firstborn and gave birth to two of my sons there, then there was the vitality, the music, and exuberance — this place makes me sick. It’s as if a shroud is covering it and underneath there is nothing but dead bodies. What’s more, if things go on as they are, AIDS will kill off all the blacks and the epidemic will have succeeded where the Afrikaners failed. That’s what causes all my allergies. It’s psychosomatic. Unfortunately, Olu will stay here until we’re both dead. He’s waiting. He’s hoping, day after day, for a nomination.”
Him too! Oh, these nominations, nominations for what, nominations for where, they are the aspiration of those whom revolutions and regime changes have passed by. They’re as slippery as an eel. Lucky are those who can catch one.
Two of the youngest children came in crying the never-ending tears of childhood. Cheryl patiently calmed them down and sent them back to their games.
“Yes, I had a daughter once, the first and only one,” she continued. “I carried her for eleven months. She clung to me, she didn’t want to let go. When finally the doctors extricated her from my womb with their forceps, she was dead. I too thought I was going to die. Ever since, I’ve had only boys. Why haven’t you had any children? It’s children, and children alone, who can brighten up our sad lives.”