At Maghrib, The Crows Fly Home

Mariam Hassan

At the beginning of sunset or Maghrib, in our bustling Dar es Salaam neighborhood, my little sister and I are languishing on a mkeka outside when she begins to sing the crows are flying home, the crows are flying home and I look up to witness death, I say death because these crows to me are a prosody of souls being taken home and I had conceived that only a place desirous for souls could have this many crows. The crows do indeed fly home, cawing at the sky as if alerting the heavens of their passing; oilike wings jet-black and beaks domineering, their diet strictly only souls. I read in an article that the crows live in the looming palm trees, and were an import from India to aid in the cleansing of Zanzibar over centuries ago. At this point, something breaks open and the moonlight washes over us suddenly. The crows are flying home, the crows are flying home seeps itself into my yearning and questioning body. I become paralysed by its echo of a wondrous child, unknowingly digging her earth stained hands too deep and clasping on to the child inside me, pulling and tugging at her to come out and play. The sun has drowned, not set, in the language of my mother. The breeze these days is a troubadour, humming secrets of Zephyr and other Gods, calling my name in a mass of voices to step forward and walk into light. I do find the light, further out, as I look into the greenery opposite our front lawn, I watch as an aging woman and two young children tug at ropes tied around the necks of two wailing goats; one brown, the other white. The children jump and run about, tugging and teasing at the goats. I become transfixed by the young girl amongst the pair, her head is bald and ears illuminated in small gold hoop earrings, dressed in a white cotton dress and tugging playfully and fearlessly at the white goat as if it were her own. I begin to think of my young self, before departure, her twisted lips in a long ago picture, standing in a white dress, eyes unaware of the camera watching her. In a poem, I wrote "silent, June heavy/ the fright of living / vast, blue, convoluted / lines your bones / and calls it a constellation" in an attempt to dissect and give voice to the girl in the picture. In one conversation I explained to my biological mother the concept of the inner child and I remember how she scoffed then said there's no such thing, all that is your soul. 

In the poem UNGENESIS, Carlie Hoffman writes about the un-coming into being, the un-genesis of who I deduced to be herself "I was young, a myth, chewing the apple/ I slept in a hemisphere of coats pushing out of the flames" portrayed as figures standing in the middle of a murky history looking in and finding nothing. These figures would be past selves, erratic, yet warned into stillness for if they begin to find themselves, they begin to learn the truth. This poem is a reverse psychology into the human past searching for itself in the human present. 

It discovers itself in each line and holds itself accountable for any error in-between like in the lines "There are so many ways to be/ betrayed by a country" It is refreshing yet sullen and starkly honest and has allowed me to face my own un-coming into being and to search for what sacrifices were made in the decision of my immigration. 

We are taught from our history that the people before us traversed seas, pastures and sands to sustain and preserve their bloodlines. They enshrined themselves in new names after each rebirth that got passed down by a higher force and referred to this as a great migration. They waded through water, tracked Earth in the crack of their bare heels, inhaled gold dust and masked themselves in new names such as nomad, mountain walker, wind whisperer or child of the sun. They birthed and buried within their movement and continued to search for new ground where their new names would come into existence. In my body, there is a great migration, a long breathless dance waning back in time many names ago, arching an identity over the axis of my brain and returning many years after, for my movement was compulsive and to this day, still a question. 

I was three years old when I migrated. I had been profoundly introverted, a quiet one, so I imagine it was easy for them to take me away without a fuss. The end result of that was a neglected memory so all the information about who I was at that age and even before, I have to research at family gatherings, investigate subtly at funerals, questioning who these faces are that knew me and what they remembered about me. Nobody stopped to think about this when the currency was stronger somewhere else. Nobody stopped because I would get a better education and live a better life. The motive was plain and simple but the motive was not mine. They had tasted the heart of a luminous country and rubbed its vibrancy into their skin, then mine, after it was decided— hush-hush— that this was who we would all become. Our higher power had chosen for us a country presumably born free, translucent, bigger than the humble fishing village we called home. 

The witchery of movement is that even when you felt settled, it never ended. More young men and women with the same hunger arrived and we became a nobody-hood; a nameless people who bent our languages into new ones for a chance at luck. We lived in the same buildings, opened up new restaurants where we'd preserve our mother tongues, and new salons because when you leave home, you also leave yourself so we shed our longing parts away. I was carried everywhere in the arms and on the shoulders of a famished generation in their early twenties who were afraid of nothing and looked stoic faced through lenses as photographers captured them in all of their freshly migrated glory, posing oddly but posing nonetheless in parks, on escalators, in front of statues, in bodegas, feeding birds by the museums. In the pictures, we are still dressed in the clothes we left in and laugh to one another about how green and big everything is, letters already drafted on the back of them that read Me at the park, 2004 or some other formulation of words that would eventually be directed home as a form of consolation. We were at the center of a rampant and rage filled dance, a bloodless flag raised on a land bittersweet by it and leaving it all up to God. As I remember all this, the crows are flying home, the crows are flying home is present in my body, a song once innocent turns violent and unbearable. The crows flying home to those palm trees which are merely a placement for home; the murder of them hunting for belonging, even at the expense of others is what eventually became of us. 

I received my better education at the oldest primary school in the city; Laerskool Oost-Eind or Oost-Eind Primary School, said to be founded by Dutch-born and educated school-masters. Even though it was moved into a new building, it still felt contained by it's colonial history and the dust in it's passageways was burdened by it. We were under their noses like fresh dust and insistent on belonging in their passageways. We dressed in orange and green uniforms and were dubbed upside down carrots by rival schools. We accepted this name but never really understood what it meant to be in those colours. It was only made clear to me in discernment, that we were being reinforced and erased in exchange for our collective inherent knowledge.

I remember being hit on the back for talking in line when the principal was addressing us. I cried, and was told not to cry, and tomorrow I should come with my hair civilised. The teacher who had hit me had a taut face, silky, and controlled. She was black and had a habit of using our stories as sermons. They'd begin with how some of us had swam here, ran here, got adopted here, some of us had swallowed bullets and bought new surnames for a taste of freedom here. Some of us were actually missing from home. Some of us were dealing drugs, some of us were going extinct and being preserved here so please dear children, don't take your lives for granted she said as a finisher. The irony ate us all up and we were soaked in rage. 

Everyday afterschool, I saved enough money in my green socks that it grazed my heels till they darkened. I took walks with my Congolese friends, accompanied them home and sometimes even slept there where I ate warm rice porridge for dinner. I took walks with my Rwandan friends and learned how close we were to each other on the map. I took walks, long winding ones, to Pakistani owned stores, where the cashier there is automatically my friend, and would sell my father incense sticks and added some roasted peanuts to chew on for remembrance but not for free. Nothing was for free. At these corner stores, I watched as Zimbabwean boys played on a huge game box where they'd gamble on a winner and grew an innocent yet vigorous crush on them. I took walks and greeted my hoard of aging uncles; some under bridges, burning foil and others feasting on ugari, awaiting prayer time. The call from the mosque would usually be muffled by the heavy bustling winds that echoed the relentless hooting of taxis, and everyone's daily hunt. I greeted them in English, and they smiled wide, hands already unfolding a note, proudly, they'd reply in Swahili with a Mambo vipi and shyly, I would respond Poa before I ran home and giggled as I pocketed more money. 

My memory holds the money hostage first before anything else. I had a piggy bank that grew so fruitfully, and I never knew where all that money would go. All I knew was that it was important to save, far more important than I was aware of at that age. It was as if it was a natural instinct to save things much like my father would with the endless empty cologne bottles he hoarded. Now I know that I was expressing a lack, I wasn't used to money so saving it felt like a gateway to keeping it forever, as if a wild bird tamed and hidden. This lack followed me like a ghost in classrooms, at breaktime with friends, at the tuckshop and eventually in my writing. All that I couldn't speak out loud, ended up in diaries or in the lives of fictional characters. I felt uncertain of myself, I didn't understand the reason I did things or where they would lead me. Academically, I was constantly improving but never piercing all the way through, and I felt displaced as if my memories were not my own and I was fed new information; a new configuration set in my young psyche. 

People often say that we are the rulers of our own realities, we can choose our experiences and control our reactions to the images that play back to us but when you are an immigrant at three years old, you do not own yourself and you have no control of what happens to you. As I grew up and garnered more sentience, I began to compose a new reality where I could choose my own path. I wrote, I drew, I cut and paste, I mimicked, I sang and I danced so much I knew very early the meaning of agency and autonomy. This reality was my playground and my dancefloor. I danced within the rage fluently, tempered my tongue and left nothing open to ridicule or questioning or worse, suspicion. I ran with the tepid wind of the city's forefathers, enshrined myself in a new name and smiled wide and toothless in all the school pictures where my eyes were dead with erased memory and rotten from unrest. I was as good as a ghost and it had taken my face, my soul had grown dormant for there was no foundation for blooming. I was a refrigerator magnet; another thing for my father to hoard. 

I became neurotic in highschool. They called it a metastasis of some sort, undefined, growing at a violent speed. They could not give it a clear name, not yet, not until it was properly examined for certainty purposes. They gave it a few more weeks to a month. "Don't worry about the bloating, the cramps are normal, you don't need to cry, what are you crying about? Are you hungry? Have some of my sandwich. Hey, it'll be okay. You miss your mother?" This was when I started to write consciously. A teacher had told us to write a poem as homework and to try our best so I did as told, for my curiosity had no other place to go and I was sick; sick with something that had no name, at least not yet. I wrote a poem about a woman, a grieving woman searching for hope and strength. Ms. Fourie, breath freshly tainted with cigarettes and wrinkly eyes aglow, said it was beautiful and with that I wrote more and more and more so that they filled my journals. Poetry was a creature with a thousand hands, a mutant that held me captive. It was a siren that called upon all my names for an emergency seance so I could finally feel my memories. In my poetry, I could not see them or hold them but I could feel them in the courses of my palms; cold wet mud, warm rice and beans, the spillage of crushed henna and the brunt of my mother's leathered hand. I could feel the ghost possessing me, choosing me, and reminding me of where I had been taken. 

My mother carried me inside of her for ten months. I was late to my own birth. My father cried so much that he sought out spiritualists to intervene. It seemed to have worked, for I was finally born with a full head of hair and a bitter scorn. The bitterness was from being out of womb waters, and for being named after my dead grandmother; this meant I was prophesied and could never attempt to die no matter how hard living would become.

The day I parted from my birth mother, she had left me with new new clothes, and they were all sent back to her, without me. She rang my father a thousand times but I was already gone, and there was no need to look for me, no need to cry, only to continue. Her sister, my late aunt, now a night star next to the moon we gaze toward at the end of each malcontent day, tried to soothe her. "She will learn and grow somewhere better," she said but my mother would not budge. She kept my clothes, folded them in her cabinet as a guarantee that I would be back. She warned everyone not to touch them and waited for as long as she could before all hope turned into grief. She cried to her mother until she could not cry any longer and began her own journey in search of better. 

I think of their first story—the crows— a genesis at the hands of the Sultan of Zanzibar in the 1880s that my mother had told me. They were a gift from India she said simply as if it their magnitude was normal. Then came their second story as imports, mandatory scavengers for the cleansing of Zanzibar for it had closed down the last open slave markets left in the world and there were bodies, so many bodies. I think of the Rufiji River where I was born, flowing into the Indian Ocean where Zanzibar floats. I think of the little girl in the white cotton dress with her white goat; this imagery is a message from my ancestors that my soul was still breathing, still playing, tugging at them fearlessly and owning my name for writing as a migrant is an ungenesis. An un-coming into being, a shedding and renewing of identity and reality. A preservation of self and memory.