I was learning to live in the disquiet I felt in Moorland-Spingarn, in the mess of my mind. The gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon.

It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.

What do you think?” I ask him.

My cousin looks at me with a gentleness he shows to no one else. “Who are we to define what is impossible or not?”

“You’re just saying that,” I tell him.

He shakes his head. “I mean it. You know what’s been happening in your head. You’re the only person who knows. So ask yourself if it feels right, and somewhere, deep inside of you, there’s a compass that will tell you whether somewhere, deep inside of you, there’s a compass that will tell you whether you’re right or wrong.

He held a book in his hands, and my eyes fell on the title: Tell Freedom by Peter Abrahams. I was transfixed. The words seemed to speak of a world beyond the walls of the Alliance.

I was going to live out my life in a home that reminded me of the loss of home and a school that offered shelter but not the certainty of home. Both, ironically, were colonial constructs, but I feared that even they might clash at any moment and crush my dreams.

I looked in vain for writings that I could identify with fully. The choice, it seemed, was between the imperial narratives that disfigured my body and soul, and the liberal ones that restored my body but still disfigured my soul. I was not sure if I really did want to read all the books in the school library.