Relics
âIt is difficult to know with precision how things became as they have, to be able to say with some assurance that first it was this and then it led to that and the other, and now here we are. The moments slip through my fingers. Even as I recount them to myself, I can hear echoes of what I am suppressing, of something Iâve forgotten to remember, which then makes the telling so difficult when I donât wish it to be. But it is possible to say something, and I have an urge to give this account, to give an accounting of the minor dramas I have witnessed and played a part in, and whose endings and beginnings stretch away from me. I donât think itâs a noble urge. What I mean is, I donât know a great truth which I ache to impart, nor have I lived an exemplary experience which will illuminate our conditions and our times. Though I have lived, I have lived. It is so different here that it seems as if one life has ended and I am now living another one. So perhaps I should say of myself that once I lived another life elsewhere, but now it is over. Yet I know that the earlier one teems and pulses in rude good health behind me and before me. I have time on my hands. I am in the hands of time, so I might as well account for myself. Sooner or later we have to attend to that.
New maps were made, complete maps, so that every inch was accounted for, and everyone now knew who they were, or at least who they belonged to. Those maps, how they transformed everything. And so it came to pass that in time those scattered little towns by the sea along the African coast found themselves part of huge territories stretching for hundreds of miles into the interior, teeming with people they had thought beneath them, and who when the time came promptly returned the favour.
Perhaps admired is too uncomplicated a way of describing what I think we felt, for it was closer to conceding to their command over our material lives, conceding in the mind as well as in the concrete, succumbing to their blazing self-assurance. In their books I read unflattering accounts of my history, and because they were unflattering they seemed truer than the stories we told ourselves. I read about the diseases that tormented us, about the future that lay before us, about the world we lived in and our place in it. It was as if they had remade us, and in ways that we no longer had any recourse but to accept, so complete and well-fitting was the story they told about us. I donât suppose the story was told cynically, because I think they believed it too. It was how they understood us and how they understood themselves, and there was little in the overwhelming reality we lived in that allowed us to argue, not while the story had novelty and went unchallenged. The stories we knew about ourselves before they took charge of us seemed medieval and fanciful, sacred and secret myths that were liturgical metaphors and rites of adherence, a different category of knowledge which, despite our assertive observance, could not contest with theirs. So that is how it seems when I think back to the way I was as a child, with no recourse to irony or knowledge of the multitudinous world.
They even went to Bangkok, where Reza had lived for some months as a teenager, living with his fatherâs agent there in the days before their affair went bad. It was a calm beautiful port town then, with canals and riverside boulevards, not the teeming behemoth it became later. People from all over the world congregated there: Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Europeans. To Hussein it was an incredible journey, an unbelievable journey, and images of that time have stayed with him all his life. And even though he only told them to me as stories, theyâve stayed with me too ever since. To this day I imagine a walk heâd described across the courtyard of a temple on the royal island, I imagine the austere tranquillity he described, and the overwhelming authority of the temple dome. I have seen a photograph of the temple since coming here, but it revealed nothing of the beauty Hussein described.
I speak to maps. And sometimes they say something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable. And later when it became necessary, geography became biology in order to construct a hierarchy in which to place the people who lived in their inaccessibility and primitiveness in other places on the map.
Latif
âI looked it up in my Concise Oxford Dictionary as soon as I got in my office, and got very little for it: Negro, black + moor. You can do better than that. So I looked up black, and quailed: blackhearted, blackbrowed, blacklist, blackguard, blackmail, Black Maria, black market, black sheep. Entry after entry like that, so by the time I finished reading through them all I felt despicable and disheartened, smeared by the torrent of vituperation. Of course, I knew about the construction of black as other, as wicked, as beast, as some evil dark place in the innermost being of even the most skinless civilised European, but I had not expected to see so much black black black on a page like that. Stumbling on it so unprepared was a bigger shock than being called you gwinning blackamoor by a man who looked like a disgruntled, dated movie persona. It made me feel hated, suddenly weak with a kind of terror at such associations. This is the house I live in, I thought, a language which barks and scorns at me behind every third corner.
I abhor poems. I read them and teach them and abhor them. I even write some. I teach them to students (of course not my own buts of offal, for Godâs sake) and squeeze what I can out of them, make them laconic where they are verbose and posturing, wise and prophetic where they are clumsily speculative. They say nothing so elaborately, they reveal nothing, they lead to nothing. Worse than wall-paper or a notice outside the departmental secretaryâs office. Give me a lucid bit of prose any day.
Silences
âThough even after all the fading and furring, so many lines still remain, now seeming like even sparser fragments of the whole: a warm look in the eye when the face is lost, a smell that recalls a music whose melody is out of range, the memory of a room when the house or its location is forgotten, a field of pasture by the side of the road in the middle of a void. So time dismembers the images of our time. Or to put it in an archaeological way, it is as if the details of our lives have accumulated in layers, and now some layers have been displaced by the friction of other events, and bits of contingent pieces still remain, accidentally tumbled about.
Then we went to Bukoba, to stay with Jamal Husseinâs family. We took a lake ferry from Entebbe for the crossing, and I remember it rained all the way, forcing down the endless papyrus on the shores and turning the lake surface into dark quicksilver. Lightning sheeted across the low-hanging sky and the wind howled like a creature terrified. That was the only time I made the crossing, and it saddens me that all I saw was this gothic extravaganza, not to mention the rising panic of all the passengers as the ship staggered about in that downfall.
We spent the night in Mombasa with one of Sefuâs relatives and then took a bus to Malindi the following morning. Being back on the coast was like being at home, or more than that, like recognising that here I had a place in the scheme of things. So much of what I had learned in Kampala was crushing, glimpses of the extent of my ignorance, and the self-assured puniness we lived with. Back on the coast, I felt part of something generous and noble after all, a way of living that had a part for me and which I had been too hasty in seeing as futile raggedness.
On the moonless nights of those few days, the commanding officer was barely visible on his side of the veranda, just a slight thickening of the night where he sat, and a glowing eye of rage when he smoked.
Relics minutaea
âIt is difficult to know with precision how things became as they have, to be able to say with some assurance that first it was this and then it led to that and the other, and now here we are. The moments slip through my fingers. Even as I recount them to myself, I can hear echoes of what I am suppressing, of something Iâve forgotten to remember, which then makes the telling so difficult when I donât wish it to be. But it is possible to say something, and I have an urge to give this account, to give an accounting of the minor dramas I have witnessed and played a part in, and whose endings and beginnings stretch away from me. I donât think itâs a noble urge. What I mean is, I donât know a great truth which I ache to impart, nor have I lived an exemplary experience which will illuminate our conditions and our times. Though I have lived, I have lived. It is so different here that it seems as if one life has ended and I am now living another one. So perhaps I should say of myself that once I lived another life elsewhere, but now it is over. Yet I know that the earlier one teems and pulses in rude good health behind me and before me. I have time on my hands. I am in the hands of time, so I might as well account for myself. Sooner or later we have to attend to that.
New maps were made, complete maps, so that every inch was accounted for, and everyone now knew who they were, or at least who they belonged to. Those maps, how they transformed everything. And so it came to pass that in time those scattered little towns by the sea along the African coast found themselves part of huge territories stretching for hundreds of miles into the interior, teeming with people they had thought beneath them, and who when the time came promptly returned the favour.
Perhaps admired is too uncomplicated a way of describing what I think we felt, for it was closer to conceding to their command over our material lives, conceding in the mind as well as in the concrete, succumbing to their blazing self-assurance. In their books I read unflattering accounts of my history, and because they were unflattering they seemed truer than the stories we told ourselves. I read about the diseases that tormented us, about the future that lay before us, about the world we lived in and our place in it. It was as if they had remade us, and in ways that we no longer had any recourse but to accept, so complete and well-fitting was the story they told about us. I donât suppose the story was told cynically, because I think they believed it too. It was how they understood us and how they understood themselves, and there was little in the overwhelming reality we lived in that allowed us to argue, not while the story had novelty and went unchallenged. The stories we knew about ourselves before they took charge of us seemed medieval and fanciful, sacred and secret myths that were liturgical metaphors and rites of adherence, a different category of knowledge which, despite our assertive observance, could not contest with theirs. So that is how it seems when I think back to the way I was as a child, with no recourse to irony or knowledge of the multitudinous world.
They even went to Bangkok, where Reza had lived for some months as a teenager, living with his fatherâs agent there in the days before their affair went bad. It was a calm beautiful port town then, with canals and riverside boulevards, not the teeming behemoth it became later. People from all over the world congregated there: Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Europeans. To Hussein it was an incredible journey, an unbelievable journey, and images of that time have stayed with him all his life. And even though he only told them to me as stories, theyâve stayed with me too ever since. To this day I imagine a walk heâd described across the courtyard of a temple on the royal island, I imagine the austere tranquillity he described, and the overwhelming authority of the temple dome. I have seen a photograph of the temple since coming here, but it revealed nothing of the beauty Hussein described.
I speak to maps. And sometimes they say something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable. And later when it became necessary, geography became biology in order to construct a hierarchy in which to place the people who lived in their inaccessibility and primitiveness in other places on the map.
Latif
âI looked it up in my Concise Oxford Dictionary as soon as I got in my office, and got very little for it: Negro, black + moor. You can do better than that. So I looked up black, and quailed: blackhearted, blackbrowed, blacklist, blackguard, blackmail, Black Maria, black market, black sheep. Entry after entry like that, so by the time I finished reading through them all I felt despicable and disheartened, smeared by the torrent of vituperation. Of course, I knew about the construction of black as other, as wicked, as beast, as some evil dark place in the innermost being of even the most skinless civilised European, but I had not expected to see so much black black black on a page like that. Stumbling on it so unprepared was a bigger shock than being called you gwinning blackamoor by a man who looked like a disgruntled, dated movie persona. It made me feel hated, suddenly weak with a kind of terror at such associations. This is the house I live in, I thought, a language which barks and scorns at me behind every third corner.
I abhor poems. I read them and teach them and abhor them. I even write some. I teach them to students (of course not my own buts of offal, for Godâs sake) and squeeze what I can out of them, make them laconic where they are verbose and posturing, wise and prophetic where they are clumsily speculative. They say nothing so elaborately, they reveal nothing, they lead to nothing. Worse than wall-paper or a notice outside the departmental secretaryâs office. Give me a lucid bit of prose any day.
Silences
âThough even after all the fading and furring, so many lines still remain, now seeming like even sparser fragments of the whole: a warm look in the eye when the face is lost, a smell that recalls a music whose melody is out of range, the memory of a room when the house or its location is forgotten, a field of pasture by the side of the road in the middle of a void. So time dismembers the images of our time. Or to put it in an archaeological way, it is as if the details of our lives have accumulated in layers, and now some layers have been displaced by the friction of other events, and bits of contingent pieces still remain, accidentally tumbled about.
Then we went to Bukoba, to stay with Jamal Husseinâs family. We took a lake ferry from Entebbe for the crossing, and I remember it rained all the way, forcing down the endless papyrus on the shores and turning the lake surface into dark quicksilver. Lightning sheeted across the low-hanging sky and the wind howled like a creature terrified. That was the only time I made the crossing, and it saddens me that all I saw was this gothic extravaganza, not to mention the rising panic of all the passengers as the ship staggered about in that downfall.
We spent the night in Mombasa with one of Sefuâs relatives and then took a bus to Malindi the following morning. Being back on the coast was like being at home, or more than that, like recognising that here I had a place in the scheme of things. So much of what I had learned in Kampala was crushing, glimpses of the extent of my ignorance, and the self-assured puniness we lived with. Back on the coast, I felt part of something generous and noble after all, a way of living that had a part for me and which I had been too hasty in seeing as futile raggedness.
On the moonless nights of those few days, the commanding officer was barely visible on his side of the veranda, just a slight thickening of the night where he sat, and a glowing eye of rage when he smoked.