The Seers

from The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia

My mother gave birth to me in Keren, but I rebirthed myself in London that spring night as I topped Bina-­Balozi on a bench in Fitzroy Square. It was as if a lantern was attached to the tip of my strap-­on so that as I entered him, I saw my reflection in a world inside him that was familiar and unfamiliar, beautiful and disturbing, disruptive and reaffirming. Hannah, Bina-­Balozi screamed my name. I have never felt more present, surrendering as I did to my sexual power, inflating the force of my desire to breathe inside him with new ways of seeing and being seen. The O on Bina-­Balozi’s backside opened like a rosebud in the middle of the night. O Bina-­Balozi, the fragrance of my garden. O. B. B. That night, as I tightened my grip around Bina-­Balozi’s waist, I whispered my story into his ears, into the London sky, a story uncensored and more truthful than my asylum application, which was gathering dust on the Home Office’s shelves. And it went like this: my mother was born in Keren at sunrise on 27 March 1941, when British troops defeated the Italians who had ruled over our country for half a century. The birth took place in a house at the foot of the mountains of Keren, which had witnessed three months of battle, three months of Europeans fighting over our land, three months during which my then pregnant grandmother had bound her stomach with flower-­ and butterfly-­print fabric as the violence of artillery fire raged nearby. To no avail. My mother came into this world and lived through it with a volcanic potency. When the child was born, the family helper searched for my grandfather, but he was out on the street celebrating another kind of birth. He waved flowers and sang his gratitude to the British soldiers who had liberated his country from fascism. A British officer turned to him and everyone around him and said: I didn’t do it for you, nigger. I Didn’t Do It For You. Nigger. My grandfather cried, not at his daughter’s birth but at the end of one humiliation and the beginning of another. He and his country were passed from the hands of fascists into another form of European oppression. This anecdote stayed with me. It seeded my bitterness towards the British in my childhood. The Brits drew my grandfather’s attention away from my mother’s birth, centring themselves in his mind instead. My mother was orphaned by a man who devoted his time to everything English, from books to food, studying their way of life, as if the way to mend his shattered pride was to mirror them in style and behaviour. He used to own flat caps, but with the arrival of the British, the fedora became his favourite headgear. He bought grey suits, wearing the English weather around sunny Keren. His shirts came with cufflinks, and his waistcoats had two pockets which he filled with silk rose petals after he learnt that the rose was England’s national flower—­­and I crooned when I unearthed the rose on Bina-­Balozi’s back. O Bina-­Balozi. My grandfather spoke English to my mother so that it became one of her many languages. My grandmother was so enraged by my grandfather’s absence from her side during labour that she gave her daughter an Italian name: Mary Malinconia. I often think about the fighting both in the mountains and at home between my grandparents, and whether the violence my mother experienced as a foetus in her mother’s womb played a role in the violence she inflicted on my father, a violence that would trickle down to me and lose its teeth inside Bina-­Balozi. O Bina-­B, give me more of the peace inside you. This sense of a family suf­fering from humiliation became like a hereditary disease that had been passed down to me. When I was two, my mother was killed by the Ethiopian army, who had taken over from the Brits and colo­nised our country ever since. I have no memory of her. All I have told you so far was passed down to me. Like second-­hand clothes, some of us march through this life with stories full of holes and gaps. But, as the Eritrean proverb taught to me by my father goes:ኵሉ ይሓልፍ ፍቕሪ ትቕጽል—­­kullu yihalif, fiqri yiterif—­­everything passes, love remains. O Bina-­B. It was at Diana’s in those early days of my life in London, when I wasn’t allowed to go to school to learn English and my application for asylum was still under considera­tion, that I connected with the language of my interior. In that room at Diana’s house in Kilburn, I too was shelved as I imagined my file at the Home Office to be: vertical, stacked among stories from around the world, from places this country had once occupied. I imagined our files leaning to one side, about to collapse, a waterfall of words pouring onto the floors of the Home Office, the building flooding with words. In that room at Diana’s, my journey of discovery to my inner world launched my increasing flirtation with the deepest desires of my body and mind. In London, and in those early weeks, I owned nothing except time, so much that I believed the Home Office was giving me time in bucketloads to drown me in it. And on that bench in Fitzroy Square, as I pushed into Bina-­B’s recesses, through the rules, roles, norms, fears, doubts, I found his native language. O. B. B. Bina-­Balozi turned around and threw his arms around my neck. His eyes became my mirror—­seeing your reflection in the eyes of a wild lover roaming the fields of your imagination is the most sensual act. O. B. B. BB’s cries of pleasure alerted a woman walking her dog. What are you doing? the woman shouted. I yelled back: What’s your problem? Don’t you have sex at home? That wasn’t dogging. The streets of London were my home—­they were where I slept, ate, washed, cried, defecated, had sex, and where I recorded the events from the point of view of my eyes…