If I were standing on the map of my life time today, I would be standing smack dab on the equator where exactly half my life was lived in one country, and the other half was lived in another.
I arrived in this country precisely half my life ago on this day. I’m still here and I’m still there in equal measure. I’ve never left there, and I’ve arrived here. I’ll tell you what I’ve come to know for sure through 4 seasons.
Winter:
First experiences do shape you. Mine was the cold. January 28th of that year had icy rain coming down. It made an icicle out of me that took years to thaw out.
I quite my first job in the winter, a gig I so loved because I worked for a bookstore at the airport and I talked to countless strangers who came in asking me.. ME! for recommendations on what to read on their flight. Books were my oxygen, my hiding place.
I quit because the chill of winter commute to La Guardia would sit on my lower back and pinch away bits of my life all day long.
5 years later, I began to see the gift of winter. It came with no obligation to like the season, just appreciate it. I learnt to hibernate with intention. Winter is for recharging.
All the quiet labor should be done at this time– the mending and ending of things, the long conversations, the writing of letters whose responses you wake up in the midnight to read again, the facing of fears, the preparation for long journeys, the shifts, big decisions… this is mind labor for winter.
Winters are for sitting still. As we say back home- tulia tuli. Surrender the anxiety, the impatience, the regrets… and just do what groundhogs do. Life’s most wonderful starts and second chances unfold because a winter break allows us to notice them.
Spring:
We are not what we look like on the outside. One day, after directing a small winter production in NY, a very warm Spring day came along and one of my cast members said to me- What! You really are skinny! See, all through winter, I used to wear thick layers of clothing which made me pass for 4 sizes larger than what I really was.
Here I was without all those layers, and my true identity as a skinny person was pointed out. I felt exposed. I mumbled an apology that I’m working on eating a lot more. My friend registered a most puzzled look. Turns out in this country I had won the lottery.
I quickly learnt that here, you get to be put in little boxes that somehow measure out your human worth, boxes of sizes and genders and race… race here is mostly about skin color. The race thing is really serious around here. Whew, chil’ buckle up!
You have to check a little box all the time and be careful about coloring your life outside your assigned box. It did shock me, hearing conversations in salacious tones about so-and-so dating a white person and how dare she. And my African mind did a flip on claims of an “advanced civilization” that thought human value could be measured in dollops of race. That’s before I awakened to the burden that has been attached to these identities. Your little box comes packed with danger like a deadly disease in a petri dish.
It’s like getting Identitypox. Soon as I was exposed as a skinny person on that warm Spring day, I caught it. It turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to my brain because it led me to developing a Identity and Belonging theory in academia that has taken me to some truly exciting places of power and quiet influence. Spring is for exposure, and for making lemonade out of identitypox lemons.
Summer:
Mombasaaa! It felt like Mombasa in the NY and Washington DC and Baltimore and Louisiana summers. Summer takes you home. Summer is beautiful and freeing and filled with foolish accidents from too much excitement.
The thing is though, it doesn’t stop. The temperatures just keep going up until your brain becomes porridge and a sloth could win a race against you.
I had told a false story many times– that I would be out of this country in two years tops. I had it all planned out, and I would look up the night sky in the summer whenever I saw the blinking light of a plane. I would say– there go I, back home where I belong. I would catch my anticipation in a gasp, because I had arrived, and I had never left.
Except that summer’s heat would not let me move forward so I could catch that plane. There it was, my Masters theses, unwritten, couldn’t think straight, my mind dripping sweat on thoughts I had worked very hard to think. Two years turned to half my life. In between, I have taken that flight many times back home, and right back here, now a child of unbelonging.
Summer is a dangerous lover. Know when to move on, when not to dwell, how to pace yourself. No need to push things unnecessarily. Had I know this about summer, I would have spent no more than one month doing all the writing. I would have happily spent the sluggish days of summer being a porridge-head doing meaningless things.
That’s why Mombasa is called Mombasa Raha. Moments of meaningless frolicking is good for life on earth. Summer is for making feebleminded memories so you can laugh really hard when you remember. It’s just saving grace that Fall comes and saves you from a rudderless relationship with summer.
Fall:
I do not recall the moment I woke up to the realization that this is absolutely my favorite time of the year. The slowing down of summer’s intoxication comes with the cooling off of the air you breathe. You feel as if you are inhaling a steady stream of sanity.. literally. Not literally, but it feels that way.
There are things I want to say about Fall that I think would probably need the strings of a guitar, a distant drum, the soft lull of kayamba beads coming to rest. I will see what my words can do.
Fall brings you home. It begins to give you belonging. I’m here. I belong. I’m there, I’ve always belonged, and no one can ever taken that away from you because you have planted and nurtured life and harvested its very breath from the tongues of humans who come along and hold your hand.
In the metaphorical Fall, your mind feels clear, calm, ready to begin going home to a nice cup of tea. You feel… mature!
Fall finds you ready to handle the things you were not ready to handle, things you had shut away on account of not having the emotional muscle to accommodate them, things like loving another human being and finishing that script.
I do not recall if most of my mature choices were made in the literal Fall, but I just have the most calming memories of the coming of Fall. I even told my mother about this season that smells like embrace and acceptance.
I told her about the splash of color across the land and soon, the falling of the leaves and the bright yellow carpet that stretches before your feet during the evening walks in a land not so foreign any more.
My mother listened and said- I know that season. It’s called bambara. Something restful washed over me during that conversation. She said- Bambara used to exist in years past and you could see the leaves turn orange and yellow and the wind would shake them off the trees and form the carpet. Bambara- I repeated that word.
Fall is for storing memory in the warm soil where the leaves cover them with the color of love. Love grows from the rot of the leaves in the Fall, from their rest in the winter, from their return in the spring, from their abundance in the summer.
I’m still here. I’m always there.
