enough to talk about such things with bitterness, and when the undergraduate Hanna had acquired enough language to analyse what she called her dysfunctional family. Long ago he had asked his father what the name Jamal meant, and he told him it meant the Beautiful One, and so that became the name Hanna used as his ironic nick name. She herself preferred to be called Anna, and that was the name she used outside the house.
‘They are lost,’ she said. ‘Ba deliberately lost himself a long time ago, and Ma found herself lost from the beginning, a foundling. What I want from them is a story that has a beginning that is tolerable and open, and not one that is tripped with hesitations and silences. Why is that so difficult? I want to be able to say this is what I am. Yes, I know, so has every human being who has ever given the matter any thought, but I don’t want to crack the mystery of the soul or the nature of being. I just want some simple boring details. Instead we get snippets of secret stories we cannot ask about and cannot speak about. I hate it. Sometimes it makes me feel that I am living a life of hiding and shame. That we all are.’
Jamal recognised the feeling she described. It came to him at unexpected moments when he too felt he had to dissemble and fudge. That feeling – that there was something to be ashamed of – had been with him most of his life, even when he did not know of its presence and had only slowly begun to understand its several causes. It added to the sense of difference and oddness that he had grown up with, a sense of strangeness. He had learned to recognise that feeling in many ways, and not just in response to hostility and unkindness and the teasing at school. He saw it in the stilted and careful smiles he received from some of the mothers of other children he knew, in the way people tried hard to prevent him from noticing that they had seen something to notice, in the ingenuous and sometimes insistent and cruel questions the children asked about his country and its customs. It was years before he learned to say this is my country, and it was Hanna who taught him to say that.
Even when they tried to, they could not forget his difference and nor could he, even though he pretended to. How could it be otherwise? After two or three centuries of unrelenting narratives about how unalike one another they were, how could it be otherwise? Sooner or later, the meaning of their difference would be there in a look or a word or the sight of someone walking across the road. The teacher might be talking about poverty in the world and would not be able to resist a quick glance in his direction. Poverty is to be found in places where people like him lived, and we, who have redeemed ourselves from this condition, must learn not to despise those who have not yet found the means to save themselves. We must do what we can to help them. That is what he took the teacher’s pained look to mean, Jamal (and Hanna and those others who look like them) is one of those poor wretches but we must not despise him or say cruel things to him.
Whenever someone old and dark-skinned came shuffling along the pavement in the way of old people, hair dishevelled perhaps or a grubby coat buttoned up askew, they chuckled, the children he grew up with, and glanced at him, embarrassed for him. He pretended that he did not feel any discomfort, pretended he was not any different from the chucklers.
‘There are times when I hate that they brought me here,’ Hanna said. ‘That they did not find another place to have me and to have you. Not because other places are free from cruelties and lies, but just to be saved from so much demeaning pretence. Not to have the chore of pretending to be no different from people who are full of shit about themselves. But I suppose they did not have any choice in the matter, really, only an appearance of choice. They could have chosen not to have me, but after that the matter was out of their
‘They are lost,’ she said. ‘Ba deliberately lost himself a long time ago, and Ma found herself lost from the beginning, a foundling. What I want from them is a story that has a beginning that is tolerable and open, and not one that is tripped with hesitations and silences. Why is that so difficult? I want to be able to say this is what I am. Yes, I know, so has every human being who has ever given the matter any thought, but I don’t want to crack the mystery of the soul or the nature of being. I just want some simple boring details. Instead we get snippets of secret stories we cannot ask about and cannot speak about. I hate it. Sometimes it makes me feel that I am living a life of hiding and shame. That we all are.’
Jamal recognised the feeling she described. It came to him at unexpected moments when he too felt he had to dissemble and fudge. That feeling – that there was something to be ashamed of – had been with him most of his life, even when he did not know of its presence and had only slowly begun to understand its several causes. It added to the sense of difference and oddness that he had grown up with, a sense of strangeness. He had learned to recognise that feeling in many ways, and not just in response to hostility and unkindness and the teasing at school. He saw it in the stilted and careful smiles he received from some of the mothers of other children he knew, in the way people tried hard to prevent him from noticing that they had seen something to notice, in the ingenuous and sometimes insistent and cruel questions the children asked about his country and its customs. It was years before he learned to say this is my country, and it was Hanna who taught him to say that.
Even when they tried to, they could not forget his difference and nor could he, even though he pretended to. How could it be otherwise? After two or three centuries of unrelenting narratives about how unalike one another they were, how could it be otherwise? Sooner or later, the meaning of their difference would be there in a look or a word or the sight of someone walking across the road. The teacher might be talking about poverty in the world and would not be able to resist a quick glance in his direction. Poverty is to be found in places where people like him lived, and we, who have redeemed ourselves from this condition, must learn not to despise those who have not yet found the means to save themselves. We must do what we can to help them. That is what he took the teacher’s pained look to mean, Jamal (and Hanna and those others who look like them) is one of those poor wretches but we must not despise him or say cruel things to him.
Whenever someone old and dark-skinned came shuffling along the pavement in the way of old people, hair dishevelled perhaps or a grubby coat buttoned up askew, they chuckled, the children he grew up with, and glanced at him, embarrassed for him. He pretended that he did not feel any discomfort, pretended he was not any different from the chucklers.
‘There are times when I hate that they brought me here,’ Hanna said. ‘That they did not find another place to have me and to have you. Not because other places are free from cruelties and lies, but just to be saved from so much demeaning pretence. Not to have the chore of pretending to be no different from people who are full of shit about themselves. But I suppose they did not have any choice in the matter, really, only an appearance of choice. They could have chosen not to have me, but after that the matter was out of their
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