The story goes that his mother, only a few months off a cramped flight from Tangier, met his father at her uncle’s café near Parc de Belleville in the twentieth arrondissement. An anti-xenophobia rally had been organized in the dimly lit tea shop. He was slightly older, a thin baby-faced activist with reluctant patches of wiry reddish hair on his face. It was a poor excuse for facial hair, but she found it adorable. She looked at him for a long time and found him beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that later during the same week, when they were alone in the small flat he shared with two other men, she slipped off her emerald-green hijab, unpinned her thick henna-reddened curls, and let them tumble softly down her round shoulders, so that he could see that she was beautiful, too.
Because her family was devoutly Muslim, they asked her not to see him. Because she was strong-willed and in love—or merely intoxicated by the idea that someone she wanted also wanted her—she saw him anyway. After many secret evenings full of ripe fruit, music, and cheap wine, she became pregnant. I can only imagine the fear that must have gripped her gut when she found out, how difficult it must have been to come clean to her family. She was only nineteen years old. They never married, and apparently, Farouq’s father outgrew his activism and settled back into his life as an upper-middle-class white boy.
Farouq traces his interest in racialization and critical race studies to his fifteenth birthday—the year he moved in with his father, who ceaselessly tried to hammer whiteness into him. He couldn’t be Farouq and Étienne—the name his father had chosen for him. He had to be one or the other. Maghrebian or French—that is, white. His obsession is the force behind his doctoral research. Three months ago it took him back to Paris, where he spent weeks holed up in the special collections reading room of the Sorbonne Library, wielding his keen intellect in an attempt to sort out the angst that his family stirs up in him. He Skyped me at four a.m. once, drunkenly ranting about growing up Moroccan in Paris without ever having been to Morocco: the absurdity of the prejudice he endured, the fucked-up way that white supremacy slyly slips a chip on your shoulder, only to turn around and innocently question its position there. A few times, he moved into French and spoke too quickly for me to follow, pausing and smiling sweetly at my interjection of “English, please.” This, his obsession, brought him here with me, as part of an agreement we half-jokingly made between glasses of wine on his thirty-sixth birthday: he comes to Lagos with me now, and I’ll go to Tangier with him in a few weeks.
I watch Farouq’s chest rise and fall in tune with his audible breath, his snores in ragged inhales and silent exhales. Let me tell you a secret: sometimes I scheme, I keep myself scarce from Farouq, but only to stoke his longing. No other reason, I swear. My mother, in dramatically different ways, kept herself scarce from my father, and I have never seen any human being adore another as thoroughly as my father did my mother. I want that so bad, you don’t know.
AFTER A QUICK BATH I DRESS AS QUIETLY AS I CAN, walking on the tips of my toes so that I don’t disturb Farouq, who has twisted his body into a shape that will undoubtedly leave him hurting when he wakes. I am incredibly tired, but I want to stay awake until nighttime and counter any jet lag. I put on a baggy white T-shirt over shorts and walk past Taiye’s room on my way downstairs. I look inside to see two open suitcases with clothes spilling out of them onto the white tiled floor. There is a crumpled orange towel on the red and blue paisley rug at the foot of her bed. She is still so messy. She’s been home for months and doesn’t seem to have fully unpacked.
A delicious aroma floats up the stairs and pierces the air around me. Downstairs, besides the sizzle and sigh of wet food on heat, the only sound in the kitchen is a melody that our mother is humming. I don’t recognize it.
Taiye is at the stove pouring cooked white rice out of a bright green plastic colander into a large stainless-steel pot of bubbling stew.
She looks at me with a smile. “How far?”
“I dey, I bathed, and Farouq is asleep.”
Sitting on the counter by the window, our mother looks me up and down, her smile sweet. “My darling, how are you?” she asks. Before I can answer, she adds, “Your sister is preparing a feast—there’s even cake!”
“Nice! What kind?”
“Chocolate,” our mother says.
“And salted caramel,” Taiye adds.
“Fancy,” I say.
“Is Farouq allergic to anything, or like, is there stuff that he won’t eat?” Taiye asks, a wooden spoon stained dark red in her right hand, her head cocked to the left.
“At all,” I scoff. “He eats everything.”
Taiye nods.
“I want to help. What can I do?” I ask.
“Uhhh.” Taiye absentmindedly rubs her thumb over the finger-length scar that runs from the indent of her right dimple to the faint cleft of her chin. “Yeah, you can fry some plantains.” She gestures toward a red plastic basket sitting on top of the fridge.
“Sounds good.” I reach up to collect the basket, inside of which are half a dozen large plantains that have ripened to near complete blackness.
“Actually,” Taiye says, her eyebrows shooting up in excitement, “we can make mosa!”
“Mosa!”
Kambirinachi
QUEEN’S COLLEGE IS AN ALL-GIRLS SECONDARY SCHOOL IN YABA, Lagos Mainland. Kambirinachi hadn’t visited Lagos in her present incarnation, but she remembered it vividly. She had seen it many times. One time before before, she borrowed the body of a taut and agile dancer at Fela’s Shrine in Ikeja. She longed to feel the thing that made bodies move so exquisitely, with such blissful urgency. Feet stomping, hips swinging, waist and ankle beads jiggling and clashing against each other, transforming the dancers into human shekere, percussion in time with the musicians’ cries, chest and body undulating in rhythm to Fela’s instruments. It had been quite the time.
Now, she was in Lagos again but confined to the school compound (confined to a breathing body that required sustenance and upkeep in fastidious ways that she had not anticipated, particularly now that neither of her parents were present to scold her).
Kambirinachi had cried until she fell asleep as her mother drove her along the dilapidated Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. She’d woken up to the creaky grumble of the pickup’s engine and the sound of her mother chewing roasted groundnuts from a cone of newspaper nestled in the folds of fabric on her lap.
“Kambi,” her mother had said. “You’ve woken? We’ve almost reached.” Ikenna handed the half-full cone of nuts to Kambirinachi. “Take.”
“Thank you, Ma,” Kambirinachi said.
She repeated it when her mother dropped her off at her aunt’s two-bedroom flat in the dusty staff quarters of the school campus. Ikenna gave her a small wad of faded green twenty-naira notes.
“Keep it well o,” she said, voice stern, eyes soft. “Don’t let anybody steal it or push you up and down, okay?”
“Yes, Ma,” Kambirinachi said, but Ikenna was worried. Kambirinachi was so small for her age. Chineke! she thought. So small and so strange. These other girls will eat her alive!
She turned to her sister, Anuli, who leaned against the pickup with a pitying smile curving her plump black-lined lips. Ikenna’s expression asked if she was doing the right thing.
Anuli nodded slowly. “Nwanne mu nwanyi enyela onwe gi nsogbu. She’s with me. Don’t worry, eh?”
Kambirinachi looked unblinking at her mother’s face, until tears spilled out of her eyes. She tried her very best not to think about the next time she would see her, lest the voices of her Kin return to drown her.
She asked, “You will come in two weeks?”
“Yes, Kambi, me and Papa will come in two weeks.”
THAT WAS A