The Wherewithal of Life. Michael Jackson

we didn’t talk about it, but then I had a talk with my sister when I was back in Uganda this January. It was the first time we ever talked openly together about what happened. I call her Mama Ali, because her firstborn is called Ali. I said to her, ‘Mama Ali, do you remember our auntie Namibia?’ She said, ‘Yeah, our witch auntie?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Do you remember what she did to us?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I do. I wanted to tell Dada Ali [her husband], but I haven’t.’ I said, ‘Okay, no problem, you tell him.’ You see, she was thinking of my position if she told him the whole story. I told her, ‘No, tell him what you think.’ Because there were times when my sister would get angry over some small thing, and my brotherin-law would call me and say, ‘Your sister is angry, and I don’t know why; I don’t know what has happened.’ So I told Mama Ali, ‘You’d better tell your husband about the way you feel sometimes and about what is affecting you.’ There were two things affecting her: that experience with our auntie was one, and the other was not knowing where our father came from, not knowing any of his family. So first we solved the issue of our experiences. We talked about everything—we had a very long day that day talking about everything, and I can tell you I’ve never seen my sister so happy. After that day, she was really a very excited woman. A weight had been lifted from her head. I think she had been carrying it—maybe she thought she had imagined it, maybe she was not really sure it had happened at all. So then, the next thing was to solve the issue of where our father came from. Luckily, we did that as well. We dealt with the two things that had been weighing so much on her. In my case, I dealt with these things by learning to hold them in and thinking of only one small bit at a time, never wanting them to affect me. My biggest fear was that those experiences would make me have a negative reaction or relationship to other people. But luckily, I think that by and large I turned that experience into something positive. But I never told anybody the story about my auntie and the issue of cleaning her and so on, and that picture has remained in me up until now. It is a very bad picture, and I didn’t want anybody else to experience it.”

      Once again, I was struck by the ethical emphasis that Emmanuel placed on relationships. He appeared to be less mindful of how the infringement of a moral law affected him—a trauma suffered or a shame endured—than on how it had damaged relations among the six individuals closest to him. In having recourse to silence and forgetting, Emmanuel might be accused of avoiding an issue that required a talking cure, a confession, an expiation. But, as a Ugandan, the ethical priority was not revisiting the past but looking toward the future. Moving on, as we say. Finding a way around an obstacle rather than confronting it head on.²¹

      And so, after reminding Emmanuel of how he dealt with bullying by becoming an entertainer, a comedian, I asked, “How did you deal with this other issue, concerning your aunt?”

      “By not thinking about it. By trying to forget it. I literally closed it down. I mean I never spoke of it before the day I talked about it with my sister. I could never bring it up in any situation, never. I totally killed it off. I continued to have a very good relationship with my sisters, my brothers, and so on, but I closed that memory totally and never told anyone about it. It was simple, really. I pretended it never happened. The bullying was a daily thing, a daily activity, so I had to find ways of dealing with that. There is only so much you can take. I could take any verbal abuse—anyone could start abusing me from morning to evening, from now to next year, and I wouldn’t care. But physical abuse—there is a limit to what I can take. Especially, I hate being punished for something I have not done. If you saw me being punished for something I didn’t do, you would soon see how those old memories come back, how everything will come up again, and I will be remembering how they punished me when I was a child even though I had done nothing to deserve it. You would see me change. I would be very different.”

      “I think I’m beginning to understand your experience in Denmark, because, in a sense, when you were telling me yesterday about your experiences here, it was as if you were being punished every day for something you hadn’t done.”

      “Precisely, yeah.”

      

      “You had done everything right—you had done everything that was expected of you here in Denmark—yet you were still not finding work. You were still being punished, as it were. So this was the limit for you? This is what you could not take?”

      “Yes. After six, seven years, it was really pushing it, and the reason was that Nanna and I had chosen to have this relationship. I was part and parcel of it. I was there, half-half, so there was no way I could just back out of it. But even so, it reached the point where I said, no, I cannot live in a place where there is nothing I can do. There’s no way you can tell me that in the whole country there is literally nothing for me to do.”

      “You said that when you were a child, in Uganda, and the situation become unbearable, you could always move. You could always find some other household—”

      “Yes, or some other place.”

      “But here you were totally stuck.”

      “Yes, totally, between two places, here and Nanna’s parents’ place. And I tell you, Michael, I got tired of it. I never get tired of anything, but I tried everything I learned in my life, in all the books I read, to survive this situation—avoiding going to Nanna’s parents’ home for a period, maybe for three months at a time, giving excuses for why I wasn’t working or why I wasn’t visiting them. Or I would lie to my friends. Even to Nanna I would lie. Nanna, this weekend I’m going to see so and so. So and so has called me, so I’m going there.”

      “You were ashamed to be seen without work, without prospects?”

      “Yes. I was ashamed. What kind of person am I, who cannot find work, who cannot support his family? I would stay here, lock the door, and watch TV, or browse the Internet or sometimes read a book, though not much. I became very selective of what I would read, you know. I’d say, ‘What can I reread now.’ I’d say, ‘Ah, let me look at the atlas.’ So I would start studying geography again. But why? Because I did not want to sit and think, ‘Should I take a beer?’ Or, ‘Should I go and smoke?’ Or, ‘What should I do now? What can I do now?’ So this was basically me, here. To tell you the truth, for six years [Emmanuel chuckled], I was never stuck for something to do!”

      “Like you said earlier, it was like being in prison.”

      “Yes, and as I told Nanna, it is a wall-less prison.²² You’re in prison, there are no walls, but where to go? Traveling to Uganda, you need money. If I left Denmark for a certain period, I would not be able to get back into the country. How do you call that? Status, your residential status is reviewed immediately, so coming back becomes very hard. The excuse that you are coming to see your family might not work again. And going to Uganda without money is worse than being in Denmark without a job. Because how are you going to start again? Even those who might be sympathizing with you say, ‘You left us here and went to Denmark—what happened?’ Even if they are not laughing at you, you definitely know that everybody is going to be cynical. ‘Welcome back, Emma, how are you doing? How did you do in Denmark?’ I mean, such questions kill you because in your small world you say, ‘Why did I even come back?’ Going to stay with my mum would be very difficult, too, so I was driven to stay on here. And not only that, I was thinking of the money I had spent on my education in Denmark, so much money. Two years of education in Denmark is a horrendous amount of money—it’s too much—and then you sit at home and they start telling you what to do. You are literally told everything. Come here, do this, send this application, go here, go there. When I tried to be proactive, like going to the municipal office here that finds people to fill vacancies in Danish companies, I would say, ‘Ma’am, can you help me? Do you have companies that need anybody, from a cleaner to anything?’ She says, ‘No, sir.’ They send me away, this office that is supposed to help me. Michael, I didn’t need to go walking around looking for jobs. That office could tell me, ‘Here’s a company that wants this and this. The official language is English. You speak both Danish and English. You might apply there.’ But no, I am told there is nothing, over and over again.”

      “How did you explain this to yourself?”

      “Simple,