Clearly, Emmanuel achieved this dissociation and disembodiment. But where Bagisu initiates gained metaphysical power from mastering their emotions, Emmanuel gained nothing. His personal fortitude was not recognized by others, and therefore gave him no social advantage. Proving himself capable of withstanding hardship entailed no redeeming transfiguration, no new social status, no right to assert himself. He remained like a child, unable to act and without a voice. He could do nothing except bow to the will of others, following their orders, doing what he was told, enduring their punishments. Reduced to the status of an object, he gradually became desensitized to life as if he was, indeed, a mere thing—without will, without consciousness, without feeling. In a sense, he was already a migrant, adrift and disoriented in a foreign environment, ignorant of the local language, lacking a place he could call his own.
Dismayed that there seemed to have been no one he could turn to, no place of refuge, I asked Emmanuel if any of his mother’s brothers showed concern for his plight.15 “No. In fact, they were avoiding us. And that’s another problem I have with my uncles, by the way. I don’t like my uncles because of that. By that time, my mum had got a job as a cleaner in the municipal offices in Mbale. She was living in town, and I was left behind in the village with my younger sisters. There was no one to protect me from my uncles and aunties. I was living with them, but they never liked us, no, no, no.”
“So you were staying in your grandmother’s house?”
“Yes.”
“And your grandmother was the person taking care of you?”
“Yes.”
“And your mother was how far away?”
“Uh, let me see. Thirteen miles.”
“How often did you get to see her?”
“At first, she went early in the morning and came back in the evening. But it was expensive, transportwise, so she rented a room in the city center. We used to see her over the weekend, when she came back. But she was away most of the time. The problem for me was that I was stuck in my grandmother’s house, and her sons and daughters were coming there regularly. You couldn’t avoid them, even if you wanted to. They would come and eat supper with us. It was a kind of millet porridge, halfway between porridge and bread. My grandmother would break a big piece off behind her hand and hide it in a cloth. She would give my sister and me that piece later, because she knew we had not got enough to eat, because my uncles and those relatives would just grab food very fast, and we were very slow and young. So she used to give us that food afterward when we were alone, when we were sitting somewhere. We didn’t have electricity in the village, and the only source of light was a candle that was actually powered by kerosene, and kerosene is very expensive, so she used to blow it out and say, ‘Eat, eat this fast before they come, eat.’ So that’s how we used to survive. And then there were days, of course, when we used to sit at home and she would prepare lunch. The problem is that when she prepared food, we had to eat it alone, because as soon as my uncles and the others came, that was it, you weren’t going to have food. These big people wanted to eat, and they didn’t care much about the rest of us. My mum was not told about any of this. And we did not dare tell her because the problem was, if we told her she would ask my grandmother, and if she asked my grandmother, my grandmother would ask the brothers and the sisters, and we would end up having even more problems.”
Emmanuel tended to move between past and present tense, as if the events he recalled from twenty-five years ago had the force of something that had occurred only yesterday. There was a similar slippage between “I” and “we,” as if he was mindful, as he spoke of his own tribulations, that they were shared by his younger brother Peter—when he returned home on visits—and his younger sisters, Mariam and Barbara.
“Yet they punished us, and when I talk about punishment it was not just a matter of refusing to give us food, no, these relatives would go drinking, come back drunk, and then unloose their sorrows on us. They’d just call us, saying, ‘Line up and lie down.’ Being beaten was not a problem for me, but my sister Mariam and my brother Peter, that was too much for me, so—I don’t want to use the word, but I hated them from that point. These are kids, you know, I was ten years old, eleven. I could take it, but the two kids could not.”
“What kind of abuse was it?”
“Actually, the name they called us was a name they called the cattle keepers. They called them ‘bararo.’ It was a term of abuse, like the word ‘nigger.’ The way I understand the word ‘bararo’ is the same way I understand the word ‘nigger.’ Originally, it was negro, meaning black, and not really a term of abuse at all. It was like calling someone ‘Asian.’ The same with ‘mulalo.’ It defined a people who came from a particular place, people who herded cattle for survival, but then ‘mulalo’ became a term of abuse.”
“You say you were beaten as well as abused verbally.”
“I got used to the word ‘mulalo.’ I didn’t really understand what it meant anyway. But being told to lie down on the ground was actually preparing you to be caned. When they come back in the evening they are drunk, or if it’s the weekend they start drinking in the morning and come back in the middle of the day. They call you from the house, where you are probably in the shade because it is very hot. We’re talking about a heat of about thirty to thirty-two degrees Celsius, but they tell you to lie down. So you lie down. There was the grave of my great-grandfather in the middle of the courtyard, and so they tell you to put your feet up on the grave and then you lie down in that slanting kind of position, me first, then my young sister and my young brother. And these guys are celebrating beating us, caning us. Whether they gave excuses I don’t remember. I just remember the beatings and how I could just control the pain. What was really painful for me was watching my younger siblings get punished for no reason. It still pains me to remember. Even today, I would rather somebody beat me than beat the next guy. I always knew that I could take more beatings than the guy next to me, and until now I still have the same feeling. Even with Nanna, whenever she is sick, I say, ‘I would prefer being sick because I can take it.’ Of course I can’t really take the sickness away from her, but that’s the feeling I have. That’s how I developed it and how I became protective of other people, especially Barbara, my youngest sister. She was never caned. Yet she ended up being the loser because we could not care for her properly. She wasn’t getting fed regularly or being bathed, because they were either caning us or sending us on funny errands or taking us to the gardens or something like that.”
“In one of your letters to me last year, you described how demoralized you had become in Denmark. Did you feel as demoralized as a child, suffering these beatings and unable to help your more vulnerable younger siblings?”
“There was one time I felt like that. This is a bit tricky. It was the lowest point. My auntie—”
“Your mother’s sister?”
“Yes, her blood sister. What she did probably prepared me for everything that I could stand. I woke up one morning when my grandmother wasn’t there. I didn’t know she had gone, but she wasn’t there. My auntie had been doing bad things to us for some time, but this morning she wakes up and tells me to undress and tells my young sister Mariam to undress as well, and then she calls her brother—she had a young brother called William—called him to come. And we are all in the same room, and then she is telling me basically to lie together with my sister and telling her young brother to lie with her in the same room. When we resisted, she throws me and my sister out of the room. We’re basically naked, and I didn’t care about that as much, but then she, she, she goes—how do you call that, how do I put that politely? She goes to the toilet, she excretes in the room, in the house itself. In the village wedon’t have toilets in the house, we’re supposed to walk and go to a latrine, but she really does it in the room, and then she calls me and my sister to clean it up.”
“When you say that she made you and Mariam lie down together, you mean—”
“Yeah, she wanted us to have intercourse.”
“Seriously!”
“Yeah,