1993: A centipede crawls up a white wall. My body presses against the door, in fear. Water laps at my feet. This is the only memory I have of Nairobi.
2016: My phone rings too early in the morning. My mother on the other end; she’s been crying. “I just wanted to know that you’re safe.” She almost said ‘alive.’
2000: I almost drown.
1995: My father holds my hand too tight as we cross the road to get to the children’s hospital. “Immunisation,” he says, slowly. I try to repeat after him but I stumble over the syllables. While we are waiting in line, someone drops a box—a loud bang rings across the atrium—a woman screams.
1997: Ms. Ryan announces that we’re going to do a project called ‘Family Histories’. My classmates bring photos of their parents, their grandparents. One kid claims that his ancestor was a convict.
1997: The first time I see the ocean. I find a pufferfish washed up on the rocks, so much smaller than I imagined it to be. The sea is wide, so wide, and ships glide across the horizon in the distance. March flies bite at my ankles, the only part of me exposed. My father tries to light a cigarette but the wind won’t let him. He eventually gives up and watches over us, distant, still. My mother walks up to the water and stares at it deeply, practicing its motions, before slowly dipping one foot in. The outline of her body visible as her dirac was pulled against her by the wind. I’m older now than she was in that moment.
1998: My father turns the channel to the news. Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech to Parliament. My mother scoffs, “They’ll be after us next.”
1999: My brother and I find a dead baby pigeon on the ground and decide to bury it. My mother watches us as we fumble through some prayers and says, “You’re supposed to dig the grave deeper, otherwise it will be exposed again.”
1995: A man grabs my brother and pushes him up against a fence, turns to me and says, “You black dogs.” I drop my lunch box.
2015: I lock myself out of my house and scale the side wall to let myself back in. A neighbour yells out at me. I turn to him and am suddenly struck by the fact that he doesn’t recognise me. I tell him that I live here, that I’ve locked myself out. He has his phone out, like a weapon.
2012: My father calls me while I am in America. Almost by accident, we start talking about the civil war. “Your mother experienced much worse than I did,” he said. Later I think about how those words cast their shadow over so much of our lives.
2015: I’m on a date and I’m trying to think of something to say; we’re talking about how we construct identities. I try to change the subject by telling a funny story about something that happened to me and a friend of mine. She doesn’t laugh, but has a thoughtful look on her face. She asks me if I consider myself Australian. I think about it for a moment. I tell her that I’ve been told that I’m not Australian too many times in my life. It leaves a mark.
2017: I visit my friend in Truganina. After lunch, we go to pick up his car from the mechanic. A young Lebo guy from Hoppers greets us. “What nasho are ya, cuz?” he asks me. I tell him I’m Somali. He cracks a smile. “You’re a Somalian brother. Waryaa!”
2017: I’m at the beach with my friends. They all jump in the water together. I lag behind, building up my confidence. The sea is so wide, so unimaginably wide.
1999: My uncle tells us that there’s a Jinn which has been possessing members of our family for generations. My siblings and I lose sleep for days, until our father sits us down and tells us that there is no Jinn. The next night, the wind howls outside, and passing cars throw sinister shadows against the walls. My brother is convinced that we’ve angered the Jinn.
1999: My mother wakes us up at 3 a.m. Dresses us in coats and shoes and ushers us into the living room where, afraid and confused, we sit quietly while she paces. Later that morning, a muffled argument from my parent’s room. When we visit our uncle later that week, he nods knowingly. ‘It’s the Jinn,’ he says.
2005: The Sheikh tells us a story about how Allah saved the mosques in Aceh from the tsunami, how every other building was levelled. He tells us to open our hearts to our brothers and sisters in Aceh. That night I dream of being swallowed up by water, my family gone, the sea thick with bodies.
2006: I am at the video store with my friend Farah. I pick up a movie and show it to him. “How about this one?” Farah scrutinises the cover. “Does it have any black people in it?” he asks me. “I don’t know,” I reply. He looks at me like I should know better, and I suddenly feel like I’ve failed a test.
2004: After an incident the previous year, our Islamic school tutor announces that there will be no class next Saturday, on account of it falling on the anniversary of September 11. My friends and I cheer, happy that we get to have an entire Saturday free.
2015: I’m at a dinner party with a group of people I don’t know very well yet. The guy sitting next to me tells me that he’s reading Things Fall Apart.
2016: The same thing happens again. I note the coincidence.
1996: I have a fight with an Indigenous boy in school, Tristan, and I break his glasses. His mother approaches my father the next day and asks that he replace her son’s glasses. My father agrees, apologises for my actions, and pays her. The next day the school principle finds out and tells my father that he shouldn’t have paid her a cent. That we were just children. She calls the woman and her son “those people”. This incident becomes critical to my father’s understanding of white Australians.
2016: I get up on stage and do a reading. It’s an ambivalent piece, about scars and memories and how they resist narrativisation, and how we narrativise them anyway. Afterwards a woman approaches me and tells me how inspired she was by my words. I ask her what she meant by ‘inspired’. Inspired to do what, exactly? She gives me a baffled look, smiles and walks away. A knot of guilt settles in me.
2015: I arrive in Puli in the rain. A man is waiting for me at the bus stop, a cigarette in his mouth, bent back; kind, warm eyes. He takes me to his home and shows me where I am to sleep. We communicate, when we must, through Google Translate. Later that night, after I get back from a long day of hiking through the hills that ring the small town, we share a glass of whiskey and he begins telling me about his time in the army. I don’t speak a word of Mandarin, but I piece together his gestures and expressions along with what little I know of Taiwan’s history into a vague outline of violence. He shows me a grey photo of his unit and points to each face and does a ‘throat cut’ gesture. Then he gets to the last picture, of a young man with kind eyes. He points to himself, then chuckles and does a throat-cut gesture again, as if to say that he too will soon be dead.
2018: I enrol in swimming classes, despite my fear of the water.
Cover image via Gece
About the author
Khalid Warsame is a writer and arts-worker. He is a creative producer at Footscray Community Arts Centre. You can find more of his work on his website.