Raya’s marriage happened in a panic. Her father found out that a young man was paying unmistakable attention to her, at first with long looks and a knowing smile as he walked by, then he saw with his own eyes how the young man stopped her in the street and held her in conversation for several minutes, probably making impossible promises and arranging an assignation. This all happened in front of him. It was improper and ill‑mannered behavior, and disrespectful to him, the father. He knew who the young man was, which was why the attentions to Raya alarmed him. It would have been even worse if he was a stranger, of course, but this was calamity enough. His name was Rafik, and he had grown up a boy familiar and ordinary, the son of neighbors with whom scarcities had been shared over the years, who ran up and down the streets with other boys and played football with them on the beach. Then, in the upheavals and confusions of the struggle to rid themselves of the British, he joined the comrades, as they called themselves, and became a member of the Umma Party. Along with other comrades, he was sent for military training to Cuba, under the noses of the British colonial authorities who either could not see the meaning of this excursion or could not care less. They were ready to go home.

Rafik returned more handsome than ever, transformed into a heroic, slender warrior in a solid-green khaki uniform, and wearing a hard round cap unlike any they had seen before. He and the other comrades were back just in time to participate in the revolution and its aftermath. The warriors of that time, of whom Rafik was then one, knew only how to terrify people since there really was no enemy in sight, just scared, browbeaten citizens. Even that word, citizen, was in dispute, and was one that the heroes liked to play with. So you think you are a citizen. Let’s see your birth certificate. What do you mean you don’t have one? Many people of a certain age had not bothered to get one, so the paper was demanded only if the desire was to humiliate or to intimidate, or very often both. What kind of bloodsucker are you, pretending to be a citizen? It was all part of the joy of power, to chasten, to terrify, or to expel at will.

In any case, Rafik came back from Cuba, resplendent in his uniform and the cap that Fidel Castro loved to wear—or as a variation he wore a black beret like Che Guevara—greeting his comrades with salutations that were new to everyone but would soon become familiar: venceremos, la luta continúa, vamos. He also started casting glances at Raya and talking with her in the street while he wore a playful smile. Anyone could see what he was up to. She was 17 years old and beautiful, and he was now notorious for messing up young women.

I don’t like the way he was talking to you. You know what these people are like, her father said angrily. Don’t try to fool me. Usindanganye. I saw you smiling at him as if you liked his talk. He is after you. Couldn’t you see that? He will disgrace you. He will shame all of us.

Raya started to protest. What was she to do? She could not pretend not to know him. She did not want to offend him. Her father swiped his arm through the air, signifying that he required her to be silent, and then he waved her away out of his sight. He consulted with his elder brother, Hafidh, who was just as fearful of shame as he was, and would understand his panic about Rafik’s interest in Raya. They kill our sons and then look to dishonor our daughters, Hafidh said. They both understood what he was talking about. The brothers looked desperately around for who could save her, and save everyone from humiliation and disgrace. Her father usually sought out his brother’s sagacity when it suited him, or when he needed to borrow money, or both, as on this occasion. For any arrangement they were to come up with was certain to require money to pay for celebrations and gifts and food. Raya’s father was not blessed with a skill for making money, as his elder brother was, and he was generous with it.

The person they found for her was Bakari Abbas, an amiable man in his forties who lived in Pemba, previously divorced and of respectable means. He was a building contractor, and acquaintances who were contacted spoke well of him, and so Raya’s parents arranged her life with him. When her father told her, in that saddened, self‑pitying way he adopted when he wanted to persuade her or her mother to agree with him, she did not think there was any real choice, either accept the arrangement that would preserve the respectability and honor of her parents and herself or choose the hooligan soldier. It did not occur to anyone but her to ask if she might have chosen to take her chances with the hero. She suppressed that thought and did not mention it to anyone. Everything had gone too far for that and maybe it would all turn out well.

So it was that her father, who was physically frail but domineering by temperament, made Raya agree to a marriage that she feared she would hate. That was how she had been brought up and how everyone she knew lived their lives. She endured the sudden, intense preparations, and the advice of aunties and other people she hardly knew, who washed her and stroked her and fed her the lore of obedience to male lust, who whispered how being cherished would ripen and inflame her, how the affectionate attentions of a husband would fulfill her world, and how God would bless the outcome. Then, on the night of her capture, she lay in the bed of Bakari Abbas and knew for the first time the shock of eager, overbearing flesh upon her unresisting body. She could not resist, not that night nor the nights that followed, because she had been instructed not to. It was his right, and her duty required submission.

Bakari Abbas was a man of personable and even pleasing appearance, wiry and strong and of middle height, well over five foot. He was amiable to the world, a man of business, with the effortless courtesy and flourishes of someone of his profession. But to Raya he was sometimes curt, and he was relentless in his demand for her body, every day, sometimes two or three times in a day. What at first was strange and frightening grew increasingly crushing and somehow humiliating, but she submitted because she did not know what else to do. She told herself that this was how it was for every woman, to endure the energetic invasions that were necessary to satisfy her husband’s need, and to find what pleasure she could for herself. She could have been more artful, could have feigned enjoyment to temper his desire for her surrender, but she was too young and too repelled. She could not help cringing while he took his pleasure, her face puckered and her eyes closed tight. He laughed to see her quailing so and tried to cajole her with soft whispers and little kisses, and when that did not work, he became adamant for her to respond more joyfully to his exertions. Her reluctance and mute resistance made him determined to awaken her, as he put it. She came to know his smile at such moments. Come, my bulbul, give me one small groan of pleasure, he murmured to her as he pounded his bony pelvis on the soft flesh of her widespread thighs.

She learned to make it easier for herself, to evade pain by preparing her body to receive him. She learned to acquire some control so she was not always at his mercy, to delay and postpone, and to feign enjoyment. She said no when she could, and fought back when he rebuked her, returning vicious abuse to his hectoring threats. It was a nightmare she could not tell anyone about. There were times when she wondered if she might have done better with handsome Rafik, but she already knew how badly that would have ended. Rafik had been shot dead in a bloodletting orgy that happened a year after her wedding.

The bickering with Bakari went on for what seemed like forever to Raya, and seemed to get worse after the birth of her son, Karim. Bakari grew increasingly impatient with her reluctance to let him lie with her so soon after giving birth, and his rages when he was thwarted were and out of control. The reports of his amiability were not exaggerated. He was charming with other people from what she could observe, but he reserved his cruelty for her and took pleasure in it, and she feared that one day his viciousness would become violent. She did not know whether it was best to cower and tremble in front of him as a sign of her capitulation, which she knew he desired, or to be obstinate and abusive in return. She was learning to live with his contempt and her own self‑disgust, but she was frantic for her child’s safety. She wondered, at times, if this was what life was like for most women, if they lived this way, in terror of their men. Why did they not speak? She did not know who she could speak to.

When Karim was a child of 3, after silent planning and stubborn cunning, she took him and moved back to Unguja, leaving her husband. She went to Unguja to visit her parents and refused to return. Her life with Bakari Abbas had shown her the futility of the obedience she had been raised to observe and that had finally enraged her enough to resist. She ignored the messages he sent summoning her back, and ignored his threat to divorce her and leave her without a cent. She ignored his citation of the law, both civil and religious, for the return of his son. So, in short, they parted in acrimony, on her part with disgust for his violence, his promiscuous lusts, and the coercion that had forced her into marriage with him, on his with outrage that he expressed by refusing to offer her any financial support, ever. He could have been compelled by the law or even by customary practice, but Raya was too dismayed and too bitter to bother, despite her father’s and her uncle’s urgings. She could not be frank with them about his cruelties. She was too ashamed. All she could say was that they were bickering all the time and she did not want to live like that. Then, she forbade them from asking for a single shilling of his money.

Raya and Karim moved back into the family home. Her parents rented two gloomy rooms on the first floor of a house and shared a kitchen and a bathroom with the tenants upstairs. To Raya the rooms felt closed in and the whole house smelled sour. There was a narrow lane between their house and the one next door, and men passing by sometimes used the alley as a urinal. Karim slept on the floor in his grandparents’ room, and Raya rolled out her bedding in the other room when it was time to sleep. She had moved in reluctantly, not eager to return to the airless cells in which she had grown up, even though she felt some relief that her mother took over some of the care of her child. Nor was her father happy to have her back, muttering about duties and a poor man left alone with no one to look after him. She dreaded her father’s overbearing ways, his passive bullying. Didn’t anybody hear me calling? This coffee is cold, is bitter, is thin. Are we so poor that we can’t afford decent coffee? Why is nobody listening to me? Where is my bathing water? My back is hurting. I can’t sleep with all the noise from upstairs. Can’t you women stop talking?

His one redeeming quality for Raya was his ability to tell stories. Those stories had charmed her childhood. She had believed they were true, and even once she knew they were not, she could not shake off their reality. He did not make up the stories, she understood that later. He had been told those same stories as a child, as had her mother, but her mother did not have his gift for telling and often forgot important details, smiling apologetically as the punch line evaded her. He told the stories really well, of talking animals when she was younger and later, fantasies and adventures in the great world, narrating the different parts with a canny judgment of tone and voice. But then the stories dried up. She knew why. A bitterness entered her father’s mind after the revolution, and a recitation of injustices and grievances replaced the stories that had charmed her childhood.

The story drought was also to do with what happened to her cousin Suleman, the son of Hafidh, her father’s elder brother. Suleman had joined the new security force that was formed as independence approached. At the same time as Fidel Castro was training the comrades to come back and make a revolution, the new government about to take over from the British was creating a paramilitary police force to provide security. The existing police force was an imperial creation, intended to control its colonial subjects, the incoming government told them. The new security unit would be a fresh start, a force to protect its citizens rather than intimidate them. That was what they were told. Most of the recruits were recent school‑leavers, the majority in their late teens. Still, the unit commander was British because why not use their expertise while they were still in place. One night, there were rumors of a planned disturbance, and the commander did not want to risk some riffraff breaking into the armory while he was at a party arranged long before. So he kept the keys to the armory in his pocket or maybe at home in his briefcase or maybe somewhere else. In any case, he left the teenagers unarmed in their barracks, and the youngsters, who had received only minimal training, who had no idea what to do, and no means to defend themselves, were cut to pieces. That was the opening act of the revolution. Hafidh’s son, Suleman, was one of those boys. He had joined up just after the end of school in December and was only a fortnight into his training.

They could not find him, not among the wounded nor the mutilated nor the perished, and in the aftermath of the events and the stories that followed, and in the boasts of the victors, they could only assume he was among the disappeared. The brothers never spoke about the boy between them except to mention him in their prayers. His mother mourned him and wept for him, and in her bereavement thought herself worthless and unfit to live. It broke Baba, even though he was not the father. Something went out of him, and that’s when the tales dried up or turned into bitter laments. As time passed, the memory of the stories grew fainter, but she could still remember that some of them were funny and tender. The one about the beggar who was charged with stealing the aroma of the sultan’s banquet, and how Abunuwas helped him pay for doing so by throwing coins on the palace floor and requesting the sultan to accept the jingling of the money in payment. Or there was one about an ostrich that came to a bad end that she could no longer recall the details of. There was also an ominous one about a castle on top of a black magnetic mountain that could not be taken because as the enemy approached, their swords and lances flew out of their hands and onto the mountainside. Or the refined sisters who ate rice with a needle, one grain at a time. The memory of the stories could not make up for his endless groans and grumbles, which grew longer and deeper as he aged. It was not as if he could help himself, she knew that, but it was still difficult to witness and bear his aches and pains.

Her mother had to give him a full‑body massage first thing every morning and last thing every night, and any time in between if he desired it. She crouched on her knees and moved from his neck and shoulders all the way down to his toes, while he groaned with masochistic contentment. After the morning massage, he dressed and waited for the day’s first cup of tea to arrive, accompanied by a freshly fried mandazi bun. Often the tea would not be right in some way or the maandazi would be too sweet, or there was something else that was not to his liking. When Raya returned with Karim, he tried to recruit her into the labor force that served his needs, calling her to administer a massage when her mother was busy, but she resisted. She had learned enough in her time with Bakari Abbas to ignore his grumbles.

At 21, Raya was a beauty, although she did not fully know that about herself. In any case, she did not care for the attention of men. She thought she had had enough of that kind of hunger, and just wanted to be left to herself, to find some ordinariness and small content. Despite herself, she found it some relief to be back with her mother and father, a lightening of the burden of responsibility she had felt for her son, and a kind of safety for both of them. It surprised her, the alacrity with which she allowed her mother to take over caring for Karim, but as her guilt about that shift diminished, she began to look at the child with more detachment and could not help associating him with troubled times.

In her father’s eyes she was young enough to be a source of shame and dishonor, attracting the attention of men of disrepute. Think of your child, he said.

I am thinking of my child, she said.

He will grow up without a father, he persisted. It is your husband’s right to demand the child’s return. Go back to him. You have a duty, your son needs his father. Or let us find you another husband. Divorce is not the end of the world, it’s nothing.

Raya shrugged and did not reply. To herself she said, You did a fine job the first time round. Nothing that you say will persuade me to return to Bakari Abbas.

---

Karim’s mother treated him like a possession she was fond of but the details of whose welfare she was happy to leave to her parents. It was not so unusual for that to happen, for an aunt or a grandmother to become the mother figure, or for a child to grow up with a sense of having more than one such figure. It might happen as a result of the real mother’s youth, or her inability to cope with too many offspring, or her ambition. In the case of Raya, she had discovered a new life of her own and had found work in a large clothing store, which allowed her to learn about fashion and to indulge her love of it. She relished advising customers about styles and outfits, and displaying the latest arrivals for them. She made some new women friends in this way and began making up for those miserable years forced on her by her father. In the busyness of her new life, she grew a little detached from her child, and was perhaps a little tetchy with him. At times, in the guilty aftermath of her impatience, she had to remind herself to show him tenderness.

It was Karim’s grandmother who fussed over him, shook him awake in the morning, and gave him his cup of tea before hurrying him off to school. It was to her that he repeated his most amazing discoveries of the day, the unsettling claim that the core of the world was molten, and the stories he read in his book of Greek myths: the beheading of Medusa, the man who stole fire from the Greek gods, the labors of Hercules. From his schoolbook he read to her of the journeys of Sindbad. Sometimes she was skeptical, as with the story of the Trojan horse. They must have been simple, those Trojans, to fall for a trick like that. It was she who dabbed stinging iodine when he stumbled and grazed his knee, who rubbed pungent embrocation on his ankle or wrist when he came home howling after a fall. He loved the smell of the embrocation and loved the name. Embrocation. When no one was around, he uncorked the bottle, sniffed its contents, and winced at its stinging aroma.

Karim grew into a lanky, soft‑spoken, self‑possessed boy whose unwavering gaze sometimes disconcerted grown‑ups. His father passed away when he was in secondary school. Bakari Abbasi’s last years had been plagued by diabetes and a troublesome enlarged prostate, but he had decided not to have it surgically reduced after the doctor warned that his diabetes might interfere with the anesthetic or cause other complications. He did not understand everything he was told, but surgery sounded dangerous, so he chose to live with the pain. Only he did not live much longer, because his heart suddenly gave way. He was 58 years old when he died.

Karim had not had anything to do with his father after his mother took him away from Pemba, because she forbade it, though she did not explain why. Her face and dismissive gesture at the mention of his name made clear that she had no time for him. Karim did not know what his father had done that could not be spoken of, but he knew it must have been something bad. So Bakari Abbasi’s passing did not provoke grief so much as some regret that the rancor between his parents had left him without something that other people took for granted. It was an exception that embarrassed him when he was younger, and there had been times when he spoke of his father in Pemba as if he knew him and was intimate with him, when really he had last seen him eleven years before, at the age of 3.

Karim at times wondered why parents like his, who were neglectful and unloving, bothered to have children. He had only a hazy memory of his father, and his mother often rebuked him for what she called his antics and often seemed to find him irritating and hardly ever sat to talk with him in the way his grandmother did. Sometimes his mother surprised him with that lazy smile he so loved and even gave him a hug and a caress, but often her address to him was a grumble or an impatient command. Stop that running around and making so much noise, kisirani we. Why don’t you go outside and play with the other children? He did not know when he began to think like this, and perhaps he did not think about it as fluently and succinctly as this at first, but he had known the frustration of it from a very early age. He would do things differently when he became a father, that was certain. He would make sure his child knew it was desired, that it was loved. If he ever bothered to have a child, that is. He did not speak these thoughts to anyone until much later, as it seemed to him ungrateful and even sinful to do so, and by then it did not matter as much as it once did.

At the time of his father’s passing away, Karim’s mother was no longer living with her parents, or not permanently. She made her escape gradually. She rented a room in an apartment where one of her women friends lived with her mother, and every few days she would come to stay in the rooms with her parents and son. The days between visits increased as the months passed, until in the end she called in for only an hour or two now and then before returning to her rented room. There was no space for a teenage boy in the new accommodation, Raya said, so he had to stay behind with his grandparents. Of course, he could come and visit whenever he wanted, but she had to move. She needed more air. It is stifling in these rooms, she told her son, speaking softly so her mother would not hear. I’m suffocating, I can’t stay here. Everything smells stale and bad. It’s the dirt of years. The bathroom is filthy, and that alleyway stinks of urine. And you . . . you are getting too big to be sleeping in the same room as your grandparents.

What else am I supposed to do? When you are not here, I sleep in this room. You don’t like me to sleep in the same room as you, he grumbled, wounded by her criticism.

Well, you can have it, his mother said, smiling at the sulky childishness in his voice. You are welcome to it.

A few months after Karim’s father passed away, Karim’s grandmother also suddenly collapsed. She had always been a tireless woman, up first, warming water, making tea, doing the washing, cooking, cleaning, from dawn until the closing of the day, and then the last one up at night. One morning she could not rise from her bed but lay there with eyes wide open, softly panting. Her collapse created consternation in the household. She had enough strength to send Karim to fetch Raya so that she could take over the cooking and the fussing over her father and his needs. On the night of her second bedridden day, she passed away with a minimum of fuss, going as quietly as she had lived her life. In the days following, their lives were taken over by the formalities of death, the washing of the body, the preparation for burial, the prayers, the funeral that only her husband and Karim could attend, the readings at the mosque and at home. To Karim it seemed as if everything suddenly came to a head in this way. His distant, unknown father passed away, then his mother no longer lived with them, then his grandmother went suddenly, from one day to the next.

You had better stay and look after your grandfather, his mother said. He’ll need you here. We’ll have to think how to organize ourselves. I can’t come back to live here. I’ll arrange for the people upstairs to prepare your lunch, and I’ll come by every day, don’t worry. It’ll be all right.

I hope so, he said sulkily, but she took no notice, preoccupied with her own thoughts.

What Karim did not know but was soon to understand in full was that his mother had been preparing for departure for some time. For nearly a year, Raya had been in an affair with a man from Dar es Salaam whose name was Haji Othman. They met when she went visiting a friend in Dar. Nothing much came of that encounter except that she liked his looks and his cheerful manner and spent ten minutes or so in conversation with him among other people. Then a few days after her return, he telephoned her at the clothing store where she worked. I’ll be coming to Zanzibar next week, and I wondered if we could meet for lunch? Later, she found out that he had asked the friend in Dar about her and whether she was attached. When he found out she was not, he asked the friend for her work telephone number, and she had given it unhesitatingly because she liked Haji and she liked Raya and she was intrigued about how it would work out. That was how it began. He came to Zanzibar, they had lunch, and after that he rang her every few days, and everything else followed discreetly. She visited his hotel when he was in Zanzibar, and sometimes she went to Dar. A few months afterward, they began talking of marriage. By then she was living permanently in her own rented room. Her mother’s passing had hastened her decision. She had no intention of taking her mother’s place as her father’s skivvy.

Karim was nearly 15 when his mother married again and followed her new husband to Dar es Salaam, where he owned a pharmacy in Fire Station Road. Karim was not completely surprised by her departure. When he learned of her forthcoming marriage, he suspected that she did not intend for him to follow her. By then he was not uncomfortable in the home his mother so bitterly despised, even though he had been irked by her casual assumption that he would look after his grumbling grandfather. The neighbors upstairs cooked their food, which he collected when he came home from school and served to his grandfather and himself. He was doing extremely well at school, was acknowledged by the teachers and by his fellow students to be highly talented, and he had no desire to move to Dar es Salaam, which he had never even visited. He knew that his grandfather, who was used to having his daily needs seen to in detail, understood that he could not demand the same care from him, a teenage boy who could not cook, nor knew how to prepare his tea as it should be done every morning nor had the patience to give him his daily massages morning and night nor could do his laundry properly, and who spent his spare time playing football or wandering the streets with his friends, or buried in his books. So it was that soon after Raya’s departure for Dar es Salaam, his grandfather gave up the rented rooms and went to live with his elder brother’s family. It seemed to Karim that he had lost his mother with little more than a shrug.

---

If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.