Sidra (in 12 Movements)
Rahawa Haile
I.
Before she is born, the Good Immigrant delivers his daughter from the probability of bondage. He comes to America for a life of ordinary disappointments. But not war, not famine. At thirty-six, the Good Immigrant has spent his every breath under foreign occupation. Italy, the UK, Ethiopia. The Good Immigrant knows nothing of black living in America and yet too much of black life under white conquest all at once. White-sanctioned conquest too. At least now he will see their faces, nescient eyes weighing the merit and threat of him by the lilt of an accent they cannot place. Their soft relief: black but other. There but only just. African. Guilt Black, not Hate Black (not usually). As in, “Man! There are people starving back in ____.” As in, “Thank God. For a minute there I thought you were a nigger.”
II.
In Miami, the heat is inescapable. Have you been? You will see that even the trees sweat at night, clear tendrils snaking down their brows, past their chins, zigzagging in the limp breeze toward the salmon-colored walkway below. They tell wailing children it is good luck when a tree sweats on your head at night, but it isn’t just the trees. In Miami, even the heat sweats at night, and that is where humidity comes from. Thermodynamic self-loathing. Forget what they taught you. Imagine what it means to be so sick of yourself you cry and that crying makes things worse for everyone around you. Now you know how the heat feels. The Good Immigrant understands too much about the water cycle to believe any of this but has taken to wearing a light cap all the same. At the grocery, he places a small carton of orange juice in his shopping cart and slides his change into his pocket, enough for a cafecito, too little for a proper breakfast. Half a guava-and-cheese pastelito, if that. The Good Immigrant is versed in many types of hunger. Could count more of them than he’d care to if pressed. He files tonight’s away where it belongs, not quite desperate—he’d passed the rice aisle earlier, after all—but somewhere between heartache and home. How do you feed a heart with $1.40? Trick question. You learn to feed something else.
III.
Every morning, before he gets dressed, the Good Immigrant shaves, sits before the daily paper, and splits his body in half lengthwise, searching. He finds it easier to work this way. Each half its own despair. He misses whistling, on occasion, but finds he can leave the rest, which eventually he does. His wardrobe follows suit. A nearby tailor alters his shirts to more easily be buttoned with one hand. The Good Immigrant upgrades from sneakers to loafers, downgrades from loafers to flip-flops. Why not? His halves spend their waking hours frantic, worried—on top of everything else—what the other may have found. This is how the Good Immigrant comes to give himself completely to the Immigrant’s Lament—an endless fight on two fronts: here and Home, where here is home now and Home is hope, until it consumes him. Until his heart and all its beating have nowhere left to yearn. Here, in this land, America, where his daughter might, could, and would someday, even if it kills him.
IV.
What did you think would be left of you, Baba? What were we to do with air?
V.
Despite reading widely before his departure—yes, the Good African read widely; what did you expect?—he had never lived in the pure vulnerability of his skin, a thing until now either alive or dead, transmuted into a liminal namelessness against the blood-white canvas of the United States. The Good Immigrant spends days staring at himself in the mirror. At the swiftness with which a person can become less than without changing a thing at all. The same could have happened elsewhere, he knows. Paris, without question. Milan, for sure. The Good Immigrant chafes at a theft of dignity for which no quantity of books could have prepared him. When he startles awake one night shouting from a bad dream, it is not in English or Tigrinya or Amharic or Italian but in Vigilance, a new tongue that will crowd out the others for his remaining days. This alloy-organ rests heavily in his mouth. His lunchtime curry goat tastes of copper (his) and steel (its). He cannot remember the last time he licked his lips and counted his blessings. When the Good Immigrant finally sees a dentist, he tenses. He opens wide and expects her to wince at the blade of him. Instead, nothing happens. One of his molars has a cavity. The Good Immigrant, it turns out, is not a Good Flosser. He tries asking about his tongue, but the words come out wrong. A receptionist slides him a scraper and bids him farewell.
Years pass. A daughter is born. At the hospital, the Good Immigrant tries and fails to say “I love you” without making it sound like a warning. What comes out is a forecast: “I love you today.”
VI.
The Good Immigrant’s wife has asked for a divorce. While the Good Immigrant has been many things, a great husband is not one of them. He spends the day at the beach with his daughter, now seven. They’ve packed towels, fried chicken, a fist of napkins. A hard cooler filled with sliced mangoes and Coca-Cola doubles as a small table. The Good Daughter carries a float longer than her body under each arm and marches toward the water, cawing at the gulls. The Good Family floats. They paddle back ashore. The Good Immigrant and his child watch men with serious expressions perform aerial tricks with V-shaped stunt kites designed to look like sharks.
He lunges after her. She is chasing the kites barefoot, indifferent to the dead jellyfish on the shore. The Good Immigrant yells out, “They can still sting you!” but it sounds like this: “Run fast enough to fly and nothing can hurt you.” One of the shark kites dives at an alarming speed near the Good Daughter and nearly crashes. Later, they learn that this is also a stunt kite maneuver. The Good Immigrant carries his daughter back to their towels and watches her sleep. When she awakens, he is upright, his gaze locked on the surf as though he could stop it in its tracks. The Good Immigrant is many feet away from her and motionless. The swash runs over his legs hungrily, again and again, the sand reaching halfway up his shins as though the sinking was the point.
When he returns, the Good Immigrant sits beside his daughter with his arms propped on his knees. He says the sand feels nothing like the salt of his childhood, bahri, the Red Sea, but at least it is sand. Smooth and familiar beneath a sagging Florida sun. He says this in English, and when the Good Daughter fails to remember the word for “sand” in Tigrinya, her first language, she says the word “rock,” imni, unyielding and familiar, linking it to baba, “father,” and bahri, “the sea.” She smiles and begins to pack. It will be twenty-five years before the Good Daughter learns that the word “imni,” as in English, can also mean “fool.”
VII.
At present, the Good Immigrant and the Other Daughter have not spoken in twenty-five years.
Oh yes.
There is another daughter. A first. A Good Daughter too, though the Good Immigrant will never understand. It is complicated except for this: he is dead to her, whereas she is only half dead to him, a memory that carries itself still alive in the real world. She has done well for herself. The Good Immigrant seems pleased his memory is still alive but only half listens when he asks the Good Daughter about it. The Good Daughter initially thinks this a form of self-protection and only later sees it clearly as self-harm. She is disturbed by how quickly the Good Immigrant can lose blood, walk away from it like a self-healing gunshot wound. It is the only way he knows to keep a memory a preference instead of a warm, breathing reckoning.
The Good Daughter considers what else her father has given his heart to and kept his heart from, the causes and regrets. How foolish he’d been to think either a choice. The Good Daughter concludes you can’t build a life with what the heart alone wants. You have to pause, weigh options, stay open, close shut. There are times when the cruelest thing a person can do is love you back.
She wonders how long the Other Daughter has known this to be true and hopes for even longer.
VIII.
In 2018, the Good Immigrant is missing or perhaps has chosen to be gone. He does this sometimes. Calls it quits. The Good Daughter has seen it before with others. She swallows and remembers a recent dream. In one future, death moved into her throat and waited. Two sparrows fell out of a tree and lay still when they overheard her singing. Hours later, she answered the phone and killed a friend. When the Dream Daughter screamed, every tenant in her building leapt out of their windows in unison as though pulled by strings. In another dream, death laid eggs in her ear. They itched and obscured her senses. The world blinked in and out, in and out, or sometimes cascaded, streaming gray down and dull. When they hatched, the baby deaths poured out of her. Each stole one memory of the twenty-nine still keeping her alive, while the last death stayed inside, her body now its.
The Good Daughter tries not to dwell on what it all means. She thinks about her name, her grandmother’s gift. The Good Daughter used to say its proper pronunciation was reserved for family alone. A small thing that could be hers and her people’s. Yet the Good Daughter is beginning to realize how dangerous this can be, how easy it is to find herself disappearing in the absence of those tongues. How lonely, when surrounded by so many mouths intentionally misled.
IX.
Who did you want to be, Baba? And what did you want to do with who you’d made?
X.
The Good Daughter sits at her computer. “Some children are born to fathers,” she types. “Others, to mysteries.” She’d had the luck and occasional misfortune of encountering both in the same man, one who loved her fiercely when he wasn’t receding from view. The Good Daughter will spend the rest of her life believing in ghosts because she has met her father and knows he wasn’t entirely man, that a part of the Good Immigrant was always slipping away. She wonders what will happen if she marries. If all the vanishings, half gones, and pasts will assemble to wish her well. Perhaps this wondering is it.
The Good Daughter takes a break from writing to catch up on the news. The Italian government has closed its ports to rescue ships. She watches a video from one such ship of African refugees thrashing in the Mediterranean. The film is dark. The African vessel sank at night. The Good Daughter keeps an ear out for the high note of her language, finds it, and breaks. Recently, a man from her country (Eritrea) killed himself after being denied asylum by her country (America). The Good Daughter slips an arm through one of her father’s former half shirts and searches for a name.
At a gathering that evening, the Good Daughter tries to have a good time. She does not know how to tell her friends it is a daily struggle to love them as more than the half dead. How she was raised to love the almost missing deeply and to a fault.
XI.
The Good Immigrant does not know where he is. If he is alive or dead. Only that he never said goodbye.
XII.
Goodbye, Baba. Kinirahebina.