Peeling Off The Layers
By Mwanabibi Sikamo
She looked out at the stark terrain as it drifted in and out of focus. The rolling English fields competing with her memories.
There was a chill in the air, unencumbered by the warm interior of the bus she travelled in. The chill was not just in the air; it was also within her. An icy knot lodged in the pit of her stomach.
The voice on the radio told her that temperatures were now below zero. The frost had taken root, clinging to newly emerged spikes of green grass and coating the hardened ground. The bookies were taking bets, the music had turned from exciting to an irritating, incessant, drone, and bright lights lined the increasingly busy cobbled streets of shops in towns and cities across the country. It was going to be a white Christmas.
Fluffy snowflakes began their descent as the bus edged southwards. Something about the snow muffled things, creating a melancholic silence. Even the children, who pointed excitedly for parents to look, did so with a whisper. She was alone; the seat next to her an empty space that gave her room to explore the landscape of her emotions.
She remembered the first time she saw snow. Well, not the first time. Because photo albums told her that she had once been bundled up in puffy clothes by nervous immigrant parents. Bundled up to frolic in the snow with other brown children and the occasional poor white one. The first time she remembered seeing snow, without the aid of fading images, was 12 years ago when she went by a different name. Her middle name. Given to her because every African child must also have an English name that will be added to all official documents and then promptly forgotten until a registration officer at a college decides that it would be much easier to, 'just use this name instead.' She smiled, remembering how she would be caught unawares by a teacher calling a name she did not recognise as her own. After college, she decided to reassert her identity and never went by the English name again.
There had been so many moments like that over the years. Moments of explaining who she is and why she is here, moments of representing her entire nation, even the whole continent, and moments of deciding it was easier to believe people were just curious and not innately rude. Moments of becoming who she is now.
That first snow was also the first Christmas when she made the reverse of this journey. 10 hours and many degrees drop in temperature had her unpacking her carefully weighed luggage and plying on layer after layer of clothing to shield from the shock of sunshine to snow. Insulating herself from the new environment. Eventually, she had taken off those layers, no longer needing them as she began to belong. Now she was going back to where she really belonged.
Over the 12 years, much had changed. College, University, numerous jobs in various cities, friendships, and relationships. But, one thing had remained constant - Christmas was always the one time of year that she had felt most different. Most alone. It was a time for families, and hers became a disparate group of others who had also been separated from their homes and sought to create new ones. Eating jollof rice, biryani, and curried goat, instead of dry turkey and bitter brussels sprouts. The commonwealth of people who did not bother to listen to her majesty the Queen as she addressed them from her gold-lined room, surrounded by pictures of her nearest and dearest.
The bus arrived at Heathrow, and she disembarked slowly, opting to wait for the rush of stretching bodies, shuffling feet, and hastily removed hand luggage to abate, as if waiting would somehow allow her more time to get used to the idea of starting again. The icy knot in her stomach melted into fluttering butterflies.
The airport staff were pleasant. They're always much happier when you're leaving than when you're just another foreigner trying to get in. She walked around the shops in a dazed, dreamlike state, barely registering the bodies bustling around her. In limbo, not just because an airport is neither here nor there or because the days before Christmas, with glossy imitations of tinsel, rows of mince pies, and wrapped up boxes with nothing in them, are all about waiting for Christmas, but because she was in limbo. A purgatorial shifting of identities; only it was, as it often is, unclear which way led to heaven.
On the flight back she said all the right things. Africa was rising. She was going to make a difference. Bringing back valuable knowledge that cannot be learnt in classrooms. And as her belly sunk along with the plane, she willed all this to be true. Shielding her eyes from the glaring brightness, she emerged with her coat on her arm. Already beginning to shed the layers. Priming herself for a sun-filled Christmas.
Mwanabibi Sikamo is a Zambian storyteller and filmmaker exploring the real and imagined lives of Africans past and present. Her fiction is steeped in the magical tradition of indigenous folk lore. She is currently writing her first novel and is happy to report that heaven has comprised many years of joyous, sun-filled, Christmases.
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