There is a garden in my grandmother’s crystal-speckled backyard in Mogadishu, Somalia; a garden which holds my people’s grief like prayer—every sliver of blood we have secreted, every secret we were too terrorized to tell, every scream we stifled in order to survive. This garden soaked up each molecule of the pain we had endured like water, its root systems paradoxically replenished by our sepulchral rot.
The grief garden reminded us that to be alive—to be ecstatically alive with all the hunger and heat which illuminated the alleyways to freedom—was to be a bold, dying thing.
Kinfolk travelled from every corner of the country to experience the alchemical essence of this grief garden. A widow marooned in the netherworld of mouths to feed with no money, whilst swallowing down her own sadness about a culture which once viewed her as a worthy vessel but now saw her as unviable, might howl her hurt into my grandmother’s hyacinths; into stems and soil nourished by what was several lifetimes’ worth of ache and anguish. A man without limbs or loved ones, all lost to a war he still could not understand, came armed with questions. ‘What are we fighting for? All wars have a reason. Please help me figure out why we are still killing each other. The dictators and warlords died decades ago, so why are we still doing this death dance? I need to know the reason so I can rest at night. That’s all. It could be any reason at this point. Please tell me.’
He poured all his questions, every droplet of his woe and worry, into my grandmother’s bougainvillea, which absorbed his anxiety until he could finally breathe right; until he realized that his life, with its Everest-adjacent challenges, deserved to be cherished; and that sometimes clarity was cosmic munificence—an act of grace worthy of adding to the ‘Win Column’ of one’s existence.
At night, however, the grief garden expelled all the distress it couldn’t digest. Part hymn, part horror score, the earth morphed into an eerie sound bed of our most intimate psychoses—an entire people who were roaming the globe, aspiring revenants, a land of poets unable to locate a synergetic lexicon for pain so marrow-deep that only the mythic could contain it.
*
When I turned twelve, my body began to transmogrify in ways that were surprising. I went from being a scrawny boy to a dimple-hipped display of feminine suppleness. My acne-stippled skin became as soft as a rose leaf, lips dew-sweet, nipples as round and smooth as saltwater pearls. My mood swooped from rhapsody to rage to resentment and back again without apparent reason.
This is it, I thought, I’m clearly dying. I would cry if the whole debacle weren’t so comical. Instead, I cackled like a Looney Tunes clodpoll (think Elmer Fudd strung out on cough syrup). I laughed and laughed at God’s vantablack sense of humor. When this didn’t seem to help, I went to the grief garden for answers.
‘What is happening to me?’ I asked the garden, but it didn’t respond to anything I had to say, which was strange: the grief garden seemed to have a solution for every shade of sorrow but mine.
Other shifts quickly took place. My voice became higher and higher until I sounded like a cartoon coquette who’d huffed helium, a cracked-out Somali Betty Boop. I used to move with ease and agility, but pretty soon I struggled to take two steps without stopping to catch my breath.
Bewildered, I sought my grandmother’s wisdom. She placed her finger under my nose for three seconds and nodded to herself.
‘You don’t know how to breathe,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry but that’s not a thing, Ayeeyo,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, grabbing her copy of Nabokov’s Pnin, her favorite novel, and opening it on a random page before handing it to me. ‘Read this paragraph aloud whilst concentrating on your breathing.’
I did as she asked, but it was oddly difficult. My brain simply couldn’t process the words on the page whilst simultaneously observing my own breathing technique. I was normally an excellent sight-reader, but for some reason I was stuck on the adjective ‘insensate.’ All I could see on the page was insensate, insensate, insensate on a non compos mentis loop.
My grandmother took the book away from me. ‘As I suspected, you have concentration issues, too. Show me your teeth.’
I opened my mouth as wide as the ocean which had once swallowed my parents.
‘You have root rot,’ sighed my grandmother. ‘No matter. Now I want you to walk in a straight line from this side of the room to the next.’
I did as I was instructed.
‘Oh, boy,’ said my grandmother. ‘You’re developing a dowager’s hump, and you don’t know how to walk properly.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that you don’t know how to be a person, kid,’ said my grandmother. ‘Don’t worry. You may not know how to be a person, but I’m going to teach you how to be something better. You, young one, are going to become a divine being. Pure sixir and sweetness. That will be the secret to your survival. Lessons begin at six in the morning, so you better get some sleep.’
*
I sweated in my sleep that night. Even though the air was acrid with the smell of gun smoke and the sounds of terror, all I could think about was my grandmother’s spirit-detonating solution to my predicament. I did not want to be a ‘divine being.’ I wanted to fully inhabit my humanity, no matter how much I would suffer for asserting my right to be a person in a world which would always find inventive ways to diminish and annihilate me if I wasn’t attentive.
I made a decision in that moment. The canvas of my life would be in miniature, but I would make each detail as polychromatic as possible. To some, smallness is a contraction of scope, but I would transmute this smallness into an expansion of all my concerns. To force vitality through the blocked arteries of constraint would be to assert rapturous self-sovereignty.
I saw dignity in being a bold, dying thing.
*
In the early hours of the morning, before my grandmother had woken up to perform salaat, I carried a bucket of water from the tank and went to the grief garden.
I stood there for a spell, listening to the chilling sounds seeping from the earth, witnessing all the misery this modest patch of greenery had been forced to absorb for years without complaint.
I gently watered the garden, and with each driblet it stopped weeping, until eventually the grief garden was no longer the site of our collective gloom. It was simply a garden, finally given permission to blossom in peace. I wiped a tear from my face and hobbled back into the house.
*
My grandmother and I drove to the beach that afternoon. I used to be a confident swimmer, and the ocean once offered undiluted comfort, but I developed a horror of being near open water after my parents had drowned. Somalia had mutated into a prison cell for them, and they yearned to know what liberation looked and smelled like, so they became boat people, willing to die for a drop of salvation.
For a long time afterwards, my existence distorted into an elastic emptiness which assumed more space than my small body had to offer.
As I sat on the beach, keeping a watchful eye on the waves, my grandmother put her hand on my shoulder.
‘Sweet one, I want you to look around and tell me what you see,’ she said.
‘I see death cosplaying as a leisurely displacement activity,’ I said.
She sat by me. ‘The essence of life is ephemera. All of this beauty and agony, everything which allows us to be here, every celebration and iota of suffering is worth exploring. You get to make the choice to shape-shift without shame, which is to say that you must accept the fact of your impermanence. That is the definition of a lucky life. We were not built to last and the same goes for this tiny blue marble we call home. Now get up and hold my hand.’
I did as I was told.
‘We’re going to stand here, side by side, and face the world together.’
I clung to my grandmother’s hand, which was calloused from a lifetime of labor.
I clung to my grandmother’s hand as someone played Dizzy Gillespie’s rendition of ‘Stardust’ on a crackling radio in the distance, a small reminder of my symphonic good fortune.
I clung to my grandmother’s hand, eyes closed, my pulse on my tongue as sand and salt perfumed the sky, waiting patiently without a speck of fear for the tide to come rushing through.
I was ready to be reborn.
SONG OF THE MOMENT: 'Stardust' by DIZZY GILLESPIE
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