Excerpt: "I was walking off a cliff blindfolded."
An excerpt from No Single Sparrow Makes A Summer
Despite everyone’s eagerness to land their feet in the Land of the Free, I felt unsure. I wasn’t certain about what was waiting for me across the oceans. I felt like I was walking on a cliff blindfolded. As I saw my siblings smiling with ease, I thought about how clueless they were about everything. Weren’t they going to miss the familiar faces they’d known and grown comfortable with?
We eventually got a letter officially granting us passage to America. We were getting close. But the letter only listed my mom’s name and the names of all of us children. No mention of Dad or Grandma. Mom called the agency and they explained that since Dad and Grandma had not moved to Kenya at the same time the rest of us had, they could not travel to the U.S. at the same time as us.
A moment like this was supposed to be the beginning of my happily ever after. Wasn’t that what everyone around me used to say? Maybe that wasn’t the way my world worked or perhaps the way the world worked at all. I could not stop the clouds that rained sorrow down on me. Was I afraid to leave what I was accustomed to, or was it the fact that my father and grandmother couldn’t go with us that disturbed me? Maybe I was lucky to have something that made saying goodbye so hard. I was overwhelmed with the feeling of losing something valuable, the feeling that what I once cherished was starting to feel like a memory, a shadow lingering in my mind.
My parents disguised everything that was flawed from my siblings and me. They told us, “Everything is alright. We are happy and so should you be.” But I could see beneath their masks. How my father’s brown eyes shifted to the sides and glazed whenever my siblings talked about leaving. How he would smile—not the kind that exposed his silver canine but the kind that made the corner of his lips tug downward as if tinged with a bit of gloom. Part of me wanted my siblings to know the truth, to pop their little bubble of glee and show them what was happening behind the curtains. But I didn’t. Because I wished I hadn’t popped mine, I wished that leaving wouldn’t put a sour flavor in my mouth.
--Hafsa Jama, author
Pictured above: The Woman Ahead, a self-portrait linocut print by the author