The Jard and the Birth Certificate

AUNT SABRIYA had gone into the city on some errands, but when she came back on that ill-fated day she found the Slave Yards completely different from the way she’d left it. It was going up in flames! Crazed by the sight, she dropped the broad beans and chickpeas she’d brought for us and came running.

What was happening? There was no explanation ready at hand. We were so shocked and confused at first, all we could do was take things in with our eyes. Then word got around that the government authorities were trying to stamp out the plague that had been ravaging the country, and their way of going about it was to set fire to entire neighborhoods where the disease had broken out. Death was on a rampage, and unless they took drastic measures, it threatened to destroy their colony.

It wasn’t water or wind this time, but fire that was destroying everything in its path. The blacks of the Yards met the situation with a river of tears as wide and deep as the sea. As for Benghazi, it absorbed the smoke from behind its towering wall in a stony, grave silence.

People were swarming like ants around the entrances to the Yards, none of them taking any notice of my aunt. In an apocalyptic scene like that one, you’ll hardly notice yourself. Undaunted by the soldiers stationed around the ghetto, Aunt Sabriya shoved them back, screaming, “Let me in, damn you! I’ve got to get the jard and the birth certificate!”

With an agonized wail, she tore past the soldiers, and all we could see of her was her dusty bare feet and her gray wrap fluttering behind her. When Giuseppe tried to run after her, the head of the mission held him back, reminding him that the people inside were afflicted with the plague.

“Don’t pour kerosene on the entrances!” Aunt Aida screamed at the soldiers. “She’s coming back out!”

She pleaded with a high-ranking army officer and a doctor with a Red Cross badge on his arm. But the doctor just shook his head as if to say, “There’s nothing I can do!” and lowered her hands off him with a sorrowful look. As for the officer, he refused to withdraw his orders, and they were carried out by a soldier standing nearby with a tin of kerosene in his hand. Pouring the fuel along the entrance, he prepared to close off the last remaining section of the Yards with a wall of fire. That was when I realized I was losing Aunt Sabriya in this blazing inferno. In a wild panic, I started scattering dirt over the ground in an attempt to keep it from bursting into flames. Giuseppe rushed over and started heaping dirt with me on top of the kerosene that had been poured out on the ground. Aunt Aida and other Negroes did the same, while others made a rush to start scooping water out of the sea with whatever containers they could find in a desperate, doomed attempt to save their homes. Yard residents poured in from all directions to put out the blaze. We worked ourselves to exhaustion, but the fire kept on as strong as ever. Giuseppe took hold of my arm and started pulling me back, his hands stiff and hard, my body heavy as a corpse.

Aunt Aida went on fighting the soldiers, screaming at both them and a black interpreter who worked for the plague-extermination campaign. As they pushed her away, she told the interpreter to tell them that the woman who had pushed past them into the Yards was healthy, and hadn’t been stricken with the plague.

“Tell them she’s gone in to get her savings and that she’ll be right back! Please, just give her a few more minutes—don’t burn her alive!!”

But nobody paid any attention to her. They just started herding the exhausted people onto wagons like disease-infested livestock, threatening to shoot them if they refused to go into quarantine in Jalyana. We felt more desperate and hopeless than ever now. Letting out what sounded like a primal scream, Aida started beating her breast and tearing her clothes. The things happening around her were driving her mad. Even so, she had the presence of mind to look around for me, and when she found me she had a terrifying gleam in her eye. Grabbing me hard by my shoulder, she wrenched me out of the mental vacuum I was in and, grapping me away from Giuseppe, headed me back toward the Yards while everybody else was going in the opposite direction. I couldn’t believe Aunt Sabriya had actually been trapped in the flames, and I was delirious too. My eyes darted back and forth in the thick smoke, hoping against hope for some miracle that would bring her back to me. All I could see anymore was a giant inferno that was devouring everything in sight, and I had a feeling her lungs, which were weak to begin with, would give out before the flames reached her.

In that moment, when it seemed that everything and everybody was burning up, I came to a realization that turned my life upside down. Aunt Aida was in as much shock as I was. Then suddenly she blurted out, “Cry for the woman who’ll never come back. Cry for your mother. Cry for your mother!”

Giuseppe had run after us and was trying to rescue me from her grip.

“Sabriya is your mother, not your aunt!” she screamed. “She’s your mother, not your aunt! And her real name is Tawida!”

Some soldiers beat her with the butts of their rifles, warning her to get away, since she was hindering their mission to exterminate the plague. Desperate now, Giuseppe pulled me away again and hid my face in his chest to keep me from seeing any more. So now I really was an orphan. I’d lost my foundation in life at the very moment when I’d discovered what and who it was. It wasn’t until I lost my mother that I found out she’d been by my side all along. She’d hidden herself in order to hide me, to spare me harm and protect me from the evil that people might do to me. It was my own mother who had braved so many fires for my sake, the last of which she’d walked into in order to rescue my father’s written acknowledgment that I was his daughter. The statement had been backed up by his jard—his traditional Libyan cloak, and a symbol of his honor and integrity. As I wept and wailed, Giuseppe held me in his arms, agonizing with me over my loss, in shock like me over what Aida had just said. He told the head of the medical mission that he was going to take me to the wagon he’d be riding in.

As I called out to my mother for the first time just as I was losing her, my misery was beyond description. The very thing I’d come to know I didn’t really know at all, or at least I didn’t understand it.

Was this the work of human beings or divine foreordainment?

Whatever it was, Giuseppe didn’t leave my side. As we got into the wagon, he explained, “They’re going to take us to a place where we all have to take baths and be disinfected, and they’ll get rid of all our clothes and things.”

At first he cried along with me, but then he got hold of himself. As he laid my head on his shoulder, I felt a crazy person leaving my body and running back to the Yards.

As if he could see what was happening, he shouted, “Don’t look! Don’t look!”

I was reliving the legacy of my mother’s ancestors, who’d been enslaved by my ancestors on the other side. I shut my eyes tight so I wouldn’t have to see others die, which would have killed me too.

That was the day I cried, “Yamma! Mama!” for the first time in my life. “Mama, don’t leave me! Mama, come back! Mama, don’t go!”

The last thing I saw of the Yards’ tragedy was thick black smoke that obscured both earth and sky. The air was filled with the stench of humans and animals being roasted alive. The spirit of my mother, who hadn’t been afflicted with the plague, was suffocating. Like the others who had been imprisoned by the flames, she’d been alive when the authorities poured kerosene over the huts and set them alight with everything and everyone in them. Like them, she’d been created from blackness, and to blackness she had returned.

As I clung in tears to the remains of the vision, I saw my mother floating into the sky. She stepped among the straw huts and tinplate shacks, heading for the sea to do laundry and scrub down floor mats. Then she disappeared, the way little girls would disappear with mysterious beings and never be seen again. That was the first and last time I uttered the word Yamma, but my mother—or “Aunt Sabriya,” as she’d always had me call her as a way of protecting both of us—didn’t hear it. There are no words to express the sorrow and regret I felt at that moment!

At the Josephite Mission Center, some nuns injected me with a tranquilizer. I think I slept for days from the shock of my loss. Every now and then I’d lift my head for a moment, then go straight back into my coma. That might have been the best thing for me, since it gave me a rest from the pain. When I’d open my eyes and see the white nuns in their spotless habits flitting about me, I knew I was breathing, but no more than that. They would smile kindly, hold my hand, and talk to me, as though the only reason for me to open my eyes was to receive those smiles. Then I’d drift back into my extended swoon.

I knew Giuseppe was with me. He made a point of checking on the people he’d known from the Yards, though most of them weren’t alive anymore. He looked for Aunt Aida to find out more about the things she’d kept hidden from me. He told me that after people’s grief had subsided, they were planning to go back to the Yards to pray over their dead and give their remains a proper Islamic burial. After that, he said, the Italian government was going to build them a new camp.

The Yards were gone, but they still lived inside us.

Giuseppe told them he’d go with them. He wanted to try to figure out where our tinplate shack had been so that he could bring me anything he found of it. Realizing what a useless question it was, he asked me hesitantly, “What would you like me to bring you from there?”

The Yards had been my life. It could never disappear. It could never burn up. So what could Giuseppe bring me from there that I didn’t already have inside me?

When he saw me start to cry and wipe my tears, he hung his head. I was lying on a tidy bed in a room painted with white lime. Apart from the bed, the room contained nothing but a small table and a big cross that hung on the opposite wall. I saw the faces of three Italian nuns who were all talking with Giuseppe. I’d never seen a place like it before. I could hear them talking about me, but the only part of me that seemed to be present was my poor little body that had grown up in a Negro slum. I was young, and an orphan, and I’d lost everything, so my life was going to be especially difficult from here on out.

“Where will she go after she comes out of her coma?” I heard somebody ask.

That question, which I heard over and over as the nuns talked beside me, whether among themselves or with Giuseppe, kept echoing in my head, lurking in a distant corner of my spirit, or running like a hungry animal toward its prey whenever the pain of loss came over me again.

“Poor thing! No mother, no father, no family!”

It wasn’t just the loss of my aunt, who’d actually been my mother, but the Yards and all it had meant to me: my childhood, my work, my aunts, my girlfriends, the sea, the giant sand sieve, love, song and dance, tears, the slave who used to tell us our fortunes and reveal what was approaching from afar, and the one-of-a-kind Bouga. After Bouga died and her body was examined by an Italian autopsy specialist who sold corpses to the Faculty of Medicine in Rome, he said, “This heart, my friend, which looks as though it belonged to a sheep, came out of a legendary human being!”

At first I thought Miftah had been spared the sight of what happened on that black day. And in fact, he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. But he wasn’t spared the grief it brought in its wake. He would guess where our tinplate shack had been and go to that spot. He would sit there alone, glued to the ground, and cry, not wanting anybody to comfort him.

On the morning of his wedding day, Miftah disappeared. Figuring where I could probably find him, I got in the wagon with Giuseppe and we took off for the seaside. I glimpsed him in the distance, dressed in the traditional costume Libyan men wear on their wedding day. He was sitting with his head between his knees, and when we came up closer, I heard him telling my mother he was about to get married and that he’d miss her at his wedding. He told her he’d do everything he’d promised he would: that he’d name his first daughter after her, make the pilgrimage to Mecca on her behalf, and never abandon me.

As we came closer, I could hear him crying. When I came up and hugged him, he burst into sobs. With tears streaming down his face, he said, “I miss her, sister! I miss her!!”

I am the legacy of those who didn’t look at their dead, who closed their eyes so that they wouldn’t see death’s cruelty, leaving them open just enough to let their tears escape.

I’m the plant that was watered by those tears.