We live everywhere: half-mooned inside the trunks of coconut trees, pearled in the orange glare of a stray cat’s eye, caught in the diesel from a matatu’s exhaust, coughed up thick and black. We are the brown of wilted jasmine petals, the lone yellow scale on a green mamba snake, the deep pink of freshly cut flesh. We line the insides of mothers’ bellies, tracing the shape of unborn children with our curious fingers, teaching them how to kick. You people do not see us; we are an unseen thing. We are the kinds of shadows that do not need a sun to make us. You may call us curses or jinn or ghosts, because you people use names to contain. As if you can contain us. God made us from smokeless fire where he made you from wet earth. Sometimes you can feel us pressing warm questions against you in the night, in dreams or in the walls, speaking through another’s mouth (a dead aunty, a lover, an exiled sister). Sometimes we are the softest part of a grandmother's palm. Sometimes the only thing holding her together. We can be big too: we push the seasons apart with formless hands, cut dry and wet heat into two parts of a year, using palm tree leaves as blades in the sky. Look for us there, where the season opens. We are here, in the heat. We are the heat of Mombasa itself. We are humid: water suspended like a prayer. And because we fill the shape of our containers, we go where there is space to fill. We press our non-bodies against absence. We live in the absence of love, especially; we bloom there to hide or keep a soul. We live in all the children who cannot be in their bodies. Here is the story of one of those children. His name was Abedi.
Let it be a lesson to human mothers.
//
When Abedi was about to be born, he received a message from God telling him to pray his body away. What God had actually said was closer to hurry up and get out, but Abedi only had the brain of an unborn child, and though he knew prayer, he could only understand leaving his mother’s belly as death or disintegration, so of course he misinterpreted.
His mother, Amina, was tired of carrying him. Ten months: he had not wanted to leave. You see, Abedi was scared. Some children come into this world – your world – with fear already knotted into their nerves, because let us tell you, they can hear you. They learn and store the way you people talk in their soft-boned fingers before they even know where voices come from. And Abedi heard, more than once. We were there. He would bump up against the wet wall of Amina’s bellyhouse, hearing snatches of I'm going to beat sense into that child or Jamani these girls are devils or even Whose son is this? Not mine! As far as Abedi was concerned, he was the only child in the world, so all these threats and names had to be about him. As he grew inside Amina, coiled up like a stunted sun, Abedi learned that he was a child, a girl, a devil, a son. He understood that these things were bad and that people would punish him for being them. So he was scared and refused to come out. Of course! It made sense to him, then, that God would tell him to get rid of his body, because why keep such a punishable thing? It was a mercy, really: disappear before they can bruise you. So Abedi tried to disappear. He clenched his whole self like a fist, turning hard against the uterus, which gave Amina her first real pain. He willed all his flesh to reverse into nothing. That was his first real prayer. He felt his round toes go first, then his legs. The thing between his legs disappeared and he almost breathed in relief but didn’t for fear of drowning. His middle gone, his shoulders, his neck, until the only thing left was his head. Abedi kept his focus, squeezing his mother a new kind of hurt (imagine a skull solidifying itself inside of you, but harder). Then his head, gone. Finally, he thought in his very own first words, I am dead.
Thus Abedi was born feet-first in prostration, body prayer-folded, head bowed to God in a furious plea. Mashallah, the voices around him chorused, ringing clear and sharp like meat skewers. What a good name we’ve given him. Welcome, Abedi, Worshipper.
//
The L-shaped room Abedi slept in with his mother smelled like human habits: faint traces of last night’s oud, clean panties air-drying after being washed in the sink, the sickly sweet scent of pink bottle hair cream. It had two small windows, one facing east and one facing north, and it jutted out of the house like a dislocated shoulder. Each night, Abedi would sit on the bed next to Amina while she prayed maghrib. To her, he was attached, maybe curious; to us, who’d been with him since behind the belly-wall, he was studying, understanding. All of it was information: the angle, the sound, even the smell of prayer. When Amina put her forehead to the ground in sujjud, Abedi would hop down and orbit her on the prayer mat, measuring the perimeter of her prostration. He’d climb onto her back to observe and assess the world from a new angle. A prayer-angle. A God-view. Amina would try to shake his little body off, flattening her laughter between her molars. But Abedi was trying to understand where God was, where he should direct his prayer. Was God atop his mother’s head? In front of her floor-kissed hands? In the impossible space between her callused forehead and the prayer mat? Beneath her feet? Heaven lies beneath the feet of your mother, Abedi had been told repeatedly since birth, so he had assumed God must live there. But he’d inspected the roughness of Amina’s soles and not found a trace of his Lord. Where to find that voice, which had first reached him in the womb? The mouth of the Most High? That Most-Languaged Mouth?
Abedi chose to perform his first formal prayer at five years old, after a year of studying his mother, though she had not planned to teach him until he was six. For the occasion, Abedi picked two matching lesos from Amina’s overstuffed closet, a pair of green ones with white and orange flowers. The proverb printed on them read: Pendo ni kitu cha hiari. Love is out of choice. We watched him wrap himself in them the way he’d seen his mother do: one tied high around his waist, the other coiled around his face, letting the extra length drape over his body like a tent or a dress. He waddled over to Amina’s prayer mat in his sea of fabric, imagining what it would be like to open into that place where God’s mouth had first reached him. He went over the questions he might ask in his head: God, how does prayer work? God, why did you make me be born in the end? God, it’s not that I’m unhappy with life. But my bones are heavy. Why am I such a heavy child?
Amina did not see the child at first, given the shape of the room. She smiled slightly when she noticed a small girl on the prayer mat, swimming head-to-toe in some grown-sized green lesos, trying earnestly to pray. Facing entirely the wrong direction. Whose girl is this? Amina wondered, and the child looked up at her.
Perhaps we should have intervened - made a door creak, a pillow fall, a window open to the mixed howls of the wind and mad dogs. But we were transfixed on the shape of Amina’s slow shock; the way her mindworld cracked as she recognized her son’s eyes in the little girl’s head. We slid, curious like air, into that crack. Her thoughts looked something like this: What are Abedi’s eyes doing here? In the face of a little girl? In fact, what are his coconut cheeks and gap-toothed mouth doing there? The cut in his upper lip from falling just two days ago? Aki, who took my son’s whole face and gave it to some strange girlchild? And who taught this child to pray? She stared at the child (and we stared through her eyes) and the child stared at her. They looked so intently that they became one-another, that for a minute or a life Abedi was Amina and Amina was Abedi; they bent time between them like that.
Then: Take those off. Though she said it with a flat face and did not appear angry, the words were so sharp they chipped us on their way out. We left the jagged inside of Amina’s head and settled into the still air of the L-shaped room. Abedi, she said like she had a sunflower seed stuck in her teeth, the name sour and unwanted, only girls wear leso when they pray.
Thus Abedi was five years old when he first left his body. God, we heard from somewhere near us, somewhere no fleshed finger could touch, please make me disappear. Try again to make me disappear. God, why won’t you show me how to do it? God i pray to disappear this body. God i pray to disappear this body. Godipraytodisappearthisbodyipraytodisappearthisbody.
//
For years Abedi suffered in his skin. Sometimes the pain would become pointed and violent, in his forehead or his belly-button or between his legs, and he’d have no choice but to try and remove it by force. Once, it collected in his hand, and the limb shook with such force that it buzzed and became purple, like an oversized insect. His nerves became the barbed wire that wealthy people grew instead of grass around their houses. He willed and willed it to stop; the flesh would not cooperate. One of his aunties, who was sweet but forgetful and missing three teeth in her plum- like face, had left a deep-bellied sufuria on the kitchen counter full of boiling water. Abedi, desperate, climbed onto the counter and plunged his hand straight into the water. Needless to say, the hand was useless after that. He could not hold it firmly enough to even grasp goat meat, let alone mix it with rice or kachumbari and guide it into his mouth. Eventually he learned to eat with his left hand, which the family understood as a surefire sign of a curse: the left hand is the one you wipe your shit with, the dirty hand, the one only Sheitan uses to eat and drink. The devil is sharing food with him, Abedi’s kin would say as he learnt to nourish himself the only way he could.
Amina did not know what was happening to her child, only that every week he had a new wound, that something seemed to be crawling its way out of him. When Abedi turned seven, she took him to see the local sheikh. This one had a reputation for seeing into the hiding places of God’s unseen things, the same reason he had a reputation for being mad. She hoped that the sheikh would identify a curse so that it could be removed. What a human thing to do: anything that scares you in a child, call it a curse. Anything to avoid looking at the dirt under your own fingernails, the blood crusting into patterns on your own palms.
Sheikh Ali did not have a house of his own: he slept on the floor of the mosque, which was a hundred green prayer mats tiled together, with the other homeless men. At night the ceiling fans breathed noisily on their bodies, sputtering grime every now and then like snot, but it was better than being outside. The sheikh’s diet subsisted on the oily grace of Mma Kauthar, the woman running the shop on the far side of the road, who offered him the unsold viazi of the day in exchange for seeing something like a dead sister, a stray curse hiding in a necklace she’d found, or her husband’s real reason for coming home after maghrib even though he was jobless and useless. And he did see, with our help. We liked Sheikh Ali, we wanted him fed. So we peeled back that milky layer on his eyeball, which God placed on all human eyes to organize His realities, to stop your small heads from splitting open with knowledge.
When Abedi and Amina arrived at the mosque, whose turmeric-yellow paint was wrinkling on its walls, the sheikh smiled at them with yellow teeth to match. Abedi liked him immediately. The three of them left their shoes at the entrance, made du’a to ward off street thieves, and sat down together on the floor of the mosque. Sheikh Ali held Abedi’s right hand like cracked ceramic, assessing its damage. We slipped into his left pupil and made things clear. Ala, he said, face falling somewhere between grief and knowing. Abedi, he said to the child. The name held no warning, no sourness, no sideways-ness for once. Abedi deserved that. There are generations of fear manifesting in your body. This happens sometimes, he said, turning to Amina out of prudence, when a child is born late. He has learned too much about the world, about people, before coming into it. So he is afraid. Or rather, there is a fear making itself known through him. Hope knocking at her teeth, Amina asked if this was a fear of God, because this would mean he was already pious to the point of it twisting his body. (Let us remind you, Abedi was six.) Sheikh Ali shook his head. This is a fear only humans can make. It comes back every now and then with a new face. It’s not his, but he’s inherited it. It’s not a jinn, not a curse. It’s a fear that was made by and belongs to your family. I'm sorry. Every family has theirs. He did what he could with it. He looked at the child’s boiled hand, how the skin spilled from it in greys and browns like a loose garment. Abedi. God tells us that our bodies do not belong to us. Si ndio? Human bodies are borrowed, only borrowed. Everything: our hearts, our livers, the tunnels spiraled inside our ears: we owe them to God. Like a debt. We will all give them back somehow, someday. So for whatever lives inside - for you, this thing that wants to come out - the body is just a temporary house. Because these things do not belong to us. They were made by others. You get? Abedi stared at the green carpet like he was trying to parse the fibers with his eyes. I’m saying your body does not belong to you, the sheikh said as kindly as you can say that kind of thing, but the fear, the suffering, is also not yours.
//
The final time that Abedi left his body, he was twelve and helping his aunty fry kaimati with his good hand in the jiko outside the house. Both pairs of arms danced with matching freckles of oil, glinting dew-like in the midday sun. The thick January heat, which we breathed into rivers of sweat down both their backs, muffled everything around them, including sound and color: the green rustle of palm leaves, the yellow yelps of schoolchildren, the tar-black noise of tuk-tuks picking up passengers by the road. Between two oil spits, the aunty teased Abedi about marriage. What kind of wife do you want us to find for you? Abedi shrugged, muttered something only we heard. The three gaps in his aunty’s upper gum greeted him giddily. Kwani what, you haven’t seen any girls? Abedi had seen them. You don’t like them? She was joking, only joking. This was not a real question; Abedi was not to answer. But he did. Listen now: something grew sideways in his aunty’s face, something that did not need a voice to sharpen it, to make its meat-skewer glint flash white in the sun. It was the same sideways thing that had grown in his mother’s face, that had soured his name in her mouth, the thing that had made him delay his own birth.
The fear came back so fast it knocked Abedi out of his body like a loose bone, and he rattled down onto the ground. When he looked up, he saw what had just been his body towering over him. From this angle, he thought he looked strong and square, something a woman would surely marry. So he left his body like that, swimming shadowlike around its ankles just to guide it kidogo, like pushing a gasless car. Because it was empty, we filled it. After some weeks, people started peppering his mother with compliments: look at how your son is now carrying himself! His stomach bears the shape of success, his spine lengthens like an inheritance, his jaw grows sharp, just wide enough to suck discipline out of the necks of his future children -- and he’ll do it well one day, God willing! They saw the outline of a man stretching out from his child-body, finally. Abedi was happy to give his mother that, to gift her and his family his body like that, without him in it. We liked the game of being inside it, of making sure his eyes kept some aliveness. He savored it too, when he could, from down there in its shadow: the words that spiced the body like sugar when they felt good and slid off when they didn’t, the way words seem to slide off most men.
Years went by and Abedi stayed there: not in his body but somewhere formless around its ankles, biting into them now and then just to remember that it was his, to mark his presence still somewhere on its form. The family sometimes questioned why the body’s ankles were so raw, but left it at boys being boys. Abedi braided himself into this otherworld, this unbodied world close to the grains of sand and the wet in the air and far from the language of wives and men. Our world. He found his reflection in dewdrops on blades of tallgrass, made friends with the dust molecules that huddled and kissed in the corners of the kitchen, followed the mosquitoes along the walls of the house, through the holed bed-nets, and traced his family’s cheeks at night; he swam between the blue fibers of Amina’s prayer-mat, which held him softly, and curled up there sometimes to sleep. He learned the gentleness of being near the world, inside its ear, beyond the barrier of the body. He grew used to seeing things from this angle, understanding what unseen things already knew: that there was space in the world. Worlds that did not require a body to read, a name to sour. He understood this as a kind of love and grew hungry for it. As the family continued to marvel at the body he’d abandoned, how this now sixteen-year-old boy was straightening into a man, Abedi reached farther and farther away for that elsewhere, otherwise love.
But his mother was his mother, which meant that she knew Abedi was not there. She missed him and the missing itself was information. Abedi was gone. She did not know where to look. She prayed and cried and prayed. She made a shrine to her lost child: two green lesos folded on the windowsill facing east, so that the first thing the sun painted each morning was that proverb: love is out of choice. She asked God to bring back the quiet curve of Abedi’s spine, the brown water in his eyes, the prayer in his feet, the music, the shoulders that arched down sweetly from his neck, his neck a river, the soft inside of his knee, the moth-like ears that fluttered beside his head like they were flying off to something they wanted. Abedi had left his body and taken those things with him, leaving a dried-up husk, a husk safe from being questioned or pried open because it had already been emptied. This is sometimes what it takes to satisfy a human family. Had he not left, Abedi would have been opened by force. Amina understood that. She missed him terribly; she accepted his absence. These two things coexisted like sour siblings.
//
On the unseasonably cool night that Abedi turned nineteen and left for good, when he really left – packed his body with him into a spray-painted matatu, then a foreign-built train that choked on its own crooked railway, and then a twelve-hour economy flight out of the continent – Amina was not surprised. Abedi had been gone long before this; the least she could do was to realize that. She had felt his absence stretching for years. In her belly, then in the world. That night, in the middle hours, Abedi left a gaping hole in Mombasa, and we stretched the wind over it like a bandage.
After Abedi said goodbye, using his real Abedi lips in his real Abedi face to kiss Amina’s almond cheek for the first time in almost a decade, Amina walked back into the house with feet weighing an ocean. She made her way into the L-shaped room, which was now empty as a vein. The night was cool, at least, that was the gift we gave her: cutting the heat open, letting the night whistle its music again. Amina stood in front of the green lesos on the windowsill, whose white and orange flowers seemed to have wilted in the moonlight. Love is out of choice, they told her. She remembered the last time that proverb had blessed a body. A child. Her child. Trying, like her, to pray.
Amina missed Abedi’s eyes in that little girl’s head.
She wished she had sat down and taught her.
Contributor Notes
iman adam is a Mombasa-born writer and artist who does not believe in borders. They are currently getting their MFA at Rutgers-Newark, where they are working on a novel about the ocean, exile, and (great-)grandmothers. iman’s work can be found in Apogee Journal and Lolwe Magazine.
