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“We grow anxious and restless without you, my child. One can only go for so long without asking who am I? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? What is being? What came before me, and what might come after? Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities. You don’t know what it’s like, blessed with the rememberings as you are,” said Amaba.
Interesting how one party is envious of another, not realizing the problems the have.
She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.
sometimes I just have no desire to honor your questions with a response.”
Yetu would never be the easy child, nor Amaba the mother to give space.
She didn’t mean to be so cruel, but what else was she to do with the violence inside of her? Better to tear into Amaba than herself, when there was already so little left of her—and what was there was fractured.
“I was cold once,” she said, “and I didn’t like it. I aim never to feel it again.”
“Such madness does exist,” Yetu said, dizzy, her words gobbled up by the eddy she was whirring. “You all made me this way. I carry the burden of remembering so you don’t have to. So acknowledge it, then! That it’s a burden!” Amaba tackled Yetu from above, wrapping her fins around her child’s torso and curling her tail fin around Yetu’s to immobilize it. “Still, child. Still,” she said. “You’re always wanting answers to why I do the things I do, but when I try to give them, you cannot fathom it. Is this my curse? To be unfathomable? Am I even alive anymore? Maybe Yetu is already dead,” said
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Her amaba didn’t want to believe that the things Yetu spoke about the past were true. If they were, what would it say about her as a parent to have consented to her child becoming a vessel of such ugliness?
Who could truly know her when there are no others of her kind?”
This is it. This is the entire book
In the old days, when we discovered a ship that threw our ancestors into the sea like refuse, we sunk it. Now we will sink the world.
we had to say more than just when it was convenient. We cannot understand a people that would willingly choose to cut itself off from its history, no matter what pain it entails. Pain is energy. It lights us. This is the most basic premise of our life. Hunger makes us eat. Tiredness causes us to sleep. Pain makes us avenge.
She touched each one of them, figuring out who each wajinru was outside of the oneness the Remembrance brought. That mattered. Who each of them was mattered as much as who all of them were together.
Yetu ignored her amaba, absorbing more memories. She had thrown away her ancestors. “You didn’t throw them away. You lived. You did what you needed to do to make sure you lived. Our survival honors ancestors more than any tradition,”
Zoti Aleyu wanted the wajinru to be one, together. But they never were. They were two. Historian and her subjects. It was time for the two to be merged.
I AM THANKFUL FOR THE ocean, from which life springs. I am thankful for the ancestors, who lived, which is all any of us can do. And I am thankful for our vast human history, wide and various enough that there are legacies of triumph for every legacy of trauma.
