The Wherewithal of Life - Michael Jackson

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by telling us to clean up her excrement. And by the way, we’re not supposed to come with a hoe or anything, we’re supposed to collect it with our hands—yeah—literally wipe it up like cow dung and then take it out. So as I was hesitating, not wanting to do what she says, she says, ‘Now, Emma, you go and get leaves and come clean me up.’ And by the way, I’m talking about an auntie who is over eighteen years old—she was a big woman, she had boyfriends, we used to take messages to them, so she was an adult, she was not a young kid. So she tells me to clean her, and I think that was the point when I started to think of running away from that place. But what kept me going was the thought of my siblings. The problem was that there was no one I could ask to help. If I told someone, my auntie would get to hear of it, and there would be another war. Anyway, I think she was very good at convincing each and everybody that everything was okay. The problem was that she was almost always the one left to take care of us whenever the others went away. So that was how I got to the point where I could take anything. I didn’t care, didn’t blink. Even today, anything you told me to do, even walk around naked, I would do it without a second thought and come back here, pick up my coffee cup again and be okay.”

      “Did your auntie resent having to look after you and your sister?

      “Probably.”

      “And she had to express that resentment by being unkind to you.”

      “I wouldn’t think so, because, first of all, this is the most strange part of it—when my grandmother wanted to rest or have a free day at home, my aunt actually offered to look after us. If my grandmother was going for a burial or some other event, my aunt would offer to stay behind and keep us. She was never forced to do this. The problem was that no one ever questioned her. She was like a queen in that village. Everyone knew her. No one would believe our word against hers. And so we went on being punished, receiving the same treatment over and over again. She didn’t resent keeping us, no. I think she had this funny feeling of wanting to bully us, and probably because everybody was doing the same thing, she did it too. Ironically, she got pregnant, and then she died eight months into the pregnancy. There was a complication, and she passed away. Even at that moment, I refused to go for the burial. I said, ‘No, I can’t,’ even though it was really bad in our village not to go to a burial. But I didn’t, I didn’t go. And when I left that village in 1984 to stay with my mum, I did not return until 1990, when my grandmother passed away. She was the only person I would go there for, the only reason that would take me back there. Her death was the last time I went to that village, until 2007, when Nanna wanted to see the village. I went with her. Even then, they did not want us there, and I have extremely bad feelings whenever I go down there. Extremely bad feelings.” Emmanuel interrupted his narrative and called to Alice Maria, “Are you okay?” Maria responded in Danish. She was fine. But I couldn’t help remarking the connection between his sudden concern for Maria and his painful recollections of Peter and Mariam. And for a fleeting moment I asked myself whether Emmanuel’s spontaneous responsiveness to the ordeal of his siblings—answering the summons of their suffering, as it were, and suffering the eclipse of himself on their behalf—exemplified the ethical responsiveness of which Levinas spoke.

      “So the punishment went on, and the worst of it was not what happened to me but what happened to my young siblings. I didn’t want anybody to touch them. Even when we went to school, the worst part was that we got separated. I went to one school and they went to another, and that almost killed me. I did not want to go to a different school, I wanted to stay with my younger siblings. I was not strong. I almost gave up. I ran away from home, from my grandmother’s place. I took off. I walked and walked and ended up in somebody’s home, where I started cleaning the house. I didn’t know them, but I cleaned their home anyway. They asked me where I’m from. I didn’t want to tell them, because I was scared they would send me back, just like that.

      “It was from that period that I stopped being immobile, I stopped being home. That’s the time I realized that if life got too hard for me, I had the alternative to leave.”

      When Emmanuel got up from the table to talk to Maria again, I asked myself whether this was what people do in an impasse, with all passages blocked. Desperate to recover some sense of freedom in mobility, they hit the road. Had the seeds of this solution been planted in Emmanuel’s mind when, as a small child, he learned of his father’s flight from Rwanda, and later, when his family fled the Iteso region where they had no right to be, no way of making a viable life?

      Emmanuel returned to the table and apologized for the interruption.

      “Were you in school during that period?” I asked. “That period when you were moving from place to place?”

      “No, no, I wasn’t in school.”

      “When you said before that you were not strong, what did you mean?”

      “I was not strong enough to protect Peter and Mariam.”

      “From what?”

      “From the bullying at their school. But I developed a sense, a trick or ability to make friends, and I started making friends that I thought could help protect my brother and sister. I started finding ways of getting friendly with the bullies, so they could actually save my brother and sister, or let them be. And I also developed a trick of making friends at the school where I went, because it was the only way.”

      “What was the trick?”

      “The trick was complicated, rough, but to me it was very simple. I stole some of the things that we came with from Tanzania, things we came with that were very rare in the village. I stole them from home. My trousers, the shirts we were not allowed to wear because we would look strange in the village. I would carry them, hide them, and take them to the bullies so I could buy them off.”

      “Wow.”

      “Yeah, I literally bought them off, you know. Things like spoons, the things we had before we came to Bugisu. I gave them out, and mum has never recovered them, even now.”

      “But she must have known they were disappearing.”

      “In the beginning, no, because they were locked away, and she was never there. So I had a way of breaking the box on the side. I could pull out one thing at a time and take it to buy off those people. It was the only way I could survive the bullying. I bought them off with those small things we got when we left the village where my father disappeared. And I did the same thing to help protect my brother and sister, right up to the time we all left my mum’s village and went to the same primary school.”

      “When was that?

      “Around 1984. My mum was still working as a cleaner in Mbale, and she had met our stepfather, who was a primary school teacher in that area. We all moved to where he lived, and he encouraged me to go back to school, even though I had to begin again at primary five. Most kids were starting secondary school at my age, but I was far behind. The prime of my life, I lost it. But my stepfather helped me with my English, so now I began to understand most of the things the teachers were saying. Although he is my stepfather, we have always called him father—so my father got me tutoring with other teachers, for other courses, and I ended up performing quite well with that assistance, so when I reached primary seven, I was under his wing and he tutored me, trained me, and we became very close. It is in that period that my mum got pregnant and had twins, though one of the twins passed away. He had a hole in his heart, and at that time, of course . . . money, issues of knowledge, and so on . . . we didn’t know that could actually be repaired. So David passed away, though Paul is still there, our sixth in the family. That is why we say we are six. So I became a babysitter for Paul as well as the others. I was very good at looking after children, and Barbara and Paul grew up without much age difference between them. They became my kids, and I paid their school fees right up to the time they finished their schooling. Even when I started working and came to Denmark, I continued paying their fees.”

      “Can I backtrack a little and ask you to talk more about the changes you experienced when you moved from your mother’s village to live with your stepfather in Mbale?”

      “For two years, from primary five to primary seven, I hardly ever got punished for anything.

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