Sahara Dust
TW: Domestic violence, abuse, rape.
In 2018, of the 516 murders in Trinidad and Tobago, 47 were women and 13 were children. Only 6 of the murdered women were “gang related”. 137 women around the globe were killed everyday by intimate partners or relatives. According to the 2018 report on the killing of women and girls released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, about 87,000 were killed worldwide in 2017. 58 per cent of them, victims of domestic and family abuse. Many of these deaths could have been prevented. This short story, is in remembrance to them.
Years later people would they couldn’t tell you what happened except it was something to do with the Sahara dust.
It was a hellova sight. An opaque low cloud as if brocade had disintegrated along the middle passage, blown itself into that apricot coloured shimmering shape of Africa.
It certainly sent Roses out into the rush hour traffic as if it had the answers to something. That led to her being her trapped into the gridlock of the cars reflecting waves of metallic molten light into the air.
Some people said it gave them dry skin and cracked lips. Some even went blind. Not Roses. It was the way she felt, that the dust-laden winds from the Sahara desert were bringing her comfort from a home that nobody in these damn islands in this New World could give her anymore.
It was not a memory exactly for nobody knew where in Africa she came from.
Like everyone else there were some things she blocked out of her mind, because it was too painful because people said, black people should just move past it, just act like 20 million Africans weren’t brutally transported to the new world.
That knowledge of a great great great great great grandparent on a cargo boat, naked, chained tightly to plank beds, shackled to others like them, on floorboards that would wear their elbows down to the bone. That daily brutality, of an ancestor dying from yellow fever and malaria of being thrown overboard, dead, sometimes, half dead.
She wanted to remember them long before emancipation before that. When they were home, somewhere in Africa with traditions, languages, way of life, thousands of years deep, when their souls were intact.
Today she came to meet them, to breathe the air of her ancestors on Wrightson Road where a plume shimmied through the sea, like champagne and settled above the traffic jam.
There was nowhere to go but inside her head. There she allowed herself to think of her husband. One year back he called her at work .“I love you, you sweet sweet thing” he said, “I love you more”, she said to the man she loved in a way that would never depend on anything he was or did, on his virtues or flaws.
Another voice replied. It belonged to a woman. “Oh I love you back, oh so much. I cant start to count the ways.”
Roses put her phone on speaker. She heard her husbands voice saying “I wish I didn’t have to leave you.” The woman voice. “You don’t.” “I do” said her husband,. “You see, Roses cant live without me. I don’t know why she loves me so much.” “I know, “ said the woman, come here.” Then more moaning and something that sounded like the cry of seagulls, wailing into the sky, about the sadness of the world, about each of us, craving love, not getting it.
She felt as if a bag of cement had been thrown at her chest. Still she didn’t put down the phone. She stayed on the phone through the long goodbye, the sighs, scrounging for scattered clothes, his quick steps, the sound of the ignition.
Then, him saying “Shit, Roses, you? How long you been on the phone baby? “
She hung up quietly then.
She hadn’t been able to leave. And she hadn’t been able to stay. She had tried drugs, she had tried God, she had tried sleep, she had tried alcohol .
Now, here she was in this traffic jam. She came for this Sahara dust, for the source. Senegambia, Upper Guinea, Windward Coast, Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, West Central Arica, Southeastern Africa help me. The places before the calamity.
She felt a heat in her body, unnassauaged by the air-condition of her Mercedes Benz.
Her shoes were tight, Her bra was tight. She could not breathe. She stopped the car. She got out of the car.
Gita, whose car was directly behind Roses, was also looking up at the sky. Pink sky she thought. In this heat, she was cold. Her sister Sita and her always felt the same thing.
When they were little, growing up in a small make shift shed opposite Curepe junction with their mother, they knew simultaneously that it was time to go out and play until the man was finished with their mother.
They both skipped, in the same way on either side of their mother when she would the money from her work, crumpled up one dollar notes sometimes, and head straight to the bakery.
They would eat bread right there, ripping apart the bag, not caring if they were in anybody’s way, shoving the warm bread in their mouths.
They would smile till their cheeks hurt, the three of them, until their bellies were full.
From the compound, she and her sister stared at children in uniform on the road going to school but knew they were not born into that world, of running water, of food in fridges, of a father.
They had their mother, and one another, and a loaf of hot bread, sometimes, a can of corned beef from the parlour with a sweet drink.
Eventually, they left the compound with the shacks for the country with a proper concrete house, a place where water would come through the taps. A room for the man and their mother and another the two of them.
The man took it turns there, to bathe her sister, and her, and soon enough he had his fingers all over them. She felt her sisters terror and her sister felt hers. She didn’t know where she, Gita ended and where her sister, Sita began.
He did the same to both of them. First the fingers, then his penis, taking turns. They both ran away on the day they saw him dragging their mother by the hair on a sheet on the street, for going with another man.
They ran and ran and ran, until some people found them and put them in an orphanage, taught them how to survive. By the time their mother died of pneumonia, nobody wanted to say AIDS, Gita took to hairdressing. Sita got pregnant by the caretaker of the orphanage and went to live with him in town.
The men came around Sita like dogs, as they had done with their mother. Sita’s caretaker man got so jealous he regularly beat her. Gita called the police. After Sita got an injunction on him that’s when he threw her hard at the concrete wall, cracking her skull in two.
Now Sita, lying in that tray in the morgue was cold. So it was natural she Gita, too, would feel the same.
Gita sat, shivering in the car looking at Roses appear in the wave of light in front of a line cars in gridlock on the street.
Rhonda was in the front seat of the car facing Roses, in a route taxi with four other people. She was going to work on the second anniversary of her sons’ death. She was making beds in the house in Goodwood park when she heard the news, that her nine year old son, Sheldon jumped in the reservoir.
The men who fished him out said they tried everything but the child was dead. People blamed her for leaving him alone. But what was she to do? His father never came to look for the child and she had to work to feed them both.
That happened a year ago. Now Rhonda was living with her brother and sister in law who threw words at her. They wanted her out. They mocked her. “What happen to that husband of yours?” Rhonda didn’t know. He left her, stopped paying the rent, and when she saw him last, he was at a dance-hall party, waltzing like a gentleman on some happy looking young lady.
She was feeling tired today. She spent the day cleaning toilets and cook, and today was ironing day. She hoped she would have the energy to visit Sheldon’s grave later today. Not like last year when the mistress of the house had unexpected visitors and she had to help serve cake and tea. Then at eight o’ clock she had to hustle to do her night job at the casino.
Back to roses. The traffic had begun to move, slowly, but Roses did not get in her car.
She did not move it to allow Gita to inch forward to the morgue or the taxi driver to take Rhonda for her night shift at the Casino.
Roses took her shoes off. She wanted to fly up to that candy pink sky. Everything weighed her down. She was ashamed to say, that what weighted her down the most was her husband, the love of her life. He had done this before, would again, but she knew she would keep loving him. That furious knowledge, that we love who we love, that their virtues or sins made not a jot of difference, that she would continue to love a cheating lying bastard, to suffer for the rest of her life, weighed her down.
She efficiently began to undress, taking off her shoes, her blouse, unzipping her jeans, removing her bra and then her panties. She stood there, her clothes on a heap on the road.
Gita and Rhonda looked up at the same time, from opposite directions to see Roses, in all her nakedness, looking like a bronze nude statue under the Sahara dust.
She heard laughter and jibes from men who had come out of their car, from passers by.
You may not believe it but when Gita and Rhonda went towards Roses to shield her nakedness, everyone under the plume of that Sahara Dust, men women and children, absorbed, as if by some osmosis this story.
That there was tribe in Africa, where women remove their clothes as a form of protest, where their nudity is a way of shaming the men who hurt them, who humiliate them, who fail to protect them.
In ones and twos, more and more women stopped their cars on the street and went towards Roses, and Rhonda, and Sita.
One by one they removed their clothes. Women with sagging breasts, and young sprout ones, women of all colours of the Caribbean from black velvet to pearly white and every shade in between, until they looked like the formation of an African Daisy, facing outwards, with open hearts.
There were women who worked in the home, looked after the children, and old parents, at home, and at work, endured the bosses who paid them less than the men and looked up their skirt; women who swallowed heartbreak and broken, still showed up in their lives, to work day after day; women who loved women; women who birthed babies; women who spent evenings and weekends alone because their intelligence scared off men; women who were sick and alone, women who were disappointed that beauty never lived up to its promise of love; women whose husbands gave them a diamond each time they were horned, women who were given nothing and were horned, women who were old and felt invisible, women who lived childless, and with too many children, women who negotiated marriage everyday, women who were hoping to be asked to be married.
These women removed their clothes, threw them to the dust. The men, instead of seeing an orgy of naked women, went temporarily blind as the Sahara dust flew at them.
The dust brought them their own shame.
The men hung their heads, and the women raised theirs, their hearts open to the sky, their arms linked, until it was dark and. with a sense of benediction, they each, clothed one another, and saw one another to safety. In the Saharan sky, burnt orange clouds wrestled with candy pink and vanished into the sooty gold of the night pressing benediction into the hearts of those who needed it.
About the author:
Ira Mathur is a multimedia freelance journalist, lawyer and T&T Sunday Guardian columnist with nine regional awards for excellence in journalism. She was born in India, studied in the UK and Canada. She currently lives in Trinidad & Tobago.
Related article to the topic: Naked Shame.
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