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"Here, There, Africa"
“Honey, I’ve been thinking we should hyphenate.” My husband shoots me a pissed-off look. “You know, Zakin-Suleiman. Or Suleiman-Zakin.” “We can talk about that later,” he mutters. We are halfway down the jetway, waiting to find out whether we can get back on our flight to San Francisco. Minutes before, a flight attendant’s voice had [...]
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After whining unconvincingly about having a headache, my Kenyan husband explained why he didn’t want to go to my god-daughter’s dance performance at Lowell, a public high school in San Francisco. “You remember when you went to a wedding?” he demanded. I thought back to the Swahili wedding I attended on Lamu before we were [...]
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“Sorry, Suzanne, but I can’t drive you to the airport. I would be too afraid to drive back alone at night,” my friend Marie-Chantal said. I looked at her, doing a quick calculation in my head before realizing Marie-Chantal* wasn’t making an excuse; she was truly scared. I had lived in Madagascar for three months [...]
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This year, my husband almost voted. Not big news, you say. But in its own way, it was. When Gabe first told me that he had never voted in an election, I had the usual American good girl reaction: I was shocked. “But it’s your civic duty!” I remember saying. Then I learned more about [...]
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The long rains are ending in Kenya, and Shela village, the tiny outpost of Islamic fundamentalism and Eurotrash, is open for business. Blinking like a naked mole rat in the sun, I awkwardly greet people I didn’t remember that I knew, often feeling surprisingly warm toward them. Intimate conversations spring up like volunteer plants; unexpected [...]
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I love my doctor. I never said this in America. The first time I met Dr. Abdallah, I had a world-class case of food poisoning. I’m talking lying-on-the-bathroom-floor-in-the-middle-of-the-night-can’t-get-up food poisoning. I was on Lamu, the island off the coast of Kenya where I met the man I later [...]
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