What I know of Uganda comes from the memories of others. Fragments that surface across years and oceans, that announce themselves when Swahili dribbles from our tongues. This is how we remember. I learn Uganda from Toronto, at the foot of the bed where my grandfather lies, his breathing rhythmic but rushed, like he is remembering the time when it was numbered. In his breath I hear the crashing of wings, the hot afternoons when time pants to a crawl, dragging its feet, begging for rest. I learn by watching my father peel a banana. I understand Uganda from how his lips twist in, craving the time when he snapped a plantain from the temple courtyard tree, its body firm and green, its perfume tender, its weight the simplest promise: a lunch of steamed matoke eaten with fingers slick from lemon and chili. How nothing tastes as good as nostalgia’s plantains. I learn Uganda through second-hand smells, through the tastes that linger on my elders’ tongues. The salt-smoke scent of crickets frying in the streets, mango and matunda impossibly honeyed, nectar drooling along the steaming pavement. And the noise: of machete slicing into coconut, releasing clear milk and white meat to be scraped with curved fingers. Of bat cracking against skull, the shock of hearing your own bones shatter. I learn Uganda through silence, because it is easier not to remember. In the absence I fiction the weight of fear, the muted language of hope, the splitting groan of roots from soil as a people are torn from their home. The sound of exile, scuttling across midnight borders, shredding crimson through morning skies. What I can’t know of Uganda is the sound that is left behind. With borders smeared, families fled, what sense remains in the land of upheaval? The smell of a jasmine bud, braided into the hair of a brown-skinned girl, the burning skin of rice left on the stove. The pulse of cicada, ever beating. The thrum of crickets, courageously loud, and the call of a bat, seeking shelter, unheard except to those who are listening.
Outstanding!