Flame Trees

I was away for twenty years. A period in which I became an adult and in which the country where I sometimes felt out of place in many ways had proven itself to be my home. That country was Belgium, where I had ended up after my escape from the war in my homeland Liberia. My reason for visiting the country now were the death of my mother years ago and the conflicting reports concerning her death.

I had to know how she had died.

I arrived in Monrovia, the capital city, somewhat afraid because of rumors that some people came home and were stricken with illnesses or died after someone had mixed poison into their food. After the war, poison had taken the place of bullets, so I was told, and the enemy was everywhere.

I was staying with my older brother Edmond in Gardnersville, a suburb of Monrovia, where the houses stood on marshy ground and where the old sewage system could not withstand the rising water when it rained and so burst.

My brother had several family members under his care. Most were teenagers and children whose parents were lost to the war. He looked exactly like my father, as much as I could remember my father. The only remaining memory was one of a clean-shaven man with a frown between his eyebrows and a smooth forehead that sprang from endless youth. He was a businessman and the owner of a store on the busiest street of Wologizi, the city where I was born. I see him still sitting in his armchair: five fingers drumming as I, his five-year-old son, was playing on the floor of his bedroom. A year later he died, leaving a gaping hole in my life. A hole that I had to fill through much pain and effort. It was a time when I found traces of my father in every grown man. And suddenly my father was staring at me out of the face of my brother.

Now Edmond must have been roughly the same age my father was when I was born. The same height, the same temperament, the same infrequent tantrums peppered with an endearing sense of humor.

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One night before my departure to Wologizi, after nearly a week in Monrovia, I sat eating with my brother in the living room. The meal consisted of a sauce made from cassava leaves, herbs, and fish, all prepared with palm oil and served with red rice, which is specific to the country. He told me about the war.

Edmond had, just as my father, a successful little store in the heart of Monrovia on Ashmun Street with goods from Dubai and China, but there was nothing left after the war. Now he was running a small stationery shop on Camp Johnson Road with one of my nephews. He lived the largest part of his life in Monrovia, and the stories that I heard about him as a child demonstrated that he was already an ambitious man back then. He opened his first store when he was just in high school, expanded it into a greater business, and was on the verge of starting a retail chain when the war broke out.

He was married, so he told me, but his wife had left him during the war. “At some point she was running through Monrovia with a rifle in her hand. She wanted to kill me,” he said about the arguments and disagreements in his marriage. “I have no idea why I deserved such a fate. The war had made everyone crazy. It was no easy time!”

As I listened to him, I got the feeling that he needed me, that he needed someone to listen to his story. As if it was the only way he could undo the heavy burden that he carried. The need to tell war stories wasn’t just something I saw that evening at my brother’s. It manifested itself in other people. Liberians longed to tell stories about the war.

“Don’t ever ask about the missing,” my brother said. “Because you will be shocked if you discover that a childhood friend, a beloved aunt or uncle is dead. Or worse: that they joined the rebels to kill their own people. Be quiet and just wait until they tell you about the missing or the dead.”

Later, after we had finished our meal, he asked about Belgium. “How is the work at your car company going, Abu?”

My brother and other family members believed that I was a car designer, or even that I was the director of the company, the driving force behind the success of the car brand. The rumor going around was that the white people found me so valuable that they did everything to keep me from returning to Africa.

It was not true. I was only a factory worker in a Belgian industrial city. The only thing I did was put truck parts together, every day, year in, year out. But I couldn’t tell him this. He would have never believed me. My story about the factory worker who did shift work six or seven days a week went beyond me and brought me to the level of a car designer.

I told my brother about my first years as a refugee in a refugee camp, where people stayed who had the same stories about war. My teacher at the camp was a former professor from Bosnia. My family and friends were a family from Ethiopia, a Ghanaian who taught me how to ride a bicycle, and a Nigerian who was so smart that he could even save money in a location where this was impossible for others. As a refugee I had a monotonous life: every day the same meal, afterward get the same stamp to show that I was present.

To fill in the time, I befriended a man who went to the city every day to borrow films for the camp. Because of my love for films, I was allowed to choose what the rest of the camp was going to see. In the film world, far removed from the reality of the camp, I felt at home. The freedom of the camp employees amazed me. They organized everything at the camp, to return again to their houses in the evenings. For a long time, freedom to me meant having a house that I could call home.

News about the war in Liberia in newspapers and on television made me desperate to escape from the cage of camp life. I learned Flemish, and by the time that I got my residence permit, I was ready to go work at a truck factory. I sent the bulk of my income to family members who fled to Sierra Leone and Guinea during the civil war.

“I worked all year long to help the family,” I said.

My brother nodded. “Yes, you did.”

The war had made him a broken man. He had had a stroke that almost left him paralyzed. He did everything in his power to be able to walk; he refused to walk on crutches, even during the times where he needed them the most. “If I am dependent on them, I will never get away from them,” he said. “I’m still fighting every day against the aftermath of the stroke. One loss from it is that I sometimes forget things.”

My nephews and nieces were sitting on the floor in the dark corner of the room listening. Some were born during the war, others had become parents themselves but could not support their own children. They were all dependent on my brother.

The night was restless around us. Church hymns and percussion sounds filled the air. Monrovia was a noisy market for anyone in search of God. “The war made sure that people focused on the only thing that could give a little comfort, and that was faith,” said Edmond.

The heat was unbearable. My shirt stuck to my body from the sweat. And despite all the safeguards my brother had taken, such as bug spray and a big mosquito net, the mosquitos found me effortlessly. I barely closed an eye.

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My lack of sleep, I realized, had less to do with the mosquitos than with the death of my mother. When I tried to ask about the circumstances surrounding her death, my brother said: “That happened long ago. Let it go and try to make peace with her passing.”

But I couldn’t.

The driver picked me up at dawn. I decided to bring a couple of my nephews with me to protect me in case of unforeseen circumstances. We loaded the jeep full with sacks of rice and other food for the family in Wologizi. By the time the city was waking up, we were already beyond the city limits.

The driver was good. I wondered at how he nimbly avoided the many potholes and pits in the road. When I made a remark about it, he answered without hesitation: “I was a driver for the rebel groups during the war.” He had crooked legs, bloodshot eyes, and the strength of a wrestler. He wore a cap and winter boots in the heat of the dry season.

His disclosure stunned me. I was sitting next to a man who had actually taken part in the war, who had probably killed.

We rode for hours. The driver stopped at a roadside restaurant in a city that was shrouded in dust and where the asphalt gave way to dusty roads.

“You must introduce yourself, chief,” he said when we were stuffing ourselves with rice and a sauce of brown beans and fish—the famous Liberian dish tobogee. I felt uncomfortable with the nickname chief because he was either using it to mock me or to put emphasis on our differences. In any case, he was unintentionally setting me up on an unwanted pedestal. “I was going 125 miles an hour in an open jeep, my head close to the steering wheel. In the back of the jeep sat a rebel with a machine gun, who unleashed his anger on everyone and anyone that we came across along the way. Our mission was to ride into the heart of enemy territory and shoot a couple of rounds with our bazookas before returning to our base camp.” Listening to him, I realized he must have been a teenager when he lived through these tales.

“We won the war, chief,” he said.

But at what price, I wondered, thinking about my mother. She had already passed away when the North was ousted from the rest of Liberia by the rebel groups to which my driver also belonged. I was told that she got sick and passed away due to a lack of medicine. But a week later someone claimed that he had seen her in a refugee camp in Guinea. A nephew in Guinea even called me, saying that my mother wanted to speak to me. The information turned out to be groundless. My mother was indeed dead and I was left behind with the question of how she had met her end.

In the following years I tried to find her grave, but I was hindered from doing so by the threat of war, lack of financial means, and the terrible state of the roads, which are impassible during the rainy season.

When we were on our way again, the dust struck down on the truck. The road north was flanked by trees, close to each other and mysterious, greener than green. They crowned the mountains as if they were quilts for the earth.

Villages and cities loomed over us, some abandoned, others sparsely populated, but always with pretty flame trees, which caught my eye as if I were seeing them for the first time. This overwhelming beauty stood in stark contrast to the recent history of this country. Along the way I saw many people who traded in charcoal, vegetables, and meat waiting for a lift.

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We arrived in Wologizi right before night fell. The suburbs consisted of cluttered houses, sometimes so dilapidated that I could scarcely imagine that there were people living there. One of the buildings that I recognized in the center of the city was a two-story house that once belonged to a Lebanese man nicknamed Old Baldy.

The people in Wologizi were quite creative in inventing nicknames. The best soccer player in the neighborhood was called the Broom because he swept aside everything that was in his way—players and the ball—with his bare feet. The child who once set flame to a box his friend was sitting in in hopes of pushing him out of it ended up with the nickname Foday, the Martyr. This nickname hung on him so long that when I met him twenty years later, now old and wise and with a job in the agricultural sector, he was still called the Martyr. But always behind his back. We also had an overweight boss who was named after a mountain because of his size.

Old Baldy’s building was riddled with bullets and dark from mold, just like the houses next to it. The main street, where girls were frying fish and doughnuts to sell to their friends, seemed to be many times smaller than I could remember, and the stores around it—such as the gas station, where checker players gathered together to insult each other—were gone.

In my teenage years I used to sing songs from Indian films on this street or play the heroes and bad guys from these movies, if I wasn’t swimming in the nearby river or together with my friends playing in the moonlight. It was so bad that those who couldn’t afford tickets would give me a few coins so that I would reenact the film for them, including the songs. I was so good at it that any time I played the villain Amjad Khan in an Amitabh Bachchan movie, the audience would take off, terrified.

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My heart skipped a beat as we headed in the direction of the house where I was born. On the right hand side, I saw the school building that was one of my uncle’s, a businessman who started out gathering and selling firewood and later became one of the richest men in Wologizi. We drove slowly to the compound, which had once been bursting with life. I remembered that over a hundred people lived in our compound during my youth. The drama that played out in the rooms and corners there shaped my outlook on life. I stepped out of the jeep and walked to the compound.

My family was standing in a small group, which primarily consisted of women and children—the remainders of what had once been the biggest family in Wologizi. The women hugged me and I smelled the firewood, the dust from crushed rice, and the meal that they were preparing. I held them so tight, reluctant to let them go, these wives of my brothers and uncles who had died during the war.

Afterward I let myself absorb the entire compound. Some houses, among them my mother’s, were gone, just like the mango and avocado trees that I would regularly climb. But my father’s house was still standing.

I went inside, in search of the room I shared with a number of my siblings—the room where I, when I was alone, practiced movie roles and tried to perfect my imitations, the art of Hindi, Bengali, and Mandarin. I would get so into the characters and roles that whenever I emerged again from playing, the real world seemed surreal. One day I dragged my mother along with me to go to a movie where Amitabh Bachchan, the hero, was killed. My mother left the movie theater in tears. “They killed that handsome man,” she said. “Why did they have to kill the good guy?” That was the end of her film adventure.

Each day after school I would help the cinema owner with the odd jobs around his house in exchange for watching a movie. The movies were invariably Indian, Chinese, or American, and some I saw countless times. Then the war broke out and I had to learn to dream of my life all over again.

My passion for cinema has never really gone away.

I walked out of the room and saw my brother Sekou waiting for me in the room where my father always used to be, the biggest room in the house, where different women now lived. The room had lost much of its former grandeur: the chair where my father always sat, his fingers tapping on the wooden chair arms, was gone, just like his scent. Each trace of my father had been erased. The wall had been painted again. There are many ways to erase the past. The effort to sustain the house had triumphed over the importance of preserving traces of my father.

“Tell me what happened to our mother,” I asked my brother.

He hesitated. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“I want to know how she died,” I said.

“It was at the height of the war. She was in Koniyan on business and got sick. She died due to a lack of medicine,” he said, avoiding me staring at him.

Of all my brothers, Sekou resembled me the most in terms of temperament and appearance. He understood my deepest fears, even with the distance between us, and when we talked to each other on the phone, he often surprised me with his insight.

“You’re always saying that you’re coming home,” he would tell me. “But where is home, Abu? You have been away for so long that I wonder if this is still your home.”

Now he turned to me. “What do you want me to tell you?”

I gave no answer.

My mother was the daughter of a scholar to whom miracles were attributed. People said that no one had taught him anything and that he gave renowned lectures without looking in a book once. All that he had was shared with his brothers and sisters. He was very generous. He had achieved international recognition, and the presidents of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea asked him for advice and prayers. He preached for peace and stood on the belief that a religion that separated brothers and sisters was only a divisive doctrine. This provided him with many worshippers, but it also made him very controversial.

When he died in a city with no mosque, the residents, who didn’t share his beliefs but saw him as one of their own, insisted that they could bury him. The president of Liberia had to intervene, especially when the Muslims insisted that he belonged to them. The president decided that the residents of the city had the right to bury him because he passed away on their land. But at least as important: they loved him as much as the Muslims. That’s why his grave lies there now.

I had a strong need to search for my mother’s grave. But since she was buried in the nearby city of Koniyan, the residents asked me to wait until they were ready there to receive me.

That evening in my father’s house, I asked a couple of my nephews to keep watch and protect me. “Chief, I will sleep in the jeep in front of the door to your room,” said the driver. “No one will dare come my way.”

I could not sleep due to anxiety. I spent most of the night thinking of my mother.

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The following day the streets of Koniyan were filled with many people who would sing tunes that were solemn but then turned joyful again. I was waiting on the crowd, which was coming down the hill at a snail’s pace. The women poured out their grief hugging me, their clumsy hands moving alongside my sweaty face. One man made his way among the women, slipping through them to the side until he could hold my hands. He let them go when we came to the grave, which lay in the heart of the city. I thought I knew the man. He seemed to be one of my nephews, the son of an uncle who lived in Sierra Leone.

The grass around the grave had been mowed, and a bamboo hedge guarded it. Around the grave stood a few flame trees in full bloom.

I remembered my mother’s shiny, dark skin. I conjured up her image. Tall and dark, she emerged from her house in a colorful wrap and a proud hat, ready to lead her students to the market, where she reigned supreme. The Lomas—a people who had lived with us Mande for centuries—had given her the nickname the Gorgeous Mande.

But she was no longer here.

One of the village sages asked me to take the floor. The words took form in my brain but caught in my throat. The crowd broke out in wails.

Another man addressed me and said: “Your mother’s beauty was the envy of many, even of the spirits. Yes, her beauty was exceptional. But still more important: she was a person of flesh and blood. She was very generous. She gave away all she ever earned to other people. No one who knew her will say now that she didn’t.” And no one did.

I chose to believe him.

Later, after the sages had said their prayers, the crowd led me to the town hall. There I finally discovered how my mother had really died.

“A commander of the rebel group pushed your mother to the ground,” the mayor told me. “Believe me, Abu, I was there when it happened. He emptied an entire magazine of bullets shooting at her, but not a single bullet touched her. Your family is unique. An illness, not a bullet, killed your mother.”

I decided not to believe him.

These anecdotes, so beautifully spoken, contained the grim truth: my mother was killed by a rebel. In a tradition where the truth could take various shapes, men who wanted to spare me the pain of the hard truth had chosen a less painful version.

In the following days I learned to live with the truth. When I was not with the wise city elders in Koniyan, whose anecdotes always ended with a wise lesson, I was in Wologizi, where I spent time with childhood friends. Or I was near Kaihah River, where I had learned to swim.

The part of the river that was once a hive of activity was now surrounded by shrubs and trees. The first time that I wanted to go there, I had to clear the way with the help of a machete. Places like this had shaped me, so that even after I had been away for more than two decades, my memories traced back to them: the scent of the trees, the feel of the sand. The voices of the girls, who fell into laughter whenever we chased them along the shore, and the smell of the earth. And also, the crowded compound, the place where I first saw the light of day.

Childhood friends trickled into our compound to dredge up the past together. I recognized their faces immediately, but I often no longer knew their names. They exchanged their war stories: some had been forced to fight, others had willingly confronted the rebels. Most had fled to Guinea or Sierra Leone to escape the war. Or had taken refuge in the forests around Wologizi until the war was over.

“When we came back to Wologizi, we saw a city changed into a forest,” one of them said.

“Yes, we hunted deer and possums.”

The war had made some rich, whereas others who were previously wealthy lost everything. A couple of my friends—of whom many had thought nothing would become of them—now belonged to the richer upper class. The war traded fortunes and left many frustrated.

The longer I stayed in Wologizi—I was already traveling nearly every day to Koniyan—the more I longed for Belgium: the ritual of waking up early, going to work and joining the assembly line, feeling the hard metal, sorting parts and then finally seeing the end product—an enormous truck, painted and polished, driven out of the enormous building for its first test ride.

I finally left Wologizi one morning. My brother Sekou and a couple of my nephews accompanied me.

We drove for a few hours when we saw a man near the road waving down our car for a lift. I asked the driver to stop because we still had an extra seat in the car. When we slowed down, my brother said, as if seeing a ghost: “Keep driving, hurry, keep driving!”

His reaction baffled me. “What’s going on?”

Sekou was sweating. He wiped his hand over his face. “That is the man who pointed his rifle at our mother and tried to kill her. Yes, he was the one who shot at our mother. I will never forget his face. I was right there. It’s him.”

The driver clenched his teeth. “Chief, let me fix this,” he said. Before I could say a word, he had turned the car around and was driving back toward the man.

“Wait, wait, don’t do anything,” I said.

I could not believe that I had found my mother’s murderer!

The driver jumped out of the car and on top of the man. He grabbed him by his collar and dragged him to my brother. “Do you remember this man?” he said as he spit in the man’s face. “Can you remember him?”

The man burst into tears. “I have never seen him before in my life, chief,” he said. He looked at me while I stood in the distance, too stunned to react. “Why are you treating me this way?”

Sekou talked about the incident with a tremor in his voice. “You shot down our mother. Remember? The bullets were fended off, but you wanted to kill her. Yes, you wanted to kill her!”

“Kill a harmless woman?” the man protested. “I was never involved in the war.”

The driver hit him, but the man stuck to his story. He was a scrawny man in a worn shirt and pants. His shoes needed to be patched. One thing was certain: this was a poor man.

My brother shook his head. “I will never forget your face, not in a hundred years. You took our belongings. You were the one who took my clothes and left me naked. I cannot forget your face. You were the one who shot at our mother.”

Why did my brother persist in claiming that my mother had survived the shot?

I approached the man. The moment I was standing next to him, I could smell his fear. The man fell to his knees and clutched my feet.

“Don’t kill me chief. I never participated in the war, never killed anybody, let alone a woman.”

Then I heard my brother say in a cold, detached voice: “Killing him will not bring our mother back. Let him go. The war is over.”

I turned to him.

A sudden wind seemed to stir up, a cold wind rushing through my body and taking possession of me.

“So now you’re telling me that our mother was in fact shot and didn’t die from being sick? You’re telling me that this man killed her?”

My brother shook his head. “I’m telling you that our mother is gone. Whatever you do, it won’t bring her back.”

The driver clenched his teeth. “Even if we don’t kill him, let’s at least break his arms and legs,” he said. “He deserves it.”

I was paralyzed by indecisiveness. A deep, cold silence seemed to descend over me, a rare coldness beneath the sweat and heat around me. It was as if I had landed in a dream where I had no power over what happened. The man was now sobbing and his grip on my feet was stronger.

It was my brother who led me to the car. When I turned around, I saw that the man was still kneeling.

We drove the entire day, and I could not remember that I saw flame trees in any town or city. They seemed to have disappeared.

“I swear that it was him,” Sekou said that evening, when he was telling our brother Edmond about the encounter. Edmond shook his head and did not speak.

By that time, the driver was already gone and the city turned again to the endless church songs and drums that rang out the entire night.

The coldness that held me in its grip became heavy and unrelenting.