EAST
Our new apartment is situated between two fighting imams. At least that’s what my fiancé imagines – that they are siblings with a long-standing rivalry, always trying to outdo each other. For each of the five Salahs of the day, the mosques to the East and the West of our apartment building start the call to prayer that is so loud you might as well be in the mosque with them. One is always just a few seconds behind the other, and usually, it almost sounds like they are in competition.
The elevator in the apartment kinda sorta works. When we were kids and my mother worked as a statistician at Air Tanzania, she got stuck in an elevator during a power cut. When she got home and narrated that experience to us, I took her terror and made it my own.
What I mean by the lift kinda sorta works is that there are some buttons for some floors that just don’t go on when you press them. Our floor is one of those buttons. You press and have faith it will not only move but get you to the floor you need to be on. Today I worried what would happen if the lift got stuck on a floor whose button didn’t light up. How would I tell the rescuers what floor I’m on? Shetani ashindwe!
There are two staff members from the apartment block who are Jita – my father’s ethnic group. They have too many questions for me with their eyes. They have never seen one of them who dares to look like me: pierced, with tattooed arms. They are convinced that there are parts of me that cannot be from where they are from. I explain that my mother is Zambian. I grew up in Southern Africa. They laugh at the fact that all I know in Jita are the greetings – Ougendelela atiki? Wasibhamo? I laugh along with them. Some shames are not mine to carry.
At sunset in our new apartment, my partner of almost three years proposes to me, surrounded by a small group of friends. He tells me later that as soon as he realised we could see the sunrise and sunset from the living room and dining room, he knew this apartment was our new home and immediately started plotting on the proposal. He tells me that he wants me to think of our love every time I see a sunset from our home.
Everyone is so happy for us, it’s overwhelming.
The people who have known me for a long time are surprised, shocked and excited that I am engaged. At 34, I have finally made my parents proud. I have given them something that they can publicly parade and bring witnesses to.
My parents had little to no expectations of me getting married. As far back as my early teens, I had made it clear that I was not interested in being owned, in being controlled, in being told what to do, especially by a man. Inasmuch as they may have disagreed with my young feminist self, they knew I was probably right, and they knew it would take a special type of person to sway me.
For the longest time, the idea of marriage terrified me. I got heart palpitations at the thought of marrying a man, at the thought of being yoked to him. History has shown that marriage is not as kind to women as it is to men. The women around me have very few positives to offer. Marriages are the spaces within which the individual woman goes to die, and if I were to die by my own hand, that would not be the way I’d choose to go.
I’ve been doing a lot of excavation, archival, and documentation work in the last year or so. I like to think of myself as a nosy person, a curious being. I like to know things. I like to research and study things. In the years since I started taking medication for my mental health, I’ve been able to study and research myself in ways I’ve never been able to because of my lack of stillness. I think about it as a study in humaning. A return to self. I think this is an important part for me because I spent over twenty years in a state of distress, such that the lines between who I am and the lines between who the trauma is became blurred.
Last week I decided to start documenting the journey to my wedding by way of intimate video diaries. I have often heard how marriage changes the dynamics of a relationship, even for a couple such as us, who have not only been cohabiting for over two years but are also both empaths and communicators. I am keen to do a study of changes, to see how this step in our relationship will affect how we have related to each other over the years. We can already feel our families encroaching on our lives. We can see clearly the social performances we have to endure to make it to the finish line. I am curious to see how these performances will affect me, will affect us. I am keen to see the things that will attempt to break me and the woman I have claimed to be over the years. There are some things that change will naturally teach you. And there are others it will force down your throat and expect you to swallow.
WEST
On the right-hand side of our apartment building are what would be described as slums. The rich and the poor are separated by a tarmac road with open man-holes that we all share. On our side of the street are brick-and-mortar houses, high-walled fenced houses. Walls with electric fences and security guards manning the properties.
Our apartment building has six floors. We are on the fifth floor, and all our balconies face the other side of the tarmac road, where there are closely packed houses with rusty corrugated roofs and never-painted, now aged, cement walls. I find a lot of irony in us being able to look over them, peering over their houses, their homes, their private lives.
A man pulls a worn-out mattress that spent the day on a metal roof, soaking up the sun. He lays it on the verandah, ties a pink mosquito net on wooden poles, removes his shirt, and goes inside.
Three girls in knee-length black hijabs make a right turn onto the dirt road.
The smell of garlic frying in hot oil floats in the air, and it feels like the start to the making of pilau.
Across the road, two women in multi-coloured deras take out trash from the house with the sepia gate.
A man with a blue baseball cap and a crutch on his left arm stops at a pile of trash and rummages through it, hoping to find something salvageable. Something to sell. Something to nourish him.
Little kids shout and wave at me from below, from a significant distance away. It is the first time I have been spotted while people-watching. I wave back, make friendly gestures, and go back into the apartment.
On the western side of our building, there is a dirt road that leads to a “massage” parlour. If you know anything about the massage industry in Dar es Salaam, you will know that more than massages happen there. As the Western media would put it, it is a place for happy endings.
At the start of that dirt road, there are more than a couple of abandoned tree trunks placed against a wall. Throughout the day, these serve as seating spots for people in the neighbourhood. Sometimes we hear drunk men talking. Sometimes arguing. Mostly arguing when a Simba and Yanga football match is involved.
In one of the compounds, there is a wooden door standing almost at the centre of the yard. It is thick and aged. From my position, it looks like one of those Zanzibari doors, or doors you’d find in coastal regions in Tanzania. No walls attached to it. Just a wooden door in the middle of a compound, which now serves as an end attachment to four clothing lines.
I think about that door a lot. Mostly because I see it a lot. I wonder why it is still there, why no one has taken it down, and how it became an unshackled door. I wonder whose idea it was to tie the end of a clothing line to it. I like to imagine that this happened in a moment of heroism. One person wanted the door torn down and destroyed, and the other insisted that it was not useless! There were plenty of uses for it! Such as tying the end of one or multiple clothes hanging lines.
I am an odd, standing old door with many uses. I never thought I was impossible to love. But I was aware that a level of patience was required, and even an obsession.
My mother has been right about a lot of things.
I worry about the changes that will find me.
*Photo by Azza Al Ghardaqa on Unsplash