Bright Unbearable Reality by Anna Badkhen

Author:Anna Badkhen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Landscape with Icarus

IN SUMMER OUR MOTHERS would ship us off to the country to stay with relatives or in sleepaway camps so we could get fresh air and skinned knees, and we would return from our little seasonal migrations wider-eyed, wilder. Here, for example, are two black-and-white photographs, taken seconds apart: I am no older than ten, a summer wild child in hand-me-down corduroys and a too-small shirt on a wooden bench in front of our dilapidated dacha, matted hair stranding down to flat chest. Behind me, next to a bed of comfrey, the door to the pit toilet has come off its hinges. On a clothesline above my head, a double embarrassment: the plastic bags we would reuse in our Soviet scarcity, and my shapeless white cotton briefs. On the bench next to me, two large secondhand stuffed animals, a bear and a dog.

When my children were young, I too would send them away for the summer—from the city to the dacha, from Moscow to St. Petersburg, from the United States to Russia—and ahead of their return I would pace their rooms to make sure everything was just so, though never as diligently as my friend and former landlady Coura, who lives in Joal, a fishing port at the southern tip of Senegal’s Petite Côte. As soon as school lets out, she dispatches her preteen son and daughter to her parents’ place in Dakar. Two months later, before the kids come home, Coura scours every room of her three-story house that grows out of beach sand a block from the ocean, strips all the beds, beats out all the mattresses, washes the door curtains that keep the cool in and the flies out, washes the children’s clothes that still might fit. In a photograph I took in 2015, nineteen stuffed animals pennon a clothesline that swags above a tiled stoop and a bed of dracaenas and birds-of-paradise. Pinned by their tails or ears, mostly shaggy teddy bears but also a few rabbits and something that might be a pig. Some of the animals have red dunce hats, suggesting gift bundles for overseas Christmases. Coura has laundered all of them with bleach, to kill germs.

The winter after I take that photograph, Joal celebrates City Day. At noon, tween majorettes begin to whirl to a loud and immemorial drumbeat up the main street filled with oily smoke from the fields where townswomen process fish. They wear short, pea-green dresses and white knee socks. Folks come out to watch the girls’ earnest effort, their faces rigid with committed concentration, their endearing botched synchronicity. Because it is Sunday and no school—but also because they are enraptured—Joal’s children follow the majorettes up the street, twirl also, stomp their own unshod or flip-flopped or sneakered feet to mimic the performance. Coura’s kids go too, of course, and their cousins and neighbors. The main street runs the length of the narrow town, and as the majorettes dance northward toward the harbor, every side street and alley empties of children.

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