Village Weavers by Myriam JA Chancy

Author:Myriam JA Chancy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2024-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

Paris, 1962

After the incident on the Seine, Sisi takes distance from the organizing, sees Scott more, Lou and Sam less. Sisi’s apartment, if she can call it that, in the 7th Arrondissement, is closer to her place of work, farther from the areas routinely used for demonstrations. She wants to be as far away from any agitation as possible. She hasn’t come all the way from Port-au-Prince to Paris to remain unsettled. She doesn’t help organize anything anymore and doesn’t volunteer when someone needs to be hidden in a closet or under a bed. Samiah heals with a jagged scar tracing the contour of her left cheekbone, betraying her involvement in the Seine incident. When they do see each other, they don’t talk about the demonstration or the nocturnal visit of the Haitians they helped flee to another country. They don’t even celebrate the holidays together. Sisi wants all that to be behind her, a calm, quiet life before her. But that life never comes.

The following spring, there is an insistent knocking, a muffled baritone voice asking, “Ça va? Are you all right?”

Sisi is sleeping and it takes her a moment to realize that the banging is at her door, so accustomed is she by then to all the noises of the building, the people coming and going in the hallway and up and down the stairs. She stumbles out of bed, ties a wraparound to her waist, and opens the door to find Scott there, looking weary and concerned, a pile of excrement strewn across her door, dripping onto the pink-tiled entryway.

“La vache,” she exclaims, looking at the oozing shit. “No peace anywhere.”

She didn’t hear anyone come up the stairs, not even Scott, doesn’t know when the door was vandalized.

“Who could have done this?” Scott laments. “I’m so sorry. But you’re all right?”

“Yes, yes,” she says, assessing the situation. “Anyone could have. The doors downstairs never stay shut or locked.”

“But why you?”

Sisi shrugs. “Why anyone?”

But she knows why. Try as she might to blend in, to look and act like everyone else, Sisi, with her jet-black, thick hair and olive skin, is often mistaken for Algerian. Even Samiah had said, when Sisi first arrived, that she could have been mistaken for one of her sisters. As Algerian independence took shape, many French took umbrage against it. Sisi hears conversations in the street: some Parisians perceive the impending independence as a humiliating loss, arguing that the Africans are still in need of tutelage, even if the Africans in question often cannot be differentiated from the French, which is, partly, how the Algerians are winning their war. When she walks alone, sometimes she is yelled at, people telling her, “Retourne chez toi! Go home!” And they don’t mean back to the island, they mean back to Algeria, or wherever they think she’s from, if not Algeria then usually Morocco or Ethiopia, back to a continent on which Sisi has never set foot. When she is with Scott, she blends in; it is assumed that she is white or, if not quite white, at least French.

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