EPILOGUE
We mostly unharmed humans who suffer even the simplest of losses are inclined to think that what we have lost is the measure of who we are. Arketa Zambakari teaches us that who we are is demonstrated by what we do when we lose—even when we have lost nearly everything.
"Dah Lost Boys in Phoenix call me 'Lost Mum. I made a walk like dem."
Arketa Zambakari
Because I was reading a book about a Sudanese Lost Boy when I visited my elderly mother in an Assisted Living Residence, because I noticed the British-accented English of Arketa, an African caregiver, I asked a few questions that launched a goal, a friendship, and this book.
"May I hear your story?" I had asked.
"It is difficult, Barbara, very difficult," said Arketa. And it was.
° ° °
I don't remember—on that warm Phoenix day in 2009 when we first talked—was Arketa’s hair shorn? I learned later that it often was, as her way to honor the death of one person or another. I do remember that she was wearing black, as she often did, sometimes for more than a year out of respect for the dead.
At some point in that conversation about her separated sons, the cost of DNA tests came up and she asked, "And where does that kind of money come from?” I immediately saw her intelligence but initially, I failed to recognize her genuine use of irony.
That day, what I mistook for a quiet personality was in fact, her traditional African respect for elders. I was, after all, old enough to be her mother and I was the daughter of a resident for whom she worked. She was cautious and prudent. I was curious and completely unaware that my life’s course was being reshaped by this woman’s story as surely as floodwaters reconfigure a river’s course.
In reflection, I recognize how little any of us can learn in only one conversation. Arketa was bright, respectful, charming yet cautious—I saw that right away. I watched as she searched my face and decided how much to tell me. She seemed friendly but shy (silly me). Stressed, surely and why not? Two of her five children, after so many years, remained separated from her, held apart by bureaucratic demands and the lack of money. Quiet, I assumed. Compliant probably.
I should have noticed the deep red color of her fingernails. Weeks later, in the privacy of her home where flip-flops ruled, I saw that same bright paint on her toenails. Boldness. I should have paid attention to direct gaze and her amazing posture—pushovers don’t stand so erect and square-shouldered. Powerful, she was, but I didn’t see it in that first conversation. I only saw that she needed help.
It was months later when I attended a Sudanese gala with her that I saw Arketa in African finery and watched her shake off my notions of shyness or compliance. As she rhythmically shuffled toward the dance floor, shoulders lifting and falling with the beat of the drums, ululating, and tossing a fetching smile across her face, she was African—beautifully, powerfully, African.
It took my deep plunge into her story before I met her tears and massive vulnerability, it was years before I was shocked by the observation of her fierce anger; it took seeing her embrace her sons brought from half a world away before I realized that the command of Arketa’s mother, “Hold your heart,” was released.
Through seven years of friendship, I knew Arketa fairly well but I knew her mostly in the context of her past and the acquaintance of our immediate families. Then, one July Sunday 2016, I called her, digging for more information about her Balanda tribal practices, and I got more than I expected. I met Arketa as she meets her world.
Through this call, I ran into Arketa the woman sickened by harmful prejudices, wearied by hatred, and dressed in the mantle of the strong name, "Zambakari." She was impatient, direct, and fired up.
“Hallo?” she said, answering the phone.
“Arketa? Barb.”
“Ah. You know what was dah talk today at church? Unnn.Fighting!”
So much for my directing the course of conversation—I was to listen. I was there to listen and learn from Mama Arketa. The Mayor of M’Boki. The Lost Mum. I was to learn from a woman who knew more than enough about hatred, about pride, about war, about willful stupidity.
“Barbara, dah Dinga (Dinka) peoples in Sudan is crazy. In dah heads is sand, not brains. Killing, killing, killing. Even dah Dinga in Phoenix is crazy, moving away fromalllldah other Sudanese people because dey are only for demselves.
“Dis day, in dah church—I stand before dah people. Dis is dah first time I stand before so many people but dah Sudanese is crazy, Barbara
“I say, ‘Look to my situation! What is dis thing of division among us? I am Balanda. I am alone. No one of my tribe is here for helping me. How will we see to each other when in your head you are on your feets with dah gun against all but Dinga, all but Neur? We should be on our knees together with our hands held to Jesus, praying for peace not war.
“In Juba, last week, my son was dehr, hiding under dah bed while bullets are flying; my niece, my nephews, running, footing it over dah mountain, over dah rough rock ground, facing dah big river to cross, using all dah money dey have for bribes, running to be alive today. Alive tomorrow.
“My son was dah six-year-old Lost Boy, running from dah bombs in Sudan, tied on dah back of dah pastor across dah great river with crocodiles to E-tee-o-pee-a only to face dah guns dehr. No one wants dah refugees. All dis because we don’t remember to be Sudanese together—only Dinga or Nuer, or something which to fight about. Dis is crazy!
“I am dah refugee. I was watching dah deaths, running, eating grass with dah children like animals. I am like Millet.
“Dah millet is put on da grinding stone. Some of it spills out. I am dat millet dat spilled. I was not crushed. I fall from dah stone and am now here, in America. What is dis I see? Dat da Sudanese in America are hating each other, sending threats to each other, wanting more war in South Sudan. What is dis craziness? Dis is wrong! Dis is wrong.”
Then, Arketa said to me, “Even some of da Dinga men stand in dah church and say, ‘Dis woman is right in what she says.’
° ° °
“What care I if good God be,
If he be not good to me,
If he will not hear my cry
Nor heed my melancholy midnight sigh?
What care I if he created Lamb
And golden Lion, and mud-delighting Clam,
And Tiger stepping out on padded toe,
And the fecund earth the Blindworms know.
He made the Sun, the Moon and every Star,
He made the infant Owl and the Baboon,
He made the ruby-orbed Pelican,
He made all silent inhumanity,
Nescient and quiescent to his will,
Unquickened by the questing conscious flame
That is my glory and my bitter bane.
What care I if good God be
If he be not good to me?
Stevie Smith, from “Another Almanac of Words at Play”
