Aissata Thiam, on five goodbyes.

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My secondary-school French classes were never uneventful. Imagine a group of West African pupils, whose mother tongue isn’t the language spoken in France, debating great ideas in French; imagine how eventful that would be. I remember one of these classes in particular. We were asked to share our experiences of saying goodbye. I can’t remember for certain which text we were discussing, or how it was written, or what precisely was in it, but I think it was a Camara Laye novel – L’enfant noir, maybe. I remember our discussion, though.

I don’t feel guilty about not remembering the text. You will read and study many books. Some of them will stick in your memory for decades. Others, you will not remember, but will then read again, and take pleasure in remembering that you enjoyed reading them the first time round. It does not necessarily mean that the author’s work was weak. Perhaps, instead, your memory is giving up on you. So, I don’t feel guilty about it – I am only human. And why should there be a residual embarrassment when none of the class had read the whole book at the time? When, although it was on the curriculum, no one could acquire the book because it wasn’t available in Libraport, the one and only bookshop in the city? And anyway, even if there had been copies, they would have been too expensive for our limited resources. Such an irony. Camara Laye was a national treasure, the Guinean author we all talked about, yet secondary-school children in his country didn’t have the means to read him. Still, we talked about his work.

I was a privileged child. I went to a private school that provided a textbook for its French class. We would read selected excerpts of great works by celebrated African authors. The textbooks were not ours to keep at the end of the academic year but, if you compared us to public school pupils, you would say we were lucky to receive more than just inconsequential talk about some classic novels.

‘La tristesse de départ’ – the sadness of leaving, as I would translate it – was the topic at hand: how did the author’s experience of leaving his family compare to ours? As a very talkative teenager, I of course recounted to everyone my experience of leaving the country at a very young age. Then, Kadiatou, the other skinny girl in the class, spoke about how sad she was when she was sent to France. What came as a surprise was Abdouramane describing his distress when he left his parents to go for a year in Japan. We all laughed – we knew he’d never left Guinea. It was a claim designed to shut us up; he probably thought that we weren’t really sad, and were just boasting about having travelled abroad.

~

I have a very difficult relationship with breakaways, so much so that I sometimes don’t want to meet people for fear of then losing them. I was once a Cyrano, bold and inconsiderate – you lose one friend, you find ten others. But life teaches you that this is nonsensical. Losing friends, I learned at my own expense, is nothing to be proud of. These situations are always sad, even if they don’t make you cry.

When I left the country in 1999, to study accounting in America, I didn’t shed any tears. I was too scared for that. It had been quite a struggle to obtain my visa, of course. But that was nothing compared to the struggle of spending a year in remote Texas, where people offer you smiles in great quantities but end up seeming detached when you most expect a bit of friendship.

I made a few friends, eventually. Kanemitsu was reliable. He was the person I could count on to provide the information needed for an essay, for instance. Japan and World War Two: what did he know about it? Nothing scholastic or scientific, I just wanted his opinion. And he gave it freely.

So, when I decided that I couldn’t afford a second year in Texas, and that I needed to go elsewhere, it was Kanemitsu who drove me to the Greyhound bus stop, towards my new destiny. It was quite a distance from college. The college itself was in the middle of nowhere, but by comparison to the bus stop it was a metropolis. Honestly, you would’ve had to have been at the stop at least once before to know it was an actual meeting place.

When the bus finally arrived, Kanemitsu helped me and my bag onto the vehicle, smiled, and said: ‘Good luck, and have a nice life.’ I had not prepared anything of the sort, so I just replied: ‘You too.’

I am certain he truly meant what he said. And that’s why, to this day, I remember those words. He was not a clairvoyant, and so he couldn’t have predicted what life would be like for me. But he could wish me well. Later, I’d take Kanemitsu’s words and make them mine. Every time I bid someone farewell, I present it like this: ‘Have a nice life.’ And I mean it with all my heart, all the time.

So no, I did not cry during that goodbye. But I cry now for all the plans that never came to fruition – for all the hopes that were shattered, for the good life Kanemitsu wished for me that, so far, has not come about.

~

I did not shed any tears when I escaped from a sad place called Yarl’s Wood at the beginning of 2010. I was just relieved. To me, not being able to say goodbye to someone who has played an important part in your life is one of the worst things possible. Fortunately, when I left, I was able to say my goodbyes to the ladies I spent a few months with in Yarl’s Wood, in the confines of that very unwelcoming space.

After that, along the way, I lost many friends. And maybe it seems strange or unreasonable, but I replaced them with people I had never met in person but who would always be there – radio hosts, mainly. I didn’t have a television or a means to buy one, and so I’d listen to the radio. There was one talk show host I particularly enjoyed listening to. She had a calming, reassuring voice. She welcomed her guest callers with the words ‘talk to me’. It was beautiful phrase, and I loved when she said it. I’d imagine myself telling the caller: ‘Yes, talk to her. Please do. She’s a nice lady.’ She was as calming as my own mother.

I turned on the radio one day, at the time the show was due to start, and waited for her voice. When someone else started talking, I searched frantically online and discovered that she had been dismissed. She should have been allowed to say goodbye to her audience, I thought. I grieved for a good few days but, obviously, I did not cry.

~

I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to my mother. I believe she fought a decent fight, but she was defeated by illness in the end. It was unexpected. She died in Guinea while I survived in Britain.

I did cry. I felt the shame one feels when they realise they’ve been more preoccupied by things that don’t matter than the people whose existence is most valuable to them.

I turned to Camara Laye. I read ‘Tristesse de départ’, to refresh my memories. Yes, it was L’enfant noir, in fact.

I concluded that what Camara Laye’s parents had felt on the day their child left was what most parents would feel in the same situation. If you came from poverty or from struggle, you would know that you might never see your child again. Because your lack of wealth would prevent you from travelling to see your next of kin if they ever faced difficulty in their new surroundings. And if you were the child, you would know that your parents would not be able to visit you if you faced hard times. You would not be able to run back to where you came from if you heard that one of them were in their death bed. So, you would know that this time, as they say goodbye to you, will be the last time your eyes will see them. From now on, comfort can only be spiritual. ‘May God have mercy on my child,’ you, if you were the parent, would find yourself wishing, praying that you once again see each other, that you never grow apart, that you never fall out when, in the right time, you manage to reach out to each other despite the distance; that you always love each other.

~

There was recently this young man in my accounting class who was going on and on about his planned trip to Asia and Australia. He was impatient to meet girls there, he said. I had resented him – probably out of envy. Why was it so easy for him to go on a world tour, while so many young men his age died in the Mediterranean trying to reach European shores? I imagined that most of these ‘wretched of the earth’ received a farewell from their parents like Camara Laye’s. ‘Go and make me proud,’ their fathers would have said.

It might be seen as unfair to think that, in contrast, this first-world man’s dad would have said to him: ‘Go and have fun.’ I resented him but, in that moment, accepted that this was his life, and his world. He did not make it what it was. So maybe I had no right to hold it against him.

When we came out of the room where we sat our final exam, I said this to him: ‘Good luck on your trip, wherever you decide to go. And have a nice life.’ I was not going to shed any tears, but I meant it, with all my heart.

 

Aissata Thiam is a writer from Guinea. Some of her writings have been published in English PEN’s Readers & Writers anthologies. She came to England in 2006, and currently lives in Gloucestershire.

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