Chapter 30 029

A road cuts through a sandy field where bushes grow.The tarmac is like a black line drawn on a map.The girl in the indigo robe turned and walked south along the road. At first she wanted to take the asphalt road, but the road burned her feet so badly that she had to walk along the side of the road, stepping on the shoulders of the soft soil.The convoy of trucks sped past her, enveloping her in a cloud of dust.The empty oil drum above her head almost fell, and she reached out to hold it steady.Oil drums are easier to hold on your head when they are full of water. She walked into the dust and walked out of the dust herself.

Memory shakes in the heat.Past experiences become a mirage.Her village of warm clay faded as she moved forward and gusts of wind.Aunts and uncles, the slowly moving cows, the heavy pounding of rice, all these seem to be gone.They lack the materiality and determinism of walking—the never-ending motion of alternating feet in front of one another. She was of the Sahel, from a tribe said to have Arab blood in her veins, a lost tribe of Israel; descended from Roman soldiers lost in the desert and carried off by Nubian horsemen - people use these Biblical tales and romantic romances explain the tribal man's long limbs and dusty complexion.But the girl's nation was born not of lure in the moonlight or an outcast tribe, but of the dust itself: a nation that draws its life from the environment they inhabit.

Who she was, where she came from—these were etched into her skin, revealed by the geometry of the scars on her face.Those scars both accentuate her beauty and mark her bloodline.Those old moms are great at crafting.They first painstakingly draw lines with thin, sharp blades, then quickly smear them with dust—both to stop the bleeding and to help form the scars.These scars were the envy of other girls throughout her childhood. The beauty of her appearance is like a map that you carry with you.As she approached a block of houses near another intersection with the oil drum on her back, she pulled her hood over her face.She hoped that the current appearance would neither arouse suspicion nor attract attention.

The roadside is crowded with low buildings and more mortars, and there is a scattered market that doubles as a parking lot.As she walked through the maze of stalls, her eyes occasionally met those of the Sahel traders.When she passed them, they would stop and stare at her curiously, trying to decipher the scar they saw, trying to read the story behind it, where she came from.But her tribe is a small, declining tribe, unknown and often overlooked.No one can unlock its secrets. The indigo gown trimmed with scarlet lace, the wide embroidered sleeves, and even the way she wraps her turban—in loose knots and the way the folds hang down—tell her where she comes from.If anyone could read it all, he could map out the route she had traveled all the way back to some wadi, some ridge, some village, even a certain house.This is exactly what she is worried about. She is afraid that her life experience will be revealed and her identity will be exposed.

She remembers an outdoor class she took on campus as a child.In the shade of a tree, the teacher twirled a tanned globe in front of them.As the globe spun rapidly, the continents blurred into one piece, not distinguishable from each other.As the speed of the globe's rotation slowed down, they gradually separated again.She felt like she was walking on a globe now, moving it with her feet. The teacher is from Mali.When Africa turned in front of the students, he stopped the globe, pointed to a corner under the raised shape, and said sarcastically, "Nigeria is here—in the armpits of Africa."

Her uncle was furious when he heard about it, and went to the teacher in a huff the next day, demanding an apology.The teacher suddenly became respectful and obedient, and apologized carefully in very elegant French.The uncle paid a lot of money for her and her siblings to have a proper public school education.He didn't want the kids to be insulted by some begging Mali teacher. "Africa is not an arm," her uncle explained to her on the way home.He spoke Hausa, the lingua franca, not the French spoken at school. "That teacher of yours is unbearable! He should look at the map more carefully, see the shape of Africa. Africa is not an arm, it's a pistol, and Nigeria is right there at the trigger." Then, for emphasis, he added Switching to the dialect used by our ancestors, "We're not Nigerians, though, we're other people."

What is Nigeria? It is the crossroads of the world.You can see it on any world map: North America is on the left, Asia is on the right, and Europe is on top.Draw a vertical line from top to bottom in the middle, and then draw a horizontal line, what will you see, the exact center of the world?This is Nigeria. What is Nigeria? It is a net, thrown at will.is a name on a map, a name coined by the English to conceal a crack in joinery.It is a trick by the hand of a magician that makes "many" into "one," like the old trick of old men who make coins disappear. "There is no Nigeria," is what the uncle wants her to understand, "There is Funila and Hausa, Igbo and Tiff, Efek and Kanura, Guari and Yoruba. But Nigeria? Just pretend A barrel in the place."

But she knows much more than that. She knows that naming a place helps it exist.A place name, a person's name, or even a child's name is a way of acknowledging its existence.If something is not given a name, it is not quite true.So the secret to maintaining a state of invisibility is to remain anonymous.Without a name, you won't be anchored in one place, cornered or caught.The key is to keep going, keep moving, keep going, out of the Sahel.