To the Girl Who Never Made it to Norwich
1
In Norwich, I walk towards the market on a path I’m not familiar with. Occasionally, I check Google Maps to guide me. I’ve been here for only two weeks, the geography of the city has not yet been imprinted into my mind, and I suffer whenever I’m on new paths. I’m also suffering from how cold it is. I’m wearing a new thermal coat over a sweater and gloves because without them I would freeze. This is my first time experiencing such cold and I cannot believe how most of my thoughts and actions are organised into preventing the frigidness. Yellow leaves fall to the ground as the wind blows. One of my roommates told me about a stall in the market which sells African ingredients. He said I could buy maize flour, masala, samosas, plantain, dhania, fresh tilapia, and anything else I needed to prepare my own food. I’ve tried eating British food, but it has no flavour at all. Without the food I’m used to, I feel alienated from an essential part of myself. My walk to the market is therefore a search for flavour, a search for the familiar, for the taste of home I’ve left behind.
I see you once a week during The Art of Short Fiction. You were the first person in the class who I became acquainted with. During the first two weeks, you and I were the only people not yet in Norwich: I in Nairobi because of visa issues, and you in Tokyo because of pandemic travel restrictions, and so the two of us were given reading assignments to discuss with each other. From my laptop screen, I noticed how large and round your glasses were and how softly you spoke into the camera, considering each word you said carefully.
“I’ve been here for only two weeks, the geography of the city has not yet been imprinted into my mind.”
“What time is it there?” I asked.
“It’s midnight,” you said.
The professor would leave us alone for a long time and we would finish discussing the stories—David Hayden’s “After the Theatre,” NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest,” and Kevin Barry’s “Across the Rooftops.” Then we’d talk about our favourite books: Mine was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, and yours Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata. The professor asked us to write something that included scenery. You wrote about riding the train in Tokyo and seeing the snow on Mt. Fuji. You talked about how white the snow was, how calm it made you feel, and how you found joy in the simple sight of snow as you moved past the mountain.
“Are you from Tokyo?” I asked.
“No, I’m not Japanese. I’m originally from China. From Shenyang. It’s a city in the North,” you said. “Do you know it?”
2
On my walks around the city, I wonder what you would think of Norwich if you were able to get here. In my third week, I bought an art print to decorate my room that depicted a rural village in Japan totally covered in snow. There were two people in straw hats crossing a deep blue river along an arched bridge, and at the top right, there were words written in kanji. I was thinking of you when I bought it, riding the train and seeing the snow on Mt. Fuji. I saw snow for the first time in Norwich. I sat in my room, looking through the window as the snowflakes fell from the sky.
Norwich is a small, pleasant city. On days I don’t have classes, I walk through the park which overlooks the council housing where my apartment is. I walk through the quaint townhouses whose bricks are a reddish or yellowish brown. I walk past the Tesco I buy groceries from when I come from school, and then I make my way to The Book Hive or Waterstones in the city centre to browse through books. Afterwards, I go window shopping—marvelling at the new arrivals in H&M, Zara, Levi’s. I’ve recently read André Leon Talley’s memoir The Chiffon Trenches and I now see fashion as an extension of who I am, know that I can tell beautiful stories through what I wear. During these walks, I feel like a flâneur, part of the city and yet separate from it, calmly observing it. It is how I feel about you when you attend class on Zoom and the rest of us are seated together in the seminar room. It is an odd switch for me: no longer being on the same side as you. Now I look at you from Norwich. You are with us and at the same time you aren’t, and even though the camera is turned to allow you to see each of us, I wonder if our essence is captured fully. When you speak, your critique is sharp and because your timezone is so far ahead of ours, I like to think of it as a critique from the future.
On most of my walks, I’m the only Black person on the street, and whenever I meet another Black person on the way, we nod to each other, a sign that we see each other. Often, I wonder about their journey to get here, and what they or their ancestors have lost to get here. Are they African students like I am? Are they Black Brits? Are they on a work visa? What is their sense of identity like? I’m obsessed with these questions and journeys because of the news I watch while waiting for my laundry to dry at the laundrette in my apartment building. News reports of small boats full of African immigrants crossing the English Channel from Calais; news of an immigration plan to send asylum seekers who come to the United Kingdom to Rwanda; and news of African students in Ukraine encountering racism as they flee the war with Russia.
Norwich is a city that will never belong to me, no matter how long I live here. Maybe it’s because of how quiet it is: It has nothing of the bustle and vibrance of Nairobi. Maybe it’s because of winter and the cold and the sun setting at 3 p.m. Maybe it’s because of my loneliness. Even though I have housemates and classmates I see twice a week, a part of myself remains dislocated from it all, and I think of you. Would you have fit in here? Would it have felt like home to you? Would you have missed Tokyo as desperately as I miss Nairobi if you’d ever made it to Norwich for classes?
Over New Year’s, I get Covid. Sick and isolated, my sense of dépaysement grows deeper and my heart aches for home. I feel split, as if I’m living two lives. There is a part of me that keeps up with my family and friends from home—who nowadays only appear to me on the screen in the same way you appear to us in class—and then there is the part of me in Norwich meeting new people and having new experiences. These two parts also exist in different languages: one in Swahili and Sheng’ and the other in English, an English that feels as if it’s a translation. How does it feel for you to exist in a foreign language? You told me that you write your first drafts in Chinese and the versions we read in class are what you have translated into English. I thought this was amazing, but I forgot to ask you if sometimes you felt like there were things you couldn’t fully translate. In one of the workshop pieces you submitted to class, you included lines from the poet Hai Zi which speak to me through the page, like an echo from my divided self: “In the world in me/ Language and experience are undivided/ I’m still trapped.” I promised myself that I would speak to you about the poem, but I never sent you that email.
3
“Sick and isolated, my sense of dépaysement grows deeper and my heart aches for home.”
Then, it’s spring. The air smells fresh, the cherry trees outside my apartment blossom, and the potted spider plant I keep in my room brightens into a lush luminous green. I’m taking a nonfiction class and in one lesson, I learn about psycho-geography, about the writer’s subjectivity and physical space and the melding of interior and exterior worlds. With the coming of the sun and the lengthening of daylight hours, Norwich feels like water from a spring. When I walk down the streets, listening to Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” and breathing in crisp air, I feel refreshed, nourished, and at peace. I’ve made friends from class and after our Tuesday lesson, we sit outside on the grass, near a lake on the campus. We talk about writing, about our course instructors, about our families, about romantic relationships we’ve had. Sometimes we go to pubs around Norwich: The Rose, where we play a board game called Codenames; The York, which makes excellent martinis; and Pear Tree Inn, which is full every single evening. The pubs feel alive, with gold-coloured beer frothing from glasses, people sitting tightly with one another on bar stools around a large barrel, the television showing football, tens of voices speaking at once, and they smell overwhelmingly of wood.
At the parties I go to, I enjoy myself, drinking Merlot, rosé, and martinis, swaying to the music, laughing with friends and finally finding belonging in the city. And then somewhere in the middle, I stop living in the moment, the movement around me appears to pause and I’m suddenly and violently swept away by homesickness. I find myself wishing that my country had strong writing institutions and I didn’t have to travel so far to reach my dreams. My curse as an international student is that I’ve carried a romantic, nostalgic version of home that threatens to drown me. Maybe it’s a good thing you are not in Norwich, maybe you would have been the same in this regard. Whenever I speak to other international students, we speak of the places we are from with such heartbreaking longing, as if by speaking about them long enough, we will be able to conjure them and have them magically appear before us.
It’s too late for you to make it for in-person classes; the university accepts this and allows you to do the remainder of your classes from Tokyo. You and I don’t talk anymore. We are no longer bound by the bond we shared of not being in Norwich. I wonder if we’d have become close had we met here. I also wonder if you will fade away from my memory some day.
About the Author
Dennis Mugaa is a Kenyan writer and editor. His debut short story collection, Half Portraits Under Water, is set to be published in 2024.
Read Dennis’ “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Edited by Carey Baraka.
Header photo by Tim Tiedemann.
