To the Kenyan Elder Who Asked if I Was a Jew
It was fourteen months after 9/11 when I met you deep in Lamu Old Town. You wore a white kofia, walked with a cane. “Mwanafunzi,” you said in a stately tone that reminded me of my grandfather. “Come talk.”
I’d grown used to chatting with strangers in the street. There are no cars in Lamu Town, on Lamu Island, and some of your neighbors are gabbers. Men would sometimes say “mwanafunzi” as I passed, using the Swahili word for “student” to identify me. I was white, tall, skinny: easy to recognize. The word became as much a part of my Lamu soundtrack as the call to prayer blasted five times daily from the island’s two dozen mosques, as the honk and clop of the 3,000 donkeys who transported goods and people through the narrow, dusty streets.
We exchanged the usual Swahili pleasantries, then switched to English. You wanted to know where I was from. I answered in the pyramidic way of the foreigner, getting more specific with each block of information: The United States. Massachusetts. Outside Boston. I’d do the same for my friends back home when they asked about my current locale: In the Indian Ocean. Off the coast of Kenya. An archipelago, an island, a town, all called Lamu.
“Boston’s very bad. Took tea from the English,” you told me slyly. Kenya had declared independence from Britain thirty-nine years before. “And were your ancestors there? At the Tea Party?”
“At the Tea Party? No, they were in Poland.” As I said it, I realized what might come next.
“Poland, eh?” A raised brow. “Are you, then, Semitic?”
This was at the start of my twenties, that embarrassing decade. I was all of a year out of the closet, and back in the States still swinging wildly between declaring “I’m gay, but that’s only one part of me” and experimenting with paisley button-downs and Diesel jeans as tight in the crotch as riding breeches. In my college essays, I’d sometimes begun adopting the “As a…” construction, as if by themselves my minoritarian identities—gay, Jewish—gave me wisdom. This despite the fact that I was only just beginning to navigate my way as an out gay man in the world. As a gay, Jewish…
The idea that my Judaism had given me an outsider’s perspective, meanwhile, was a stretch. There were so many Jews in my hometown of Newton we sometimes called it Jewton, and though I’d participated in the usual Reform rigmarole—bar mitzvah, summers at a heavily-but-not-exclusively-Jewish overnight camp—we were, theologically, Jew-ish at best. I had about as much experience with actual antisemitism as I did with men, which is to say zero.
Before I arrived on the predominantly Muslim coast of Kenya, a few family friends had suggested I not mention my religion. This advice was aimed at avoiding bigotry, but I knew it was borne of bigotry too, a conflation of the militants we saw on TV with the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims. I resolved not to take it.
Still, whenever religion had come up in Kenya, I’d found myself saying, “I’m not really anything.” Besides any biases I’d come in with, my reticence was based on a few signs that perhaps it really would be better not to advertise my Hebraic roots. On the side of a building I passed most days, someone had drawn Osama bin Laden’s head with the warning, “U never know who next Bush Blair.” According to rumors passed on by Lamu’s small and eccentric expatriate community, various unsavory characters had taken up residence in town over the years, including a pair of “Iranian Islamic fundamentalists” who used Lamu as a hideout (from whom they were hiding was never made clear to me).
More broadly, my skittishness reflected a general uncertainty about how much of my still-forming self I could share with the world. This was especially on my mind when it came to my living situation. I’d rented a room in a guesthouse where two Kenyan guys also stayed; a pal of theirs, Omari, worked at the house, and on occasion the four of us met in the courtyard for dinner. This was during Ramadan, and though the guys knew I wasn’t observing the fast, they always insisted I be the first to break it, adamant the visitor take the first bite despite their hunger.
The guys got a kick out of my clumsy attempts to make my way in your close-knit community, and little got past them. One afternoon, Omari announced he had a “question for Bwana Lucas.” Mischief glimmering behind his wire-frame spectacles, he asked, “Is it true that you are scared of cats?”
I was, in fact, scared of the feral cats endemic to Lamu, and would sometimes change routes altogether if I saw one hissing in my direction. But how would Omari know that?
At first, he claimed he’d spied me evading one. “You were going one way, saw the paka, went the other.” After I asked for details—where and when had he witnessed my alleged act of cowardice?—he admitted it was a bit of town gossip he’d heard. “In Lamu,” said Omari, “people talk.”
The feral felines became a running joke between us. “Run from any cats today?” he’d ask. Sometimes, during a pause in the conversation, he’d turn to me and meow.
Against this was the backdrop of immense anti-Muslim bigotry emanating from the U.S. In the months after the Twin Towers fell, hate crimes against Muslims (or those perceived to be Muslim) soared in my country. American mosques were vandalized and burned. The month before I met you, our Congress gave our President the authority to invade Iraq, a country whose connection to 9/11 was nonexistent, though Bush the Younger had little trouble convincing a huge chunk of the electorate otherwise.
“It felt claustrophobic to predicate any hope of cross-cultural connection on keeping myself a blank slate: the guy who ‘wasn’t really anything,’ who wasn’t dating ‘at the moment.’”
And so it felt good to break bread with Omari and company, felt good to be accepted as an American at that table, our nascent friendships their own small acts of resistance against the tribalist impulses thriving around us. But there were limits. Whenever one of the guys asked if I had a girlfriend back home, I said I didn’t “at the moment.” If I was on the fence about saying I was Jewish, I knew homosexuality was a true no-go: sex between men is a felony in Kenya, punishable with prison time.
It wasn’t that there were no gay guys on the island. In the seventies, Lamu attracted gay men and hippies from the west, earning itself the nickname “the Kathmandu of Africa.” An American anthropologist I’d met in Mombasa told me that some local guys on Lamu hid themselves under buibuis, the black wraps worn by Muslim women on the coast, to visit their male lovers without getting caught. But if there was a gay community in Lamu, I didn’t possess the savvy to access it. Once, feeling bold during a chat, I asked one of your neighbors what he’d do if he found out his son was gay. He told me he’d take him to the highest cliff in Kenya and throw him off.
My journal from my time in Lamu is difficult to read, filled with anxiety about how to reconcile the future I wanted with who I actually was. I didn’t come to your town expecting to hang a Pride flag from my window, but still, it felt claustrophobic to predicate any hope of cross-cultural connection on keeping myself a blank slate: the guy who “wasn’t really anything,” who wasn’t dating “at the moment.” The version of myself I was becoming in the States and the version of myself that I was in Kenya, around Kenyans, felt too far apart to sustain.
Why did I open up to you that day you tugged me aside? Maybe it was your age, or your puckishness. Maybe I was just tired of hiding the varied aspects of who I was. Around us, Lamu life continued apace, donkeys weighed down with burlap sacks and their watchful owners squeezing past. You wanted to know if I was a Jew. “Uh-huh,” I said, my voice going high.
“Very good,” you said, and that was that. Places to go, people to see. You wished me luck, and off you went.
Very good—what did it mean, exactly? I pondered your quick departure. In Lamu, people talked. How badly had I erred?
The answer came the next day, when, after getting a haircut, I passed an old man, gave my usual nod and, anticipating a nod or a “mwanafunzi,” received something else back, something unexpected.
At first, I thought I’d misheard. I turned back to see the man continuing on his way as if nothing unusual had transpired. The next day, it happened again with a different man, and again the day after that. Some said it plainly, as they would any greeting, others with the regal warmth with which you spoke. None said it with malice.
Shalom.
I had little success predicting who would shalom me and who wouldn’t. It seemed most often to come from older men, agemates of yours, which made sense, but occasionally younger people did it, too. Some days, no one would say it. Others, two or three passersby might. If the guys at the guesthouse were aware of this innovation, they never mentioned it, nor did I feel the need to bring it up. It was as if the shaloms were a release valve, relieving enough excess pressure for me to go about my days less encumbered, the existential questions about identity that had obsessed me a little less urgent than they’d been before.
Three days after I left Lamu for Mombasa to finish out the term, terrorists thought to be associated with al-Qaeda in Somalia blew up an Israeli-owned hotel across town from where I was staying. Four months after that, President Bush brought “shock and awe” to Baghdad, initiating the disastrous Iraq War. It was a time not unlike our current one here in America, divisions so deep that any talk of shared humanity rang pollyannaish, or delusional. And yet especially in these last years, I’ve found myself thinking more about those moments of connection from almost two decades ago. How I’d sit up a little taller at those dinners, walk a little looser when your friends shalom-ed me as I passed.
Shalom, that multifaceted word! They’d say it impishly, earnestly, reverently. They’d say it as a politician might: an index finger pointing my way, a flinty grin. They’d say it like a wink. Shalom, shalom, and I’d repeat it back. Hello, goodbye, and peace.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lucas Schaefer's writing has appeared in The Baffler, Slate, One Story, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, where he is at work on a novel. You can find him on Twitter @LucasESchaefer.
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Header photo by Noah Holm.
