収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Posted by Paul Chuks

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In what is another instalment in the colloquy of migration, Salma Ibrahim’s Salutation Road arrives with a spirit that livens up its readers, until the reader has completely zipped through the story. It will leave them with delicious metaphors like “her hair is a riot of dried curls,” while pondering the paradoxes the plot tried to unfurl. Salutation Road shimmies its readers into a riverboat journey on which they will rendezvous with a universe that mirrors what could have been and what was, the past and the now, in the lives of a Somalian immigrant family in post-Brexit Britain.

At the start of the book, the reader is made to know that the word “immigration” can be austere, via the dramatization of the tension that Britain’s exit from the European Union spawned amongst migrants. In leaving the Union, the British populace is promised a massive reduction of migration into their country. They are largely sweetened by the promise, and favor the expulsion of “foreigners” through a referendum. Then immigrants begin to tremble at their existence in Britain: Since they were used as bargaining chips by politicians to set aside what has existed since the Second World War, who knows what will happen next? Their fate is in limbo.

The plot avails itself of the theory of the parallel universe. One of its protagonists, Sirad, drops onto the sofa after a long day and begins to sift through abandoned letters, some of which are unpaid bills, available balances, arrears, and urgent notices. The one that piques her interest is a letter embellished with a minimal blue stamp at the corner, with a motto: for light and truth. She is invited to an unnamed London school that is fascinated by technology and migration. The school is concerned about how technology can help salve the wound that Brexit has caused for migrants. It wants to help them have easier lives by inventing something undeniably groundbreaking, in an event reserved for the invited only. She is suspicious of the letter. At first she thinks it is her mother playing tricks on her; but she is surely too steeped in worries and anxiety to try pulling a prank, let alone an elaborate one such as this. The next day, in a sort of trance, she boards a bus going towards her work (or so she thinks), but, as the letter promised, she ends up in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital. On the way to Mogadishu, she engages in low-spirited conversations with other passengers who are fated for the same destination as her. In Mogadishu, she disembarks from the bus and is unable to compute her next action. She stands on the side of the road where the bus left her and looks around at the soldiers controlling traffic. She politely asks one of them to get her a bottle of water because her insides have become dry as a desert. The soldier obliges. After she gulps the whole contents of the bottle, a woman (her aunt, supposedly) approaches her and offers to take her home.

Apparently, the letter was the door into a parallel universe and this Mogadishu is the parallel scene which contains what could have been. Sirad meets a woman who is a spitting image of her mother back in London, still steeped in worry. This Mogadishu has become a relic of itself because it is mired in an endless war. On getting there, Sirad is coated with survivor’s remorse: She feels guilty for having left at a young age and conceives of herself as different from the rest of its people, since she has not braved the life of a typical Somalian girl, coursing through and surviving war. Britain offers an illusion of safety that has been able to wrap her up safely away from the wrath of this terror, but never its effects. Every time she looks around and sees the devastation sitting in the people’s eyes—and in the environment—she breaks inwardly from the cowardice of migration, which seems to her to bring with it some element of evading destiny.

But was it her destiny to survive the war? Is war ever anybody’s, any country’s, destiny? And, as has happened in Somalia, should people embrace conflict and be proud survivors? Should they castigate those who left for other countries? Who in this dichotomy is in moral deficit? Who is a bona fide citizen with undying love for their country? Does migration highlight the transactionalism that is said to be incompatible with love? Or does it spotlight the depth of the profanity and darkness of the power structures under which we live, when something as evil as war is not enough to stop greed? These questions and more bog down the reader’s mind as Sirad sits in her new home in Mogadishu.

A man walks in who reminds her of her father—a spitting image, too. Aaobo, she later nicknames him. He is older, with gray hair and a slower gait. She is instantly left with a riveting longing for a father, since she was not lucky enough to have experienced one before he abandoned the family. In this parallel universe, her father is around, still married to her mother, aged and full of scars and stories she wishes she had known or witnessed. He treats Sirad to extra chunks of tender lamb and limes as they sit together on the carpet and eat like a family. After the meal, she is prepared to meet her double, Ubah. She is nervous, especially because she later learns that Ubah is not on speaking terms with her parents; she is the rebel version of Sirad. This is evident in how Ubah shuts Sirad down when the former hints at one day leaving her marriage without giving prior notice to her husband or parents.

When the bus returns her to London as mysteriously as it took her, Sirad is entirely uncertain how to explain what just happened. And this is the great thing about the book: its ability to contain complex paradoxes that oust our current understanding of human logic. To tell her real mother in London that she was on a bus to work as usual, but somehow ended up in Mogadishu where she met their alternate selves, is to give the elder woman’s mind another cause for worry. What excuse is tenable enough to justify returning home by dusk? Sirad casually says her work kept her late, and it works due to a preconceived notion of her good behavior. Her younger brother, Ahmed, would have gotten an ass-whooping.

The story peaks when her double informs her that she is in London. Sirad leaps for joy because Ubah is another addition to her scanty set of friendships: Rosie is moving to Rwanda as an expat; Maxine, the librarian, although she makes time for Sirad, is always busy. Sirad and her double develop a complex friendship that ultimately enters grey areas of ethics and morality. After a few outings with Sirad that involve shopping and sightseeing, Ubah develops cold feet towards her, and suspends everything altogether. Sirad is caring: She loses sleep over the condition in which Ubah finds herself. She worries that Ubah has been trafficked into London, that she lives in a camp to which no outsider is allowed entry, and is an unregistered immigrant who won’t be able to get proper care if and when she gets sick. But Ubah does not want to be treated like a lost child, unable to find her way in a desert. She wants autonomy and respect.

It is worth mentioning that the characters in this novel are properly diverse, to illustrate this complexity of human life: Ubah is what Sirad would have been had she not migrated at an early age; Aaobo is the father who left her mother too early; Maxine the friend who solves the puzzle of her friendship with her double, and Rosie the embodiment of the double standard between white and Black migrants; Ahmed is the young truant who was predicted to end up like his father, due to their resemblance, but later turns out to be a computer engineer with photography as a side hobby, travelling the world looking for a wife. White immigrants are called “expats,” an admiring word for a white person living outside their country; while Black immigrants are just called immigrants, a byword for scornful disapprobation.

When does love become too much of a load to carry? When does it lose its respect? When the parties involved fulfil their obligations by being present and offering helping hands to a friend in need? Or when one or the other party has drifted away from the friendship and any little show of love is taken for granted—and in this case seen as “disrespect”? When Sirad is called back by the London school to share details about her double in exchange for cash, she quarrels with them at first, because the school has not lived up to its promise about migration and technology, offering only further mystery, and because the betrayal they request is incompatible with her morality. She eventually gives in after imagining what could be achieved with the money they offer, settling her mother’s outstanding bills the most convincing possibility of all. Given that the friendship has petered out, is selling Ubah’s information a justifiable action? The light that returned to her mother’s face, the weight that sloughed away at the awareness of this new finanicial settlement: Do they excuse Sirad? She lives her days in misery, convinced she’s a bad person, until she talks with Maxine—who admonishes her to learn to forgive herself and start life again, over and over, because clinging onto the past leads to nowhere.

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