First Earthquake

Rome, Italy, Age 7

My mother’s hair is long, straight, and black. It blows behind her in the wind. She is walking away again. In the moonlight, she is a phantom ship, drifting out on obsidian waters, toward the place where the sky and ocean meet, disappearing over the curvature of the earth, and the moment is so evanescent, so intangible, that I am already wondering, a wisp of her still in sight, if she was ever there at all. She does not turn to see me in the doorway. I am seven years old, bundled up in a pink sweater and down-stuffed coat, my bobbled hat pulled down past my eyebrows. My white socks are dingy and damp from the rain that seeped into the black canvas shoes I insist on wearing no matter the weather. I want to call out to her but am afraid she will not turn around. Or, worse, that she will, but still won’t choose me. She gets into the passenger seat of the blue Fiat her husband borrowed from an acquaintance. They are passing through Rome for a day, on their way back to Massachusetts. They vacationed in Venice.

Earlier, before my mother arrived without sign or signal, I woke up to the sound of rain. It was dark outside, so dark I thought it might still be night until I smelled pancakes. My father makes pancakes on Saturday mornings.

As I ate my breakfast, face buried in a shabby copy of Little Women, my father fretted. He tapped his foot, peeped at his watch, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. I wondered what was making him anxious and hoped that whatever it was wouldn’t require him to sit at his desk all weekend. He had just returned from a work trip to Dhaka. I wanted him to myself. The radio, always perched on the kitchen counter next to the toaster, its bent antenna somehow finding the BBC World Service, brought news of a catastrophic earthquake in Armenia. Tens of thousands of people were killed; hundreds of thousands lost their homes and everything in them. A city called Spitak was destroyed. A new city, the woman on the radio said, would have to be built over the ruins. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev asked the world for help. On my pancake, I spread butter and sprinkled sugar.

“Does Mama have family in Armenia?”

My father flinched, then looked at me with wide eyes magnified by Coke-bottle glasses.

“No,” he said. “Her family are Armenian, but they lived in Turkey. They are all in America now.”

We usually avoided the topic of my mother, but the BBC said this was an emergency. Rules are suspended in emergencies.

I am half-Armenian but was not sure if the earthquake had anything to do with me. My Ghanaian father, stepmother Anabel, sister Yasmeen, and I live in Italy. This was the first I’d heard of the Caucasus Mountains, the fault rupture point that caused the event. I asked my father what an aftershock was. He said they are tremors in the earth that follow an earthquake. They are the earth’s delayed reaction to stress.

The doorbell rang just as I was about to go upstairs to brush my teeth. Yasmeen, who had stumbled into the kitchen rubbing her eyes, jolted awake and scampered after me to see who it was. We hoped our friends from next door had come to play.

Our mother was on the front porch with two red balloons and shaking hands. I stared at her. Remembering my voice, I shouted for my father to come. We hadn’t seen my mother in three years, not since I was four. My father nodded hello and sent Yasmeen and me to get dressed. When we came downstairs, my parents were still standing in the hallway. They weren’t speaking. My mother’s hands were in her pockets. She had let go of the red balloons and they had floated up to the ceiling. Her head dropped. My father’s shoulders were drawn back, his legs spread apart.

“Your mother is going to take you for a drive.” My father opened the closet and pulled out our puffy coats. I could feel him on the other side of the front door when he closed it behind us, as though to say he would be there, exactly where we left him, when we returned.

My mother’s husband drove, silent while my mother chattered. Our half sisters were dying to see us. She would bring them next time. Venice was a magical place. She could hardly believe it was real. Our grandparents bought us a kite in the shape of a fish. Our father could show us how to fly it in the spring.

Despite the drizzle, my mother’s husband dropped us off in Piazza Navona. An artist drew a funny sketch of us, together, with bulbous heads and startled eyes. We ate at a café—plates of spaghetti al pomodoro. All of us requested lots of parmesan cheese. My mother asked about school and said she liked our house, even though, as far as I knew, she had only seen the hallway. I asked her about the earthquake. She hadn’t heard the news.

“Someday, we’ll all go to Armenia,” she said. It sounded like half question, half statement, so I said, “Yes,” even though I didn’t believe her. As we left the restaurant, a juggler swept over, grinning. His hands seemed to barely move, but his blue, yellow, and red clubs hurtled high above his head. He caught two in one hand and one in the other and bowed deep. My mother clapped. Yasmeen and I, always tentative around strangers, considered the cracks in the paving stones. My mother pressed a few gold and silver thousand-lire coins into the juggler’s hand. She also gave one each to Yasmeen and me to toss into the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi. I told my mother what my father told me about the fountain—about how the four figures in it are the gods of four rivers on four continents: the Nile, the Ganges, the Danube, and the Rio de la Plata. Above the gods is an obelisk, topped with a dove. The obelisk represents the Catholic Church. The river gods are powerful, but they prostrate themselves before the Vatican.

“The fountain is a symbol of colonialism,” I whispered, echoing my father, who speaks to me like I was a grown-up. Colonialism, as I understand it, is white people stealing land from black and brown people, white people beating and killing black and brown people, white people forcing black and brown people into slavery and servitude. My father, I know, was born in the last year of colonial rule in what was then the Gold Coast. He says being born as Ghana was being born was the beginning of his good fortune, of our good fortune. I liked that my mother laughed and told me I was smart. When I threw my coin into the water, I closed my eyes tight and listened to my mother’s laughter sing with the sound of water. That sound was the wish I dared not shape into words because words could be misconstrued.

Now, I watch my mother get into the blue Fiat. Her husband starts the ignition. To see her more clearly, I squint. She rests her head against the window and I imagine, or perhaps hope, she is crying. The car pulls away, absorbed by the night. I sniff the air for exhaust or perfume, for any remnant of my mother’s presence. But I smell only wet limestone and garlic. My stepmother, Anabel, is cooking dinner. Piazza Navona seems far away now. We live in EUR, a neighborhood known by an acronym for the Esposizione Universale di Roma—a world’s fair that never happened because of the onset of World War II. EUR was built by Mussolini to celebrate twenty years of Fascist Italy, and to expand the city to the sea. Unlike the rest of Rome, EUR is an orderly place. Its buildings are solid, polished white, and arranged around a grid of right angles. Usually its predictability makes me feel safe, but now it feels inhospitable, spiritless. Somewhere in the house, my sister shrieks. She does not want to take a bath. Her anger, I know, is about something else entirely. With a last deep breath, I inhale whatever particles of my mother remain, and close the door behind me.

In the hallway, I remove my shoes. The marble floor is cold against my thin socks. Above me, the bulb my father keeps forgetting to change flickers from light to dark then light again. Between my thumb and fingers is the Polaroid my father took of my mother, Yasmeen, and me minutes ago. All of us blinked.

Later, as I am about to walk into my father and Anabel’s room to say goodnight, I overhear my father venting.

“She can’t even bother to spend time with her daughters,” he says. “A few hours are all she could spare for them? That’s why I didn’t even want to tell them she was coming. She’s never going to change.” He drank a lot of red wine at dinner and his voice is louder than usual. It rises above the hiss of the radiators and the near-human yowls of the stray cats that beg under trattoria tables by day and hunt mice in the city’s sewer system by night.

I knock on the cracked-open door and enter, trying to walk normally, resisting running into my father’s arms. My lips quiver and I purse them to keep from crying as my father pulls me into a long hug. My head on his shoulder, I nuzzle into the soapy smell of his neck. He holds me like this every night until we vibrate to the same rhythm. Our heartbeats say he is mine and I am his. He kisses my forehead and reminds me to dream sweet dreams, reminds me that tomorrow will be ours. We can read together all day and maybe, in the evening, we will listen to highlife music and dance in our pajamas. These reminders, I know, are meant as consolation. He wants me to forget my mother was here.

The following week, I take the caricature by the artist in Piazza Navona and the Polaroid picture of my mother, Yasmeen, and me to school for show-and-tell. I do not tell my father.

I attend an international school on Via Cassia. My classmates are from all over the world, but I am one of only two black students. Sarah Brennan, an English girl with green eyes, wants to know why my mother and I are different colors. There is no malice, only curiosity, in her voice, but I feel embarrassed. I can only say I don’t know why. As I return to my seat, my face burns.

At lunchtime, Miss Rossi, my teacher, sits next to me and asks if I enjoyed spending time with my mother. Tears pool in my eyes as I nod. She takes me by the hand and leads me into the bathroom, where she helps me wash my face. She asks what is wrong. How do I tell her about the trembling that leads to ripping, then to violent rupture; to whole lives and whole cities disintegrating; to piles and piles of rubble; to displacement and exile? How do I tell her that a day that begins with pancakes for breakfast can end in disaster; that, in an instant, an earthquake or a mother can arrive and change everything? How do I tell her that even when the earth stops shaking, cracks in the surface spread silently? Pent-up forces of danger and chaos can be unleashed at any time. I don’t know how to explain any of this, so I tell her I am afraid of the aftershocks.

Resettlement Registration Form

Name: Nadia Adjoa Owusu

Alias Name(s): N/A

Date of Birth: February 23rd, 1981

Age: 28

Gender: Female

Marital Status: Single

Citizenship: United States of America; Ghana

Religion: Atheist? Agnostic?

Education: BA, MS (in progress)

Occupation/Skill: Waitress, Graduate Student, Writer

Name of Father: Osei Owusu

Name of Mother: Almas Janikian

Ethnic Origin: Black. Biracial. Indo-European? Central Asian? Although I identify as Black, I am more literally Caucasian than most people who call themselves Caucasian. My mother is ethnically Armenian, and Armenians are from the Caucasus region between Europe and Asia. Her grandparents escaped Turkey during the Armenian genocide of 1915-1917. They eventually settled in Watertown, Massachusetts, where my mother was born. My father belonged to the Ashanti tribe from the Kumasi area of southern Ghana.

Preferred Language: English is my first language. I used to be fluent in Italian. I still speak it, but my vocabulary has dwindled. I also speak conversational French and some Swahili. But, my preferred language is Twi—my father’s native tongue—even though I don’t speak but a few words of it. When I walk by people speaking it on the streets of New York, I slow my pace, listen for a while. The sound warms me from the inside, like groundnut soup and fufu. This is probably not what is meant by “preferred.”

Country of Origin: I was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, but that is only because my father happened to be stationed there at the time. He worked for a United Nations agency.

My mother is an American citizen, so I became American at birth. However, I did not live in the United States until I was eighteen. Much of America felt familiar to me when I arrived. America is experienced everywhere in the world. But calling myself American doesn’t feel quite accurate.

I also hold a Ghanaian passport. I’ve never used it, as far as I can remember. It’s much easier to travel with the American one. But it was important to my father that I was officially Ghanaian.

I have never been to Armenia or Turkey (except for a layover in the Istanbul airport once).

For my father’s job, we moved a lot. I lived in Tanzania until I was three. At three, I moved to England to live with my aunt Harriet for two and a half years. I lived in England for a second time at age twelve for a term at boarding school in Surrey. From ages five to eight, I lived in Italy. I moved back there for three years at age thirteen. Between the ages of eight and ten, I lived in Ethiopia. From ten to twelve, and then again from sixteen to eighteen, I lived in Uganda.

My stepmother, Anabel, is from a small village on the Tanzanian side of Mount Kilimanjaro. My mother’s second husband was Somali. So I have two half-sisters and a half brother who are Armenian-Somali-American. And my half-brother on my father’s side, Kwame, is Ghanaian and Tanzanian.

When I turned eighteen, I moved to New York, where I have lived for my entire adult life. New York is a kind of home.

Confused? Me too. I never know how to answer the question of my origin.

Country of Asylum: There are three relevant definitions of the word asylum: 1. Protection from arrest and extradition given especially to political refugees by a nation or by an embassy or other agency enjoying freedom from what is required by law for most people. 2. (antiquated) An institution for the maintenance and care of the mentally ill, orphans, or other persons requiring specialized assistance. 3. Any secure retreat.

Though my application seems to relate to the first, I am seeking the kind of place described by the second and third definitions. I am seeking a place to wait out the aftershocks.