Writing about Clem
Sometimes, I wish I stayed behind, Clem says to me.
She says it is a feeling that comes and stays with her, slipping into the dreams that come when the city is completely still, and the ones that come when her eyes are half-open and the city has only started to crawl. Other times, she know it wouldn’t have worked out, that the sticky bittersweet feeling is homesickness: a longing for a place where she is not different, where everything about her will always return home.
It’s about the money. It would have been nearly impossible to sustain a family if I had stayed, she says. She pauses as though she is turning the page of a book, ending a chapter, but with the look in her eyes, I can tell it always comes back.
Her voice is low, her accent is soft. It sways and lifts itself like the water below us.
She still identifies as a child of the soil, African, Cameroonian. Even though the image in her head of who an African should be is upside down. It’s the same way she is torn between wanting to be seen and staying anonymous. Berlin gives her the latter. Writing allows her stay in between.
On the street in Berlin, she is just one in a few black faces, looking from the outside but finding her way in through the stories she creates.
Staring at her beautiful locs, I conjure images of what her mind is like from the little I know of her. Perhaps when a woman walks down the street in Berlin with a child on her hips, her dreads tied in knots that look like cornrows, she memorizes the shape of the woman’s face and imagines if her voice feels like velvet: soft and smooth to touch, or if it’s nasal and wears drawl around it. Does she have three children like me? Is she afraid, like me, of people staring, and seeing through her?
Clem is constantly doing this, observing the lives of strangers and conjuring stories for them into something solid and tangible, stories that belong to her more than they belong to them. It’s how she navigates this space — the physical and mental space.
At the Purple Hibiscus Trust Creative Writing Workshop in Nigeria for the first time, she tries her best to be open; Chimamanda has said it is a safe space. So Clem writes about things she has never really written about. In many ways, she feels connected to this country: several family members have studied here, and lived in several cities she only knows about from pictures.
We are sitting in the bar by the water, exchanging stories about ourselves for the Exercise on the 5th day of the Workshop. She thinks about what to say staring at the traffic on the bridge over the water but just not seeing it. She tells me about wanting to belong everywhere, of trying not to hold back but still, holding back in her conversations with the other participants.
She wonders if I feel her holding back now, of being selective with the information she shares. Looking up from her computer, she later tells me I can use any information I already have, anything not included in the details we poured out in that small serene space above the water.
We smile half smiles.
