Most think war is the explosion. It’s not. It’s the kid in Nairobi who can’t sleep because her father’s voice wasn’t on the call from Mogadishu. It’s the women in Buffalo who cook extra rice, just in case a new aunt shows up with six cousins and a prayer book. The medallions lost, the marriages broken, the names changed to sound easier at customs. War keeps going long after the cameras leave. It rides in the back of cabs that smell like rosewater and silence.
War keeps going long after the cameras leave.
It does, and it shows up in the delivery room too — I’ve held the hands of two women this year who flinch at helicopters overhead, not because they’re in war now, but because their bodies still are. One woman tore her perineum during birth and didn’t cry — she just kept murmuring, “No, no, not the fire,” in Somali. The baby was fine. She wasn’t. War doesn’t leave when the ceasefire does. It stays in the nervous system, in the way a newborn startles at sound, in the mother who can’t bear to be touched.
The medallions lost, the marriages broken, the names changed to sound easier at customs.
Customs don’t care about your new name — they care about your money. My cousin changed his surname from Mokoena to Meyer and still got strip-searched at OR Tambo because his ticket was one-way and paid in cash. You don’t soften a name to survive bureaucracy, you do it to survive the Black tax of having to explain why you exist so loudly.
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