Immigrants

Sometimes, I just snooze after a lot of reading….

Well, mama is deep into We Need New Names and I’m listening with baited muzzle because the writer, Noviolet Bulawayo, mama says, should win the Man Booker Prize for lovely, memorable writing about her country, Zimbabwe.

And mama says it makes her think differently about the immigrants in Rome, for example, who sell purses and scarves and cheap jewelry on the streets, trying to make a poor living in a country that is so very different from their own.

What are their lives in Italy, France, the US? Where do they gather together and talk of their various countries. Where do they gather to mourn those who have died at home from violence, from illness, from age?  And how do they ever go back again when their visas have run out and they are petrified of getting new ones because they might be sent back to the horrors of life in their villages?

What a book, mama says.  She has been in tears often as she reads this book, and I comfort her with my little warm body and she gets better.  The colors and smells and tastes of Zimbabwe float up off the pages the way the children who run out to play in the wind in their villages hope to float, hope to fly, hope to fly far and away from the violence of crooked leaders, rape of young girls, the bulldozing of their shacks.

A book not to miss, says mama. And she reads a lot of books.  But this new writer is one to watch.

I hope she writes more books so that I can lie next to mama when she reads and be ready to dry her tears.

But sometimes, I cry, too.