Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

I rewrote newspaper articles in my head, and at night ran through my collection of books for fragments of novels that I could bring to class the next day. I graded my students’ essays with a dark red pen whose ink I spread liberally across the page so that entire paragraphs were often rendered almost illegible. Unlike most people who stake their claims on a particular field or discipline, however, I wore my ownership lightly. I rarely corrected my students when they misspoke, and not simply out of decorum or consideration, but because I had come to believe that true ownership did not have to be announced, much less fought over. Mistakes and assaults on the English language were made by the millions every hour of every day, and yet not even those infinite errors had the power to take away what I thought of as truly being mine.

My classes ended early each morning, and yet I often stayed throughout the afternoon in order to prepare my lessons. I had a list of standard texts that were supposed to be covered — a Faulkner short story, some pieces by Poe, and a handful of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poems, many of which I committed to memory so I could recite them to my students as I strolled through the aisles. There was the familiar “Let us go then…” and “I heard a fly buzz…” and of course the singing songs of myself; to these I added some of my own, slightly exotic favorites — a page from Rilke and selected bits from Rimbaud, Bishop’s “One Art”—all of which I imagined gave my class a more personalized, global feel. While many of the other teachers seem to have merely stumbled into the courses they taught, I began to think of myself as having been born or almost preordained for my course. The economics teacher was also the football coach, while our history teacher had been, until just four years earlier, an aspiring Broadway actor. No one seemed to complain, though, not the teachers or the students, despite the academy’s reputation and motto of being an “institution of exceptional scholarship.”

My syllabus had an intuitive, logical arc to it. We began with familiar domestic narratives, essays, and poems, before moving on to more modern and slightly obtuse pieces, several of which were read in competing translations. I explained it to Angela as being a part of the same pattern in which life was lived. As babies and young children we know and understand only what is immediate and before us, I told her. We accumulate memories and in doing so begin to make our first tentative steps backward in time, to say things such as “I remember when I was.” And from there our lives grow into multiple dimensions until eventually we learn to regret and finally to imagine.

While it was common even among the most disciplined teachers to allow for small fabrications, from the beginning the stories I told my students existed on a more ambitious plane. Now when asked for details about my life, I indulged myself. When one of my students wanted to know what I did before I began teaching at the academy, I told him that I had spent years working in a coal mine and had the blackened lungs to prove it. To another I was the captain of a Japanese trawler, and then a few days later a pimp and hustler. The more outlandish my responses were, the more my students wanted to know the truth, which had been the point all along.

Not only was I good at these inventions, I was grateful for them; only in fiction could I step outside of myself long enough to feel fully at ease. The stories all came naturally, just as I had shown myself more than capable of coming up with last-minute narrative fillers for the asylum applications I once worked on. I thought of this as a distinctly American trait — this ability to unwind whatever ties supposedly bind you to the past and to invent new ones as you went along. While most of it was frivolous — these stories of imaginary childhood deprivations and absurd careers were never more than an easy laugh for my students — I strayed on occasion into darker ground, if only to make sure that I held their interest.

“My family,” I told my students once after having been asked why we came to America, “had to leave their home abruptly. That’s why we ended up here.”

They fell hard for anything that sounded like that, and were quick to imagine the missing details on their own. They assumed war first, hunger and poverty second; despite their best intentions, and how many times they had recently heard someone say that Africa was more than just the sum of that, I knew these were the only images they had. Africa was everywhere in the news and the pity for it and its inhabitants had spiked a thousandfold as a result. There were rallies in Central Park for the dead of Sudan, and protests outside the UN and several different African consulates against more general crimes ranging from corruption to blanket oppression. The news at night showed throngs of people gathered around a stage wearing the names of the dead, while at the same time celebrities across the country thoughtfully called for an end to genocide.

My students were naturally infected. Some of the first ones I had taught at the academy were organizing a Save Africa Now campaign, which they asked me to be a part of, assuming, however naively, that they had a natural ally in me. Two years later I hardly remembered them; they had been shy to the point of invisibility in my class, but they had grown into themselves, and with one year left at the academy before college, they stood taller than me, with matching dark brown shaggy hair that dipped just below their eyebrows as if they were still afraid of being taken too seriously. I asked them what they wanted to save Africa from.

“Violence,” one of them said. And if that wasn’t enough, the second one followed up by adding, “Millions are dying, Mr. Woldemariam.”

I never asked them how they planned on ending the violence that had recently upset them; letters and more rallies were somewhere in the plan, money would surely be raised and sent — the fact that action was being taken was enough to ensure that whatever they did was right. I had already heard all I needed. They were visibly disappointed and I’m sure later full of contempt when I refused.

“My family’s Irish,” I told them. “I’d feel like a fraud if I joined.”

I shared little of my life at the academy with Angela, and so she never heard anything about those early stories, any one of which would have given her a moment’s pause. When she asked me how the job was going, all I could tell her was that it was fine, in part because I suspected she no longer cared.

“What about going back to school?” she finally asked me. “You’ve been there for two years. I thought you wanted to get your Ph.D.”

The idea of me with a doctorate still held sway over Angela, even if I had quietly placed it on the same shelf where numerous other ambitions of mine now rested. It was part of her faith that this was one of the only ways that we could secure a bright and happy future, and in that regard she was no different from the immigrant parents I had known at the center who were convinced that the only thing that would save and protect their children in America were advanced, specialized degrees.

“I don’t think I’m ready yet,” I told her. “I still have a lot more reading I need to do. And more experience teaching can only help.”

“And for how long are you going to do that. Two more years? Five, six? It’s just a part-time job, Jonas. It’s not supposed to become your life.”

And that was at the heart of what worried Angela — that despite our being married we had yet to form a life as commonly prescribed by others. In life, one made steady but consistent progress. Capital was raised, furnishings and homes were purchased and then later resold for a double-digit profit. More than two years into our marriage and we were nowhere near that. Angela’s concerns over money and stability had yet to diminish. As time passed she needed more pillars to keep her fully propped. Her law degree had been the first, and now she wanted to know where the second was.