Blue Daughter of the Red Sea: A Memoir

13 Divine Detour

13 Divine Detour· 127 · What is hanging up cannot be reached sitting down. Amara proverb C   . I saw her straight white teeth and heard her clear ringing laughter through the windows of my imagination. The Los Angeles Airport looked very ordinary. Although my final destination was Vancouver, Canada; and Los Angeles was only a stop, a stepping-stone to the top, I enjoyed toying with dreams I had of L.A. The idea of her beauty danced for me. She undulated her belly, swung her hips right to left, tilting them up and down. She displayed her graceful handworks. And then, the dance came to a stop, and the music became a soundtrack to the faces that were facing me, attacking me, killing every sense of hope in me. I shuddered as I anticipated my journey and saw myself entering a world of unknown realities. The strange faces, the strange land, the strange language , and the strange customs overwhelmed me with a sense of fear and thrill. Life was once again opening the doors of possibilities to me. All I needed to do was to learn the tricks of the battlefield. I felt ready to go to war. I knew that if my sword was faith and it was aimed with courage, I would be triumphant. An alternative I had not. The passport I was using belonged to an Ethiopian woman who was naturalized Canadian citizen. She was twenty-eight years old, so I dressed up like a grown-up to appear as close to that age as possible. I wore heavy makeup, a blue dress suit, and high-heeled shoes that betrayed my inexperience in wearing them, since I could barely walk. In Rome, I passed the board, but, in Los Angeles, where I was supposed to transfer to get to Vancouver , I was caught. I was sent to the immigration office. An officer received me and stared at me, detecting any resemblance between the picture on the passport and me. He spoke with the officer who sat across from 128 The Book of Disenchantments
him. They laughed, exchanged remarks, looking at me with their mocking and cold stares, and again they laughed, and I died to know the language they were speaking. One officer started at once to show and tell me, feature by feature, the sky-earth differences between the real woman, the lady on the picture, and the impostor, me. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, except the few nouns like nose and mouth, and from the way he pronounced them, I had a hard time understanding even those. He pointed out how my nose didn’t look like hers, or the shape of my lips and my high cheekbones, and how much younger I looked. He showed me the picture on the passport, and I silently reproached myself for being that stupid , for the woman on the picture looked undeniably different from me. Moreover, she had on black shades. And the glasses I was wearing didn’t look anything like hers. I used to give myself credit for being smart, but this episode would surely refute the impertinent assumption. But then again, what did a disenchanted sixteen-year-old on the verge of despair care about details! So I insisted I was the same person on the picture. Again, they laughed, and for the umpteenth time in my life I wished I were born in a first-world country so that I didn’t have to be an orphan in other people’s land and so that I could’ve spared myself from being humiliated one more time. He yelled I wasn’t the woman on the picture. I whispered I was. I needed an interpreter. First, I asked for a French interpreter so that I could tell them I was from Quebec, Canada, but the French I learned in school ran for cover when the French-speaking flight attendant besieged my unfortified mind with words. Next, I was brought an Italian lass (notice my struggle to thwart a possible deportation to Ethiopia), whom I call angel No.1 in the city of angels. She sat there and bawled with me. The power of compassion and trust obliged me to reveal my identity. Enraged by the filthiness of a delayed truth and by my insolent lies that insulted their intelligence, the two officers bombed me with their fatal expressions and mouthing lips. The...