Best Of Elamin Abdelmahmoud's 'Son of Elsewhere'

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Elamin Abdelmahmoud's Son of Elsewhere: a memoir in pieces

If you look like me, here is something you understand internally, before you're ever told: in America, when presidents need to look like they're doing some-thing, they take it out on Brown and Black bodies.When governments need to look like they're in control, they exercise that control over what can be subdued, and that is often places where our bodies exist. Those bodies-my body, and the bodies of my neighbours-are vulnerable to the whims of America, to the needs of insecure men. They understood this in Iraq in 2003, when a reeling America needed to look powerful. They worried about this in Iran in the late 2010s, when political commentators casually suggested that an erratic president's path to legitimacy lay in waging war. It is often Brown and Black bodies that bear the cost of America's assertion of strength. We are the canvas for brutality.

p. 60

In the wake of 9/11, there was an uptick in hate crimes against Muslims. Women wearing hijabs were harassed in public. Mosques were defaced and attacked. Kingston Police's strategy was meant to be a proactive one: by making their presence known, perhaps they'd scare off any would-be threats.

I can't say if the strategy paid off. But what I can say is it didn't make me feel safe. It made pulling up to the mosque feel like you were exiting a demilitarized zone. It didn't help that we never saw the police offt-cers themselves. I still have no idea where they went. Were they patrolling the perimeter while we prayed? Were they playing cards in the imam's office? The mystery only added to the tension I felt.

p.123

Abdelmahmoud on his late grandmother:

She radiated light. It was immediately obvious to anyone who ever met her that her instinct always tended toward kindness; her disposition always toward being generous.

p.178

My grandmother would bring the family together without ever saying this was her plan. It was her way of leaving the light on for us to find one another, without her saying a word. This was the wisdom of her tenderness.

p.179

Her first word was ilhagni, which does not have a direct translation in English. Its root word, ilhaq, roughly means "hurry, before it's too late." But ilhaqni specifically applies to a person in crisis-it means "hurry, I need you, I am out of my depth." It connotes an urgency not unlike if you'd fallen through the ice. It's a word for needing another person. It's a word for when you can't save yourself.

p.185

Funerals in English are tidy, quiet affairs. The tenor of sadness is different when the grief has to be contained. In the immediate aftermath of death, for the living there's a lot of talk of" being strong," as though strength is grieving without letting it destroy you. As though grief is a dam, and your job is to make sure it doesn't burst.

p.186

To speak and to be understood is a freedom. It is perhaps the most fundamental freedom. To summon words intentionally, and have another person understand your meaning and connect with it, is to be unbound.

p.193

Abdelmahmoud on country music:

I get a peaceful, easy feeling, like there is no conflict I am meant to resolve. Country music holds a deep familiarity, well beyond the intellectual. Country songs about places I've never been to land on my ears and I am softer, like somehow this music is taking me home. I can't help but be flooded with this feeling, and I wanted to understand it.

p. 225

“It is, by default, a genre born of longing. It is music born of people looking for a new place to call home, while trying to remember where they came from. A glimmer that wouldn't die, or more accurately couldn't be killed. Country, then, is a music of rooting and orienting yourself-a genre as compass, a stretching backward to move forward.”

p. 227-228

But there in the [Country Music] Hall of Fame— in small font, but still there—is the Big Truth of country. At its core, the music is a mystical marriage of the African banjo and the Western European fiddle.

The histories of the people who brought these instruments to America couldn't be more different. The enslaved clung to the banjo for hope in the face of brutality and death. The white fiddlers, on the other hand, had it easy. Yet these groups had in common the fact that they were homesick-longing for what they once knew. Their favours of homesickness merged and thoroughly combined, and we got what eventually became country music.

p. 227

But regardless of generation, a great deal of Sudanese music is built around description of place: the young artists sing about specific neighbourhoods to win favour with audiences; the established artists paint a picture of nature-the banks of the river, the breeze, the roses. The young and the old both sing of traditions; the elders revering them, the youngsters curious if they can bend them just a little.

p. 230

Love is a practice, a trail you carve out by travelling the same path over and over and over until it becomes familiar, until it lights the way home.

p. 255

History weighs on us most when we are its sole custodians-when we are the ones who have to tell it to the next generation. This is often forced, not chosen.

p. 255

Elsewhere is for the middle children of diaspora, those who have definitely left but haven't exactly arrived.

p. 263