portrait titled after my father’s absence – Dalia Elhassan

when i was 13, i asked my father to tell me the story of his life & he did not look up from the bone he was polishing with his teeth when he named a year: 1989. he was a young man in amreeka for the first time, first of his name to uproot the soil that raised him & 1989 was nyc, meeting winter for the first time, sleeping on an attic floor, & i take down the details furiously: the ice that gathered on & flattened his afro, eyes that slowly lost their warmth, button down short sleeve & corduroy pants, my father not yet my father unhappy & alone in this country that did not forgive him or his father or his father or his father for their existence pride his only faith, years of watching sun become moon then sun again, of snow that revealed what it meant to be white and the english he picked up is not the english of a colonial school back home but a dialect easily mistaken as improper, dialect that turns and twists until tongue cannot tell native from foreign & i take this all in, note the details he does not mention –                    the failed marriage to my mother & four kids he did not mind           loss of vision & ability           feeling in his right knee diabetes  & the medication   loss of nation-state of omdurman   of what it means to truly be at home      of father       of self     lost, the only thing he feels       the only thing he is to me