Vamba Sherif
PHOTO: Reyer Boxem
The Kingdom of Sebah
Breda: De Geus Publishing House (2003)
The Land of the Fathers
Breda: De Geus Publishing House (1999)
Vamba Sherif
Vamba Sherif
PHOTO: Nvasekie N. Konneh, December 2005
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Vamba Sherif
The Kingdom of
Sebah
Novel Excerpt
Original title:
Het Koninkrijk van Sebah
Translated by Anne Hoey
Publisher's Synopsis:
"Het koninkrijk van Sebah, Sherif's second novel,
tells the story of an African family that arrives in
the Netherlands and has to learn to deal with the
new circumstances. Part of the writer's own
experience is woven into the novel. At the beginning of the 1980s an African family
flee their country and end up in a small Dutch
town. Mansakeh, the son, sees how differently his
parents and his young sister cope with the new
situation. His father, who has been a respected
scholar and a wrestler, struggles with the strange
culture. Only when he accepts a job as a factory
worker does his self-respect recover. In the
meantime, his wife Sebah keeps the family going.
She even manages to develop into an independent
woman who commands admiration and is invited
to speak in public. When Sebah appears to have a
relationship with a Dutch man, her spouse shows
her the door. Mansakeh suspects that the
estrangement between his parents also involves a
secret from the past. A secret that must have
something to do with him, their son Mansakeh.
Like the author, Mankaseh is a boy who discovers
writing as a way of expressing his concerns. The
boy's mother, Sebah, is the books pivotal
character. A strong woman, she bears great
resemblance to the author's own mother.
Conscious of her own culture, she knows she
must not shut herself away in this new country.
She steps outside and wins her own place in
society through her qualities and insight.
"‘In the beginning, there was a woman –’ That is
how Sebah would tell her version of the story of
creation. With these words she would bring about
much more than she could have guessed."
In our first year in this country town there was a
lot of snow, and at night a profound silence fell
over our neighbourhood. One evening I slipped
out of bed, tiptoed down the stairs and pushed
the curtains at the big window aside a little to
look at the yellow-lit houses opposite. Now and
then a car would spray up blackened snow. The
neighbourhood was built in a square, with a
playground where no child played, which was
screened off from the main street large block of
flats.
The red brick houses were all equally small, as
though the inhabitants had a strange concept of
space. The big windows downstairs were the same
as those on the upper floors, and the blue or
brown front doors and even the cobble-stone
garden paths leading to the houses were all
identical. The front and back gardens, tiny
patches of ground, were enthusiastically
maintained by the inhabitants, and distinguished
themselves by the choice of flowers and plants.
The house the four of us lived in was different.
The number of the house was barely legible, the
paving tiles were overgrown with hardy weeds
trying to survive that severe winter, and the thick,
milk-white curtains at the downstairs windows
were often closed, so that curious passers-by
would wonder what was going on behind them.
At first, I felt disappointed about my room, which
looked out onto the back gardens of the next
street, but I slowly got used to it. And to the green
wallpaper and the poster with clogs on it above
the table that my books lay on. Sebah, my mother,
had placed my clothes in little piles in the
cupboard and told me I had to put my dirty
washing into the basket that stood in my room
next to my shoes and sandals.
The only print on the wall of our living room was
a framed poster of the Kaaba in Mecca.
Every trace of the previous tenants had been
removed. My father had taken the flowering
plants away. ‘They belong outside in the sun,
where people can admire them, Sebah’, he said.
And he’d given all the walls a fresh coat of orange
paint, taken down the prints that decorated the
kitchen walls, and thrown them in the bin,
followed by a list of local restaurants. A bunch of
dried flowers, some doggy posters and a set of
naughty playing cards were removed from the
lavatory, leaving its walls bare except for a
number of tiles bearing maxims. And there was a
glossy with a photo of the newly crowned Queen
on the cover.
My bed had gone cold that evening while I was
downstairs, but I crawled back in anyway and
rolled myself up, close against the radiator, which
my father – as fed up with the cold as we were –
had turned up full.
My sister Mariam slept in the little attic room and
I could hear her tossing in bed. My father had
insisted that Mariam and I should each have our
own room, for he thought we were old enough to
be aware of the differences between us. Sebah,
who initially also wanted a room of her own, just
as in our home country, had eventually agreed to
share a room with her spouse after he won the
argument by quoting a learned man with a
flawless reputation. Sebah didn’t want to talk
about it any more, but her husband wouldn’t let it
rest until he had convinced her, in an open
discussion in front of an audience that consisted
of their two children. Mariam was seven, two
years younger than I, and you could already see
what a beauty she was going to be. My sister had
my mother’s blue-black skin and my father’s
dreamy eyes. Her luxurious hair, usually in simple
plaits, framed a little face, flawless apart from a
tiny scar at the side of her nose as a result of
constant picking, for she loved dried snot. In
character, too, my sister resembled the rest of the
family – she was stubborn and often had us
speechless.
One morning during that first winter, my father
came downstairs to have a cup of tea and he saw
Mariam playing outside, dressed in only a thin frock. She was scooping up handfuls of snow,
letting it slide through her fingers. She danced,
skipped, followed her own footprints and rolled
in the snow. Spellbound, my father watched his
frolicking daughter, until his parental instincts
took over and he called her. But Mariam just
carried on with her game.
‘Sebah, see to it that your daughter behaves
herself. We’re foreigners here, for Pete’s sake!’
my father called out angrily.
Reprinted with permission from De Geus Publishing House, The Netherlands
Copyright © Vamba Sherif
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