“But that was about Bayswater in London.”
“Well, you can teach them about that. At Moore, we don’t like to tell our professors what they should teach, we prefer to trust them. Look, don’t worry. You can teach about yourself, ''you’re about as multi-cultural as you can get. Frankly, Marcella, it’s all new to us. Teach whatever you like.” It felt more like carelessness than trust.
At first I prepared complicated lessons, working out all my conclusions in advance. I set out to show the students how, taking the longer view, cultures are just the outcomes of people who moved from somewhere else and would move on, how nothing is separate, permanent, fixed or owned. I was warning them away from the vanity of simple certainties, not understanding how few certainties they held.
On the day of my first class I arrived early, nervous, overdressed in a dark business suit, and believing the blackboard to be central to classroom teaching, I listed on it, before the arrival of the students, five names: Timbuctu, Xanadu, Shangri-la, Zanzibar, D’Souza.
After the dozen or so sleepy students had finally shushed themselves into silence and settled to wonder at me, I read the list out loud. How they roll off the tongue, our gorgeous trisyllabic names. I had no way of knowing what these young Americans already knew and I offered them the lovely names to test and tease them, and to claim the upper hand.
“The last one,” I said, “is me, Marcella D’Souza. What do the others mean to you?”
“They’re all imaginary places,” was the first reply, the one I had wanted.
“OK,” I said, “Any other ideas?”
“Isn’t Xanadu in a poem?”
“Good. So where are these places?”
“Nowhere. They don’t exist in the real world.”
“True only in one case, I think. Do you know which one?”
“Timbuctu?”
“No, Shangri-la. That’s from a story. The rest are real. Timbuctu is still there.” I waited, but nothing was ventured. “It’s in West Africa. In the nation of Mali. In the Sahara desert now.”
“Isn’t Zanzibar in Africa, too?” offered a girl with strikingly clear blue eyes, who had chosen to sit close to me.
“Yes. Good. Off East Africa. In the Indian Ocean. And Xanadu?”
Then I explained, arriving at my point, that all three had once been great places. Timbuctu was the ancient centre of trade and learning for the vast Mali and Songay empires. Xanadu in China was the site of the Mongol Emperor’s summer palace, though now reduced to the market town of Shangtu in Inner Mongolia. And Zanzibar, I said, was the centre of a cosmopolitan trading empire reaching across Africa by land, and by sea to Arabia, Persia, Asia and beyond. These were places, I told them—my pale, perplexed students—that a more primitive Europe once envied and feared, old reputations that lived on as myth, leaving behind an inexplicable, exotic resonance to Western ears. But, exotic places, I then told them, are just places that you haven’t taken the trouble to learn about. The same with people.
While I was in prison, I had looked all this up in encyclopedias. In all the years since I left Zanzibar it had nagged at me, the disparity between the light I saw in the eyes of strangers when I mentioned Zanzibar, and my own recollection of its difficulty and darkness. They said it was exotic, and that I was exotic too, so that no word has lead my heart to drop more quickly, with its careless declaration of my unknowability, my absolute unbridgeable separation from the speaker. I watched for similar examples of foolishness and found the other names. I thought there might be a lesson for my students there, for the difference between what is true about the unknown and what is imagined. And there was something for me too, a slyly subtle plea that I might be embraced.
But all this was too much for them too soon, too much of my concern and too little of theirs. They looked blank, even resentful. Some were still eating their breakfasts, and not knowing America’s casual ways, I thought this might be insolence, though I lacked the confidence to correct it.
The girl with the intense blue eyes—her name was Julia—came to my assistance. “Maybe, she said, we can talk a bit more about these places to help us to understand.”
“All right.” I turned to the board, placed my finger on it, pushed away the compelling thought that I was a charlatan with no business being in this classroom, and took a breath, “Does anything come to mind when you hear this name, Zanzibar?” A silence. “Just the first thing that comes into your head.”
“Somewhere exotic.” A boy, of course.
“A Bob Hope film.”
“What?”
“An old film, ‘The Road to Zanzibar.’ It was about slave girls wearing those see-through pajamas.”
“OK. OK, Arabs and slaves, then.”
“I think of a tropical island.”
“Very good. "You see, you do know something about it. Actually the state of Zanzibar is several islands. Unguja and Pemba are the largest. Unguja is usually called Zanzibar Island because Zanzibar City is on it. They’ve all been in a union with mainland Tanzania since nineteen sixty-four. So, what else is it known for?”
“Spices.” Julia had been holding back.
“Yes, their main export is a spice. Do you know which one? No? Cloves. The whole of Zanzibar smells of clove trees.” Why did I choose to tell them this, putting romance back into it?
“Have you ever been there?”
“As a matter of fact, I have. A long time ago.”
Now, well into the semester, my lessons spin out more easily. It seems that what they want from me is less understanding than clues on how to live their lives. From me, the woman from Zanzibar and London who has only just arrived. And who has, by the way, spent the last eight years in jail. My life hardly seems a basis
