6 July 2020
Dearest Fazal,
The temperature is rising. Castle Valley should reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit today. I am writing you from inside with Basho and Issa stretched out beside me. Brooke is writing in the other room. The blinds are closed, and it feels as though we are inhabiting a cave where colors are muted, and sounds are muffled.
We received the saddest of news, Jonah Yellowman’s son, his namesake, died yesterday from the Covid-19 virus. I just got off the phone with Jonah. He said, “I have no words.” The family is gathering at his place in Monument Valley. He is going to drive down to Phoenix to put things in order. He told me he talked to his son, Jonah, on Friday, who said he wasn’t feeling well. Jonah told him to come home to Utah where the traditional medicines awaited him, that he could help him. He never heard from his son again.
He never let us know how sick he was,” Jonah said. On Sunday, his older brother, also in Phoenix, went to check on him and he was dead.
Indian Country is being ravaged by the pandemic, Fazal. As you know, Jonah led a Navajo Nationwide “Ceremonial Call to Action” two weeks ago to ask the virus to leave and that their communities focus on the traditional medicine and ceremonial means that are theirs to heal themselves as they honor the power that they, the Diné, hold. We joined them in our own fire ceremony burning prickly pear, yucca leaves, piñon boughs, juniper, and sage as instructed. A thick and winding smoke animated by collective prayers rose upward as we smudged ourselves in silence.
Harvard announced today all classes through 2020–2021 will be taught online due to the surging coronavirus. And so, there is no going back to Cambridge for this next academic year, we will remain here in the desert for the duration. I don’t even know what that means.
The photograph of yours in my hands today offers a clue: A tree is framing three women, two babies in the lap of the woman seated in the center, and a man whose posture appears as a single bookend with his head held up by his left hand anchored by an elbow resting between his knees that he is hugging toward his chest with his other hand as they all sit on a mat on the ground. I see a polygamist and his three wives. Behind them stands their progeny, dozens of children, young and older facing your camera, some smiling, some not.
This is a family tree rooted in place.
Taking a closer look at this family through my grandmother’s magnifying glass, I count thirty-seven children. Eleven of the children are looking elsewhere, over their shoulders, to the side, down at the ground. One child appears to be talking to another, one nearby listens. Each expression on each child tells a story—like the girl with her arm around the tree, her head leaning against its trunk who is focused on something out of the frame; or the boy whose elbow is perched on his knee like his father with his hand on his forehead sitting atop a woodpile; or the young woman standing to the side opposite of the tree, whose hand covers her mouth and yet her smile remains visible. This is not one portrait of a family, but a multitude of small portraits born from multiple wives.
I share these polygamous roots with those you have befriended and photographed here in Kenya, where your own roots lay through your father by way of your grandfather who was born in Northern India and migrated to Kenya before Partition in 1947 after which those lands would be called Pakistan.
The man who would bookend my great-great grandmother as a plural wife in Utah would be called Mr. Bunker. Or on Brooke’s side of the family, “Brother Brigham” would suffice, a man with not three wives but fifty-five wives claimed as his. By the time of his death, Brigham Young, the great Mormon colonizer, would have fathered fifty-six children by sixteen of his wives with forty-six of his children reaching adulthood.
A friend of ours, Ken Sanders, who is an antiquarian bookseller, came across an archival photograph of Brigham Young seated next to “one of his wives” whose face had been scratched out. What wasn’t removed was the turquoise and silver bracelet wrapped around her brown wrist accentuated by the sheen of her jewelry. She is believed to be Navajo. Ken approached the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who bought the photograph immediately for their collection for a sizeable sum. It is no surprise this photograph has disappeared from their archive as the Church may not have wanted this known or discussed.
Brooke and I once gathered as progeny of Brigham Young in the Mormon Tabernacle where we witnessed over 10,000 cousins all seated beneath one historic roof on Temple Square. Each descendent wore a white square badge with a number to denote which wife they sprang from. Brooke’s badge, as one of Brigham Young’s many great, great grandsons, bore the #2: Lucy Ann Decker was Brigham’s second wife, but his first plural wife. She was twenty years old and would become a mother of seven children. Clarissa Young Spencer, her daughter, married John Daniel Spencer, father of Helen Spencer who married Rex Winder Williams, Sr., and was mother to Rex Winder Williams, Jr., Brooke’s father.
My matrilineal line from polygamy goes like this: Emily Abbot Bunker, first wife of David Bunker, mother of Cynthia Celestial Bunker (who was the daughter of Emily and fathered by a freed slave working on the railroad in Ogden, Utah), mother of Vilate Lee Romney, mother of Lettie Romney Dixon (who was born in Colonia Dublán, Mexico, part of the Mormon community that fled Utah, where polygamy had been banned), mother of Diane Dixon Tempest, my mother.
My focus returns to the two babies resting in the lap of the wife in the center whose hands cradle their tiny legs. I want to kiss their little feet like I do with my own nieces and nephews.
Now I am looking more closely at the women and I am wondering if the fourth individual I thought was a man is actually a woman. It is her weary gaze that convinces me I was wrong. Maybe this photograph is not a polygamist family portrait at all, but four women and their children on the run.
Maybe I have just projected my own history on the history of these women who have been displaced from their homes and families, relocated to a camp and place unknown to them, as we white people so often do. Maybe I just made up a story not seeing who these women and children really are but who I imagined them to be. The woman in the center wears an oversized white t-shirt that reads “International Rescue Committee.” The IRC logo of a globe appears beneath its name. “The IRC Aids Refugees & People Whose Lives Are Shattered By Conflict & Disaster” their website reads.
I am looking at a refugee camp. I am staring into the faces of mothers and children who have been displaced and traumatized by conflict or famine or war. Let me get out of the way so I can witness the strength and sorrow and resiliency reflected in the light and shadows of their faces who are facing you.
Not until this moment, did I remember to turn the photograph over and find your elegant script, now a compass point I will use to orient myself:
Nyirabahire Esteri, traditional midwife, holding newborns
Nsabimana (“I beg something from God”) and
Mukanzabonimpa
(“God will grant me, but I don’t know when”),
flanked by
mothers Kanyange, Mukabatazi, and her mother,
Rwandan
refugee camp. Lumasi, Tanzania, 1994.
Survivors of the Rwandan genocide. Life in the midst of death. A midwife to life during war. Humbled, Fazal. Caught in my own version of colonial solipsism. All I could see was my own history projected on to theirs. I pause. I look again. I know nothing, my dear Fazal, of the lives of those you have photographed. I only know the journey they allow me to take into my own history of women and children and the family trees we lean against looking elsewhere.
May I share a story of women helping women? I think of our son Louis’s mother, Annonciata Kagoyire, from Rwanda. She survived the Rwandan Revolution in 1959, also known as Umuyaga Usenya or “Wind of Destruction.” Another “59-er” like her was Paul Kagame, who fled the country and went to America only to return years later as part of the Rwandan resistance to fight the war in 1994 and would later become president.
Louis’s mum married a Congolese man who owned land in Masisi. Mama Lisa, as she was called, shared their fields with the local women who were Hutu. They worked together as women who were farmers and sold their crops in nearby towns like Goma. Mama Lisa was beloved and respected. The women she had helped were now helping her when the war broke out. They protected Mama Lisa and her seven from their husbands who were hunting them because they were Tutsis. The women hid them for weeks, moving them from place to place to place until they could no longer harbor them safely. And then the women told Mama Lisa she must flee or they would be killed. The men found out what the women had done. Mama Lisa gathered her children together and gave them each a name to remember and sent them in various directions to fend for themselves. Before she said goodbye to her three oldest children, she said a prayer to keep them safe, and asked God to return them to her. And then they scattered in the depth of night. The three older children, Lisa, Samuel, and Louis (fourteen, thirteen, and eleven years old at the time), followed their mother’s instructions, each one carrying a different woman’s name on their lips as they found their way to the right women in the right villages who anticipated them. Each child was delivered safely to its mother (this was within roughly a three-month period), who was waiting for their return inside the refugee camp in Goma on the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. What happened within those harrowing months is their story to tell, not mine.
Now, when I return to the faces of these women with Nyirabahire Esteri seated in the center of this gathering and flanked by women who have just given birth, I say their names: Kanyange on her left and Mukabatazi on her right, Mukabatazi’s mother seated next to her—the woman I took to be a man who triggered my own story of the oppression of women. I see their strength, I see their resilience, and the ghosts that will walk with them forever.
I now see a gathering of the future and the postures of the children who will carry the burden of generational trauma.
Deep bows,
Terry