Threads of Love in the Diaspora
Exploring the Bittersweet Realities of Love, Survival, and Hope in foreign lands.
Hey, y’all
I know I haven’t been consistent but I’m working on that. I hope you are still here to explore life with me. This week’s post is inspired by Rudo D Manyere’s novel 3:15 AM and other stories.
Please enjoy.
The story of love amongst many immigrants in the diaspora is far from your typical Hollywood romance. In her enthralling debut novel, Rudo D Manyere narrates the story of Kurauone, a Zimbabwean man who is madly in love with Adesua, who to him, is a Nigerian goddess. Having been in the UK for more than forty years, they both have had the unfortunate reality of leading the life of an undocumented immigrant. For Kura, it was a life characterized by joblessness, prison time and being distant from the family without a means or hope of ever seeing them again. Adesua is also a victim of the same fate. She desires something that can sustain her and someone who can balance her up in this world of no opportunity. Because, for both of them, not having documents spelt exclusion from the general systems of self-sustenance and even sustaining the families back home. Consequently, Adesua eventually marries a white native by the name of Steve.
Kura serves some time in prison and is only kept sane by the hope of one day being able to give Adesua the life she deserves and for both of them to live the life of their dreams and fantasies. When Kura finally receives his documents, a green card that promises to afford him a better life in the foreign country, it feels meaningless. After forty-one years of struggling without a way out, the green card lifeline comes at a point where Kura is old and is prepared to rest. What exacerbates his situation further is the discovery that Adesua and Steve are moving to France. Kura, in his despair and existential crisis: finding no point in living without Adesua —the only vein that kept him going while in prison—resolves to go back to Zimbabwe.
Realities of love abroad and the tradeoff.
There’s a running joke on social media that Africans move abroad in search of money to go back on vacation to their home countries. Another common one is that the Zimbabwean dream is to leave Zimbabwe. The humour in these sentiments bears with it an iota of truth about the realities of the lives of immigrants and that of native Zimbabweans and Africans as a whole. It is a painful irony that home is not sweet after all.
In this story, Kurauone echoes these sentiments about his life abroad;
“It was like being caught between a rock and a hard place- living illegally in a country you would never be accepted or surviving in your own country where you were never certain where the next meal would come from. “
These words ring supreme today and are the theme for most immigrant lives abroad. Many like me, who have by sheer grace found the opportunity to cross over, find the alternative worse than working a minimum wage job and hoping you’ll have enough at the end of the month to send for siblings back home. Now, for people like Kura, the concept of love as an end in itself ceased to be practical. Adesua’s brother spells out to Kura that, in the UK, for an undocumented immigrant, love is an illusion. According to him, love is not love unless it can guarantee or at least carry with it the prospect of being documented.
Adesua and Kura were beautiful lovebirds. In the words of Kura, or rather, Rudo, they were the “Shona and Yoruba duo. A concoction by the African gods deemed good and pleasant in a foreign land.” But, it wasn’t an economic relationship in the UK and thus, they couldn’t pursue it. They couldn’t just love each other and hope that love would conquer all. For a better life, amongst many other routes to take, Adesua had to find a mate that could conquer her mere problem of existence. She married Steve. The sacrifice had to be made. And such are the sacrifices that are made by many immigrants abroad in search of a safety net and not just mere happiness.
But what is love?
While Kura was serving his prison sentence for being caught with fake IDs and Documentation, an immigration lawyer funded by the government would try to persuade him to return home. It made all the sense to him that he went back. He had nothing in that country: no family, no savings and no dignity. What held him from doing it was her dearest Susu, the love of his love.
“Susu was the one who kept me alive,” says Kura. “Susu gave me hope and gave me the will to live.” Such were the words of a man well stricken by Cupid.
I found the part of Kura’s life in prison reminiscent of Viktor Franl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning. There in the concentration camps with raging gas chambers, where tomorrow was not promised nor was life in the next hour, the will to live and keep going, as Frankl states, came from his hope of reuniting with his wife again.
It strikes me deeply that both these men found meaning and a reason to live from the prospect and belief that one day, they would be united with their loved ones and live the life they had always dreamed of. While I try to adult in foreign lands, questioning the meaning of all these things that we pursue, I find myself resting on the fact that it is all pointless if there’s none to love and none that love’s us back. I’m therefore persuaded to believe that if there’s anything in need of utmost pursuit, giving, sacrificing and protecting in this life, it is love.
So, what is love?
It is that which kept Kura going even when all odds were against him. It is that which kept Frankl willing to see tomorrow in the Nazi Concentration Camps. love, in this context, is that which gives meaning to life. A reason to exist.
To whom shall we cry?
My mother landed in the United States as an undocumented immigrant. She was fleeing an economically unstable Zimbabwe which did not show her a sign of a better tomorrow, not only for herself but also for her two children. I was two years old when she left the country and it was only after nineteen years that I landed in the US. She had her fair share of love stories that she couldn’t or could pursue.
In the narrative, Kura and Susu meet because Kola passed away from exhaustion six months after getting his papers. Kola at sixty-three was only just about to start working legally, an age generally considered the retirement phase. He was survived by two daughters, one of whom he left when she was only two years old, and after forty years, she would be seeing him in a coffin. Five months after I set foot in the US, my mother passed away. There's little solace in the fact that there was a slim chance that my story could have been akin to that of Kola’s daughter. At the same time, I wonder how many of the same stories are still being told on the same wavelength. But what I know kept my mother going was her love for her children back home, and she refused to rest before we got reunited.
The bigger question is this: outside all the means of survival that we may try to employ, as citizens of broken countries and immigrants abroad, to whom do we cry? Because the individuals put in place to lead and serve do not care for the populace and electorate. While this may be the nature of man, it is also the nature of man to hear and know of stories like that of Kura, Susu, Kola, me and many others and feel empathy. It is the nature or mxn to love.
I write this in light of the upcoming 2023 Zimbabwe presidential elections, praying that in all the noise, chaos and darkness clouding the country’s status quo may freedom reign. Our voices are our only weapons, and in love lies our defence. I’m confident because when I read the room, Africa is changing.
Aluta Continua.