Whenever we gather at the house of Sisi Saru, a Zimbabwean who has lived in Sacramento for fifteen years, we immediately form two groups – the men sit outside, or recline on couches in the living room arguing about African politics, while the women, most of them professionals, enter the kitchen and begin to cook while they talk about hairstyles, or earrings recently received from Africa; occasionally, the older ones mentor the younger on relationships, work, education. The men don’t always simply sit – if it isn’t raining, we stand or sit outside, around the barbecue, the younger ones watching the meat, while the older keep the debates raging. Eventually, the women finish cooking and send a child to check if the meat is ready. Then we’ll all go inside and eat, the men to one side of the room, the women to the other. It never fails.
Today, however, it drizzled a bit, so most of the men are inside. Only four of us sit in the backyard near a little orange tree, barbecuing. The three men I’m with, a Kenyan who recently got his American citizenship and two Zimbabweans, have each lived in California for ten years. Since I’m the newest and youngest Zimbabwean man in Sacramento, I must watch the grill. I don’t have to do this, but it’s our tradition from
the village: younger men roasted meat while the elders discussed serious matters. It also allows me to do something important, as I don’t have a job yet.
These three always lecture me on how to survive in the USA, often reprimanding me for my inexperience in running my family, which consists of my white wife and our as yet unborn daughter. I haven’t figured out the best way to relate to my wife, who already tries to control me. I don’t allow this. The fact that I’m an immigrant doesn’t mean I’m stupid.
My mentors say I’m too new at everything, period. Enias, the Kenyan, insists that my bad judgment began in Zimbabwe; I should’ve waited to leave the country until I had already gotten admitted by a university. He tells me I could have come on my own, without the help of some woman, but he doesn’t understand that she’s not just some woman. I fell in love with her first time we met in Chimanimani. Enias laughs when I mention love, and reminds me that there is nothing wrong with marrying just for the green card. I’m not like that.
On the matter of work, the men have suggested I concentrate on applying for vacancies in warehouses and at construction sites. The pay is better than in retail, collections, or customer service. You’re a young man, they say, you can do hard labour. Let our friends, meaning the women, start in the softer, more comfortable fields. I always nod to show that I take their advice seriously, even when they tell me to forget about my University of Zimbabwe degree and present myself to employers
as a high school graduate, the basic requirement for these jobs.
Sorry, I’m not going to work in construction or in a warehouse. I’ll use my education to choose the better parts of bad. ‘You need to be more practical, my brother,’ says Enias. ‘No one cares about your BA here.’
He pauses as if to let the other men acknowledge his words; then he looks at me with his small, hard eyes. ‘What were you thinking of anyway, majoring in English?’
‘He’s about as unemployable as they can get,’ Makombo jokes.
The others laugh, but it’s a kind, gentle laughter. Enias, whom I suspect changed his name to a more American-sounding one when he became a citizen, has worked for the California Corrections Departmentfor ten years. He’s a supervisor, but he tells me I’m not yet ready for that type of work, and he doubts that I will ever be. He tells me never to reveal to interviewers that I have an English degree since that will just make them laugh.
‘They’d laugh?’ I ask. ‘It’s not as if I would be lying.’
‘They don’t know that you’re not lying. And with that accent of yours, no one would believe you.’
‘But don’t we all have accents?’ I’m thinking about Enias’ accent, which is worse than mine. ‘Even Americans have accents.’
‘Yes, we do,’ Enias says, ‘but when I was African I didn’t waste time studying English in college.’
I don’t like this Kenyan’s tone today. Who does he think he is? I pretend I haven’t heard his comment and say, ‘I carry my certificates to interviews.’
‘And how many interviewers have asked for those?’ he asks.
None, but I’ve only gone to a few. I was even promised calls at some. At a toy store in Arden Fair Mall, the female interviewer asked about Zimbabwe.
‘What’s it like there?’ she said.
‘Much as it’s like here, except we have fewer cars.’ I am aware of the exaggeration, but enjoying – with that familiar ripple of pride for the place I’d left behind – the idea of talking about my country. She smiled continuously.
‘I see you did customer service at… oh, Edgars? Is that a department store?’
‘Yes, just like Sears, better than Sears.’
‘Better, huh?’ She looked amazed, her stare full of promise.
Although I lied about having worked at Edgars, I can say that interview was a success. I’m waiting for the call she promised.
‘She was making fun of you,’ says Makombo, standing up. He enters the house and returns with three bottles of beer. He seems to have forgotten that I drink, too. Or maybe he now thinks the unemployed don’t deserve a little beer.
‘You can’t let them dwell on national origins,’ says Simon. ‘That’s the basis for discrimination.’
‘But she seemed genuinely interested,’ I say.
‘You always see what’s not there,’ says Enias, lighting a cigarette.
‘That’s the problem with new immigrants.’
I focus my attention on the barbecue. I open the lid to let the smoke escape. Makombo flips the rib rack and nods satisfactorily at the perfectly browned side.
He works as a nurse at Kaiser Permanente, but he doesn’t look as if he likes people; besides, he wouldn’t be a nurse back home either, but in California the job pays well, and it was his ticket to America. He’s applying for his citizenship and has already recommended that I consider nursing once I stabilise. Nah, not me… We’re not all cut out for people care. Eventually I’ll return to teaching.
I walked right out of teaching onto a plane. Later, in San Francisco, I called the school from my fiancée’s mobile phone and told the headmaster I was resigning. He stuttered in shock, then started yelling into the phone, threatening to report me or something (half the time I couldn’t hear what he was saying). He might not have realised where I was, so I told him to check his caller ID; then I remembered that, oh, the rural school phones had no caller ID. I just hung up, much to the amusement of my fiancée, who knew how much I had hated the school. In one of my e-mails, I had told her that Zimbabwe had become unsafe for me, and we speeded up my visa application.
But now I miss teaching, and it may be a long time before I return to it. That would just kill me: teaching is all I’ve known. I could become whatever I want in America, but I don’t have to suffer first for it. I’ll go back to teaching one day – I know I will. I refuse to think of myself as a beginner. But the men seem to want everyone to start at the bottom as they did. I’m different.
Enias worked for a long time in warehouses before finding a real job. I’m already tired of hearing about his first night loading a truck. If he thinks his story will inspire me to do as he did, he’s dead wrong. These hands are teacher material.
Makombo says construction work was a gym membership that paid him, although the Sacramento summer heat was unbearable. He consoled himself by remembering that he came from a hot area. He comes from Zaka, one of the hottest places of Zimbabwe, but that dry heat doesn’t compare to the humid Sacramento summers.
Simon worked in construction too during his college years, but the job he says he enjoyed most was dishwashing. ‘Each time I came to work I felt like those janitors – the sekurus – we had made fun of in boarding school back home,’ he says. ‘Servers would come to the back and just dump dishes in the sink without scraping off the left-overs. To them I was the invisible man.’
‘You have to be visible enough to become invisible,’ says Enias, ‘ but when you reappear, you’ll land your dream job..’
The women too have their stories. Some began in retail and customer service, but most have worked in live-in care. Caring for people isn’t something I imagine doing, even though it sometimes comes with free accommodation. My wife and I have an apartment already; besides, washing and feeding people is not my idea of humble beginnings.
These men don’t know that I already interviewed with Wellspring, a staffing agency for live-in care. Sisi Saru made the referral for me, so getting an interview was easy. The interview went well at first, until we got to the point of experience. I’d never been in that line of work in Zimbabwe, so you have to lie about your experience, and I told them I cared for disabled people in Harare, taking them to the park, watching them, feeding them. I could hear that I didn’t sound convincing so I started to talk about my grandfather.
The interviewer smiled and said, ‘How exactly did you care for him?’
I could have told her the truth, that all I had done was hold his stick while leading him to a small hill to relieve himself, since he’d lost his sight, but I fibbed boldly: ‘My grandfather was mad. Mad and blind.’
Then I realised that she might think that by ‘mad’ I meant ‘angry’, so I added, ‘He was crazy, cuckoo.’
Her smile disappeared and she sat up straight. I told her that I missed my grandfather, but I could tell I’d lost her attention. And when I left, I knew she wouldn’t call me. I didn’t really care. I never told Sisi Saru how the interview went, and, fortunately, she never asked. I haven’t mentioned it to my mentors either. That was my very first interview in America; and I never had to interview for my teaching assignments in Zimbabwe.
About the author
EMMANUEL SIGAUKE grew up in Zvishavane, Zimbabwe. He now teaches composition, literature and creative writing at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento, is a board member of the Sacramento Poetry Center, hosts poetry readings, is the book review editor of the organisation’s bi-monthly newsletter, and is also the co-editor of the recently published African Roar: An Eclectic Collection of African Authors. Sigauke has also taught fiction workshops for the UC Davis Extension and the Hart Senior Center Annual Writing Conference. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals and anthologies. His short stories have been published in Writing Free (2011) and in Writing Lives (2013).
Post published in: Arts