a prayer without words
medicine from East Africa
Dear friend,
A week into my trip to Kenya last month, I found myself motion sick and feverish. My body weakened right on the eve of a safari in the Maasai Mara. At the lodge I was staying at with two of my closest friends, the staff helped prepare a drink that I would continue to seek out during the rest of my trip: dawa.
Made with hot water, lemon, honey and ginger, I drank cup after cup of the concoction for 24 hours until my stomach and my body settled. Even after we left the lodge and continued on with out trip, I would seek out dawa on menus and crave the bitter lemon pulp swirling in dark tea. It wasn’t until the last week that I discovered dawa in Swahili simply means medicine. This combination of ingredients had become so common and powerful in the culture that it now symbolized healing in a cup.
A few days later, we found ourselves a short flight away from Kenya in Zanzibar — an island off the coast of Tanzania known for its powerful spice economy. At a spice farm tucked away in a humid, lush area, I watched as ambiguous green plants transformed into turmeric, cloves, cardamom and ginger. Each one, affectionately called by its name, was shown at its root or in the pit of its leaf to have vibrant color and smell.
All this medicine hidden in plain sight.
The first time I held ginger, with its rough brown skin and gnarls, I was in my early twenties. Growing up, ginger wasn’t present in any of the Midwestern, African American or Southern dishes I ate. Only in college, when I started encountering other cuisines did this strange spicy root find its way into my life.
Similarly, the thought of traveling to places like Kenya and Zanzibar was far beyond my reality or any possible future I could imagine for myself. They were never in my consciousness as places to seek out. I knew that going to the continent of Africa - the widely idealized return to the Motherland - was something I hoped to do in my lifetime. No one in my immediate or extended biological family had ever stepped foot on African soil. Our initial ancestral break from the continent, which had happened a few hundred years ago through inconceivable violence had created an abyss larger and more mysterious than the Atlantic Ocean. In my own colonized mind, the diverse countries of Africa had merged together into a monolithic, foreign place. A mass of land and people with no connection to me except through the infamous Door of No Return.
It was only through my friendships with other Black folks from the diaspora that my sense of identity expanded and deepened. I suddenly felt this new hunger and desire to experience a kind of transnational representation and communion with Black people that, just a few years earlier, felt unfathomable. When the opportunity came to have that experience with two of my closest friends, it felt divine.
I’ve written before about thresholds. How there are moments in time, space and the spiritual realm where it feels like everything opens up and invites you to step through with faith and courage. That’s what this journey felt like. This was one of those moments.
The other night, I began the painstaking work of removing my braids. For years, I avoided hair salons for many reasons related to the anxiety and trauma I carry around my hair, but I made it one of my main goals to get my hair braided while in Africa. Over the course of a few hours, three women in Nairobi tended to my head. Speaking mostly Swahili, they massaged my scalp under hot water and marvel at my “real 4C” hair.
Mostly, they smiled and called me beautiful.
Children came in and out of the shop. Men selling sneakers and snacks popped inside and the salon momentarily transformed into a runway as the women modeled the sandals or sneakers they were thinking of buying. It reminded me so much of the hairdresser I went to regularly as a teen to have my hair relaxed and pressed. The trust I felt having my head in her hands. The full chairs and long wait and laughter that seemed to move between each woman - both strangers and family - as we waited to be transformed. To be touched tenderly. To be made beautiful by people who could see us.
Unravelling each of the midnight black hair extensions feels like a strange grief practice. Working the braids apart with my fingers, I can feel the magic seal break apart. The pile of hair is now a memory of an elusive and essential kind of care.
On my last week in Kenya, I traveled with friends to a nearby area called Tigoni where rolling hills of tea sprawl for miles. The word plantation has always felt loaded. I have such little context for the concept outside of chattel slavery. In my mind, a plantation was and has always been a place for enslaved people and the legacy of their enslavement. Visiting Kenya’s tea plantations invited me to reimagine what it could look like to be surrounded my miles and miles of crops. What it could feel like to watch dark, Black bodies move through fields unburdened by a legacy of torture. What it would be like to know land in a way that is not tainted by displacement or extraction.
Driving through the hilly landscape as the sunset turned the sky purple, a prayer filled my heart that was too big and wild for words.
In a coffee shop on the north side of Chicago where I was working on this letter, I did The Count. 1 out of 38: the number of visibly Black people other than myself occupying a seat in the crowded establishment. For a short period of time while I was in East Africa, those numbers were reversed. I’ve been thinking about what a specific kind of medicine that is: To be liberated from origin stories rooted in trauma and surrounded my phenotypical mirrors, reflecting back multiple versions of who you are and could be.
Often, we confine medicine to the pills in orange canisters that we pick up at pharmacies but medicine is much more abundant. We are always encountering medicine and we are always in need of it.
The kindness of a stranger turned family.
The wonder provoked by a foreign terrain that suddenly feels familiar.
The way natural beauty unfurls and weaves itself through our sorrow.
Returned to my everyday life, I feel myself changed. There’s no bypassing the challenges of what it is to exist in a body in this world — the suffering and disconnection and fear — but there is power in having new visions. In knowing a different kind of longing and watching as bigger prayers moved through the expanded spaces in your chest . . . in feeling a long hardened part of yourself be made softer.
There is occasionally a transient sensation the overcomes me like something warm blanketed on my shoulders when I didn’t realize I was shivering. A feeling as gentle and free as the purple Kenyan' sunset.
A prayer answered.
With love,
Jas
Beautiful, very moving writing. Thank you 🙏