Not Forgetting Zanzibar or Zion

Daughter of the Sultan of Oman, Muscat,
born to a fair Circassian concubine in Zanzibar,
Salme, my sad heroine whom he begat,
was born to fall just like a Middle Eastern falling star.Far from Oman her father cultivated cloves
in Zanzibar, importing slaves to do the labor which
made him from his abundant, fragrant spicy groves
extremely powerful, near Africa, and very rich.

When her father died, beloved Salme fell
in love with a  rich German merchant, so she left her home,
becoming Christian—Emily! An Arab belle,
apostasy epitomized by beauty in her tome.

She told how once she’d had three children she became
a widow, for her merchant husband fell beneath a tram
in Hamburg, and she found life there was not the same
without a husband. Everything now seemed to her a sham.

She was contrasting German coldness with the heat
of her close family and friends at home, and greatly missed
the bubbly laughter of the Arabs on the street,
something  rare in solemn German homes, and hard to beat.

Salome thought she could abandon Zanzibar,
but Zanzibar remained within her heart, on German soil.
If you should try to change the person who you are,
stay close to home, or you’ll be yearning for your native soil,
just like Judeans, who in Babylon would weep,
remembering—though some tried not—walls of Jerusalem:
a lot whose right hand never fell asleep
and played their harps to make sure they would not forget this gem.

Too many Jews today no longer sing when far
away from Zion, and assimilate like Salme, to
a land as far from Israel as is Zanzibar.
Unlike Salme, few will realize the harm they do.

Adam Wheatcroft reviews “The Sultan’s Shadow: One Family’s Rule at the Crossroads of East and West” by Christiane Bird (NYT Book Review, 9/12/10):

A green and fecund island, ¬barely 20 miles off the east coast of Africa, Zanzibar for centuries represented gratified desire. For voyagers across the Indian Ocean its safe harbor was a refuge after a long journey. The vast Chinese trading fleet led by the eunuch Zheng He moored at Zanzibar in the early 15th century to exchange its silver for African gold. For Vasco da Gama, who landed there in 1499, beginning 200 years of Portuguese domination, it was an island of repose for men slaughtering their way across the Eastern seas….

In her book and her letters, Salme remembered the love and warmth of Arab families, and also the bubbling laughter of Arab women. In exile she pined for her homeland. She died in 1924 in Jena, Germany. Her daughter Rosalie found a box of Zanzibar sand among her mother’s belongings; it was mixed with Salme’s ashes, which were buried in the grave of her long-dead husband. Finally, her greatest desire was gratified: symbolically, she went home.

Reviewing  Afterlives, a novel set in colonial-era German East Africa, by  Abulrazak Gurnah, a Zanzibar–born Nobel laureate, Imbolo Mbue writes in the 8/21/22  NYT Book Review (“Love and Empire”):

In his 1961 book “The Wretched of the Earth,” the French psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote that “the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values.” Abdulrazak Gurnah’s superb 10th novel, “Afterlives” — his first to be published in America since his work went out of print decades ago — proves this theory true, through the interwoven stories of three protagonists in an unnamed coastal town in German East Africa in the early 1900s, a period when virtually all of the continent “belonged to Europeans, at least on a map: British East Africa, Deutch-Ostafrika, África Oriental Portuguesa, Congo Belge.”