nothing to deserve it. You would see me change. I would be very different.”
“I think I’m beginning to understand your experience in Denmark, because, in a sense, when you were telling me yesterday about your experiences here, it was as if you were being punished every day for something you hadn’t done.”
“Precisely, yeah.”
“You had done everything right—you had done everything that was expected of you here in Denmark—yet you were still not finding work. You were still being punished, as it were. So this was the limit for you? This is what you could not take?”
“Yes. After six, seven years, it was really pushing it, and the reason was that Nanna and I had chosen to have this relationship. I was part and parcel of it. I was there, half-half, so there was no way I could just back out of it. But even so, it reached the point where I said, no, I cannot live in a place where there is nothing I can do. There’s no way you can tell me that in the whole country there is literally nothing for me to do.”
“You said that when you were a child, in Uganda, and the situation become unbearable, you could always move. You could always find some other household—”
“Yes, or some other place.”
“But here you were totally stuck.”
“Yes, totally, between two places, here and Nanna’s parents’ place. And I tell you, Michael, I got tired of it. I never get tired of anything, but I tried everything I learned in my life, in all the books I read, to survive this situation—avoiding going to Nanna’s parents’ home for a period, maybe for three months at a time, giving excuses for why I wasn’t working or why I wasn’t visiting them. Or I would lie to my friends. Even to Nanna I would lie. Nanna, this weekend I’m going to see so and so. So and so has called me, so I’m going there.”
“You were ashamed to be seen without work, without prospects?”
“Yes. I was ashamed. What kind of person am I, who cannot find work, who cannot support his family? I would stay here, lock the door, and watch TV, or browse the Internet or sometimes read a book, though not much. I became very selective of what I would read, you know. I’d say, ‘What can I reread now.’ I’d say, ‘Ah, let me look at the atlas.’ So I would start studying geography again. But why? Because I did not want to sit and think, ‘Should I take a beer?’ Or, ‘Should I go and smoke?’ Or, ‘What should I do now? What can I do now?’ So this was basically me, here. To tell you the truth, for six years [Emmanuel chuckled], I was never stuck for something to do!”
“Like you said earlier, it was like being in prison.”
“Yes, and as I told Nanna, it is a wall-less prison.22 You’re in prison, there are no walls, but where to go? Traveling to Uganda, you need money. If I left Denmark for a certain period, I would not be able to get back into the country. How do you call that? Status, your residential status is reviewed immediately, so coming back becomes very hard. The excuse that you are coming to see your family might not work again. And going to Uganda without money is worse than being in Denmark without a job. Because how are you going to start again? Even those who might be sympathizing with you say, ‘You left us here and went to Denmark—what happened?’ Even if they are not laughing at you, you definitely know that everybody is going to be cynical. ‘Welcome back, Emma, how are you doing? How did you do in Denmark?’ I mean, such questions kill you because in your small world you say, ‘Why did I even come back?’ Going to stay with my mum would be very difficult, too, so I was driven to stay on here. And not only that, I was thinking of the money I had spent on my education in Denmark, so much money. Two years of education in Denmark is a horrendous amount of money—it’s too much—and then you sit at home and they start telling you what to do. You are literally told everything. Come here, do this, send this application, go here, go there. When I tried to be proactive, like going to the municipal office here that finds people to fill vacancies in Danish companies, I would say, ‘Ma’am, can you help me? Do you have companies that need anybody, from a cleaner to anything?’ She says, ‘No, sir.’ They send me away, this office that is supposed to help me. Michael, I didn’t need to go walking around looking for jobs. That office could tell me, ‘Here’s a company that wants this and this. The official language is English. You speak both Danish and English. You might apply there.’ But no, I am told there is nothing, over and over again.”
“How did you explain this to yourself?”
“Simple, my rationalization was simple. I used to think, yeah, the economy is not good, so they are not hiring. Or they probably need somebody with longer work experience in Denmark. Or they need someone with a different qualification.”
“So you were giving them the benefit of the doubt.”
“Precisely. And that is probably what kept me sane. If I admitted that I was not getting the job because I’m black, that would have killed me. I would have probably given up a long time ago. But I kept on telling myself that with the qualifications I had, including a master’s in applied economy and finance, there must be somebody out there, and I would find that somebody. But by 2009, 2010, there was no longer that hope, no longer any explanation I could come up with.”
“At that point, did you come to the conclusion—you were honest with yourself and said, it’s because I’m Ugandan that—”
“Yes, I started even telling Nanna now, openly I told her, ‘Nanna, these are the real problems. First, my age. Second, where I come from. Third, the way I look. I don’t think it is qualifications, I don’t think it is a lack of positions to be filled, not at all. It’s those three things. This was in 2009, 2010. By this time, Nanna would ask me something and I would not answer. It was too painful to respond to her questions, even when she greeted me. She might ask, ‘Emma, today you sent an application, where did you send it?’ I wouldn’t answer, because it had reached a point where I told myself I would never get a job in Denmark ever. I even went looking for a job as a sweeper or cleaner, but they told me I was overqualified. I looked for jobs that suited my education, and they told me, ‘Ah, there are many who have applied for this position who are more qualified than you.’ Those were the answers I was getting from almost everybody. Either I was overqualified or there were people more qualified to take the job.”
CHEAP PLASTIC SANDALS
By the time Nanna suggested we break for lunch, I had lost track of time. Emmanuel’s story had, by turns, absorbed, amused, and perturbed me. It had also made me angry, despite my conviction that decrying the injustices of this world is seldom the best method for dealing with them, for the perpetrators of social violence are often immune to our outrage and indifferent to the consequences of their own actions, while the causes of social injustice all too often remain beyond our power to change. It was for this reason that, over lunch, I turned the talk to the ingenious ways in which Emmanuel had come to terms with his situation and the uncanny similarity of coping strategies in cultures across the world. One of these strategies is to rework our experiences of adversity as stories, thus sharing with others the ordeals we have undergone. Not only does confession free us from thralldom to what has been repressed; it clears the way for a fresh start in relationships that have been lived under a cloud of ambiguity and shame. There is no more moving example of this transformation than Emmanuel’s trip to Uganda and his decision to recall with his sister Mariam the abuse they had suffered at the hands of their maternal aunt and to clarify exactly what had happened. I remembered an e-mail I received from Emmanuel in October 2010 in which he expressed gratitude for my willingness to remunerate him if I published his story and for providing a “breath of hope and an eye opener.” Just as Mariam had been
