Enter Tears

At the book fair, The History of Tears is the only book that mentions you. Around it are piles of manuscripts by historians of war and conflict. But somewhere, there must be soaring stacks in your name; for every book about a battle, there is a missing book about its tears. That’s the book fair I would prefer to walk through. It’s true I will not be able to hold any of the volumes in my hands, flip through their pages, read their titles or the names of their authors—they too have been wiped from history. 

We all know what happens in war. As soon as it begins, it strips a people of everything: their language, their homes, their songs, their trees—it even yanks the tears right out of their ducts—and leaves nothing on beaches but human cargo outside slave ships.

That’s why I want that book fair, with its scant attendance, its abandoned garden, its ironclad silence. I want to join the books that rack up on the shelves until they crumble. I want to rush there right after I read, on a morning without power: “Morning. Year 1650. Where the Congo River gushes out into the ocean, six slave trading ships await their cargo.”

Tears: history excises you from its crimes the same way autumn rids branches of their leaves; even the last leaf it does not cede to the tree—even the last tear it does not leave to its people. And I don’t know, I really don’t know, which crime is worse: to uproot families from their land, or tears from their corneas?

And I don’t know how returning tears to their owners could possibly reverse the crime. Justice is not the drawing of tears on cargo boxes. Justice is cargo sinking the ship; tears crushing the bookshelves.