A Stranger at My Table: The postcolonial story of a family caught in the half-life of empires

By Ivo de Figueiredo

"A touching, contemplative chronicle of loss and self-discovery."
– Publishers Weekly

From the acclaimed biographer of Norway’s most treasured cultural icons, Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Munch, comes a story of a migrant family in search of roots and for each other.

Ivo de Figueiredo’s lyrical and imagistic memoir navigates a difficult search for the origins of his estranged father, which opens a door to a family history spanning four continents, five centuries and the rise and fall of two empires. At the age of 45, Figueiredo traces his father’s family in the diaspora. Having emigrated from the Portuguese colony of Goa on the west coast of India to British East Africa, and later to the West, his father’s ancestors were Indians with European ways and values—trusted servants of the imperial powers. But in postcolonial times they became homeless, redundant, caught between the age of empires and the age of nations.

With lush descriptions and forthcoming honesty, A Stranger at My Table tells the story of a family unwittingly tied to two European empires, who paid the price for their downfall, weathering revolution and many forms of prejudice. The author’s trove of often-strange photographs, letters and recordings as well as his eye for the smallest details and double-meanings lead the reader down a mysterious path as his search for his family’s heritage results in a surprising reunification with his father and reconciliation with his past.

Praise for Henrik Ibsen. The Man and the Mask, 2019

Ivo de Figueiredo’s work marks the high point in the long line of biographies of Ibsen that have been published since 1888.
– Dagbladet

This Ibsen-biography shares the quality of its subject: It is unsurpassable. […] Anybody with the slightest interest in literature should indulge in a meeting with the most important Norwegian contribution to world literature: The works of Henrik Ibsen. Outside of the plays themselves, there is no better place to start than Ivo de Figueiredo’s two books, “The Man” (2006) and “The Mask” (2007).
– Klassekampen

A jubilant outcry … it is this literary composition that makes Ivo de Figueiredo revise our understanding of Ibsen.
– Dag Solstad

Praise for Sleeping Sinner, The Køber Case. A true story of spiritualism, love and a possible murder, 2010

The book is so well written that I almost forgot that it was a book. It resembles a film or a court case. Figueiredo’s trick is to focus on the unsolved parts of the case […] Figueiredo deserves gratitude and admiration.
– Aftenposten

Wonderfully fascinating reading. Exciting like a crime novel, but from real life.
– Varden

Electrifyingly well written. The historian and writer, Ivo de Figueiredo, stylistically just gets better and better […] It is like a thriller you cannot put down.
– VG+

• Language: English
• Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733957991

Book preview

EAST AFRICA

I’D HOPED TO TAKE THE FERRY from Zanzibar to Pemba, as Aleixo would have done. But sadly the ferry has been cancelled due to rough seas, and I have to travel the hundred kilometers by air. There are twelve of us tightly packed into the small propeller plane; a couple of tourists, the others residents of Pemba going back home, all of us fated to live or die together in the next half hour. We are soon juddering over Stone Town, yellow sands turn to blue, and then before I know it I see Pemba spread out below me, green and overgrown, indented with a myriad of twisting inlets that threaten to split the island up into a hundred tiny fragments.

I had decided to travel in Dad’s footsteps in the summer of 2011, to learn as much as I could about his life. Visiting my aunts in Boston was the first stage in that process. Now I have set out on the second; exploring the world of Dad’s childhood in East Africa. I’ve been constantly aware during this trip of the irony of my enterprise; surely it would be simpler to go to Spain, look up Dad’s house and knock on his door? But I no longer know him. And scarcely did as a child. What feelings would seeing him arouse in me? I feel sure I’d see him through the eyes of my childhood, and I fear what these eyes would see. I need to observe him from a distance, to see him without him seeing me. Or, better still, search for him in another place and in another time. Which is why I am here on an island off the coast of Africa; there is no shorter route back to my father.

The terminal at Chake Chake Airport looks like an abandoned rural bus station. I sit on my rucksack under the canopy outside, scouring the surrounding hot landscape for life. Where have the pilot and my fellow passengers gone? All I can see around me are empty fields and a mass of vegetation swaying in a warm breeze. Slicing through the landscape is a red country road that winds its way down toward the forecourt in front of me. I follow it as far as the eye can see, without much hope. Half an hour passes, or perhaps an hour, and then a cloud of dust emerges on the horizon, only to disappear again behind a clump of forest. When it reappears, the cloud has transformed into a black car that turns abruptly onto the forecourt and stops two meters from my feet. A young man leaps out and opens the door for me, grinning from ear to ear. I smile back, put all questions aside and get in. Where are you going? he asks. Who knows, I think to myself, as I ask him to show me around the island.

I spend my first day in Pemba in the back seat of a car, that may or not be a taxi, driving between fields of carnations and banana trees, past simple huts made of cow dung, and carpets of sweet scented cloves spread out to dry. Driving up hills toward the sky and open vistas, and then back down into the thick vegetation of the valleys, as though diving into green cumulus clouds. It isn’t for nothing the Arabs named this island Al Khudhra, the green island. Pemba has the dampest and most fertile climate in this part of Africa; you only have to spit over your shoulder and a mango tree will spring into life. It was just as much like this when Aleixo arrived here more than a hundred years ago as it is today. Just as then, the island is largely covered with jungle, plantations, and soil that is soft when it rains and rock hard in the drought. How can one find any trace of the dead here?

As evening falls, I check into a rather shabby hotel in Chake Chake, the dusty crossroads that purports to be the island’s main town. My room has only one tiny, dirt-caked window high on the wall. The ceiling fan almost detaches itself from its fitting as it goes around. I pull the grubby sheet over me, switch off the light and disappear into the dark. Or so it feels. I’m disappearing from the world, floating into a hot, foreign night. But didn’t I have this feeling the moment I set foot on African soil? This is no longer Great Grandfather’s land, nor Grandfather’s, nor Dad’s. They came on a wave of hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of Asians keen to serve the British or build a future in the shelter of their empire. They settled in Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika, the latter of which the Brits had taken from the Germans. And they came to the island of Zanzibar and the mainland Swahili coast, the ancient lands of the Arabs in Africa.

This is such a long time ago now. Wars and revolutions have been fought since; blood has flowed. Africans have reclaimed their country; the white colonists have gone their way, as have many of the Asians who worked for them. But surely nothing ever disappears entirely. We can fill suitcases, empty shelves, clean out the house, leave the key in the door and slip quietly into the night. But surely there’ll always be something left behind? A trace, however faint, the words you said, the space your body once occupied, the image you’ve been in another’s eyes. Nobody is completely eradicated, unless the memories of the person have been driven out by those who are left behind.

Early the next morning I look for the ancient Portuguese fort that now houses Pemba’s Museum. Two friendly archivists lead me across the courtyard and into a windowless room where the walls are lined with shelves full of files and bundles of paper. Can they tell me something about my great-grandfather Aleixo, the postmaster? I am handed some useless, mildewy documents that almost fall apart in my hands. No register, only random payrolls and protocols. How about the post office, does it still exist? Nobody knows. I am told that there is one Goan man left in Chake Chake.

I find his house and knock on the door. No one answers.

That evening I sit in the only place in Chake Chake that even vaguely resembles a restaurant. The menu consists of the one thing that is presumably always available: chicken. A group of men in ankle length white kaftans are the only guests in this brightly lit room. They each sit clutching a Fanta, watching a football match on the television suspended high up in the corner. It feels like a men’s pub night back at home. Sitting alone, under the TV, is a woman in a hijab. No doubt somebody’s wife. I shovel the tasteless chicken down and force down the sugary Fanta. Over the last century the once religiously diverse Zanzibar islands have become almost entirely Muslim, especially here in Pemba. I think about the one lonely Goan they say lives in town. What does he do in the evening? Does he sit at home knocking back his whiskey behind closed curtains? Where does he get the pork he needs to make a vindaloo? Or has he too converted to Fanta and chicken?

I put my money on the table and walk toward the exit. The woman in the hijab averts her gaze as I pass by. Only when I turn off my light and arrange the mosquito net around my bed do I realize: there must be traces of my family on this island. True enough, Great Grandfather didn’t have much when he arrived here, nor did he ever buy a house here. And when he returned to Saligão years later as a pensioner, all he took with him were a title and a medal.

But in return, he left his love.

During their years in Pemba, Aleixo and Ermelinda had four children. The first was born in 1900 and was given the name Michael Joseph. He would be my grandfather. Just as the two babies that followed, he was born at St. Joseph Hospital in Zanzibar, since, being so backward, Pemba lacked the necessary facilities for a safe birth. The fourth and last child, a girl who was given her mother’s name, was, for some unknown reason, delivered here at Pemba. Ermelinda died here in childbirth aged thirty-three, her little girl surviving for a few years before she too passed away.

No photographs exist of Grandfather and his siblings from this time. Great Grandfather’s face is only a collection of fuzzy dots on a photograph. Of Ermelinda there isn’t a single picture. All I know about her is that she is my great grandmother, and the first in our family to be buried in foreign soil. It may, of course, have occurred to Aleixo to take his wife’s body to Zanzibar. But the steam ferry only went between the two islands once a week, and it took the entire night. Instead Great Grandfather decided to take her coffin to the Catholic mission on Dongoni, a peninsula a few miles southeast of Chake Chake. This missionary post, founded by German missionaries who arrived in the 1870s, consisted of a church and school. After the abolishment of slavery, they took in freed slaves and offered them an education. They also made a cemetery for themselves and for the few Catholics who lived on the island, or rather, those who died here.

I decide to look for my great grandmother’s grave. After all, stone survives longer than paper, and people in churchyards generally stay put. The only way for me to get to Dongoni is by the route that Aleixo once took. The two archivists at the museum offer to take me. As we rumble under the mango trees in an open jeep I imagine overtaking a cart carrying my great grandfather. I see him sitting with his head bowed and a hand resting on the coffin behind him. From Chake Chake he travels along the sound to the ferry port where the tall dhows are scattered like stranded swordfish on the wet sand. Then crossing the sound by boat, Great Grandfather sits grief-stricken behind the coffin, his face turned toward the thick mangrove forest on the other side. From the beach he goes up the hill, past the church and the school, into the clearing and sees the dark tombstones, and a hole in the red earth that waits to receive Great Grandmother’s cold body.

Back in Saligão, the Mãe de Deus church rings out for her three times, but only on one of its two bells, as is the custom for those who die far away from the village.

I have four men with me, a local guide in a salmon-pink shirt, a scruffy looking boatman and the two archivists, all motivated by the prospect of a small fee. The boatman throws the anchor some distance from the shore, and we wade ankle-deep through a belt of ochre-colored mud, doing our best to avoid the sharp roots of the mangrove trees that poke up everywhere. The church and school were dismantled long ago, the stone taken away and put to other uses, while the jungle has claimed the graves for itself. Otherwise the landscape has hardly changed since Great Grandfather was here. We soon find the path that twists through the jungle, past the remains of the old church’s foundations, before disappearing into the green overgrowth. For several hours we walk through thick vegetation, hacking our way onwards with machetes, step by step.

I have barely managed to accustom myself to the heat, or to Africa, before I am swallowed up by the jungle. Soon my arms and legs are torn on thorns and branches, on sticky leaves that grab at me and slice into my skin when I try to free myself. My guides are not only more appropriately dressed, in long trousers and shoes, compared to my T-shirt, shorts and sandals, but they are also very used to this. And not one of them considers giving up for fear of losing the fee offered by this modern-day Dr. Livingstone whose mood is worsening with each trickle of blood that flows down into his sandals.

I am seized by doubt. What kind of idiocy is this? What am I doing here in this jungle on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean? I may be trying to follow Dad’s story, but he never even mentioned Ermelinda. Aleixo died when he was barely a year old. His grandparents were mere stories to him, so what on earth would I want with them? The truth is that I haven’t a clue; I am just clutching arbitrarily at the myriad threads that lead from me and Dad to the dead and long forgotten. In tearing at these threads, I tug at handfuls of stems and greenery, and hack at branches to penetrate the vegetation. Will I really get closer to Dad, closer to myself, by battling through this thorny jungle in search of a relative who rotted away and evaporated into the ether long ago? This jungle is too vast, our family tree like a giant tangle of branches that fills the horizon, that stretches across oceans and continents, across centuries, so large that it spans the rise and fall of empires, the birth and death of nations, the release of slaves, the displacement of peoples. And if Dad is one thread in this vast tangle, then I am dangling at the end of it, over an empty void.

That’s what I’m doing. Hanging like a fly in a cobweb. The prickly leaves have twisted about my arms, my legs are caught in a cluster of thorns. Peevish and humiliated, I let my companions cut me free, before we continue our arduous task. We are soon separated from each other again; only the sound of swinging machetes tells me that I am not alone here in the jungle.

I’m about to call off the entire expedition when I glimpse a large, stone cross sticking crookedly out of the ground behind some bushes. And then another nearby. I shout out to the others:

Gravestone! Over here!

The others are hacking their way toward me; the scruffy boatman clears a little patch in front of the cross. Exhausted I fall onto my bare knees before the grave, run my hand over the rough surface of the grey stone. Not a letter, not a mark. Not even stone lasts on Pemba. It will take us twenty minutes to get to the next gravestone, and another twenty to the next. It’s pointless. Any names are gone.

To my surprise, rather than feeling disappointed, I feel a strange sort of calm. I have no idea where Dad’s story begins, or mine. But is it true that Dad never talked about my great grandparents? Might it be that I didn’t listen? All those times he berated us for not caring about his background, for not writing letters to our aunts and uncles, for being so Norwegian. I realize now that there was something he desperately wanted to tell us. The fact that reproach was the only language he knew, and that all he gained was our rejection, does not make this any less true. Why did he save all the letters he’d received during his life, sorting them chronologically and filing them so neatly in ring binders? None of his siblings did this. Families who spend their lives moving, traveling over lifetimes, seldom save such things. There may be a few pictures, but for some reason letters are generally lost. But Dad saved everything. And didn’t he, I thought, travel back to East Africa himself as an adult? He mentioned it once, long after the divorce, but I’d never asked where he went or what he