Here he comes. Tall as a tree. Ankle length jalabiya blue as the sky. Ashy feet squeezed into brown leather sandals.

“Mohammed”
“Oumar”
“MOhammed!”

“Oumar”
Would you look at that? He just walked past me like he doesn’t know me.
No Salaam.
No double kisses, one on either cheek.
No one hand draped on the arm of the other, our lips pursed around mon ami, did you hear?
No shady commentary with an undertone of flirtatiousness.
No flirtatiousness? Is that really Mohammed? Because that boy would never not flirt.
We met in the din of Mutha’s, the blackness of the club cut by blue laser lights shooting from the ceiling. My boy was doing arabellas on the dance floor, his sinewy torso glistening with sweat. He was all brazen gaze when he caught me staring. His face rippled open into a knowing smirk.
That’s my Mohammed.

But this version that slides past me without an ounce of feeling?

“Mohammed!” I called again but all I got was the back of him getting further and further away.
So it is true then what Mustapha said the other day, that Mohammed had taken to un-know everyone. It is true then, that he has taken to denying history.

But why, Mohammed, I wanted to cry out. You’re not the first African boy with a mother who cries to her sisters who cry to their sons who then send long missives from Mali to New York. All of us are boys who like other boys, who bury our boy-lovin ways far from the scrutinizing eyes of our mothers. Half of us are intertwined with wives back home. The other half are fighting the pull of the tide. It is a magnificent force. A perfectly synchronized dance, the chorus of mother, sister, brother, uncle, cousin all shrieking when are you taking a wife?

Mohammed, you’re not the first one with a treasure trove of hustles and no papers.
A treasure trove of hustles because you have no papers.
A treasure trove of hustles in spite of having no papers.
A treasure trove of hustles to one day acquire papers.

Get your papers, my mom said to me on the phone a month ago, then get hers, she added referring to the girl from my village now tasked with becoming my wife. She’d been on the periphery of my childhood. In some of my classes at secondary school. Skirting the edges of my friend groups. I was expected to marry her. To usher her into this country that, after 10 years of living, I knew nothing about. I was supposed to provide her and I a home. Yet I barely hung onto my matchbox in Harlem.

See, Mohammed, you are not the only one, I yell at his back, his jalabiya stretched across the wiggle of his bottom. He is gradually swallowed up by the crowd of entrepreneurs hawking wares of fake designer everything under the sun. Calling out to passersby in broken English, to their fellow Africans in Wolof, Yoruba, Amharic, Arabic.

There’s more I want to say to this boy who now pretends to barely know anyone when he passes them on the street. All these hawkers around me are my witnesses that I’m trying to bring this boy back to his senses.

Mohammed, do you remember, me and you and Lawrence and Mahmoud squeezing into Lawrence’s Harlem studio on Saturday afternoons. Huddled around his computer working on our newsletter. What was that thing you used to say? Let’s get in their faces. So we called it, Voices from Abroad: the queer African migrant quarterly. In their faces. That’s how our group, Uhuru was born. Wazobia, the lesbians added. And we thought, how cute, a name that the boys and the girls can agree on. Because lord knows, we could agree on nothing else.

Boy surely you remember our parties. Remember how you’d spend days, weeks, getting ready. Bent over your sewing machine, its whir resounding throughout your apartment. That juju between your brain and the sewing machine. The stunning ensembles your hand crafted. Remember how you used to greet me at the door, loose thread clenched in teeth? Remember my cooking? Thiebou, fish, lamb dibi, salad I’d magik out of a tiny budget. We’d crawl out of those parties as the sun smeared orange across the sky.

Mohammed, is it true you’re getting married? That’s no reason to shun your best friend in the middle of Herald Square. Boy, so what if she’s white. Good on you for grinding your way to citizenship. But don’t confuse hustle for real. Don’t forget the pride march and how we paraded our half naked asses in the June sun. Don’t forget how we pranced all the way from Times Sq to the LGBT Center on 13th, the “Gay African & Unafraid” banner our sail. Lawrence loved all the attention from the boys. You and I were shaking our asses, shaking it like it’s motorized.

That was the night I finally let you into my bed, wasn’t it? Boy you were so shy after all that flirting. This won’t change anything between us, right? I asked you, your toothy grin gleaming in the dark of my room. I’m not the partner type. But, yet, I loved you.

Boy don’t you realize you are treading your way to the unhappiest of lives. A life of longing for the freedom to love freely. A life of yearning and unquenchable thirst. You and I have fucked our share of DL African niggas all over Harlem. The coming and going in and out of dark rooms, surreptitious looks, false bravado, ignoring each other at the weddings. What kind of life is that? I have to live my life in the open. Like prancing half naked in a parade while others cheer.

Published July 6, 2026
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.