Scars of Pleasure, Scars of Pain
Osuwan stood upon the mountaintop and shouted at the sky- only this time it was much different than at the earlier times. Life had changed so much since the lion left his father's people in Africa to live in America. During the day, the skies were mostly cloudy and seldom was there a perfectly sunny day and at night, the only lights to be seen were the passing planes. So the skies of Seattle were not the vast blue expanse by day and the canopy of stars the lion had experienced as a cub and this was proof enough that the Pacific Northwest and Africa had absolutely nothing in common. And the mountaintop was not carved by geologic forces over the course of millennia but rather was made by architects just a few years ago. There was no similarity between Osuwan's old home and the one where he now inherited. And yet there were.
The lion's nerves were constantly on high alert, as any foreigner would be in a new land. The kind-hearted gestures of an American fox, well-meaning but clearly unaware became threatening to the lion so unsure of himself in this new territory so far from his pride. Even a mundane walk down to the grocery store or to the church or the restaurant became an adventure for Osuwan- not knowing what to expect made him super-sensitive to any threat, real or imagined, and he would not reduce his guard until the time he returned home. The anxiety had turned his nerves into naked wires, and the lion was living by instincts as a warrior behind enemy lines rather than a member of Seattle's African expatriate community. And at any time, the lion would get those feelings...
They were the scars of pleasure and the scars of pain that the lion had known since the day he left Tanzania and the daily realization that the United States and his homeland were different made these scars become sensitive once more. And there was no telling who or what could set them off- the racist comments of a coworker or boss, the general feeling of being so far from home, the cold, grey, rainy Seattle weather- any one of those things and so much more could set Osuwan off and make him feel homesick once more. The bigotry, the cold, the homesickness were all psychological and emotional injuries which had left a mark on the lion's mind in some way or another. And they would all result in emotional outbursts, even in the most inopportune situations. They came on the lion with all the strength of a wild animal, and they enveloped him the same way shadows envelop a room. Even in the brightest of circumstances, there was always something dark and foreboding and Osuwan, as strong as any lion would have been, could not defeat these fears in this new land. That was the nature of these feelings.
In spite of all this fear, the lion had grown some defenses against the hopelessness that came with knowing his country was a place he would never see again. His homeland, his family, all of it was gone. (A civil war which showed no signs of ending had effectively burned that bridge many years ago forcing Osuwan to leave as a refugee.) America was, like it or not, accept it or not, the lion's new home. Now to say that Osuwan was alone in this trying situation would be untrue- many had opened up their hearts, their wallets, even their homes to this poor refugee who fled his country with only the clothes on his back and a small suitcase. He was employed as a custodian at a local community college. He thought about Margaret, the elderly vixen missionary from the Catholic church who had become his financial sponsor until he could find a more permanent home. He thought of Benjamin, the otter who was the senior janitor- from him, Osuwan had learned the art of grounds keeping and a large part of his English vocabulary, enough to function on his own. But still those feelings remained.
The winter snows had come in several weeks ago and everyone in the Seattle area was ready for an earth-toned festival of remembrance and gratitude that Osuwan had come to learn as Thanksgiving, soon to be followed by a holiday of bright lights, greed, and unfettered capitalism known as Christmas. The lion had so much to be thankful yet nothing, not even a clue as how to repay the generosity as the clicked on the television, seeing as how the snow had pretty much paralyzed the city by keeping people hemmed in their homes. And the cold was just another painful scar, a difference from how things in Africa were.
"In today's news, we have sad news from the ongoing war in Tanzania," the anchor's voice started and there were seen pictures of the gruesomeness and pointlessness of the war. At this point, Osuwan no longer knew nor cared what the two sides were fighting over. All he could was his countrymen, mostly lions just as Osuwan was himself, fighting some ill-defined force in the hope of earning a victory for some unknown, unseen ruler. Their fighting had cut off the lion from ever returning home and even if hostilities ended that very next day, Osuwan still had many obligations which kept him in the United States, as he was trapped between two worlds. And then he got that feeling again.
He knew that someday there would be peace but then what? Foreigners would decide what would be in the country's best interests, modernizing the existing infrastructure of a country based primarily on subsistence farming into one based on technology. This would require razing all the forests which Tanzania was known for into hundreds of factories to provide manufacturing jobs for Osuwan's countrymen. With the forests depleted, soon the river, the sea, and the skies would leave and all of the natural beauty of his homeland would be gone forever. All the faermland which had belonged to his pride would soon be in the hands of multinational corporations, lost to the foreigners and never returned.
On the desk of his threadbare apartment, Osuwan remembered the photograph that speaks volumes about the future of Africa; it was shot in the Congo. In the background, there was a factory owned by an electronics company, a building of the future but in the foreground, one could see a female lion cub, just past the age of infancy, naked and emaciated from an early childhood filled with hunger and hunger-related diseases. Flies clouded her eyes, a testament to the filth and poverty of the developing world, and behind her was a poster advertising jobs at the factory. And once more, the feeling came to Osuwan asking him, "What will becoming a modern country accomplish, especially for the ones who have no hope?" And there was adly, no answer.
Looking back, as much as he missed his home, the lion realized that some things were better here. Poverty and war had left his country and the majority of the African continent for that matter, unhappy and yet, here in his new land of Seattle, in the United States, he could accomplish much. Still, the pleasures of Osuwan's current situation were offset by the pains of what he had come through. In the memories, the scars of pleasure and the scars of pain resonated and echoed back as his voyages into a troubled yet also triumphant past continued. For all the thousands of miles the lion had strayed from his home, his home- in this case, a Spartan apartment filled with what many Americans would consider substandard- had followed him. And here even in this den of dishevelment, Osuwan the lion could find peace.