Still an hour to go and the backseat getting restless, ready to rise up out of their carseats. You start a silly song, making it up as you go, as we have made up our whole lives together. I remember nothing of the words and then a fragment surfaces: “why, oh why, oh why oh; why, oh why, oh why.” Rhymes bounce around the car and the boys in the backseat are laughing and making up their own verses in that final stretch and even though nearly everything surrounding that song has disappeared—the car, the tune, this particular family configuration, where we were heading—the way you could cast a spell, bring us back from the brink of a violent uprising into a carnival, a ride where everything was twirling and spinning, bursting into the sky. It was something to marvel at, even later when the rides shut down and the carnival packed up and moved on to other towns, leaving an empty field in the dark and only a faint trace of “why oh why oh why oh.”
Carol Tyx is trying to withstand the onslaught of chaos and cruelty in her country. Besides reading and writing, she works with others on environmental and immigration issues. Her latest books include Achilles: Slicing into Angola’s History that gives voice to a 1951 prison uprising and the chapbook Rearranging Myself.