Last Tuesday

On Tuesday evening my bag was stolen from beside me. With it--my laptop, journal, two dusty postcards, a flash drive, and a novel entitled, “The Inheritance of Loss”--were lost to the alleys at dusk.

Tuesday is half-off pizza night at Tusky’s, the commercial supermarket across the street from my loft. The pizza is shit. Yet, for Mombasa's young Westerners, suffering under the constant burden of ugali and fish stew, pizza Tuesday is something of a tradition. I claimed a table with a few Brit friends. We ate, as the sun drew angles on our foreheads. The city was dark when I finally reached at my feet, grasping for a bag that was no longer there.

Last week, I read a fascinating article about the scale of globalization. The common picture of globalization, the author argued—uninhibited flow of capital, new communication networks and cultural media, deterritorialization and global transnational governance—must be retranslated. Not simply a monolithic process, a network of corporations and mega-power brokers, globalization is inherently local, constantly reproduced in the individual faces of labor and consumption. This is not Thomas Friedman’s homogenizing Flat World. This is a Bangladeshi girl stitching Adidas with swollen fingers. This is the boy in Soweto reciting Lil Wayne lyrics on his way to school. This is an American volunteer in Kenya, eating a pizza his host family cannot afford.

I leaned against the railing trying to circulate blood to my fists. Next to me, my friend was describing to the security guard what had happened. We were just sitting there and when we went to leave we saw that the bag was gone. No we didn’t see who took it. No, we are not drunk! I gazed into the street, the flow of traffic helping to steady my breathing. I was paralyzed. My laptop was stolen and I could not understand what people were saying. Yet, as my eyes scanned the shadows, it was not isolation I felt in that moment, but rather the intense intimacy of the encounter.

In my six weeks in Mombasa I have eaten cow intestines. I have bowed my head with the whispers of Swahili psalms. I have waded the flooded streets of Magongo, retracing the footprints of my host-brother's youth. Yet, I had always felt the discomfort and unquestionable security of being a foreigner—the cultural differences that kept these two worlds distinct. Safely orbiting, but like the moon, never breaking the plane of the atmosphere. When the faceless stranger grabbed my bag, I was fully present in this new place, woven like Kanga silk, into the teeth of Mombasa.

I went to the police station with my friend. They filed a police report, but cautioned that there was little they could do. Mombasa is glowing with bag-less mazungus and faceless thieves.

The individual faces of labor and consumption. I am a white American carrying a laptop home from work. He is a stranger, but I know him. I see him every day. He wears sandals made of rubber. His teeth are stained from tobacco and neglect. He lives in Bamburi and he can make more money reselling American electronics than he can selling mangos. In that moment, it was not simply the ownership of my belongings that was contested, but also the autonomy of our two stories. The bag exchanged between our palms, shrinking the void between our histories. Like a Thomas Friedman column, except that I see him every day, all musk and bloodshot eyes. In that moment, I knew what the author meant. Me and the stranger, an eclipse of the sun and moon. Two distant bodies, aligned--the vast space between our cores undetectable as we trace each other’s curves in darkness.

Two days later I buy a new laptop. I hope he has a family to feed. Mombasa is still glowing.