When night fell in my grandparents’ village, Berlovka, it blanketed the entire celo, which had existed for decades without a single street lamp, in a collective darkness that mimicked the heavy hand of the Soviet state. In all my summer visits to the village with my mother and sister, I do not remember a time when the lights in my grandparents’ kitchen and the hata did not come on, or when we weren’t able to turn on the black and white TV, with its clumsy knobs, and view the grim but earnest-looking faces of the actors on the glowing screen. Because of the poor quality of the antenna’s reception, which always involved static, and my limited vocabulary in Russian, I’d look up from whatever I was doing when a scene was accompanied by music and watch the moving images, often of fair-skinned, dark-haired women and men, beautifully cast against the agrarian countryside of the Soviet Union. I marveled at it all, my lack of understanding, my racial difference, obvious in the color of my skin and the texture of my hair, my existence in this very village, unlit on the outside, thousands and thousands of miles from the equatorial Africa I called home.
