Un livre, une page. The red moon, by Kuwana Hausley.

Before Harlem, New York – 1998

Looking at her makes me remember. I can almost feel the heat rising, riding backs of broken cobblestones, gray and scraped smooth by a ceaseless parade of tired, black, sandaled feet.

But that was far away and long ago. Here, this woman peers almost timidly the curving, splintered wood of the brownstone door, blinking furiously now as the wind and rain whip her face. I stared and a sudden longing whistles through my mind, dancing around me on each restless gust of cold, wet wind that slams into my chest as I walk down 132^nd street in Harlem. Harlem is so far from my home. It is so far from the endless Kenyan plains that I still dream about each night.

The rain pelts my face and I shiver as it shimmies down my neck and creeps underneath the thick, scratchy collar of my coat. I cannot stop scaring into this woman’s face, this African mother draped from brown to ankle in gold and wind-crushed linen. As she descends the stairs, the rain seems to disappear around her. Now that she has committed herself, she doesn’t blink or falter. If anything, the rain has become a tightly woven fruit basket bearing down on the crown of the head, under which her proud demands that she stand erect. The only concession she gives is to pull her head wrap up out of the folds of her long dark cloak and clutch it tightly underneath her chin. The scarf is the replica of the same gilded hijab my mother wore as a child, long before she became my mother. I know this because it is the outfit that she chooses when she comes to me at night in my dream.

(…) The moon was red when my mother died. Fat, fairly, bursting, as I remember, it rode so low in the sky that it grazed the back of the leopards who hissed and spat and cursed it for interrupting the hunt. It caressed the thorny tips of the acacia trees, bending them, seeming to crush them with light.

In The red moon, the author has centered on Nasarian, the daughter of a successful Samburu herdsman and his Somali fourth wife. On the verge of adulthood, Nasarian finds herself trapped between the demands of her traditional tribal life and her desire to live abroad as a writer.

Kuwana Haulsey is an actor and director and the founder of The Open Door Society Inc. whose mission is to feed, cloth, house and educate street children and AIDS orphans in the third world countries. A graduate of New York High School and Performing Arts and Rutgers University, she is currently at work on her second novel “Keepers of the world”. She lives in Brooklyn New York.