My Uncle Omar

My grandfather was the glue that held my family together. With his death, his firstborn son, Omar was to take his place as the head of the family. Instead, he seemed to quickly unravel. My uncle was an intelligent and kind man when he wasn’t high and wrecking havoc around the house. A High School dropout, he didn’t work nor did he feel the need to. Most of his days were spent, roaming around town with his junky friends or lounging in his room, listening to Bob Marley and constantly getting high with money he sweet talked out of my grandmother, mother or aunt’s hands.
My uncle stole my innocence. He destroyed my childhood and raped my mother’s trust.
Maybe he thought that he would get away with it or that I was too young to ever remember. I have been starved, beat and left to sleep on a rotten mattress but nothing has hurt me more than being sexually assaulted, at five years old by my mother’s brother.
I never told him to stop, I was too scared. But it hurt, it still hurts. Being touched, being forced. I never told anyone because I was so ashamed.
When I was 8 months pregnant with my second child my mom, over the phone, innocently suggested that he be named after my pedophile uncle. After all, she said he was always so kind to me. He always gave me baths, bought me candy and walked me to school. I exploded. I tried to hold it in, but like food in an anorexic’s throat, it just wouldn’t go down. I couldn’t hold it in any longer. The pain, the anger, the shame, the loneliness, through sobs and tears, I told her. I told her everything. I told her how much I hate him; how I wish he would die. A weight had been lifted, part of the elephant in the room, tackled.

We were the first in my neighborhood to have a Color TV and VCR player, courtesy of my dad and like most people in poor countries; one TV in the neighborhood is a TV for all. Our backyard turned into a movie theater that never emptied. One night, as we watched “La Vengeance Aux Deux Visages” (Return to Eden), Uncle Omar came home drunk and for no particular reason went into a dark rage. He stumbled his way into his tiny room, on the dilapidated section of the house, picked up his baseball bat and without warning, turned our beloved box into a pile of crushed plastic and broken glass. My usually pleasant, mother was livid. Not even my grandmother’s teary pleas could stop her from having him arrested. After 24 hours at the local commissary, he returned home. I was almost seven and in the first grade. Maybe his stint in jail had a positive impact on him because he stopped abusing me.
My uncle never married, never had children. He amounted to nothing. Today, he lives off of handouts from my grandmother. He still lives in my grandparents’ house, in the old middle class neighborhood junkies like him turned into a slum.
My dad was a hardworking man. Less than two years after leaving for New-York, he made enough money from selling T-shirts, knockoff bags and watches to buy my mom her dream house: a two bedroom house, less than a mile away from the Atlantic Ocean.
And again, it was time to move.