Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
SHADOWS
KWELA BOOKS
For dear Lawrence Tshuma,
My wonderful father.
Sparkle, sparkle, the seed is growing.
For you, Dear Reader,
Give me a pen and paper,
And let me tell you a story.
Writing is more dangerous than killing, doctor.
(Prison guard to Nawal el Saadawi –
Egyptian writer and activist)
SHADOWS
Sing song sung for many suns
Sung in fluttering hearts,
Dying in glare of sun
Speak up speak up! Yet –
Soft sound cedes to serpent hissss
Sweat – red as blood – seeps through hatred sores
Sows seeds of sorrow
That
Sway in wind like stalks in
Mourning
Speak up speak up! Yet –
Several suns later here we are
. . . Once more
Slopping through soapy waters of
Sorrow
Sun shines shanty like silver
Beneath
Chanting masses fisted hands
(Pamberi! – Have we been here before?)
Punch in gut
Insipid stares
As
Death dances
In delightful seduction
. . . (Varoyi naked on grave) . . .
Sing song sung for many suns
Sung in fluttering hearts,
Dying in glare of sun
For when new sun rises on the morrow
To stain sky with pale-lit sorrow
We shall – you and I –
Have forgotten
Have forgotten
That man we watched die on the brow
Bludgeoned black by brutes we saw before
Bitter day back in 08 –
Life Politics
I want to be alone.
But a man is never alone in the township. The township is like a loud woman who follows you everywhere, staggering with a Castle Lager in hand, she will not let you alone. The children are standing in the street with their tongues stuck out to taste the precious rain. But there is no rain just yet, only the smell of it in the sullen air.
I arch my neck; the sky is a ceiling of silvery sheets. They reflect a light that stings my eyes. If you look at the people as one throbbing mass, they blur into a collision of colour: fleshy buttocks beneath a sarong; pink Madonna stretched taut across bouncing breasts, nipples visible through the flimsy fabric. Somewhere, colour becomes a stench – I’m stumbling past Nyoni’s house, where a sewer burst several nights ago: the family woke up to find shit bubbling through the cracks in the kitchen floor.
I walk. Past Kaduna Shops, where a newly arrived mealie-meal truck is wreaking havoc. Faces I have known all my life – Dlomo, MaMloyi, Malaba with his bald head and Mupostori church robes, even Poppi with his comic face squashed into stupidity – they all distort into monsters, hungry for so long that all they now know is how to be greedy. I walk. Past MaG’s shebeen, where I ignore the greetings. In the gutter, a stream of shit flows. And there, in the midst of all that shit, clumps of wild sugar cane flourish, their stalks pumped full of sewer water.
The houses shrink before me until I come across the one I’ve been looking for. It’s a brick facade with plastic sheeting in the windows, and an asbestos roof with a hole gaping at the sky. There is Nomsa, dark-chocolate skin bent over a fire under a lemon tree. With the dishevelled hairs on her head running in and out of one another like a commotion, and the cakes of sleep in her eyes questioning the existence of this morning, she’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Her face is narrow, her nostrils flared, her lips full. It’s as though I am noticing her for the first time, her slim neck, slight breasts and the curve of her hips filling out her sarong. A rosary dangles from a necklace bronzed by rust, tucked into the space between her breasts. I wrap myself into her, as a boy into his mother, as a lover into his love, and fight the urge to weep.
She sways me to the rhythms of her body and begins to sing:
There’s a rainbow,
Ayo ayo, ayo ayo
Over the hill brow down
Ayo ayo, ayo ayo
If you listen closely
Ayo ayo, ayo ayo
You will hear the birdsong sung
Ayo ayo, ayo ayo
The birdsong sung.
“I think my mother is about to die,” I say.
Her eyelids flutter.
“Hold me.”
The scent of a woman is a comforting thing, motherly and erotic at the same time. She smells of Geisha. When I was a child, Mama used to lather my skinny brown frame in Geisha soap. Whenever the Geisha advert aired on Ztv, I would run into the house in time to mime: Geisha, lasts and lasts like a mother’s love!
“Mpho? Are you sure? You know, you’ve said this before.”
“I know. But this time I really think she’s about to die. And she won’t let me help her.”
“Are you all right?”
I
