and aloneness
can exist together
Instead I tell him where I’m from we
Have no such con-
cept if he thinks I am / Too wise
he won’t speak honestly
And so I talk the way the men
He says are men like me
Talk in the books he reads to me
I understand
Those books are not supposed to make me wise
And yet I think perhaps
They show me what he means
By privacy // Perhaps
by privacy he means / This
certainty he has that
The weapons he has made
Will not be used against him
In the Language
I cannot talk about the place I came from
I do not want it to exist
The way I knew it
In the language of my captor
The keeper asks me why I
Refuse him this
I think to anyone who came from / The place I came from
It would be obvious
but // I did not think my people
Superior to other people before
The keeper’s language has infected me
I knew of // Few people
Beyond the people / I knew
before and when I met new people
The first thing I assumed was
they were just like me
Perhaps even relatives
Who had before my birth been lost
In the jungle or on the plain
Or on the other side of the mountain
And so at first I thought the white men / Were ghosts
one spoke my language
And said that he had spoken to my father
I did not fear them
I thought they had been
whitened by the sun / Like bones wandering
I thought I could / Help them
I thought they didn’t
Know they were dead
2
Purgatory: A Memoir / A Son and a Father of Sons
I myself prefer to be left face up
in a ditch and for someone to go to jail
because of what he’s done to me.
— PRISCILLA BECKER
Ajax (within)
Boy! Where is my child?
— SOPHOCLES (TRANSLATED BY JOHN MOORE)
1
Most mornings, on my way to school, I would stop on the bridge over the branch of the creek that separated the school from my house and peer through the railing down at the minnows twisting in the pale current.
Some afternoons, and sometimes on the weekends, I would climb through the thick bushes behind the school—I would push, violently, sometimes knocking whole trees down, sometimes stomping on them, imagining myself hacking through a faraway jungle, and once I brought one of my grandfather’s machetes with me, his only souvenirs from the army, although he hadn’t fought in a war, two machetes and a pair of boots, and hacked so desperately, so gleefully then that I didn’t get anywhere, but stood in one spot, hacking—and through the bamboo trees beyond the bushes, to the village of abandoned and rotting houses in the placeless clearing.
Two houses, both wooden, and both painted brown, although most of the paint had peeled away, stood in the center of the village if one were facing the village, having just emerged from the bamboo forest. To the left of the houses a narrow dirt road led away from the village. To the right of the houses stood a building that looked like a cross between a barn and a warehouse. It, too, was brown, and brown also where the paint had peeled away, exposing the wood underneath.
The village was the emptiest place I had ever seen. But the warehouse and the houses were full. The houses were full of furniture nobody had used in years, and old kitchen appliances, and shoes—I remember several pairs of shoes—and stained jeans. In the first house I walked through, the first couch I saw had been tilted on its back. It lay in a small living room, and next to it was a pair of cracked brown wingtip oxfords, and a few feet in front of it were two empty, beatenup suitcases; otherwise, it was surrounded by old sheets of plywood and fragments of the walls. The houses stood even though they looked as if more material had been torn from the walls than could have been in the walls in the first place.
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