In your 6th year.
You remember being dipped in a bath of medicine
Kusehliswa umbilini wakho [they were calming your spirit]
Owayehlahlanjiswa yimimoya.[which was fighting invasion by foreign entities]
You kick and kick until you pass out
In your mother’s arms.
Ulal’ububuthong’obunesingqala. [Your sleep is drenched in after wail]
When you wake up
An old red skinned woman is in the house
Igqirha. A doctor.
Covered in swaying beads.
She is a startling sight but you are not afraid.
She runs around the yard
Chasing something the rest of you cannot see
And returns with tainted talismans.
You are all bathed and made to stand in a queue
At the end of which is a blade in her leathery hands
Ukuqatshulwa / Protection
Niyaqatshulwa
Two small incisions are made in your meridian points
The backs and fronts of your
Wrists, necks, knees and ankles
A black paste is rubbed on top of them
to calm the bleeding
The leftover paste
is mixed with milk and you are given it to drink.
It is hard to see your father and mother’s faces
Through the smoke of impepho in the room
But, that evening there is peace in your in your sleep
Finally.
Ubuthongo buxolile
Izinyanya zivumile.
It is correct that you can and should leave.
Ukubhadla
When your teeth have grown to full size
You learn that you share your father
with strangers who have your lips and your eyes
Who have just as much claim to calling him Tata.
Except they’ve always called him Teti
Because he was their land first.
Now you are on that land.
It buys you mangoes and grapes.
It fetches you from school
Teaches you to play the piano
Buys you chronicles and encyclopedias
And rents movies for you on Saturday nights.
Behind your innocent eyes, you smell
The fragrance of angry people in the vicinity
Who don’t call to remind you
That this land belonged to them first.
You know the feeling of not being wanted
By them. As intimately as you know
the feeling of being accepted
in begrudging fragments.
Embodiment (Selfhood)
Your face, now that it on its way
speaks on your behalf
Long before the language of the tongue
How does it feel to have a body?
Somebody wears you on her back all day
Preparing your legs for uprightness.
You do washing, ironing and cooking
You sleep.
You sweep and sweep and sweep
Inside, outside, under.
You sleep.
Her voice is a song
You forage for your lunch in the front yard
But only she touches imifino
Yours is to observe and smell.
You feel the sting of wet cotton and plastic
On your thighs.
She offloads you
And sings to you in vaseline tones
She hands you over to your mother
Whom you recognise by her sharp voice
And the late afternoon light.
Thyini, Nanku noCelizapholo [Indeed, here is the Venus star)
Homeland
the street i grew up in had no name.
and is in a country that no longer exists.
Home - [still unsure about this]
what do i remember about vuli valley?
i remember the colours of the houses.
picked from a chalk palette.
green. guava. peach. yellow. white
They all smelled the same.
chicken on the stove. aromat.
furniture polish. pride.
the faint scent of a mattress airing from yesterday’s bedwetter.
doilies and porcelain ducks
painterly portraits of grandparents captured in their prime.
no captions.
homes guarded by dogs called
blackie, whitey. snoopy. snowy. tiger. danger. rex and rover.
all tied up and warning us of danger, gevaar, ingozi.
Mithandathu
The way your arms and legs shoot outwards
like autumn branches
Your wooden complexion
Your serious face and stubby toes.
There’s a unanimous decision that you’ve borrowed
your grandmother’s shape and form.
Where will this shared body take you?
You wear your own vaseline now.
The time has come for you to learn
The skill it takes to rub it
into every millimeter of skin
Enough for it to sift through the brown
to ward of any ash
But greasy enough to catch the dust
from your new school shoes.
These people should know that you glisten
from too much care.
1993
Your mother buys you
New uniforms
To go with your brilliant new lives,
Filled with new 1993 words
Like cul-de-sac and hedge.
An air of preparation binds you to your fate:
Ironed shirts, polished shoes,
Crisp white socks perched
On hangers like birds on a wire.
Waiting for your first day.
Vuyo grates the polony the night before
And tucks it onto ‘sliced brown bread’
Another brilliant fact that comes with your new life.
You are yet to discover Melrose Cheese
The day finally breaks.
Everything is crunchy from being new
Your bag, your uniform, your shoes.
Your mother.
Like little loaves of pioneering bread.
You are spread with vaseline and sent off
With a R1 coin in one hand
And your sister’s hand in the other.
The diary
Your love of words is rewarded
With a diary on your 9th birthday
It is pink. And in it, you memorise
The language of your new world.
Blonde. Ponytail. Gymnastics. Apartheid.
Democracy. Rugby World Cup.
Niggerballs. Fat. Spacecase.
Billabong. McCauly Culkin
Your desired name is Kelly.
At break you play with friends from Mdantsane,
Gompo and Vergenoeg
Who also have peanut butter, polony
And incisions on their wrist and necks.
They teach you to play uduva, noshenxe
In four years time, you will learn how to smoke cigarettes
And kiss boys at the museum
Together after Derby Days.
You will never meet funnier humans.
Girls named Lauren, Kim and Rachel
also become your friends.
And they invite you to their homes
Which they call their houses.
You are fascinated by their hair
And the wires on their teeth.
They teach you to wipe your juice bottle
With the hem of your uniform before and after
You have shared it with someone.
And you teach that to your sister.
They also teach you that the hair on your legs must
be waxed or shaved.
So you do something
That no woman in your family has ever done
And steal your father’s razor.
Diary V2
When I was 8 or 9 I got a diary for my birthday.
It was sofa pink with purple pages
And a weak silver lock.
How dedicated I was to my secrets.
Every pencil crayon dying for them
What they were, I don’t know.
What may I have written about my new life?
Tasting avocados? Kissing Olwethu?
School?
I may have written about cheese.
How I liked that our new life came with
things like cheese and ham.
Instead of just polony or jam.
I practiced the phonics of my new world.
Blonde. Ponytail. Gymnastics. Apartheid.
Democracy. Rugby World Cup.
Niggerballs. Fat. Voting.
Billabong. McCauly Culkin
I may have written about swimming pools.
Naming our dog Speedo.
Learning how to swim.
Thinking I can swim. Swimming anyway.
Almost drowning at something called a Gala.
Poor Andrea Govender and me.
Dreaming about being in intermediate swimming.
Learning to desire being average.
Settling. Settlers!!!
Oh yes! Elise’s mom dropping me off
after a ballet recital at the Settler’s Monument.
My parents had a fight that night.
As a sign of settling in.
I may have begun to use words like Lapa and Salad.
I may have even become somebody who has Goals.
Thanks to Mrs Philpott and her trip to Singapore.
Clifton Park
Our new house was going to have a double story
And a hedge
The epitome of indawo ekhumshileyo
A White House
I couldn’t wait to run up and down the stairs
Screaming “coming”, when mama or my “mommy”
called me from downstairs
Like Americans on TV
A week before we moved in,
the owners of the house
Invited us over for a braai
And we got dressed up
and steamed the car windows with our unbridled anticipation
The smell of the fire as we entered the gate
Waved us in
While the meat sizzled in the lapa
Where the grown ups were.
We swam in our future pool
With the children whose bedrooms
now belonged to us.
I’d never seen a swimming pool like that,
With lights inside.
Seeing their long hair move under
The water was glorious.
The next day
They phoned to say they had called the police
Because we had stolen a diamond necklace.
Their apologies were not accepted.
We never did live in a double story house.
White Mother / Ukuthakathwa: The Invasion
She towers over you
On top of her greencross shoes
And smells like lavender in the mornings
Her powdery skin beckons.
And your mothers let you go.
Your new matriarchs receive you with
Unflinching composure.
Big smiles. High Voices.
Suspicion. Self-control. An Itching.
Never really looking into your brown eyes.
But never averting her gaze on you.
Holding something back.
A smile that comes from the mouth but not the eyes.
You run towards her fragile embrace
And crash into her knees.
The promise of belonging hangs
Like a rainbow after a storm.
You make friends.
Rows of ponytails surround you
And out of sheer compulsion
You touch one, without permission.
She catches you.
You love her.
Even when she won’t pronounce your name properly.
Even when she decapitates your mother tongue
Because she also gives you money to go home.
By June you are reading in English
And playing England Ireland Scotland Wales
By December, you are fluent in the
signals of unrequited love/grace
And colouring perfectly within the lines.
Inyewe
In winter
You begin to wet the bed.
The plastic on the mattress protects the precious bed
But the stench escapes.
You wake up first and creep out of your room
Carrying the wet sheets.
Uyangcotsha
But you can’t reach the
bottom of the scullery sink.
Izigqukru: A rite of passage
In the summer of 199_
Just before first break
Somebody says god left you guys in the oven to burn
That is why you are burned
God took this person and her people out on time
That is why they are not burned
Everybody laughs
And you do too
Because you are in Rome.
It takes 20 years for you to think of an appropriate comeback
A burn if you will:
Maybe god didn’t take you out on time.
Maybe you are undercooked
Umsindo - A heavy weight
what happens in your body –
the place that houses everything that has ever happened to you and your ancestors –
when you begin to open your mouth,
after years of ukumumatha? [holding food in your mouth]
you remember your white friends,
who treated you with kindness and contempt at the same time.
who did not braid your hair at the sleepover
because there was consensus among all of you that “it’s gross”. who didn’t come to your father’s funeral because “they didn't know they were invited”. who always said “my mom says you can come to my house but I’m not allowed to go to yours”.
Now they are slowly making their way to your house.
or frightened somewhere in the distance, at the prospect of walking towards a door they can’t help but seek out in their quest to remember who they are.
Your greatest challenge
is what you are going to do with the
Your power, now that it is
your turn to invite.
The Romans
A Roman turns 13 and invites you to her disco.
You are the only one of your kind in the room
10 boys. 10 girls.
Sweets. Fanta Grapes and Alanis Morisette.
Braces glistening in the moonlight.
When the music changes from fast to slow
The girls sit down in a row and you follow.
One by one, they are asked to slow dance.
Even the ugly ones.
You wait for the 10th boy,
a handsome blue-eyed cliche,
To ask you to dance
He doesn’t.
When he looks at you.
The room gives him permission
To sit down.
You watch your matching mates
kissing and giggling.
And you sit there, smiling that smile of their culture.
Your parents have not told you about the laws of your new life.
You have no reference point
For why this boy has rejected you.
From that day on,
You believe you are the problem.
How to see
i gaze at makhulu.
not because she is filled with anything new.
but because she knows people i wish to know.
she has a memory i wish to photograph.
she is an apparition of all that i do not know yet.
to gaze at her is to study myself.
in daily expressions of peace
she waddles across her yard
left and right. like a free compass
the wind making patterns on the tail of her pink gown.
remembering that her panty slept outside,
she picks its frayed edges from the teeth of her fence
I watch her struggle with her bent fingers.
Hayi, u92 ayingo 29.
Hayi hayi hayi mama mama
she mumbles. i giggle.
where she goes. i follow.
unaware of my roving camera,
she eventually stops:
“ufota mna?” [are you photographing me?]
Scapegoats
Returning from the wilderness.
After many years.
Your scapegoats appear in your dreams.
Zivuz’iinkathazo. (drooling troubles)
Bleating from grief.
Weighing the weight of all of their sins.
Zithi ziyagodola. Zinxaniwe. (They speak of cold and thirst).
Despite all the gold they took
That still glistens around their mouths.
They remain impoverished,
And need your help.
They have fed enough on your peace, they say.
And wish to find a peace of their own.
A peace they promise to return back to you.
A debt the children of their children will pay.
Zifun’uxhelelwa. (They want a ritual slaughter)
Zifun’isiko. (A rite of passage)
Your scapegoats need rituals.
Did you hear that?
Ceremony. Ukuhlanjululwa. (Ritual cleansing)
Nokubikwa. (And a naming)
You dream again. This time, that niyazalana.
You are related to your scapegoats.
Your scapegoats are your relatives.
By force.
Take this dream.
And cry into it if you will.
Wail the wail of a mother
Who knows a knowledge she does not wish to know.
What will you do, Mixed Blood?
Might you also need a ritual?
Might you also need water and word and seed and blood?
Might you also hunger for
For the soil to turn?
Okomphokoq’upholiswa phandle(like phutu cooling on a tray)
in the air of purple dusk?
Look at them.
Look at your scapegoats.
Gaze back at them
Stare if you will
At what constellations of grief look like
Look at the face of yesterday’s power.
And prepare your knives.
Sharpen your knives.
Now is the time for blades so sharp they cut things back together*.
*a line borrowed from David Whyte’s poem No one told me
Process
we are in a process.
what is this process about?
and where are we in the process?
a lot has happened.
this is a long process
and it is still going to be a very long process
we are in a marriage.
what is this marriage about?
and where are we in the marriage?
a lot has happened.
this is a long marriage
and it is still going to be a very long marriage