Africa39 (17 page)

‘I’m afraid that your father lied to us,’ she said. ‘He lied to us about what he was doing in Africa. He lied about how long he would be there. I’m afraid that you and your brother can’t live here any more.’

The following morning, Missy woke us up early and drove us to a tall white building a few blocks away. She held our hands as we walked inside and asked us to sit on the couch near the door. She went to speak with a short lady with black hair who was standing behind a big wooden desk on the other side of the room. She occasionally pointed to us as she spoke with the lady, and then she walked back to us, kissed each of us on the forehead, and left. She drove away.

The short lady with black hair was nice, she allowed us to play with the toys that were scattered about the room. Tayo and I couldn’t answer any of the questions she asked us. That evening she drove us to another house and introduced us to a younger white couple. The woman with the black hair told us that they were our foster parents, that they would take care of us until our Daddy came back.

Dad returned from Nigeria two days after we moved in with our foster parents. He simply showed up one afternoon after school and picked us up.

‘Daddy, what about our foster parents?’ I asked as we entered the car.

‘Don’t worry about them,’ he replied, gruffly. ‘I am your father, not them.’

We drove in silence for a few minutes, and then Tayo spoke up from the backseat.

‘Is our new mom at home?’

‘No.’

‘Is she coming to join us soon?’

‘No.’

‘What about Mom? Is she coming back?’

‘No, and don’t ask me any more questions about her. Don’t worry about her. Kick her out of your memory.’

Dad looked angry, so we listened to him.

Things went back to normal. Dad never told us why he was late returning from Nigeria, and he didn’t mention anything about our new mom again.

My father changed jobs a few weeks later, and then he changed jobs again. We saw him even less than before, but he began to talk to us for long periods of time at random moments; sometimes after we’d finished our dinner, sometimes before he left for work, sometimes after he’d tucked us in.

‘I have big dreams for both of you,’ he’d say. ‘You guys are the only reason I am still in this country. I should have left a long time ago, because I don’t have any opportunities here. No one takes me seriously. But whenever I think of leaving I ask myself what the both of you would be like if you grew up in Nigeria. Here you can become leaders. I don’t know what would happen there.’

We always nodded, but I can’t say that I really understood what he was talking about. My father claimed that I had been to Nigeria before, but I had no memory of the trip, and Tayo had never even left Utah. Nigeria, to me, to us, was merely a chorus of scratchy voices over the telephone, a collection of foods and customs that our friends had never heard of. It was a place where everyone was black, where our cousins spoke a language we couldn’t fully comprehend. Where our mother lived.

But somehow I knew that my father was right. And I was glad we were living in America. In Utah. I never wanted to be anywhere else.

After Dad tucked us in, Tayo and I would stay up and read to each other. We waited until we saw the thin patch of light beneath our door go dark, until we heard Dad’s soft snores rattling down the hallway. Then Tayo would reach under his bed, pull out our emergency flashlight, and walk over to the single, tall bookshelf on the other side of our room.

We had dozens of books. My father never bought us toys, and he always claimed that he was too broke to buy us new clothes, but somehow we each received at least three new books each month. Most of our books were non-fiction – short biographies, children’s encyclopaedias, textbooks – because Dad was convinced that novels were for entertainment purposes only, and he always told us that we would have time for entertainment when we were old enough to make our own decisions. So Tayo and I would huddle in a single bed, his or mine, with a biography about George Washington, or a book about the invention of the telephone, and each of us would read a page and hand the flashlight over.

We eventually grew tired of these books, though, so we began to make up our own stories. Actually, Tayo made them up. Even though Tayo was a year younger than me, even though he looked up to me and followed me in every other part of our lives, he was a much better storyteller than I was. He was almost as good as Mom.

He always began:

‘Once upon a time . . .’

‘There was . . .’

‘There was a large elephant with a long purple nose and polka-dot underwear . . .’

‘That liked to run . . .’

‘That liked to run all over the valleys and desert, and the elephant had many friends, giraffes and leopards, and a cranky orangutan that always wore a pair of bifocals like Dad’s . . .’

We’d continue in this manner, sometimes for hours at a time, until Tayo fell asleep. Then I’d pull the flashlight from his hands, place it back under his bed, and snuggle in next to him until I fell asleep as well.

One Saturday morning, as Tayo and I were playing basketball on the concrete courts behind our apartment building, laughing, shouting, and leaping, Tayo stopped dribbling and looked up at me, his eyes shining, hopeful.

‘Don’t you wish Mom would come back?’ he asked.

I didn’t know what to say. I took my status as older brother seriously, and I knew that Tayo would probably mimic whatever I said. I wasn’t sure if it would be OK for me to tell the truth, or if I was supposed to say what Dad would say in this situation. I chose something in the middle.

‘Sometimes,’ I said.

‘I do all the time,’ Tayo said. ‘I want her to come back now.’

And a part of me agreed with him. I wanted her to come back, I wanted everything to be the way it had been before she got sick. Before she left us.

But the other part . . .

Looking back, I think I was open to the idea of a new mom because there was a part of me that was ready to consign my mother to memory. I wanted to install a false version of her in my mind. I wanted to forgive her by forgetting her cruelty, the pinching, the slapping, the screaming. I wanted to forgive her by forgetting her.

But now, Mom, I remember your hugs. They were warm and tight. When you wrapped your arms around me I always felt as if I were home. And your food was delicious. Even when you stopped cooking, even when you would only warm up a few pieces of frozen chicken in the oven and open up cans of beans and corn for dinner, your food tasted as if you’d spent hours preparing it.

And your smiles, I’ll always remember your smiles. They were rare and lovely, like priceless coins from an ancient kingdom.

No Kissing the Dolls Unless Jimi Hendrix is Playing

Clifton Gachagua

Posters with the face of a grinning girl with red hair are all over the city’s walls. A family of three who have found a home outside an Indian café stitch the posters together into a curtain, her face watching over them. Her name has become infamous. Seventeen murders in the ghettos, no MO, no evidence, and somehow the murders all happen at the same time in the five different ghettos.

The poet has come home to roost. He is in love for the first time after a very long time. He spent the night out with a girl in a leather dress the colours of collage frangipani and a long face under red hair and Bengali bangles and heavy chains stretching from her nose ring to an earring, a girl who would otherwise be living in a hefty loft in the UK with another poet with no medical cover to boast of. A girl who held his hand through the city and showed him her blue blazoned red tongue and the weapons she carried in her nightmares.

He puts something on the record; he’s not sure what it is, as long as it is not silence. Love likes noise. He lives alone now. Once in a while he will miss them, the other poets. They fucked indiscriminately and with few inhibitions, smoked and listened to vintage radio podcasts playing
zilizopendwa
. There were debates about Them Mushrooms. Of course everyone knew, they were all there when it happened, that Them Mushrooms had failed in that event of ’67 to keep the noontide in its place. The water had come all the way to their feet, bringing with it the dead bodies of children and chihuahuas from the Italian villas off the coast of Malindi. No one could write poetry after that. They went back to smoking, fucked less, let silence replace Them Mushrooms; their fathers’ favourite musicians had failed them. They listened to their bodies more, the silence of metabolism, spent time fixated on the now obsolete. They all had penises the size of semicolons and made a show for everyone who came to visit. The sky was not enough for them so there were the octane tanks hidden in the boiler. How many ways octane helped them re-enact what Marijani Rajab must have felt when he made
Zuena
, and, more importantly, would
Zuena
ever come back to him? Their poetry came down to that important question: would the dead lover ever return?

They smoked and smoked and danced to the old tunes better than their fathers ever could, twisting waists and shifting disks in their spines. Koffi Olomide’s
Andrada
and
Effrakata
, first slow then fast, slow then fast again, a recital about dead children as intermission, then the climax. They imagined dance-fucking their own mothers in those fallen hours of the night when it was possible to see certain constellations when you lived next door to the equator, and in this regard constellations of both the southern and northern hemispheres. They had forgotten lung cancer. They worked in advertising and owned holiday homes in Shela and Pate and failed to train chihuahuas to sit, roll, stay, jump, do not poop on people’s lawns. Some anti-smoking campaign display-glass lungs full of dead babies and filters were enacted next to strip clubs but the poets knew nothing would ever stop them from smoking.

After a while they all had to leave his loft and find another place for their semicolon parade. That was then.

Dik Dik remains one of them.
One of them
is a phrase he carries with him around his neck, it’s something his mother could never and will never offer him, a place where his bow-legs meant nothing, when all he ever wanted was for her to stick out her tongue.

He sits alone in the middle of his living room and thinks about the girl with the red hair. He readjusts a register.

Long hallways of palm frond alloys, boulevards of thick baobab, dead children, flying dragonflies, cheap foam life-size GSU and imitation art line Kenyatta Avenue.
Beautification
programmes. Meja Mwangi, last seen here a long time ago, disappears into Sabina Joy with an amputee prostitute who offers him an hour’s worth of conversation in Gikuyu – no longer spoken here – for ten times the normal rate. She holds his hand tight and smiles like two moons, blush on the cheeks. He disappears inside her, never to be seen again. Some people will stalk his grave and spend fifty years waiting, fasting, praying. Cyborgs will find them there and eat their intestines alive.
Alive
. Pick, roll, unfurl them in their hands like cashew nuts. He will never come back; the sons will never come back to their mothers. The mothers have forgotten they ever had sons. If they meet in the Matrix Way they will greet each other like strangers, probably sleep next to each other, tired and outworn, and they will kiss with their eyes closed.

The prostitute comes back and the night is on her lips and anyone who asks to kiss her she says yes. What else can she say but yes? Because yes is a sacrifice to all those young twenty-somethings and taxi drivers who have the world in front of them and the government so up their assholes it tastes like the Year of the Colon.

She comes back with those dark lips the colour of night and she is blowing kisses to the night and right there at the equator there is a kind of magnetic borealis – a migration of evolving nova from the 456 regions to the Near Death Kentucky Fried Chicken Canto regions, where it says Dante was just looking for the devil to fuck his ass. She is dying and her body is in this experiment of reverse engineering and she is tearing into ribbons of primary colours – wait, wait, are these wings? – no, they are not wings, they are the roads she must take to get home but as soon as she steps on to the curb they disappear. She goes back to the house, kisses him on the forehead, no eye contact, and he remembers his mother. She just wants someone to accept her love.

She walks out into the street.

A man with an eye patch on his nipple and a single eye on his other nipple pinches himself to look at her. He feels a chill, goosebumps spread across his body – he has not yet learned how not to arouse himself whenever he pinches his nipples. He is a work in progress, he reassures himself.

She sees Dik Dik clear in her closed-eye vision when she finally falls asleep.

He has seen the way many men fall into the night of that smile and never come back so he simply looks at her from the corner of his eye. For her this is enough. She says her name is Chromosome-1972. He has read on a banned billboard the short history of seventies chromosomes so he does not ask her anything else, he is playing it cool – some genuses don’t take too lightly to old-age categorisation.
Short history
and
early death
appear together in conversations. He does not offer a smile.