One Day I Will Write About This Place (13 page)

Peter got a scholarship.

I didn’t—­I enjoyed the fantasy, but not the applications.

We are drunk. The woman throws her head back to clear the gleaming hair from her forehead, laughing loudly, dripping gel. Bel Biv DeVoe shakes thick, dark, and low in the bluish light of the bar. She is model lean, not Congo dancer round. She smells of hair oil and Poison. Sometimes she retouches her lipstick, and all the time her shoulders pop unconsciously, her chin dances gently, as Janet Jackson, Neneh Cherry, and Babyface thump in the background.

The college manuals that arrived in the post from America have photos of international students of many colors sitting on stairs and looking very relaxed and international. Like Model UN club kids, but after they have had polite sex. Some wore jeans, some wore saris, some slouched, some stood straight. They were clean. No ribs sticking out. No moans.

At the bottom of every photo, they gave their opinion, like, What’s really cool about Brandeis is its diversiddy. They looked like pictures on television from the seventies, the early eighties. UNESCO concerts on the children of the world—­a possible world full of many kinds of normal people: all doctors and bankers and lawyers, and all these things are possible, for any shape of anybody. All those kids we used to watch on television were now in Massachusetts doing diversiddy.

I want to do diversiddy.

We order tequila shots. She shows us how to drink tequila properly. Salt and lemon, and she tosses them down expertly, and licks her lips and pouts.

After a while, her accent loses its German. She shouts something loud in Gikuyu to one of the waiters. She knows his name. He smirks and shrugs and arrives with a tray of more drinks, no longer a man in a bow tie and white shirt performing an international Westlands service, now he is a Gikuyu man swaggering.

I read
Decolonising the Mind
by Ngugi wa Thiong’o a few week ago. It is illegal and it was thrilling, and I had vowed to go back to my own language. English is the language of the colonizer.

I will take Gikuyu classes, when I am done with diversiddy and advertising, when I am driving a good car. I will go to the village and make plays in Gikuyu, in my good new car. I will make very good decolonized advertisements for Coca-­Cola.

I will be cool and decolonized. An international guy. Like, like Youssou N’Dour. Even Ngugi is in America.

The waiter drops the tray hard on the table; drinks spill off the top. She shoots him a sharp look, and he laughs.

I am now very drunk. The nightclub’s lights are caterwauling above me, like a frenzied child with crayon lights, scrawling and squealing with delight. Then we are dancing, close, she and I. She whispers things in my ear. She smells of chewing gum and liquor.

Michael Jackson is squealing “Earth Song,” and his softer tones whir in the spools of her breath, like a winged termite after the rains. The termite heads straight for the tubes of fluorescent lights on our veranda—it crashes and falls, its paper wings crumple and break.

I must hold myself together. I break away and go to freshen up in the bathroom.

She is sitting, her hair askew. Her legs are open now, and she bends to scratch her thighs, the stockings seamed. Gikuyu
r
’s and
l
’s tangle and snarl into her English, like a comb on untreated dry hair. Her head still nods to the music, now a little too vigorously. The soft inter­national jungle on her head parts every so often, and we glimpse the roads she used to arrive here, the stitches from the grafted pieces of hair, the patches of bald, the little spurts of darker, kinkier hair pulled brutally into the weave, so brutally that there are little eruptions and scars on her scalp.

Illusions are peculiar creatures. We assume whole things, when a stranger’s movements show a pattern that seems consistent but a single sharp contradiction arrives and a person becomes not whole but a series of mistakes: bits and parts.

A whole system falls apart—­if no faith or vision carries it.

Her hands are no longer red-­tipped tools made for lifting Black Russians to her Hollywood lips. They exist only to be measured against the wrong-­looking Hollywood powder now visible on her face. It is not for her complexion, so her skin color must peel under chemicals so she can look right. But rightness, coolness cannot be faked. Once this is apparent, calluses spring up on her palms.

I look at her sharply. The curtain of face powder has opened, and there they are: three small dark tribal marks on each side of her nose, not from the weather, not from work, or an accident, three deliberate, immovable lines on her face.

“Where are you from?” I ask.

Her eyes still. They are beautiful, clear and light brown and velvety, large with long lashes, slanting down as they meet at the top of her nose.

“Subukia.” She knows. Her body slackens. A lock of weave falls over her nose, but she does not notice it. She hunches forward.

Wambui, all those years ago. She reminds me of Amigos Disco Wambui dancing on Independence Day, so easy to believe in the person she wanted to be, so impossible for me to accept that person has come to be. The waiter stands behind me, hands me the bill, still grinning; his eyes run down her breasts and to the middle of her now slack legs.

I pay the bill. More money than I have ever paid for anything. I am ill. Her eyes swell with tears.

Me, I want to peel it all off: the hair, the skin, the Black Russian hand gestures. I am so angry at her fake attempt to be what she is not. That she fooled me. I want to put a hoe in her hands and tell her to go home to Subukia and grow potatoes.

…

Your first adult act, at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, after your passport has been stamped and you have crossed into NoMansland, on the way to study finance and marketing at the University of Transkei in South Africa, is to watch your parents and baby sister turn away at the airport, your second-­ever kiss from your mother still tingling guiltily on your neck, like brackets, as your feet rush clumsily toward the duty-free shop.

Your sister Ciru, who is traveling with you, to study computer science, is more sensible and keeps her dollars in her pocket. You stop in front of a woman who, in that fat Ndirangu novel, is somebody who wears a thing called a chignon, which is a vague thing to you, but you know it involves hair that manages to face the sky and stay in place, and you know it smells like this: like crisply unwrapping paper and hidden machines that let you stand still and dream while they propel you to where you need to go.

This is not like Nairobi’s new secondhand markets, where students now shop for imported things. Street upon street of Kenyan shops and textile factories stand disemboweled by the death of faith in a common future. The owners have left the country, or have entered shady businesses that simply find ways to steal from the treasury with the help of Moi’s cronies. It’s not worth making anything anymore. Mountains of Care Clothes are everywhere. They come in massive containers from Europe and America. A few days ago, I stood next to a filthy-­looking man who was standing on a mountain of clothes spread on giant flat sheets of black plastic surrounded by the smell of rotting fruit, in the hot corrugated market, sweating and hot and shouting and throwing a hundred-­shilling Hugo Boss jacket at my face.

Here, there are rows and columns of Marlboros in the duty-free shop that are not battered from the bumps of smuggling. They are not bought from a khat-­chewing Somali trader, on Kenyatta Avenue, with strange scripts in Arabic, or wrong bottles in the wrong box, or a slightly off-­kilter brand name. Porchi. Poisone. Sold by thin, thin men, from Somalia. Dominos of nations tumble around Kenya—­and Somali men walk about, overstimulated, and thrust their faces into yours, dribbling chewed khat, eyes bleary, jacket open and say… kssss, kssss, kssss, kssss… Rolexxx… xss… xxxsss… SeyKo.

Mandela is free, and South Africa has malls.

I know now I am on a highway to everywhere. I can get on an escalator with no jostling, no moving, and let machines carry me all the way to the world I want: where there are no gaps in me. There are no background noises here, no whispers in many langauges in this airport, no
kimay.
I pull the wallet out of my back pocket, my eyes half-­lidded with self-­conscious indifference, hand in pocket, nose sweaty, and buy a smoky green bottle of Polo aftershave.

Fuck Kenya.

Brenda Fassie was brought up in one of South Africa’s worst townships, Langa—­in the Cape Flats—­once a wetland, now just dust, where not even grass can grow. She was the youngest of nine children. Her mother played the piano. At age five, she was singing for tourists to make money for her family.

She left home at fourteen. Rumor has it that she slept with truck drivers and made her way to Johannesburg, Egoli, the City of Gold. She joined a band called Joy, and later became a part of Brenda and the Big Dudes—­where she had her first hit, “Weekend Special,” a song about one-night stands.

Brenda Fassie is Langa in a summer heat wave. She is streams of sunlight on rusty township roofs. She is the cramp of life close: strands of sound twist and turn into a thick rope, in her throat—
­mbaqanga,
gospel, the old musicals, the choral protest songs, gangsters and money; sex for sale; liberation politics; gumboots and grannies spilling in tens of thousands into this cramped township. It is these sounds bending and melting; it is them shouting louder to be heard; it is drunk and beaten jazz saxophonists in shebeens. Roofs start to crack and squeal in the direct sun. She stands and belts—­a whole township street of burning silver and rust. Whipping sounds rattle and bang in her head.

She had no teeth in her first album. This was a strange fashion at the time in South Africa, among some brassy urban black women. Several front teeth were removed, some said, to give men more pleasure. Then she got false teeth. Those who know her say she has a habit of taking out her false teeth when she is drunk at parties. I want to stop paying attention to her. I can’t stop paying attention to her.

…

Transkei women know their cars.

Kofi is a Ghanaian student at the University of Transkei. His car has sixteen valves. Not fourteen. Not twelve. It is his brother’s car, really. It has sixteen valves. I know this because every time we are sitting in Kofi’s car, swarms of honey-­colored girls come up and say:

“Ooooo…”

“. . . sixteen valve!”

Last night we went out looking for women. A group of us students, from Ghana, Uganda, and Kenya. All of us have parents or uncles or aunts who teach at the University of Transkei, deep inside Xhosaland, near Mandela’s birthplace. I have two uncles here, my mum’s brothers, both university professors.

Kofi suggests St. John’s College in Umtata. This high school, I am told, was once one of the best schools for blacks in South Africa. Nelson Mandela went to school here. We park outside the dorms. The dorm door is open. No security guards, no gate, no teachers. We walk right in, and Kofi is twirling his sixteen-­valve keys.

Broken windows, peeling paint, and many small groups of girls in makeup and skimpy clothes. If one day, the day apartheid is dead, the day the world is fair and equal, and all of those who watch R&B videos have equal access to represent these sounds to the world, Kofi will be among the selected.

We know, he knows.

When we met, he asked me what my rap name was. I did not know. He smiled, a secret smile. He stood against a doorway, his whole body leaning to the same side as his fresh slanting haircut, his smile lopsiding in the same louche direction. He had on a long baseball top, and a bandanna around his head, full of stars and stripes.

His father is a professor, and he is applying to go to America, to Ohio to study business administration, followed by an MBA. Meanwhile, he will DJ at parties.

The girls line up in the casting audition; the girls near the door are all dressed to party. In the distance, the sullen girls are huddled, pretending not to be interested, some in school uniforms, others carrying books, one with a Bible ostentatiously open. I am wearing Polo and my jacket—­the one I bought all crumpled from a pile that stood next to a public toilet in Gikomba, Nairobi. The jacket occupies South Africa well.

Everybody feels small in their localness, and everyone finds it hard to imagine that those from far away are uncertain in their localness too. Here, in this jacket, I am only from abroad. I have discovered a glossy black lining, which I have rolled back. It sits, shiny—­like a Coca-­Cola smile—­folded over the tweedy gray jacket.

“You,” Kofi says to one of the girls. His finger curls to her. I am always tempted to lean my head sideways when I am watching Kofi move. I vow to have a lopsided haircut; maybe it will make my body lean the right way. “Come here.” She comes. Soon her friends join her. We don’t talk really. Kofi leans forward, and walks, swinging his MC body from side to side, and we all pile into the car.

Nomarussia, one of the women, in new thick clean brown braids, like Janet Jackson, turns around on the seat and nods to her friend. “Sixteen valve.”

We sit in a nightclub called Dazzle, children of the mad rush out of Africa. This is not Africa. We are told that every day by people here. Are you from Africa? South Africa is not Africa.

There are Kenyans here, Ugandans, Ghanaians. We are all united by a network of relatives, professionals from Africa outside South Africa. Most of us are studying finance or computer science—­some wind from somewhere announced that it is the next big thing.

Nomarussia turns to me. “Hugo Boss!”

She smiles, wide.

“I like men from Ghana,” she says, and takes in my carefully permed and gelled hair, the black polo-neck under the jacket. “You look like Luther Vandross.”

Her hand touches my wrist, and goose bumps gallop across my shoulder blades.

“You Ghana men are very handsome,” she says, her skin clear and yellow and gold. “But how come your women are so ugly?”

On the screen, a dark R&B American man—he could easily be Ghanaian—is standing in front of industrial pipes of MTV smoke, leaning against a doorway; his hair leans, his body leans, and he sings some luurve thing, his skin dark, and around him a harem of milky-­colored women with long milky hair are grinding their bodies and pouting, surrounded by smoke and light.