Station Zed (4 page)

Plumpy’Nut that needs no water, no refrigeration,

no preparation, a food suited to eternity,

so that body, becoming
Ba
, may eat to enter
Akh
,

unless you’re shut out, unless you live

forever in your death in
Duat
, condemned

forever to eat this peanut slurry as a biscuit

that he chews and chews … but when he’s finished

he begins throwing the silver wrapper

in the air, catching it and throwing it

fluttering in the air, the silver wrapper

turning the air between him and his mother

into a medium, another otherworld

nobody but them can share just as long

as the calories, the sugars, the digestive

juices feed that silver-never-ending-

in-the-moment-momentary fluttering.

for Tayeb Salih and Binyavanga Wainaina

Heat lightning flicking between head and heart

and throat makes me hesitate: I could see

in the rearview one part of the story

while up ahead the crowd breaking into riot

were throwing rocks at one another as the soldiers

retreated into a doorway. The whole thing

comes back like a moment out of Eisenstein,

the baby carriage bumping fast and faster

down the city stairs, screaming mouths ajar—

and that’s when I smelled an overripe lily smell,

an eye-corroding battery-acid smell:

tear gas in a green cloud came wafting

from the mosque, all of us imploding

into the eyes staring from next day’s newspaper.

“Oh yahhh, we got plenty of carjackers here, Mr. Tom.

Two fellows, I see them in the rearview mirror, one

with a
panga
, the other with a gun,

and so I put the car in reverse and drove right over them.

But you journalists are crazy, you like all this—

after the elections when we Kikuyus

were being hunted down at all the checkpoints

the fellows I was driving for, good guys sure, they want

to find the worst thing and shoot it for TV.

And so they stop the car near a stack of burning tires

and inside the tires is a Kikuyu like me

and they tell me I’m safe, we don’t have to worry

because we’re the press: but that damned fine fellow in the fire,

if he was me, would I just be part of the story?”

Later, in a
matatu
blaring “Sexual Healing,” I sat

staring at a poster of a punk rocker without

her shirt on, two machine pistols

held at just the right angles to hide her nipples.

It made me weirdly happy to look at her—

her, and the light coming through the windows,

and the jerk of the
matutu
through giant potholes,

and the lifting off of whatever fear

into the logic of a dream where I was some new life form

sent down for no larger purpose

than to listen to the talk-show host ask questions

about “the alpha female,” “foreign influences”

that make riots happen,

and if “the President is going to plant some trees.”

When she wrote about Africa, note that “People”

means Africans who aren’t black while “The People”

means Africans who are. She never mentions AK-47s

(which don’t yet exist), but prominent ribs, naked breasts. Lions

she always treats as well-rounded characters

with public school accents while hyenas

come off vaguely Middle Eastern. Bad characters

include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners,

and future employees of the World Bank.

She always takes the side of elephants, no matter who they trample.

This is before “blood diamonds” or nightclubs called Tropicana

where mercenaries, prostitutes, expats, and nouveau-riche Africans hang out.

But there were genitals, mutilated genitals.

And of course her
sotto
voice, her sad
I-expected-so-much
tone.

A nail in the wall is what the world hangs on:

a poster of the latest “big man” whose name

in fifty years nobody will know; or Jesus looking

put upon, head drooping on the cross, hands bleeding

a hundred times over in the wooden gallery

of tiny Jesuses for sale. Or else a mosquito net

drapes down in a gauzy canopy

over the narrow, self-denying cot

where you sleep for a few hours, sweating out

malaria between parsing words

writing the fatal formula that cuts

into the mind terms you can’t live with or without:

“We are foreign men in a white world,

or foreign-educated men in a black world.”

The plate glass shattering rewound into the windows,

cannisters of tear gas leapt back into the hands that threw them,

even the horns hooting and the awful traffic jam

reversed into dawn and malarial mosquitoes

drifting in my room. The power hadn’t come back on,

the air was completely still, and overhead the sun

passed behind the moon—everything in motion

uneasy as clouds shifting. I imagined on

the road the sound of different footsteps,

slap of sandals, leather soles’ soft creak, the sun

dissolving in its own corona in its arc

across the continent to blaze out above ships

plowing through the Indian Ocean while millions

of shoes on the tarmac walk and walk to work.

Not English Somali Italian French the mouth

blown open in the Toyota battle wagon at KM4

speaks in a language never heard before.

Not the Absolute Speaker of the News,

not crisis chatter’s famine/flame,

the mouth blown open at KM4

speaks in a language never heard before.

Speaks back to the dead at KM4,

old men in
macawis
, beards dyed with henna,

the women wearing blue jeans under black
chadors
.

Nothing solved or resolved, exactly as they were,

the old wars still flickering in the auras round their faces,

the mouth of smoke at KM4

mouths syllables of smoke never heard before.

Lake water

in smooth still sun moves in

and out of synch

with the violin

playing at the villa—

the bow attacking the strings looks like a hand

making some frantic motion to come closer, go away—

it’s hard to say what’s being said,

who’s being summoned from the dead,

from red sand drifting

across the sheen of the shining floor.

The pianist’s hands taking wing to hover above a chord

become the flight path

of a marabou stork crashing down

on carrion, the piano levitating up and up

above red sand that it starts to float across

the way a camel’s humps

far off in the mirage rise and fall fall and rise

until mirage overbrims itself

and everything into its shimmering disappears.

And the ones who died the day before,

blown up at the crossroads at KM4,

scanning the notice board for scholarship results,

put their fingers to their names as the onlookers applaud.

The little man carved out of bone

shouts something to the world the world can’t hear.

All around him the roads, lost in drifted, deep red sand,

die out in sun just clearing the plain.

Dried out, faded, he makes an invocation at an altar:

an AK-47 stood up on its butt end in a pile of rock.

The AK talks the talk of what guns talk—

not rage or death or clichés of killing,

but specs of what it means to be fired off in the air.

No fear when it jams, no enemy running away,

no feeling like a river overflowing in a cloudburst—

forget all that: the little man of bone is not the streaming head

of the rivergod roaring at Achilles; nor dead Patroclos

complaining in a dream how Achilles has forgotten him.

The AK wants to tell a different truth—

a truth ungarbled that is so obvious

no one could possibly mistake its meaning.

If you look down the cyclops-eye of the barrel

what you’ll see is a boy with trousers

rolled above his ankles.

You’ll see a mouth of bone moving in syllables

that have the rapid-fire clarity

of a weapon that can fire 600 rounds a minute.

And there, among the dead, appearing beside your tent flap,

at your elbow in the mess hall,

waiting to use, or just leaving, the showers and latrine,

the boy with his trousers rolled appears

like an afterimage burned into an antique computer screen,

haunting whatever the cursor tries to track.

So he liked to play at games with other youths?

The English has the slightly