And then sets it ablaze
Who does not call this justice?
The queen draped in regalia
On a subversive courtroom catwalk
Is the prisoner stripped dripping blood
Paraded before men turned into beasts
Who taught our men to hate us?
If they hate us, can we call them ours?
In the hours of loneliness where your rivers
Burst onto pillows, sleeping children and concrete floors
Did we ever stop being yours?
They lie in your name
Despise in your name
Erase
Berate
Bludgeon
Belittle
Deny in your name
In the ravenous gorge between
What is written and what is true
An incendiary wall rises in your name
Like you,
they would cast us as monsters
Steal our gems
Then discard our carcasses
In the wasteland of the scavenged
Like you,
They would immortalize us
With the mouths they use
To say they love their mothers
In a country of contradictions
Mothers leave their children
Because they love their children
Men give women their names
Women give men’s names meaning
Men carry this wealth out the door
As they are leaving
You are
Ever present and invisible
Amplified and silenced
Tortured and free
Married and abandoned
Elevated and degraded
Warrior and healer
Comrade and lover
Bleeding and beautiful
Playful and ferocious
Mary and Mary Magdalene
Oshun
Kali
Sekhmet
With life and death in the palm of your hand
You are gone
And
Everywhere
Invocation
We call on memories buried inside skeletons of the first people to walk the skin of the Earth
Who nursed and nested in the cradle and spread civilizations across the planet like seeds
Tell us of the air that flows through the heart of the land to all of life and creation
Tell us of breath, the first song
Tell us of words like constellations of ideas mapping our contribution to humanity
Tell us of infinity
How the universe lives in us
Tell us which stars bear our names
So that we no longer have to fear the night
Tell us of Earth
Of roots that course through the body of the land like veins through flesh
Tell us of the force that squeezed red sand like dough to form mountains
Tell us how to make communities strong like gemstones formed under extreme pressure
We call on the desert to remember when she was the bottom of the sea
Help us understand how to be fluid like water
How to be supple without losing our identity
We call on the volcanoes to inject us with flames of imagination
Once we carried tongues burping fire
We melted metals with our minds
Tell us what we have forgotten
We are not afraid of bones
Tell us what we have lost
We are not afraid of remembering
Tell us what has been erased
We are not afraid of time
Tell us who we once were
We are not afraid of ourselves
Isabella Matambanadzo
A Zimbabwean feminist, she was raised with a deep awareness of her country’s struggles for liberation and self-determination, which has influenced her life’s path. Her love for the arts won her a prestigious Reuters Foundation scholarship to study Journalism, Literature and Theatre Studies at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. In addition to working on the campus newspaper, serving on the founding team of Cue TV, the Grahamstown Arts Festival television channel, and broadcasting on the campus radio station, she supported herself by working as a waitress and reading audio books at a centre for the blind. She graduated with triple majors, summa cum laude and achieved Dean’s List recognition and Academic Colours in 1999. She was published in the anthology Writing Free (Weaver Press, 2011).
A Very Recent Tale
The cubicles in her school library were hand-crafted from old teak, harvested from high on a kopje whose trees were once adored as sacred. They were the place where the ancestors were put. Upright. Swathed in generous constellations of frankincense. From the thickness of those faraway forests, their duty was to keep a watch on the next generations. And that is what they did. Until there were no trees left.
The adolescent girl, face framed by a pair of glasses, used her long hands to lever a reference book from its place on a wooden shelf. She sat deep in the cavern of a high-backed polished olive-green leather chair. Picking open the text, she inhaled odours of ancient things.
Her eyes paused at an entry:
The Gloriosa Superba is Zimbabwe’s national flower. It is among a variety of the protected plant species within the country. When Queen Elizabeth II visited Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, in 1947 she was presented with the gift of a flame lily diamond brooch. In traditional medical practice, skilled physicians use the plant to heal, induce abortion and as poison.
Flame Lily had been so named for her mother’s favourite flower. She came into the world with a burst of incorruptible joy, brightening an otherwise gloomy season. The tendrils of her hair twirled into a globular gathering of deep yellows and warm oranges, just like the petals of her floral namesake.
Mama Senait, a middle-aged Eritrean midwife who had attended her home water birth, had obviously seen it all. “Mmmm”, she exhaled, her expressionless face concealing her feelings, “she’s a big and healthy one.”
A migrant herself, Mama Senait was the community’s midwife. She had left all sentiment behind her thirty years earlier when at fifteen she escaped from an unexpected war. Her friends had been less fortunate. They had been captured in the raids that took young girls from Asmara to the frontline, from where they were expected to strengthen the military ranks of the war that started in 1988 and continued till 2000. Girls became guerrilla women there, expected to dance in patriotic muteness to music that discounted what the men had done to them up there on the hills.
Mama Senait lived her life on two ingredients: prudence and pragmatism. Just as she had learned to perforate an amniotic sac, she had trained herself to cut off all emotion from her heart and live within her dead-end choice. Her only indulgence was bringing babies into the world. Her rudimentary spiritual theory was that for every brown life she pulled expertly from a womb reluctant to let go of its treasure, a wandering soul would finally find rest back in her once homeland.
Flame Lily emitted a spectacular fart in answer to her birth attendant’s sobriety. It was an unmissable declaration of her arrival.
As her uterus emptied of its creation, Matireva Chiweshe, who had never planned motherhood for herself, was surprised. Her ears caught the fall of salty droplets, out of tune, into a champagne flute handed to her by a man she’d never wanted to love. That thought brought her hidden memories forward.
Flame Lily’s name held a second tribute only revealed to those who probed about the stubborn, bounce-back kink in her full head of hair, and how at a summer’s picnic, she would turn an enviable earthy hue. Nosey minds would learn that it was a tribute to her Zimbabwean roots. A country left somewhat unexpectedly. A place and time that had become forgotten in all but the soul.
By her early teens, Flame Lily’s voice would be scrubbed clean of her mother’s Zimbabwean influences. School took care of that erasure. Matireva looked at this paradox of her child
, who was at once full of her being, but looked nothing like her.
By birth, behaviour and accent, Flame Lily was as English as could be. But in her dreams, a language she heard in her mother’s songs played her imagination, pulling her to places she wished to be:
Vanorara musango
Vachichema kwazvo
Vamwe vano tsanya
Vachigununguna
Zviri kwamuri Mambo
Chido chenyu itai.
Chido chenyu here ichi? Pindurayi Mambo
Chido chenyu here ichi?
Pindurayi Mambo . . .
The music rose in crescendos, causing Flame Lily to ask inconvenient questions. Her parents’ secrecy with each other produced equally unsatisfactory answers. Yes, their meeting in November of 2017 was plausible, but was there romance? She demanded to know.
Her parents had both been invited, rather suddenly, to a dinner hosted by the Ambassador to Harare, Zimbabwe’s weather-beaten, battered and bruised capital. It was the season for lavish, jubilant bread-breaking of this nature. The Biggest Man, for years viewed as an affront to all things progressive, had finally buckled. Not voluntarily, but under a disproportionate weight placed on him by his own Generals. Men he had once considered his trusted friends. He had no choice. After all, he had no guns; they had them all.
The country’s lawyers argued publicly over whether an enforced resignation, tendered in an unsigned letter, was in fact a coup. Or not. Court etiquette, couched in faux-polite phrases such as “my learned friend”, fell by the wayside. Life-long friendships heaved against each other, intolerably strained over whether a weary old man who had outlived his welcome, even in his own political party, had been treated fairly or otherwise. Friends took jibes at the legal minds’ contest for superior acumen. From the mixture of jest, jealousy and jingoism, “Not A Coup” rapidly gained hold.
The citizens of the country fell back on the safety-net of survivors’ wit and parody. They wanted, some of them said in righteous rage, the Biggest Man to be put out on a bench in the square of the capital city’s First Street. They deserved a chance to throw at him the rotten eggs they had stored, like precious gems, in disintegrating nests. Above all, they wanted the Biggest Man to return the billions he had stolen.
At the vast Embassy dinner table Matireva had no choice but to notice, positioned across from her, a tall, long-haired chap, whose skin gave off the unblemished shine that comes from generations of privilege. The rather awkward guest-list was an amalgam of ideology-less politicians, priests of the new and old order and protest types. Inconspicuous spies from both host and hosted countries sat carefully interspersed between those of opposing views. Someone who called himself an entrepreneur kept talking about money. It was a potent mix.
She spent most of the evening listening to predictable analysis of what had happened and how, remaining politely attentive; but in truth, she found this company boring and showy. She despised that her work as both owner and curator of The Clever Natives, an art gallery that took work from what a reviewer in a travel journal had called “unknown artists”, required her to hobnob with expatriates.
Jonathan St John was the hurriedly appointed Cultural Attaché. He was charged with turning this unexpected political moment into one of artistic production. He was on the prowl for painters, photographers, theatre types and any artist with an appropriate story of struggle and creation. They had to be fresh names, he explained, who saw the mélange of existentialism and history as representative of a shared, hopeful future.
Matireva looked at this man with suspicion. He wanted underdogs who through his country’s benevolence would be turned into global superstars. He also wanted first dibs on purchasing the most valuable art being created by hungry artists.
Jono, as his mates called him, had a disarming smile, flanked by even teeth that were the obvious beneficiaries of high-quality dental care. He claimed to have been born in Nigeria to Foreign Service parents. She suspected he was a spy.
The conversation was heated, fuelled by copious amounts of alcohol. Even the preacher men drank, she observed. She nursed her drink with caution, unwilling to be drawn into the dubious debate.
The mood of merriment continued until July of 2018, when the elections were to be held. By then, Jono had, quite uninvited, made her gallery part of his daily routine. His presence felt like a trap. Every day, he sprawled his long legs on the front lawn, occupying her space. His tools included engraved pens and leather-bound notebooks. He interviewed artist after artist. He appeared to have a limitless budget. He bought food, drink, painting supplies and cigarettes. Just like his ancestors, Matireva thought.
From the east-facing window of her office she watched the barely-there winter sun cut through end-of-day traffic that moved at the pace of an overfed zongororo.
Three weeks before Election Day, the city’s walls were covered by glossy campaign billboards of candidates who promised that they were the beautiful ones, anointed to lead by the most powerful deity of all deities.
Jono cast a shadow over her view as he strode, unwelcomed, into her office. His proposition made her swallow nervously. How would she like, he asked without a question mark, to organise a dozen or so of the artists who exhibited in her gallery to travel to Britain, all expenses paid, for a couple of shows.
“I would not,” she snapped, hoping the three little words would make him go away.
But Jono sweetened his deal. Scholarships for those whose works were most popular were already lined up, and post-exhibition support for those who would return home were certain to be confirmed. For a year, at the very least.
The community of artists around her had become like family. She knew that behind the vibrant colours of the post-Not-A-Coup creativity that drew on the country’s flag were empty pockets and emptier stomachs. No one was buying art. Her accountant had suggested that if things remained this way, she should consider closing down.
So she said in a business-like tone, “Our company policy is that when an artist travels, he or she goes with his spouse or partner and their children. We don’t separate families. We insist on medical insurance for everyone and that a quarter of the payment is made to the artist in advance. You also need to support the application costs for emergency passports. Not everyone has travel documents.” Jono reached his hand out to shake on the verbal deal.
That was how, after voting on Monday, July 30, together with the artists and their families, she ended up flying across the ocean, with canvas loads of new works carried on board as hand luggage. In the small space between her departure from Harare and her arrival in London on August 1, things fell apart.
As they sat in the stuffy train from Heathrow Airport, Jono moved nervously beside her. “I suppose you’ve seen this,” his questionless question, as he handed her his mobile phone. And she saw a woman’s body, face-down, bullet wounds in her back, one foot shoeless.
Soldiers had been deployed downtown, to the side of the city where the gallery stood. They had opened fire on anyone in their line of vision. Her gallery, an old house her parents had left her, had gone up in a haze of smoke and flames.
A journalist for an international news agency, who had meandered off the election story beat at a nearby hotel, captured the events on his camera. The images made headline news. And because of the unplanned coincidence of her opening exhibition that evening featuring paintings of soldiers in a very different mood—in an overseas gallery that held other sacred things looted from the past, imprisoned in displays behind glass—she knew there would never be a return to the scene of crimes current and past.
Her stomach churned as she looked at clay pots taken, together with waist beads, from a maiden’s trousseau. In that very moment she understood it was not only her dreams that had died, but the hopes of many of her generation. Born of war, their lives would forever be steeped in cycles of unfinished hate.
Maaza Mengiste
An Ethiopian American, she is the author of Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010), s
elected by The Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books, and a second novel, The Shadow King. She is a Fulbright Scholar and recipient of a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She was also the 2013 Puterbaugh Fellow and a runner-up for the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She has been published in the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Granta, The Guardian, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Guernica, and Lettre International, among other places. After her family fled the Ethiopian revolution, she spent much of her childhood in Nigeria, Kenya and the US. Both her fiction and non-fiction examine the individual lives at stake during migration, war and exile. She was a writer on the 2013 documentary film Girl Rising, and on The Invisible City: Kakuma. She serves on the boards of Words Without Borders and Warscapes.
This Is What the Journey Does
From my table next to a large window inside a café, I watch the young man. The orange glow of a late afternoon sun drapes him in thick layers, lying across his shoulders and accenting his face. I recognize him for the East African that he is, a young man of Eritrean or Ethiopian origin with a slender frame, delicate features, and large eyes. He has the gaunt look of other recently arrived immigrants whom I have met, a thinness that goes beyond a natural state of the body. He moves differently from one accustomed to the space he inhabits; his gait is a series of cautious, jagged steps forward. He appears frightened, overly sensitive to those who brush past him. He seems as if he is trying to coil inside himself, shrink enough to avoid being touched. Though I can note all of these details, I know there is nothing really special about him, not in Florence, Italy. He is just one of the many refugees or migrants who have made their way here from East Africa, a physical embodiment of those now-familiar reports and photographs of migration.
Pedestrians amble past on the narrow sidewalk, casting long shadows in the golden light of dusk. They are caught up in their private conversations, lost in the steady rhythm of their exchanges. They are unaware of the young man I am observing, staring past my own reflection to get a better look. They do not realize that he is picking up speed behind them, his body stiffening with each passing second. He bends forward at the chest, slightly at first, then as if he might tip over from his own momentum. He moves that way for several paces before he starts to push past pedestrians, oblivious to those he nearly trips. He is a wild, wayward figure careening carelessly through the busy sidewalk, distracted by his own thoughts.
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