I am seated on the ball, holding up my pink tantantala dress. I want to test if the ball is very strong. Also to test if it can burst. We used only four layers of jesa-milk-kaveera and rubber-strings. Kato blew into the jesa-milk-kaveera until it became swollen and the blue words Full Cream Milk faded. Then he held the tip and I tied it with a small rubber string so that air wouldn’t escape. The ball bounces better when the tube is blown to full. Then we wrapped the swollen jesa-milk-kaveera with four layers of buveera and rubber strings.
The ball is very strong. The ball can bounce.
Today is our Mirundi competition at Kadopado. Kato organized the competition for today because Jjaja will not be home the whole day. She will be at church listening to the Easter Carols. Kato organizes everything because he speaks well. I don’t speak well. I stammer, and children say that I bark my words. But I don’t bark all the words, no. I only bark the first letter of the first word when I speak. I don’t talk much, but I do things better than many children. I am the best Mirundi baller in Bajjo but Kityo and Kalema and Apio say that Kityo is the Mirundi champion. Kityo says how can a girl be good with the ball? No girl in the world can beat him in the Mirundi game.
We play Mirundi all the time and each time I win. I can do fifty knees without resting, twenty feet without resting, ten heads without resting; I can do ninety knee-feet-head Mirundi without dropping the ball on the ground.
“Babirye you have fire between your legs!” Kato says.
I jump up like this and kick the ball at him but the ball goes up in the air, and I fall on my back, and my legs go up and my tantantala dress flies over my face. I wanted the ball to hit Kato and bounce off his head.
Why does Kato tell me that? For me I don’t tell him those things which Jjaja told us. Jjaja told Kato to never play with girls because they have fire between their legs. And Jjaja told me to never play with boys because they have snakes between their legs. I told Kato that Jjaja doesn’t know because she is very old. I told him that girls have girl private parts between their legs, not fire. Even boys have boy private parts not snakes.
I pull the dress away from my head and I see Kato with a face. Kato starts, taking the direction that takes you back to church. I think Kato has taken the path which branches off from the church maize garden to Kadopado field so that he will get there before me. I jump up, pick up the ball from the buyukiyuki where it fell and I run forward. This road passes our school, Mount Rahel’s Junior School, and goes to Kadopado.
I get to Kadopado before Kato and find Lule, Kawuki, Tom, Kalema, Namu, Jjuko, Kityo, Tina and Naka doing Mirundi with a fibre ball. I stand behind the anthill where Kato and I hide to watch football when we are coming from school. I knee the ball, and then kick it and it hits Naka’s back. It bounces off, and Lule gets it before it touches the ground. He starts: knee knee knee, foot foot foot foot, head head, knee knee knee. I come out from the anthill. Only Naka sees me. The others are counting Lule’s Mirundi. I count, too. Twenty knees, twenty feet, five heads; the ball falls.
I foot the ball and make it fall in my hands.
“Ref is where?” Apio says.
“I I I don’t know,” I say. Now I don’t want Kato to be the referee because he said bad things to me. I tuck my tantantala dress into my knickers and I start. I want to show them Mirundi before the competition starts for real. Knee, knee, knee, knee. Foot, foot, foot. Head. Knee . . .
“Look, Babirye, you have blood on your leg,” Kawuki says.
I continue to knee up to fifty Mirundi because Lule did forty-five. I want to be the one on top. Then I let the ball fall. Kityo takes it. I start counting Kityo’s Mirundi. I walk backwards to the anthill, counting. I pluck Kawunyira leaves, counting, I clean the blood off my thigh, counting. Everyone is counting. I hurry back to the game, counting. Sixty knee-feet-head. He drops the ball and I pick it.
“We wait for Kato,” Apio says.
I start. I want to do seventy, because Kityo did sixty.
“But you Babirye what happened to you? You have blood on your legs,” Apio says.
“Ayaa, even on her knickers. She did things of stupid with boys,” Kalema says.
I knee the ball and make it fall in my hands. I throw it at Kalema. Kalema dodges it and it goes down the field. He laughs. Apio, Kityo and Tom run after the ball. Everyone laughs.
I run back behind the anthill.
On my left leg there are two blood strings. They are like small red snakes, crawling down to my foot. I pluck more Kawunyira leaves and clean my leg. There is some blood on my dress too. I bend like this to see where the blood is coming from. The middle part of my pink knickers is red red like Kato’s gum. My heart starts. It beats faster than how I do rapid knees when I am playing Mirundi. I race back home. I want to hide in my bedroom and check if the blood is coming from my chuchu.
I hurry behind the kitchen to pick the key but I see that the door is open. I am afraid that Jjaja has come back home. Jjaja will see the blood and think that I have done bad things with boys. I hide and wait. I don’t see Jjaja, I don’t see Kato. I go quick like a lizard to the house, to my bedroom.
I stand behind the door and remove my knickers, and then I use them to clean my thighs. I touch my chuchu to check if I will feel pain, like the pain of a wound. No pain. Blood is just coming from my chuchu, I don’t know why. Every day I play Mirundi but blood doesn’t come.
I take off the tantantala dress, put the knickers inside it and I hide it under my mattress. Then I pick my purple-black dress from my suitcase, and I put it on. It is the ugliest of the clothes mummy sent me on my ninth birthday last week. But Jjaja says whatever mummy sends us is beautiful because she works so hard to send us money and things. I chose this dress because when blood goes on it it will not show like how the tantantala dress showed.
I get into bed and cry for mummy. I want her to come today and take us with her to America.
I hear Kato’s voice saying, “Babirye where are you? Are you in the house Babirye?” He comes to my bedroom like someone has told him I am there. He pulls the blanket off my head and chest. I pull them back and cover my head again. “G G Go away,” I say. “Y Y You left me alone at Kadopado.”
“Just I saw blood on your knickers and I was afraid. Even I went to call Jjaja but I didn’t see her because there were very many people at church.”
Kato wants to cry.
“G G Go away.”
“Naka is there outside. She said that Kalema said you did things of stupid with the boys.” Kato’s voice is crying.
“I I I didn’t. J J Just I was playing Mirundi!”
Something moves in my stomach like a ball. It starts from the left side and crosses to the right side. Then it stays there and it pains me. My stomach is like it is going to burst. I turn and lie like a frog and press the ball with my hands.
Kato stays and cries for me. I don’t want him to cry for me because Jjaja says when you cry for someone who is sick you can bewitch them and they die.
I press the ball very hard and the pain goes.
I uncover my head to see Kato. His face is like a fibre ball. His eyes are swollen, his nose is wet with mucus, and his cheeks are swollen. I think my face is a fibre ball too, because I have also been crying.
“I I I am not sick. J J Just the stomach was paining me but now it has stopped.”
“Why did you have blood on your knickers?”
“L L Leave me alone.”
Kato cleans the tears on his cheeks with his palm. Then he blows his nose in his shirt. He says, “Babirye, are you sick?”
“D D Don’t tell Jjaja that you saw blood on my knickers.”
Kato doesn’t want to leave me alone. He goes and comes back with the food flask where Jjaja left our lunch and I tell him I don’t want to eat now. He goes again and comes back and says he’s going back to church to call Jjaja. I tell him don’t tell Jjaja that there was blood on my knickers.
Jjaja enters the house singing azukidde tali muno yesu azukidde . .
.
“Balongo bange? Balongo bange muliwa?” Jjaja says.
I hear more noises and I know that Jjaja is talking to Kato. I throw the covers off my head and pull out the tantantala dress from under the mattress. I use it to clean the blood from my chuchu, and on my thighs. Then I fold it and put it back under the mattress. I cover my head again and press my thighs very very hard so that blood will stop coming.
“Mulongo wange kiki ate?” Jjaja says. She has entered my bedroom.
I don’t want to cry because Jjaja will think that I am sick.
“Bikira Maria Nyabo, Kiki kino?”
“Jjaja her stomach was paining her,” Kato says. His voice is coming from the doorway.
I uncover my head.
Jjaja has my blood-pink knickers in her hand. She walks to the door and tells Kato to move away, and then she closes the door.
“I I I didn’t do bad things with boys, Jjaja. B B B blood just came when we were coming from church,” I say. “I I It’s not stopping.”
Jjaja throws the knickers down and she pulls away my blanket, saying, “Mulongo wange abadde ki?” She lifts my dress and then covers me again. She stands there, her face doing things: her eyes look from side to side, up and down; her lips knock onto each other. She starts counting on her fingers, one, two, three . . . she counts up to nine.
I cry because Jjaja’s face is sad.
Jjaja sits on my bed. She lifts up my head and rests it on her lap. Then she moves her hand over my back, saying baasi baasi baasi.
When Mummy brought us to live with Jjaja, we were four years old and whenever we cried for Mummy, Jjaja put our heads on her lap, Kato on the left, me on the right side and then said, baasi baasi baasi.
The words mean that everything will be all right.
Selina Nwulu
A London-based writer, poet and essayist, she was Young Poet Laureate for London 2015–16, a prestigious award that recognises talent and potential in the capital. She writes for a number of outlets, among them The Guardian, New Humanist and Red Pepper, and has toured her work in the UK and internationally. She has also been featured in Vogue, ES Magazine, i-D and Blavity among others. Her first chapbook collection, The Secrets I Let Slip (2015), was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. In 2018 she created a poetry series, in connection with the Wellcome Trust, called “Who’s Full?” which looks at food justice and health.
The Audacity of Our Skin
I
What does it matter?
. . . you don’t worry about dirt in the garden because it belongs in the garden, but the moment you see dirt in the bedroom you have to do something about it because it symbolically doesn’t belong there. And what you do with dirt in the bedroom is to cleanse it, you sweep it out, you restore order, you police boundaries, you know the hard and fast boundaries around what belongs and what doesn’t. Inside/Outside. Cultured/Uncivilised. Barbarous/Cultivated, and so on.
—Stuart Hall discussing anthropologist Mary Douglas and her “matter out of place” theory1
I remember an empty seat next to me on a crowded train, my breath a plague. I remember walking easy in a quaint French village before being interrupted by the wrinkled nose of a passerby; tu viens d’où, alors? reminding me that foreign follows me like an old cloak lugging around my neck. I remember the breeze in Kerry’s voice telling me, I don’t like the really dark black people, but you’re alright, the way horror grew in my chest like ivy that day (its leaves have still not withered). I remember Year 6, the way my teacher shuddered at a picture of my profile. How I first understood revulsion without knowing its name, tucking my lips into themselves to make them smaller, if only for a little while. I remember the pointing, questions of whether I could read whilst holding a book, being looked at too intently to be thought beautiful but blushing all the same. I think this is a love, but the kind we have been warned to run from. It owns a gun, yet will not speak of its terror; obsessive in every curl of my hair, the bloom of my nose, the peaks and troughs of my breath. I’d tell you who I am, but you do not ask for my voice. You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you?
II
Hostile, a definition:
Bitter; Windrush citizen: here until your skin is no longer needed
Cold; migrants sleeping rough will be deported
Militant; charter flights, expulsion as a brutal secret in handcuffs
Unwilling; women charged for giving birth after the trafficking, after the rape
Malicious; Yarl’s Wood is locking away too many hearts, will not let them heal
Warlike; landlords, doctors, teachers conscripted for border control
Argumentative; hard Brexit, soft Brexit, Brexit means Brexit
Standoffish; do not fall in love with the wrong passport
Resentful; black and brown forced to prove their right to free health care
Unwelcoming; the number of refugees dying to reach you
Afraid;
Afraid;
Afraid;
* * *
how long must we make a case for migration? recount the times it has carried this country on its back so this nation could bask in the glory of its so called greatness? how loud should we chant our stories of beauty of struggle of grit? write all the ways we are lovely and useful across our faces before we become a hymn sheet singing of desperation? what time left to find a favourite café and a hand to hold? to lie on the grass in the park and spot clouds whose shapes remind us of the things we’ve lost? the souvenirs we can’t get back?
III
Who are we to one another: a dirty secret
Here’s the thing we forget as we age: we’re not so different. Yes, there are some people whose clothes will never start a riot, those who will never know the grief of having a face made synonymous with a thug (the trauma of this deserves its own word). It is true that the things we experience are wrapped up in the life we are given. But when it comes to who we are, down to our most intimate core, aren’t we all just a bit lonely, a little scared? Asking questions no one truly has answers for?
Consider this; many of us did not want to get up this morning, some of us couldn’t. There is that dazed place we all inhabit seconds before fully waking that has no border, needs no passport. When the temperature drops to a chill, a body becomes its own shelter, shoulders round into a cave protecting itself. Some of our worst fears will come true, others won’t. We are all still chewing on words we wish we’d said to someone, somewhere, and longing to swallow back the ones we’ve said in temper. A first love will make our bodies speak languages we didn’t know we were fluent in and we all carry the heaviness of loss. How did we forget that we’re all deeply connected on some level? Revealed only in moments like when a stranger falls ill in public; the way most of us will flock to help them, to remember ourselves.
Every day my computer scrolls through a news feed of angry people drunk on their ability to put others back in their place. There is a growing army of the righteous who tell us that there is a correct language to speak, an exact way to love, one acceptable altar to pray on. I watch a video of a man on the top deck of a bus screaming at another with a boiled kettle rage. He is all fist, spit in your face, my-granddad-didn’t-win-the war-so-your-kind-could-piss-it-all-away. I’m not sure it matters who the person on the receiving end of this rage is. In the video he is a chilling quiet, the kind many people of colour will recognise. It is a calculated silence, the kind where you are bargaining for your survival (and this too needs its own word). It does not matter whether he has a job he works hard at, the taxes he does or does not pay, if he tips generously, whether he is kind. That’s the point, isn’t it? Racism does not look for nuance, only the audacity of our skin. I wonder if with a different lens these two could be lovers, could be sitting next to each other as strangers on the same top deck. They’d realise they were listening to the same music and how this one track makes them each feel a particular kind of giddy as the bass drops, how as the bus jolts a headphone would fall from eac
h ear and they would turn to look at each other and they would smile.
IV
What words have been left for us?
Words tell lies. This is difficult pill to swallow for a writer, but it is true, I think. We’ve inherited childish terms that shape the way we interact with one another. The words black and white are at their heart nonsensical, artificially packed with history and, all too often, too much meaning. And yet, still, these labels are seared onto our backs. You’ll find this no better than in the language of terrorism, filled with a cruel rage reserved for people of colour, with the more noble and redemptive words, such as lone wolf and misunderstood, for white acts of violence. How we ourselves are living in a language that equates our colour to a shipwreck where all hope is lost. It is, after all, a dark time. Blackness, with all its pain and apparent innate knowledge of rap and knife crime and squalor embedded under its skin, stands with its back to whiteness, which in turn, knows fresh air and the best schools to get into. How boring this, but these terms of reference are as scorched in our minds as a national anthem. How then, should we come to understand ourselves with the language we’ve been given? To find meaning and truth in words that are the scraps of the dictionary?
* * *
Give us back our tongues and we’ll give you an answer. It may not be a sound you’ll recognise but it will be ours, all ours.
Half-Written Love Letter
I often imagine my parents came here
after hearing the sea of the British isles.
As if they put their ears to its shell
and the waves threw themselves tipsy
against conch, willing them to come over.
Then there were the things
we understood without words;
how sun in these parts is a slow swell,
the coastal path walks of Dundee,
graffiti hieroglyphics, damp shoes
against Sheffield cobbles and
the tastebud clench of a tart apple.
We learnt this country fiercely;
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