Mating

by Norman Rush

  He said something apropos my obviously overlong meditation on all this.

  I explained why I was puzzled.

  He was vague. He had had very little to do with the choice. It had come out of the mother committee. It was a useful thing to do because it gave everyone a chance to see what things were breeding in the hinges of shadows, the place where shadows bend, meaning what doctrinal involutions were establishing themselves in the hothouselike recesses of the different Bible groups. Also a tranche of the older boys and girls would be leaving to go to secondary school at Kang, where they would be targets for the Scripture Union. This is like a rinsing, a rinsing off that needs to be done periodically. He said Try to look forward to it.

  Thick Calm

  Different things made me not want to go to this particular parlamente. One was Nelson’s insouciance and generalness about what the event would structurally be: I couldn’t get answers to the questions of whether teams were involved, who would speak when, whether he would be lecturing first or at all. There was too much spontaneous order being assumed. I always want to know the rules, because there always are rules. People who tell you there aren’t tend to be hiding their knowledge of the rules for their own advantage. Then also he was clearly trying to flog up major attendance at this parlamente, or so I concluded from the hyperactivity of the summarist with her incessant announcements. You were almost afraid she would jump out from behind a tree to remind you one more time to be sure to come. But Denoon was telling me that the size of the crowd was a matter of indifference to him. Denoon was in a state I was beginning to think of privately as thick calm. He was seeing everything sub specie aeternitatis, all of a sudden.

  I was careful to point out to him that at the same moment he was arranging what would amount to a shot across the bows of undue religiosity, he was, behind the arras, pushing a sort of milky cult of the foremothers, centered on the cemetery. I was sympathetic with what he was trying to get at. I admired him for trying. He was trying to do something about the bottom layer of the Tswana mind, which consisted of the conviction that our ancestors hate us, watch us, and are touchy. Via little picnics and observances in the cemetery, he was clearly trying to propagate the cartoon that the five charter mothers buried there were mothers of us all and were powerful and were loving toward us, the living. Thus he would be crowding out very slowly the main source of an underlying kind of paranoia in Tswana culture, presumably. If you believe that the dead hate you and that all your afflictions come from offending them, this is what we’d call paranoia, a structural paranoia: he was right. I said to him Your foremothers cult is mariolatry of a sort, like the way the Catholics use Mary to soften a cosmos run by a punitive god and his pal Satan. It’s religion, I said. He said No, it’s ideology. He was made extremely uncomfortable. I wanted to say that blaming your ancestors for all the bad luck and illness bound to befall you in a dire terrain like Botswana was probably pro survival, group survival, in that it directed rage and suspicion backward and mostly away from contemporaries, except, naturally, for the occasional unlucky witch.

  I understood what he was trying to do, but also Of all things in existence some things are in our power and some not is a truth. You can be only so promethean before the consensus is you’re a nut. What was to be done?

  When Whitemen Come Amongst the People It Is Always for Lying

  The morning of the day of the parlamente I got a disabling headache. It was a classic. I get headaches, but out of wanting to resist being a stereotype I rarely mention them, so that when I do complain I’m credible. Nelson was attentive and clearly unhappy at leaving me in my duress. But he went. I insisted. I lay there feeling totally razed until, at around three in the afternoon, when the meeting would have been in progress for two or so hours, I was seized with the conviction that if I didn’t go I was going to miss something critical to resolving my feelings about the prospect of staying in Tsau. I took four Compral and went, trying, futilely, to time my steps not to coincide with the thudding in my head.

  The parlamente was al fresco. There were about a hundred people packed in a crescent around the porch of Sekopololo. Burlap canopies had been stretched above this area. Everyone was sitting on mats. Denoon was on a strip of mat back against the porch, sharing it with Dineo and a sharp-tongued aunt, Mma Keridile, who was in charge of the municipal herd. Bolsters had come from somewhere. There was food being handed around, bean salads and scones, and hot tea, which was welcome. It was a little chilly. People were bundled up. I found a place to sit where I could lean against the trunk of a thorn tree, at the edge of the crowd, out toward the view of the desert. There was no particular pattern to the distribution of the crowd, except for the cluster of men around Hector Raboupi directly in front of Denoon. I liked the mixed lolling and disputation idea, and the vaguely Near Eastern feeling coming from being on rugs and under tenting. The tan light was soothing. So was holding my mug of tea against my forehead.

  The way it worked, as I gathered, was that beforehand people had submitted statements or assertions on the general subject of god and religion. These were on cards which got shuffled by Denoon or Dineo or Mma Keridile before one was selected to be read out. The writer would acknowledge. Then people would respond, sometimes substantively and sometimes with deprecative shouts. The point in having three interlocutors was to rotate the function of selecting people from the floor to reply. And you were supposed to signal your desire to comment by holding up a twig. Maybe half the audience adhered to this protocol, half the time. Also the chairs were authorized to summarize or supplement contributions and to determine how long a particular point was to be pursued. Clearly also the panel was balanced in terms of viewpoint in that Mma Keridile was a believer of some kind, probably a Zed CC, Dineo was neutral, Denoon was the village atheist. You could tell which chair was in charge of the current phase of the proceedings by his or her tenure of a glass bar like Mma Isang’s and a little metal hammer to strike it with in order to punctuate the flow. Most of the older children were there, looking excited. There was coming and going in the crowd, but not much.

  I arrived as Denoon was reminding us that parlamente was not intended to raise one idea or belief up to oppress others but for all views to show in the light. Now for a time we would proceed in English. I was relieved at this. The idea of exerting the concentration necessary to follow closely in Setswana, with my head hurting the way it was, was painful.

  There was a statement before us, to wit, that it was wrong that in only one village in all Botswana was it true that believers of god could not raise up a building, this village of Tsau. There it was. The very issue I had been told endlessly was under control, not an issue, was plainly on the table.

  No, someone said, this rule was correct because in the religion of the people before the coming of the makhoa there were no churches required. But also the rule was correct because not even BNP or Boso could raise buildings, which was best because such buildings would be signs and proofs of division amongst the people. Mma Isang’s contribution was that if Tsau was a village for women, then why should a church be raised if no church could be seen in any corner of Botswana where a woman could be seen to be the priest or pastor. She repeated this in the form of a rhetorical question to the crowd, asking for the name of any church of which this was not true. It was a fusillade, highly organized, and there was more. The stalwart Dirang Motsidisi pointed out that we know from scripture that the Lord Jesus was very much rude to his own mother, Mary. This could be proven time and again, so why must we rush to raise churches in such cases? She followed this with We must always remember that whole tribes were at one time given by chiefs to be under one church, such as the Bakgatla given by Chief Lentswe to be under Ned Geref Church, whose name we know today from crushing down African people and in South Africa saying all the while apartheid is from the Bible. Where were the seconds for the pro edifice view? This seemed to be a true rout. I was certain Nelson and Dirang had orchestrated it. There was no question it had been a
rtful.

  My pal King James piped up with Until it comes when god speaks the same rules to every church there should be no churches of differing kinds raised up. Because churches disagreed very much, yet all said they were the churches closest the lips of god. Nelson glowed at this, and at Even there are churches found who say you must talk as poultry or dogs, just senselessly, to show you are of god. I gathered that this was a thrust at some pentecostal tendency in Tsau not known to me.

  That wasn’t quite all on the subject, though. One group, which was, I noted, referring to itself as the Friends of God, contended variously that god deliberately made false creeds abound in order to force people to find which was the true one, the implication being that Zionist Christianity was the true creed. A few of the Friends of God were carrying mini New Testaments and using them rather than twigs to signal when they wanted to be heard.

  A majority laughed politely at this contention of the Friends of God, and out of this laughter the voice of the Ox, Dirang, rose at its most clarion. We must not waste gum poles and mud blocks to raise any church at all, because really there is too much disagreement, she said. If you stay to Kenya the Israel Church Nineveh will tell you you must speak in any words of nonsense god sends to you, as even small boys in Tsau can see. If you stay to Zimbabwe you can be told by followers of Maranke that to pray you must kneel but with your eyes held open and your hands raised up and not closed together and you must turn to the east whence Christ will return from and you must make a loud sound in your nose like Zulus finding out witches. This produced a ripple of grumbling. There were some Zulus among us. Then she said In Malagasy there is a church of vomiters who teach out that we best worship god by vomiting, so you must practice to vomit, because in your vomit will be found sins and devils your eyes cannot see, so thus you must ask your moruti, who can see everything. Then she repeated that she was not disrespecting any view but surely everyone could see that if one church tells you a man can have only one wife and another says he can have many, and each have buildings to gather and plot in, there would soon be trouble. Her final point was a hit: she reminded us that there were many villages in Botswana with more churches than fleas and yet in those villages also would be found thieving and too many prostitutes to look at.

  I realized I was thinking of the pro-Denoon people as loyalists and everyone else as the opposition, whether their differences sprang from ultratraditionalism or genre marxism à la Boso or reflexive centrism. This is interesting of you, I thought. I realized how natural it felt to be dividing the women—sisters—into winners and losers when I heard myself inwardly ranking the loyalists, with myself included, the winners so far.

  There was a fairy ding from the chair and everyone got up to stretch. The signal to rise had come somewhat after the fact, I thought, since Raboupi’s men had been getting up even as Dineo was concluding a homily to the effect that if god was our author he would expect us to make use of our brains without restriction, even as touching views as to god himself. She was her usual oddly splendid self, in a purple sheath split fairly high along each side seam—which permitted her to maneuver on the ground comfortably—and a coarsely knit white cardigan and a black turban whose broadened tails could be arranged around her neck scarfwise. It was intriguing. Denoon was dressed in a way I believe he felt made him look more non-Western. He was back to his headband, which was actually functionless now that I was keeping his hair short. He had on his pasha pants, and he was wearing a boxy plain light blue dashiki over a black turtleneck sweater. I looked closer. On the right breast of his dashiki was a large food or drink spot. My reaction was weirdly strong: I was ashamed! I was guilty of letting him come to appear at a function wearing dirty clothes. Of course I had been lying with a cloth over my eyes when he left, but still. Then I was doubly ashamed, the second wave being over the extent of my identifying with Nelson. I had long ago seen the archetype of pathetic identification and sworn to learn something from it at the time. It had been in a crowded coffee shop in a Greyhound terminal in Yreka in the redwoods in northern California. I was sharing a table with a young local working-class couple. They had ordered omelets or scrambled eggs cooked so incompetently they looked like omelets. The husband must have been ravenous, because he managed somehow to furl an egg mass the size of a potholder onto his fork and swing the entire thing into his mouth. Obviously my horror showed. His wife turned red at my shock. Then she furled her own egg up defiantly and neatly in exactly the same way as her husband, intending, I’m certain, to suggest to me that this was merely a regional way to eat eggs and not something boorish and particular to him. She had done it instinctually. What this is is servility. I told myself Never forget it. And there I was, flushed, wanting to go up and somehow block people from seeing the spot on Nelson’s shirt.

  I stayed sitting, afraid that if I got up and started walking around I might jar my headache back to its heights. A new hors d’oeuvre had come out, which somebody brought me. It was smoked bream cut into chunks, with thorns stuck into the pieces to facilitate neatness. It was decent. I’d heard that Herero herdsmen were detouring to Tsau and bringing sacks of smoked bream down from Lake Ngami. If we could get this with any regularity it was good news. Animal protein was a fixation for me in those days. I noted that people seemed less gingerly about the bream than I would have expected, the prejudice against fish-eating being what it is among the Tswana.

  When things resumed, the new chair was Mma Keridile. After a vote we went into Setswana. Even chewing too hard seemed to set my head off, so I had to concentrate on masticating my bream ultratenderly. I drifted during a rather diffuse rally by the believers, consisting of set answers to the one question of why churches were in fact needed, answers like To prevent us from evildoing and To say where we shall be once we are dead. The constituency for this was sparse and, I thought, about out of gas, when Denoon felt called upon to add something that was being left out. His point, which he pursued prometheanly in Setswana, was that a better way to look at a religion than through the particular beliefs that compose it was to see how much repetition it expected of its most faithful adherents. By this he meant the sheer numbers of times per day or week a particular text would have to be repeated or service attended. Every church was there to see if you were doing enough repeating to be satisfactory. Built-up churches were engines to enforce repetition. Repetition is what we use to put a child to sleep. This was all too spun out, but on it went. Whenever there is a church edifice it is in fact there to give you a place to come and repeat something, and you will repeat as you are told because every church says it is your father’s house and we are used to obeying our fathers. The reason for repetition was to make our minds sleep. And it would be good to remember that the big competition between churches was not only over doctrines but also over seeing which one could be foremost in the number and kinds of repetition it could impose on its faithful. I felt for Denoon. All this was heartfelt but indigestible. I knew this theme. It went deep with him. I had heard priests described as superintendents of repetition before. Repetition was a problem everywhere. American television, or irrelevision, as he slightly annoyingly wouldn’t stop calling it, was based on it. Genre was a covert form of it and genre was overrunning literature. And so on.

  I was clearly not alone in having missed the signaling that was supposed to precede Denoon’s being allowed to declaim for so long. There was a shouted protest from Leta, the worst batlodi.

  She continued with This is lies! She herself was violating the rules by plunging straight into English without getting assent, which drew comment.

  Why are you speaking so long with saying we must not have beliefs whilst you are thrusting beliefs upon these people from long before when we first came here? she asked.

  People said Shame! but she went on. Always you are giving forth beliefs, yet you are a lakhoa and we say why is he not giving forth beliefs to makhoa rather than Batswana?

  I was amazed. She was very junior to be putting herself forward so aggre
ssively, and her status in Tsau was interim and dubious to say the least. And there was ingratitude. By accepting the batlodi Nelson had saved them from jail time.

  All this came out in the partial chorus that rose against her: She is impudent, She is a new person who is soon gone, Where is her mother to see this?

  She said You see because when whitemen come amongst the people it is always for lying, as we know from when they came with New Testament put down in Xhosa and Pedi that was saying it must be one man one wife as you can see written. And then in time they could no longer keep hidden Old Testament with proof of many kings with many wives at that time. And you must make that woman stop with writing, as I am not on for examinations, I am speaking my heart.

  She was pointing at me. It was like a blow. I had taken my notebook out and was getting a few things down. I had done this publicly often enough, without anyone objecting, although I suppose that usually people assumed I was under the rubric of recording something about birds. Before anybody had to defend me I stopped, ostentatiously.

  Leta stopped then. Denoon was silent, feeling chastened, no doubt. He looked worried.

  I sensed a larger attack gathering. Dorcas Raboupi seemed to be creeping between several groups. When I perceived the attack forming, my headache vanished completely, occultly.