by Tom Sleigh
that she’d been “done to”—
a young woman with large eyes,
solidly built, holding a cell phone she kept
looking down at as if expecting it to ring—
while other women at other desks stared into
digital cameras taking their photos,
biometric scans of face and fingerprints,
fingerprints then inked the old-fashioned way
into a dossier, questions and answers,
any known enemies, was your husband
or brother part of a militia, which militia?
Faces looking back from computer screens
logging each face into the files, 500 each day
lining up outside the fences, more and more
wanting in as the soldier and the motorbike’s
grit and oil-fume haze stinging my skin
cast a giant shadow-rider riding alongside us,
human and machine making a new being
not even a hyena, who eats everything,
even the bones, could hold in its jaws.
Nostrils parching, the gouged road drifted deep
made my fever rear back as the bike
hit a rise and fishtailed, almost crashing
into a pothole while I hung on
tighter, not in the least bit scared, as if all my fever
could take in was what the single-cylinder
two-stroke piston inside its housing kept on
shouting, Now that you have come here,
do you like what you see? Is this your first time?
Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? Sad? Sick? Happy?
Hunger
In places where I am and he isn’t,
in places where he is and I’m not, if
he’s survived, if his baby teeth have grown
past rudiments of mouthing, now he bites
and chews, his will driven by craving for what
might be there and might not in the food sacks
that if you put your head in them smell not
at all, as if the grain weren’t real, or made
of molecules extraterrestrial, a substance
never seen on earth before, a substance
that in the huge warehouse rises in
a pyramid, grain sacks stacked into
a mock Pharaoh’s tomb so if a human-headed
bird with an infant’s face should fly up
in green-winged splendor sprouting from bony
shoulderblades and feathering his neck
muscles so exhausted they minutely
tremble, unable to hold his head
upright for more than a few seconds, wouldn’t it
be hard, almost impossible, for his winged Ba
to dissolve into Akh where his molecules bend
into beams of light?—and so he stays in Duat,
nothing transfigured, as in this moment:
to get a better look at me, steel turtle head
in flak jacket, he cocks his head almost
like a bird’s, his sidelong famine gawk,
as he lies listless in his mother’s lap,
coming back into focus when the woman
from Médecins Sans Frontières gives him
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.
Eclipse
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.
KM4
1/ THE MOUTH
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.
2/ THE CONCERT
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.
3/ ORACLE
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.
4/ “BEFORE HE BLEW HIMSELF UP, HE LIKED TO PLAY AT GAMES WITH OTHER YOUTHS.”
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
too-formal sound of someone
being poured through the sieve of another language.
Syllable after syllable
piling up and up until the boy,
buried to the neck,
slowly vanishes into overtones that are and are not his.
As if he were a solid melting to liquid turning to gas feeding a flame.
5/ TIME TO FORGET
There’s a camel a goat a sandal left in red sand.
Over there’s a water tower, under that’s the bore hole
and here the body asks and asks about the role
it’s asked to play: no matter how it’s dressed.
Like a nomad like a journalist like the hyena
who eats even the bones
and shits bone-white scat from the calcium.
No matter if it sleeps under a dome
of UNHCR plastic, baby blue in the sun,
or hides in a spider hole
or walks around in uniform behind plate glass,
the body makes itself known before it becomes unknown.
On the television the blade runner is facing down the skinjob,
and of the two, who is the more human?
On the table there isn’t a glass of whiskey but the ghost of whiskey
that keeps whispering, It’s OK to be this way, nobody will know.
And then the boy who rolls his pantlegs
up above his ankles because to let them drag along the ground
is to be unclean turns right before your eyes into a skeleton.
6/ THE COMING
At KM4 a wall of leaves spits green into the air
and hangs there beautiful and repulsive.
Between the leaves, in the interstices where birds
don’t stir in sun and heat, the smell of raw camel meat
wakes you to the vision of what keeps going on in the wound—
the wound inside your head that you more or less shut out
as you go round and round the roundabout
at KM4 where your friends the soldiers in the Casspir
are all pretending to be dead.
The TV Ken doll anchor keeps complaining to their corpses,
Hey, can’t you get my flak jacket adjusted
so it doesn’t crush my collar?
Leaves softly undulating, little waves of leaves undergoing shifts
between astral blue and green, leaves always breaking on leaves
in the little breeze that the Casspir passing stirs in the heat—
stirring the memory of putting your fingers
in the wounds of a blast wall at KM4 as if you were
doubting Thomas waiting for Christ to appear:
thumb-sized holes for AK-47s,
fist-sized for twenty caliber, both fists for fifty.
7/ RAP
Out of a mo
uth of bone that lives inside
the darkness in a stone like a cricket hidden
somewhere inside a dark house, the incessant stridulation
sounds like the song, I would love to be martyred in
Allah’s Cause and then get resurrected
and then get martyred and then get resurrected
again and then get martyred …
If your trouser legs drag on
the ground you’re sullied, you’re unclean.
Be a Fedayeen. Be a Marine. On the other side
of language where none of the concepts stick
the boy with his trousers rolled liked
what he called “the rap music”
and a t-shirt emblazoned with the word “Knicks.”
8/ AT COURT
Off behind the acacias in a little oasis of galvanized shade
the soldiers sit smoking and joking,
they talk to you with shy smiles and gentle laughter,
they offer cigarettes before you can offer them,
their tact and manners are exquisite.
It’s like being at a king’s court where the thrones
are three-legged stools, where the knights before battle
go around in regulation-issue sleeveless undershirts,
where the gold and silver floor is dust packed hard by boots.
Now the wind is blowing through the trees,
the scene is changing as the day moon grows strong,
leaves hanging from the branches
drip and curdle in the afternoon sun.
The soldiers lie down on mats, their faces slacken,
sleep runs like a hand over their skinny bodies,
and a goat climbs into a huge cooking pot
and licks and licks the sides clean.
9/ REUNION
The journalist who doesn’t sleep walks into a bullet.
The young boy with trousers rolled waits at KM4.
Before them both is a door into the earth that swings back
like a cellar door in the last century.
Ahmed Abdi Ali Patrice Andy Bill Rika Zero Idil Yoko
meet in the underworld at The Greasepit Bar
and talk about rotations up to the world of the living:
they come back like Patroclos to accuse dreaming Achilles
of having forgotten and forsaken him,
faithless in death to their companions …