Unbury Our Dead with Song

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  ‘The Hague,’ I corrected him, but he continued on.

  They had served together in the Ogaden war. The Somalis, cut up by the Italians and the British and parcelled out to Kenya and Ethiopia, were waging a unification war. But neither Kenya nor Ethiopia wanted to give up their colonial borders for ones that made sense. Several massacres, like the Wagalla massacres committed by the Kenyan army against Kenyan Somalis, left hundreds dead, and still nothing resolved. Somalia eventually descended into anarchy and piracy — of course, that resolved nothing. Perhaps with national integrity, the country would have survived itself, but already parcelled out and under siege, collapse was inevitable.

  Now, of course, JB did not put it quite this way. He saw the Somalis as ungrateful for all the Ethiopians had done for them. And, rather conveniently, he invoked pan-Africanism to say that Africa needed to unite and not form borders along ethnicity. But still, what The Corporal did went beyond the call of duty. So much so that even his fellow soldiers and commanding officers feared him. We were intrigued. He ordered a round of tej, honey beer, for us all as he settled in.

  ‘The Corporal — there is no courage in that man. We once captured this Somali kid, no more than 16 years old, but he could handle an AK. We captured him, and we were loading him into our army truck. Suddenly, a grenade in the truck. You know what your Corporal does? He picks up the kid and throws him on the grenade. We survive, but the kid has a crater for a stomach. He is still alive, and I take out my pistol to finish him off. But The Corporal, he tells me not to waste a bullet. And he stands there and watches him die. He has a smile on his face, like he is watching the son he does not have get married. I am angry, and I curse him. Next thing I know, he is holding a gun to my head. He forces me to thank him. Forces all of us to thank him. Later, he gets a commendation for his quick thinking.’

  He drank his tej fast, as if to chase down the nasty taste of the memory. I joined him, as did Maaza. We all needed to chase down history with a drink.

  ‘We all died that day — every one of us. We are soldiers — we killed many more after that. But him, he liked to kill in order, starting from the bottom up,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked him as I ordered us another round.

  ‘He finds a family. He starts by killing the least, the smallest — a cat, a dog, a goat, a cow, small children, until only the mother or father is left. He called it the bottom-up method,’ he explained, tears that seemed independent of his matter-of-fact narration rolled down his face.

  I must have been missing something in translation — it did not sound like The Corporal at the ABC, the Tizita musician. I was not sure if I believed JB — wars happen, and soldiers torture, kill and commit atrocities. But this was Nazi shit, something that went beyond sadism to become evil personified by The Corporal. Was it that I did not want to believe it?

  But why would JB lie? Our meeting had been purely accidental, so it was not like he had time to prepare such an extreme story, and why that story, as opposed to another, more believable one? If true, it would certainly make for a better story. I was going to keep listening.

  ‘I am sorry for asking this — he did save your lives after all, no?’ I pressed him as I reached to put my hand on his shoulder, which he brushed off.

  ‘It was the kind of saving that kills, you understand? It’s like a child dying to save the parent. The parent dies too. I mean, look at me,’ he said, as he forcefully poked himself in the chest.

  ‘If I had to do it all over again, I would jump on that grenade. A musician? The Corporal? I can only laugh. He cannot sing his sins away,’ JB added, more to himself.

  He ordered another glass for himself. As soon as it arrived, The Corporal walked in, and I saw fear slowly spreading all over JB’s face. Torn between running and finishing his drink, he chose the latter and, with his ever-widening eyes on The Corporal, he gulped down his drink. The Corporal walked over to the server-bartender to say hello, and they talked for a minute or so. JB finished his drink and tried to bravely walk out. But The Corporal opened his arms wide, started to smile and then broke into laughter, the sort of laughter that comes with not having seen someone for a very long time, a friend from another life. The Corporal hugged JB, slapped his back a few times. JB returned the greetings, with a bit of embarrassment, but just as enthusiastically — and then, as soon as he looked back to Maaza and me, the fear returned.

  ‘Did JB tell you our war stories?’ the beaming Corporal asked, turning to us.

  ‘Yes, he told us how you saved their lives,’ Maaza answered, looking at me, and I at The Corporal.

  ‘Is that so? JB is being too modest — he would have done the same in my place,’ he answered, without missing a beat. ‘JB, my friend, my brother, you must have a beer on me.’

  Maaza translated as JB turned it down with effusive excuses. The Corporal insisted, and he relented.

  ‘Thank you, Corporal. I will drink it first thing in the morning.’

  He had quickly come up with a solution, and I admired him for that. The Corporal laughed and told the server-bartender to keep a bottle of beer in reserve for JB. I did not realise it then, but sly or fearful, JB had left us with the bill for the rounds he bought for us.

  The Corporal, dressed in a cheap brown suit, had all along been standing, and he politely asked if he could sit down with us. As I introduced Maaza to him, she had a contemplative look on her face, as if trying to figure out which of the emerging, competing stories was true. The Corporal, now appearing slim to the point of fragility, was hard to reconcile with the murdering soldier painted by JB. I asked him if he would like anything, and he ordered tej. He was ready to get started.

  23

  ‘Sound — I think The Corporal was trying to tell me — expresses that archive, a 200,000-year-old archive of extreme human emotions.’

  My journalistic instincts told me that The Corporal was the sort of man for whom you had to find the right word, the right question and the right phrasing to open him up. No bullshit, no warming up to a conversation.

  ‘Corporal, I want to start by giving you one word only: Tizita,’ I said to him.

  ‘If I did not play music, I would be like JB. Unable to do anything for myself except drink. War — we go to war; war is death…. We come back to life, and we find we are already dead. We cannot respect life if we know that someone can take it easily. Music? The Tizita brought me to life,’ was his immediate response.

  I suspected he brought up the war first because he knew JB would have spoken to us about it. I was glad he did because it created an opening to ask the harder questions later.

  ‘But what is it about music that does that?’ Maaza asked him, translating her question for me.

  ‘The only true thing in this life is sound; the one thing that can take you back is sound,’ he answered.

  ‘Back to and from where?’ she asked, and he looked at me as if to ask who was doing the interview. I nodded to agree with her question.

  ‘Back to the beginning. If you think about it, in the womb there is no light, only sound, the mother’s beating heart, for example. The child patterns his heartbeat after the mother’s. Life is sound; it does not matter if you are as deaf as a stone, you feel sound, the beat — and you build your life around this sound, this beat. You walk, run and shit on it; you live and kill to it; you make love and kill to it — always to sound. Sound is more than rhythm; sound is everything. The soul.’

  ‘The soul — isn’t that a bit vague?’ I asked.

  ‘Because it is unknown. We want to call it unknown because that is easy. Think about the first death — the Tizita, to me, for me, is that sound of the first death, the recognition and the surprise and the realisation; that first consciousness that realised it was going to be no more — and it wanted to leave a message in a bottle that becomes me and you. With the Tizita, I can feel it; I know it, but I cannot speak it. So I sing the Tizita, because it will echo in your soul, sound waves from yesterday meeting yours and,
perhaps, we shall understand something that we do not have words for yet. All I can say is, you can walk for a very long time and get to where you are going, but all along, little bits of yourself are left along the way, and you get to where you are going, and there is no going back without stepping on yourself, and there is no going forward without eventually tearing your entrails out of your body. The Tizita is that impossibility — I am dead and buried, and I am alive and well at the same time. When I sing it, I know what that is, even though when I stop, I cannot explain it — an understanding with no words, only sound.’ He stopped and looked at Maaza and me, waiting for his words to sink in or for the follow up question.

  Echoes — he sounded a little bit like The Diva and her idea of the Tizita carrying traces of that first light. And yet, it was not a return to the beginning — it was to feel echoes of a series of first violences and beauties — the big bang, the first birth, the first death, the first love and down through the years. If the Tizita was like the wind, it would be whipping across these sediments of violent and beautiful firsts, echoing them into the present. Just last week, before coming to Ethiopia, I knew of the Tizita as an archive of the past, but now I was beginning to understand it in a more fundamental way.

  Let me put it this way: historians record history — and even though there are competing versions, it is there on paper. In science, each new discovery and invention is directly tied to the previous one, an archive that is also new. But human emotion, feeling — where is the archive? Philosophy and psychology explain. But where is the archive that we can visit to learn about what the first human being felt on first experiencing love or the tragedy of losing a loved one? That first parent to bury their child? We fall in love, and it feels like it’s for the first time; we assume the emotion of love does not contain the archive of past loves, from generation to generation, all the way back to that living thing that first gruffly grunted, ‘I see, I love.’ Sound — I think The Corporal was trying to tell me — expresses that archive, a 200,000-year-old archive of extreme human emotions.

  ‘Anything else?’ The Corporal asked, looking at his watch. I needed to win him over if I was going to get to talk about the JB, the war and music beyond what he had rehearsed. I had to give him something. I weighed my losses — which one would draw out The Corporal? My dead uncle cut to pieces by thugs? My own mother’s indiscretions with the dictator? Stories of madness from the belly of Babylon? What story? Then it hit me, a loss that was mine — one I could not account for.

  ‘You know, Corporal, when I lived in Boston, something happened. I dated this girl; I loved her, but we were both damaged. We broke up, you know…she left me. Months later, we met and she said she was pregnant, with a boy. She had an abortion….’

  He looked interested. ‘It is life — but what did you do?’ he asked.

  ‘We fucked and cried. I realised how much I loved her then. Then, in the morning, she left, and I never heard from her again. Often I wonder about that — this other life—’

  ‘Maybe she had no choice. Or it was what she wanted, and it had nothing to do with you,’ Maaza interrupted.

  ‘Maybe, I know — I know most probably it was the right thing to do, for her anyway, but still, I wonder about that other life I could have lived — wife, son, writing for The New York Times…. Sometimes, I want it so bad that this life I am living seems like the lie. When I think of that other life, I feel like it is out there, another me living it, but I have no words for it. And I think I hear its echoes when I am listening to the Tizita,’ I said, thinking that adding that bit about echoes of that life was a nice touch. It is not that I was jaded; I knew, sensed so much, and I wanted more of the story. My hunger had become manipulative — or I was finally doing my job.

  ‘Yes, that is exactly it, my friend — to know something and not have words for it — only sound can carry that; you can hear that other life and feel it through music!’ he exclaimed, putting his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘But there is more to the Tizita. It is not just about loss; it’s more than that. The Tizita is about life, living in this hard world, of drawing water out of a rock, or turning a mirage into water. The Tizita is about life, all of it,’ he tried to explain. I had no response to that.

  ‘But, my friend, why don’t you?’ The Corporal then asked.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Live that other life — you know what I mean?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be here,’ I answered.

  ‘But you would be there,’ he said, and we all started laughing. ‘I better get you another beer,’ he added.

  ‘Do you think he is a war criminal?’ I asked Maaza as he went to the counter.

  ‘Hard to tell — but then, what do war criminals look like?’ she asked simply. ‘There is no innocence when it comes to us.’

  I should have, but I did not ask what she meant.

  The Corporal returned with three beers, one for Maaza and one for me, toasted and slammed his glass on the table, rubbed his hands on his trousers and blew on them as if to cool them down.

  ‘For a musician, the beat’ — he drummed the table, a syncopated staccato, like he was playing the conga drums — ‘the beat consumes him, and it becomes all he hears, total immersion, a total darkness before he continues; the beat is life itself.’

  ‘Tizita, in the end, is about life, yet you were a soldier. The war, how did the war influence your music?’ I asked him, feeling it was the right time to get to his war experiences.

  ‘Trench warfare in the twenty-first century. I never quite understood it, but we fought, killed and stayed alive. But on this one day, we rushed an enemy camp. I took aim and shot an Eritrean soldier. I felt a sharp burning pain on my right thigh; I had just been shot. I could have continued fighting, but the sight of my blood and the exhaustion — I was done.

  ‘I sat down and tended to my wound, watching the rush of soldiers killing each other. When the fighting quieted down, I rolled over the body of my kill. I knew the face; though bloodied, he looked familiar. It was probably a soldier I had fought alongside to get rid of our common enemy, Mengistu, just a few years before. I deserted that evening,’ he narrated without much emotion, like he was telling a story he had told hundreds of times before.

  I did not say it, but I knew the reason he had not answered the question was because that was the myth he wanted me to tell the world. I started to ask him about the alleged atrocities, but he saw it coming.

  ‘Let’s save war talk for later,’ he said and stood up to leave. ‘Bottoms up,’ he said in English and laughed, finished his tej and left to go set up at a local juke joint.

  Maaza and I looked at each other, trying to gauge each other’s thoughts.

  She said it aloud first. ‘It’s a good story. It’s a fucking amazing story.’

  The server-bartender whom we had not paid any mind came to us. We really should not believe every word from JB, he said. I asked him if he could tell us anything about The Corporal to contradict JB’s account.

  ‘That is all I am willing to say,’ he said, more cautiously than fearfully.

  Maaza asked him if he had been in the army as well. Instead, he told us to talk to The Corporal’s CO. You know, his commanding officer. He had no idea where to find him, though, and I was not so sure it was worth the trouble trying to find him. I wrote for a tabloid after all, and I could take liberties with a story that your Nation reporter could not.

  ‘The Corporal is a great musician. He is also a great man,’ he said as we settled our bill.

  We stepped outside. The sun was setting, dark clouds around its girth, bright-red-yet-dark rays coming through as if from behind a massive, greyish screen. Maaza and I held hands, the joints from her piano fingers pressing against mine. If we were kids, we would have been skipping, walking and singing, only in our story, the Tizita tears us apart. We liked it here.

  24

  ‘The Tizita is selfish — it just wants to be sung.’

  The Corporal’s juke joint �
� unlike The Diva’s, which was more like a neighbourhood joint — was a place for African transplants in Addis. Indeed, it was called the Amakwerekwere Joint, referring to what our xenophobic South African sisters and brothers call African immigrants because their languages are undecipherable to the sensitive South African ear: Amakwerekwere. Unsurprisingly, there is a mixture of five distinct smells in almost equal parts — mint tea, charcoal burner, weed, stale/fermented alcohol and roasting goat meat.

  Maaza and I settled in with drinks as The Corporal held court centre stage. He was playing his masenko with a three-piece band composed of a krar player, a drummer and a bassist. His band mates were much older than he was. The bassist, for example, appeared to be well into his eighties. Where the relatively younger krar player did some furious footwork so that a fusillade of sound captured pain, anger and loss, the older bassist took his time, bending his strings into a heavy multisyllabic rising and falling pentameter — what I imagine peacefulness would sound like, if it had a rhythm.

  The Corporal called up a young woman who had been sitting by herself surrounded by coats and walking sticks piled on plastic chairs. She was the bassist’s daughter, it turned out, and even though they did not say it, I could tell she was an apprentice. It is like a young football player being called in to play because the game had already been won, or irretrievably lost — might as well give them some practice. She took the bass from her father, who kissed her on her cheek as he left the stage. The drummer eased the band into a slow song — and she slipped on the bass.

  Then something went wrong, and everything was out of sync — the bass, she had not found the grooves to play her bass along. The krar tried to make a headway into the sound of the band, but it ended up sounding like amplified termites drilling into dry wood — fast, busy, with a low buzz of activity as they hollow out everything. The drummer, unsure of what was happening, kept working. And that was when The Corporal came in with his masenko — he kept the beat with his one-stringed devil until the bassist caught up. He slowed down when she ran ahead and sped up when she lagged behind until she finally found her walking pace within the band. And then, her youth serving her, she started driving the bass through the spaces left wide open by the older, experienced players, and she emerged from the background to take the lead.