9/28/2017 0 Comments a'courting, according, accountingWhen I left the church, I also wanted to leave guilt behind. The what-what from the pulpit about original sin, and mounting spiritual debts. The stuff about turning the other check, and the needle’s eye, and blessed be the poor and the meek. No one can escape guilt, though; everyone has some portion, a slowly-amortizing, always-compounding debt. Two days ago, ZESA struck, and the microgrid my building shares with the wholesale produce market and the egg and dairy shops collapsed. Twelve hours elapsed by the time I called the ‘fault line’ myself – no one had officially reported the outage. And crews were done for the day. And they hoped to get out next morning. Twenty-four hours elapsed, no power. No wifi. Dead laptop and phone, and the week’s shopping wilting in the warming fridge. The cleaners came through yesterday afternoon, and moved all of my vulnerable foods from my nonworking fridge to the fridge across the hall in the office portion of the building, to keep things from going off. The office half of the building has a deafening generator running at full blast, a few scattered office lights left on overnight last night, as if mocking my lamplit squinting. But, the cleaners said, “How are you going to cook? Who is going to cook for you?” I figured I’d get takeaway, hey? “But you can’t eat takeaway, not after we have gotten you used to fresh food. It is not good for you.” Eeeeeshh, I’ll survive. I mean, takeaway is basically all I eat at home. “No, no, no. You can’t be eating chips and what-what. I have a sister,” Qubukile said. She already introduced me to her fetching youngest sister, who works for Schweppes, makers of Mazoe Orange Crush. She knows I like Mazoe. Her sister “just happened to be in the neighbourhood” last week, and came around, and met me on her lunch break. A beautiful woman, the same penetrating eyes as Qubukile; a crisp medium blue dress shirt with a flared collar and sensible skirt. I made awkward small talk whilst sitting in athletic shorts and a t-shirt hammering away at my computer. So that was one sister. Qubukile broke in to my reverie, “This one is my second-youngest sister. I have 11 siblings, you know.” Eleven siblings, potentially eleven separate matchmaking opportunities. Surely not twelve girls? Some must be married. “She lives in town and has a car, and she will cook for you. I will call her.” No, no, no – naw, that’s alright! I can make do for a night! “Oh, no. She will like cooking for you. She will cook, and then bring it to you. I will give her the ingredients from the kitchen. She will make....spaghetti? With meat? And maybe mushrooms?” She knows I like mushrooms. “And then she will bring it over.” I wanted to say – but she doesn’t work for me! And for that matter, you don’t have to, either! Qubu and Tia seem to relish cooking for me – it’s a day-ender after cleaning the offices across the hall. They come to my apartment, and sit in the chairs in the kitchen and bustle about, and half-shut the door and make animated conversation. On days I’m not around, they relish the satellite television that shows South African pictures on endless loops, one whole channel dedicated to those that feature magic – often the channel I find when I infrequently turn the set on. They cook for me, and it seems to be part of their job. The building manager sometimes ghosts into my apartment and hovers after they’ve left, asking anxiously, “You are enjoying their food? They cooked for you?” Oh, yes, yes, I say, it’s so lovely, but you know they don’t have to? I can manage. I’m used to managing on my own. I live alone! With a dog! To which he replies, “Oh, no, no, no, Doc. That is their job. They will take care of you.” Confounded, I offered one more fumbling, feeble protest. Ohhhh, but it’s such a hassle! “It is no problem,” Qubukile said as she scrolled down her contacts list and walked out of the room. A half hour elapsed as I continued to bang things out on my laptop, working quickly against the depleting battery. I looked up – and this happens a lot in my own home now – startled – and there is Qubukile, standing with a woman in a skirt-suit and glasses. “This is my sister,” she said, and I introduced myself with a thin smile. Hellooo, I said, warbling a little. Uhhhh, sit down? –and gestured to the overstuffed dining room chairs on which there were stacks of books. They perched awkwardly, moving things around. Small talk ensued. “She works for Delta Beverages,” Qubukile explained, “And lives on this side.” “This side” could mean anything, as could “that side.” “This side,” in this context, seems to mean “in town.” Beverages run in the family, Heh! Heh! I laughed awkwardly. “Yes? Oh yes,” Qubukile politely laughed. “That was my youngest sister. This is my second-youngest sister. There are twelve of us. He is 36,” she pivoted abruptly, speaking to her sister. “He is a doctor, and he lives alone.” I am 36! Heh. Heh. Heh. And yeah, just me and my dog. And in my family, it’s just me and my sister. “That is niiiice,” Qubukile said, as there wasn’t much else to say, and no in-road for the sister. She pivoted again: “She is getting her MA in Accounting.” Accounting! Well, that’s a good career. Everyone wants to know where the money goes. “Yes,” the sister says, “at Midlands State University. I am almost finished. Next month.” Oh, yeah. I went to Gweru two weeks ago. I pause. For the book festival? We all pause. It seemed nice, hey? I met some lovely professors from MSU there. Pause. “Welllll, she is in the middle of work. She works until 5, and then she will cook for you, and come over at seven?” Qubukile glanced at her sister, who nodded equivocally. I wrote down my number on a post-it note, and handed it to her sister. “I will call you when I am downstairs,” she said, making me feel all the more uncomfortable with this ‘arrangement.’ The evening continued, and shortly after they left, the electricity came back on. To celebrate, I answered all of my emails at once, binged on Facebook, and then turned on the television to a Step-Up movie, happy to veg out. Seven comes and goes, and Step-Up: Revolution continues (N.b. the Step-Up revolution is perpetual). I check my phone compulsively, painfully guilty that this whole thing is happening, and determined not to miss her phone call. Which I do, anyway, but only by a minute or two whilst puttering about the kitchen fixing hard boiled eggs for breakfast. I call her back and flap down the stairs in my slops – flip-flops – and athletic shorts and novelty t-shirt, bedraggled and sleepy-eyed. I see her outside; she is standing in her car door. She smiles. Gone is the sensible but plain skirtsuit. Instead, a flirty white and black minidress, with flared skirt, slightly starched. She is wearing short heels, but white patent leather. She holds a white clutch adorned with gold studs. I stand awkwardly, smiling awkwardly, flapping my slops against my soles in place, awkwardly. She holds out a pot of meats and vegetables, warm to the touch. I try to make small talk. How about that concert at city hall? I bet the traffic was pretty bad, immediately regretting it, worrying I made her feel uncomfortable for being late. She does feel uncomfortable about being an hour late and makes apologies. I realize idiotically that she was late not because work went late, but because she had clearly taken an immense amount of time making herself beautiful. It dawns on me that I might be expected to invite her to stay to eat, and of course I should, because she cooked for me, but I can’t, and panic is rising in my throat. The wind has cooled and whips jacaranda blossoms down around us. She shivers slightly in the breeze. Heh! Heh! No problem, I say, trying for reassuring and kindly, but coming out pettishly. I am very grateful for you and your sister, and you having cooked for me. She grabs a neatly-tied bag with stacked Tupperware, and her clutch, and I walk us toward the building. Going up the stairs, I nervously accelerate, wanting distance between myself and this painfully awkward moment. She pants theatrically for a second, “You are running!” Oh, right, heh. Heh. I go to the gym, and ... uh... yeah, I move quickly these days. We get to my apartment, and I unlock the three-part system. My living is a mess – scattered books, cigarette packets, pens, notebooks, laptop, tablet, more books. I steer her to the kitchen and place the still-warm pot on the counter. She sets things down next to it; she pauses, and sets her jaw, and then sets her clutch down before undoing the bag, and lifting out containers of steamed vegetables, creamed mushrooms, cooked spaghetti, enumerating each one, and at each one, I crow weakly. Oh, there’s more? Heh. Heh. How wonderful. “My sister made you coleslaw?” she queried, looking around. She did, yes, and I’ve been snacking on it this evening, I said as she lifted the lid. The corners of her mouth tightened, “Yes, I am so sorry I was late.” Oh no, no no no, it’s fine, I burbled, ready to repeat reassuring no’s for hours if need be. There are not enough hours for the no’s I feel compelled to say. “Right, so, shall I serve you?” Shall I serve you. Shall I serve you? There aren’t enough no’s for this, and there aren’t enough words to smooth over what is happening, that there is a beautiful woman in my kitchen who has been pressed into cooking for me, which is a definite courtship ritual no matter what society you belong to. I can’t, I just can’t, sit around my living room in silence making small talk with someone I have no intention of marrying, no matter how lovely and generous and gracious she is, and I’m in over my head, and these things happen, but there’s no knowing in advance how painfully awkward this will feel, and how this has never really happened to me, or at least I’ve never been aware of it happening. I have never been a “catch,” too neurotic and too finicky, and too oblivious and too aloof, too too too too. No, no, no, no, of course not, I can serve myself, but oh, oh, thank you so much for cooking. You shouldn’t have, really, it’s too generous, I babbled. Your sister is so lovely, and I’m so lucky to have her around, and everyone in your family is clearly lovely and generous, I said. I moved ever so slightly towards the kitchen door, like by inches. She picked up her clutch and set her jaw. Right! I should, uh, show you out, as if the eight foot walk to the front door was a long trek after a long night and we were both exhausted and the door was somehow complicated. She smiled woodenly as I fumbled with the three locks. Thank you, thank you so much, I said again. Really, it was so lovely. SO kind of you to do this, to which she replied with quiet reassurances, “Oh, yes, but takeaway is so bad, it was the least I could do.” I thought about giving her a kindly warning about the darkened stairwell, to be careful, but didn’t want to seem anything other than oblivious, and that seemed cruel, and there was also no way to do this without appearing to hustle her out anyway, and god, I thought, I hope she cooked something for herself, or held back some of the food just in case, and oh my god, she cooked for me, for us, and I am pushing her out the door, and I don’t know that I’ve ever felt quite so bad as this. Well, it was lovely meeting you, I said. But I don’t think this is going to work, I didn’t say. It’s me, not you, I didn’t say. Nor did I say, And it’s so late. Or, And we have to work in the morning, after all. I couldn’t bear to hear her descend the stairs in her modest heels, tapping hollowly. I couldn’t stand there and watch her pull her car out into the empty streets and drive the deserted blocks home. I couldn’t stand to think about the fact that she might now have to rustle up dinner for herself, take the pins out of her hair, loosen the heel on her shoe, slide out of her dress. I couldn’t stand to think how bad I was at all of this – at saying no, at not accepting generosity I can’t or don’t know how to return. There are things I can’t say, and silences I can’t explain, either. I have a friend here who is utterly unabashed in her flirtation with me. She knows it won’t go anywhere, but also knows she doesn’t have any filter. “I need to get in the swing of things,” she said. “To get in the game again. I have honoured the ancestors by staying celibate for now, but I don’t need to do that anymore.”
She likes my red beard (“like a pirate!”), my dad bod (“but a sexy dad!”), my strawberry blonde hair (“you are so, so...white”). I tease her that she just has a taste for the exotic, which she gleefully admits. She recounts to me all of the pale redheaded men she’s known – three, I think, including me. A German she’s working on, but who has no butt. The Germans don’t have butts. She asks me how a white boy has so much butt. She teases me that the gym will ruin my physique. She introduces me, generously, to friends, but always with a long prologue in chiShona that ends with an admission to me that she has told them all about me, that she has a crush on me. Her friends invariably confirm this, and at least one was awesome enough to look at me appraisingly and say, “Ehhhhhh, he is not so great.” I know where to find that friend, and I look forward to spending more time with her. This is not quite the end of my second month in Zimbabwe. There are eight months to go. The cleaner has eleven siblings. There are known variables, and unknown variables. Known-knowns, known-unknowns, unknown-knowns, unknown-unknowables. There is a ledger of generosity, given, returned, not returned, with blind double entries. I will leave this place indebted although I come here rich.
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9/22/2017 0 Comments The Last Two Jews in Bulawayo“The only remaining member of the Newman family, old Ruth: mother of four, grandmother of seven, and great grandmother of twelve, all, all in other countries across the globe: was confined to a wheelchair. As they continued on their walk, the Boxes worried about Mrs Newman, alone in that house, old and infirm. They decided to telephone her once they got home, and ask if they could help in any way. Her number was in the directory, the only Newman left in Bulawayo…. ‘Please get off the line? Off! Get off! I vunt for to shpeak mit my son, the doctor!’ Ruth’s Yiddish accent was never far below the surface. Her husband, Paul Newman, had met and married her in Vienna, in 1934, and brought her back to the family home in Bulawayo, where the family had flourished until the late nineteen sixties when they began to feel threatened by the Schwartzen and, one by one, left. Only Ruth and her husband, Paul, stayed on, Ruth in Number 43 and Paul in the Jewish cemetery at Athlone. The remainder and the remains.” (John Eppel, “The Keys,” White Man Crawling) Walking out of the university’s guesthouse one Saturday afternoon, I took a turn around the leafy, shady suburb of Khumalo. Not the Suburbs, which is another neighbourhood altogether, closer to the city center. At the end of the road, I hooked a right, and caught a Star of David out of the corner of my eye. Stirring stained glass, stars of David and menorahs, vines and olive leaves, all rendered in translucent, backlit glass. A long building, its roof rising to a central spine. Out houses, former servants’ quarters, a few pieces of laundry flapping on lines. Not a synagogue, anymore. I wonder how synagogues are decommissioned: are they boarded up, shut up, left, without a parting prayer? Or does the space need to be closed somehow, spiritually? Not a synagogue now, but a police station. Do you say the Kaddish for a space?
My grandmother worked for decades at the doctors’ building at Touro, the Jewish hospital in New Orleans. She was the nurse for a series of kind and generous doctors. When Leonard Bernstein visited New Orleans, he paid a visit to my grandmother’s boss for a check-up and check-in, monitoring his guttering lungs, blood oxygen levels. She was a devout Catholic, but felt at ease amongst people of any earnest faith. I wondered if she knew he was gay, too, a Communist of the old guard? Other, othered. Other of an other. Another. In New York City, I always lived in Jewish neighbourhoods. When I moved to Brooklyn sight unseen, the only place I could afford was on St. John’s Place, in Crown Heights. Crown Heights, that storied battle-ground between orthodox Jewish families and black and West Indian families, coexisting uneasily since the neighbourhood erupted into violent riots in 1991, after Guyanese children were killed by the motorcade of the Chabad spiritual leader. The neighbourhood bore the fissures of the divide – there were blocks, like mine, that were black West Indian, the homes of public school teachers and the Trinidadian middle class. Other blocks had fallen into urban disrepair; and other blocks teemed with apartment buildings full of Jewish families. The life in the neighbourhood was West Indian, and every September there was a raucous West Indian Day parade. I could stand on the roof of my brownstone, amidst the herbs and vegetables planted in zinc tubs by my roommate, and look out to the screaming, singing, laughing river of Guyanese, Trinis, Barbadians surging down the street, belting out the latest island hits, hands hlding polystyrene containers of pigeon peas and jerk chicken and dripping roti. I packed up my wagon when the house broke up and rents soared – Geo to another house in Brooklyn, Catherine to the deserts of Arizona, myself to Washington Heights. After Crown Heights, Washington Heights in Manhattan, another long-standing Jewish neighbourhood that existed inside, next to, among the Dominican families that had filled the neighbourhood in the 1960s and 1970s, creating generations of Heights-born Dominican families that filled the streets with the clack clack of dominoes slammed on tables, cigar shops where paterfamilias sat and shot the shit, blowing clouds of smoke onto Broadway. In the midst, Jewish mothers formed walking clubs, pumping their black-clad arms up and down the streets, gossiping and taking the air; the shul teeming with serious-seeming young men in hats and ringlets, all black all year round, shouting to each other in Hebrew for the basketball that they lobbed gracefully toward the hoop, unencumbered by their stiff jackets and tucked-in white dress shirts. Many of the buildings’ elevators, went automatic on Saturday, climbing up and down between the floors, stopping at each one each time. The 190th St A train stop had an grandfathered elevator operator, a black woman who carved out the corner near the panel with an improvised desk, pushing buttons up and down, earbuds in to cut the loud ambient buzz of the grinding gears. Saturdays were a marvel, and street-level apartments filled the neighbourhood with laughter and talk and prayer. Every year the rent on my studio went up $50 a month, and what was once reasonable was increasingly in line with a city determined to price working and middle classes out of its preserves. Both of these experiences clashed with the strident and aggressive Black Israelites who set up shop on 34th St, in front of the Herald Square Macy’s, belting imprecations and thrusting out pamphlets. They seemed to belong to nowhere, not to the contact zones in the neighbourhoods I lived in, but rather flew in as though from outer space, to deliver dire warnings of sinfulness and forgotten apocryphal similitudes In both places, I was a minority in minority enclaves, and a harbinger of the gentrification to come. While I lived in each place, it was, to bourgeois eyes, rough around the edges. “Food deserts,” bereft of adequate grocery stores. Awkward admixtures of check cashing places, and bullet-proofed Chinese takeout stores, bodegas stocked with beer, and soda, and cigarettes. By the time I left Crown Heights four years later, a Starbucks had sprung up two subway stops down at the frontier of white, twenty-something development. When I left Washington Heights, rents were soaring, the last “affordable” neighbourhood in Manhattan, “discovered” by white gentrifiers who had read the half-dozen piece in the Times extolling its convenience and “culture.” Gentrification is just colonialism in softer terms. But how to understand the spaces that are lapped over time by successive waves of displaced peoples? My friends the Schklars have folded me into the fabric of the young Jewish community of Chattanooga. Josh, with his facility with languages, is quickly becoming fluent in Hebrew, and their Sabbaths are observed, Friday night dinners with the lighting of candles and prayer. Bethany, the daughter of Christian missionaries, is delightedly entangled, and recently confessed she was converting. Would that be weird, I asked? To have gone from an evangelical Christian youth to observant Judaism? Not really, she said; after all, almost all of their friends were Jewish, and the good parts of faith are just good, any way you slice them. At their parties, I chat with the gregarious emissaries of Israel, sent abroad to foster community and ties to the homeland. I jive with the goofy Sarah Brook, dry and funny and warm, and rib her like a little sister. I meet pragmatic and amused young Jewish people who have gotten quite used to explaining the differences in their faith to the church-going, Sunday-observant Christians that people our hills and mountains. Chattanooga is the “Most Bible-Minded City in America,” but that doesn’t mean they understand all of the People of The Book. Josh has stories from his work as a physical therapist, asked to be a cultural middleman for the occasional Jewish guest, explaining why the pained old man couldn’t be touched by a female nurse, or the significance of the prayer tassles peeking out from the bottom of his shirt. Their babby Noah is doted upon by all, was showered with onesies with Jewish themes, given a block table with cutouts of Hebrew letters. In the middle of Bulawayo is another synagogue, announcing its presence with buttresses adorned with Stars of David in granite relief. It is now a roiling Pentecostal church, broadcasting its prayers into the streets with crackling loudspeakers, pastors warbling and bellowing, congregants shout-singing its praise. Jane says that the board of the hospice she worked for was populated with most of the last community of Jews here in Bulawayo. When their synagogue caught fire, they rallied the troops and allies and sent them running, to put out the flames with bucket brigades. In Kabul, on Flower Street, if you looked up in the right block, you would see a stone lintel with a carefully carved Star of David. A Star of David in Kabul. I asked around about it, and heard the story of the Last Two Jews in Kabul. Through the turbulent nineties and early oughts, each would hold services on the Sabbath, on the downlow, for themselves and any transplant that found themselves there on a tour. Their story is a wry allegory of Judaism’s penchant for minor disagreements; it was explained that the last two Jews were mortal enemies, having disagreed over some trifling interpretation of the Torah, nothing that should have caused an irreparable rift. They lived across the street from each other on this charmingly narrow alley populated with dusty antique stores filled with lapis lazuli, rusting 19th century artifacts, and roman coins. When one died, the other grudgingly gave a service, the only person qualified to do so. When he died, not long before I came in 2013, I wondered who might say the Kaddish for him. I met Zandele at the Book Café to see her art – beautiful brightly-coloured techno-organic abstractions out of which peeked the merest shadows of heads, bodies, hills, breasts. Her bubbly son Nathaniel was with her; he had just gotten out of school for the week, on a Tuesday. His school uniform charmed, stern short pants and ironed button-down adorned with an embroidered menorah. A menorah, I asked her? Is there a Jewish school here? Yes, she explained. It was long-established, a good private school amongst long-established Catholic schools once peopled with nuns slapping knuckles with rulers. And is the curriculum Jewish? Are there any Jews here in Bulawayo? There were two left, she said; she knew them by name, as did every parent at the school. They felt protective of the Last Two Jews in Bulawayo, their last lifeline to the faith that animated their school. And is the curriculum Jewish? It is Rosh Hashanah, she said, reminding me of the Jewish new year that always felt like the real new year to me. My life had for decades been charted against the fall-spring axis of collegiate semesters, the sweaty, saddening summers of waiting for the cycle to restart. When I taught at CUNY in New York, I learned to follow the high holy days: school was cancelled for the most important, and for the minor, I got used to announcing that students would be excused only if they asked to be so in advance, the onus on them. L'shanah tovah. There are a lot of seventh-day Adventists here, she said, so they share a Sabbath, which is convenient. There used to be Jewish teachers here when I was younger, she explained, but they were all gone now. So do the children learn Jewish history and culture? Ye-es, she said, to an extent. It was now mostly boiled down to the Big Things, like the holy days ad Chanukah, the Sabbath and services. Wow, I marvelled. One of the last two Jews is about to give birth, she said, an event to which the whole school looked forward to. The children asked, Was it time yet? Had the child come? And the parents clubbed together to give a shower. They were waiting for continuity. Bated breath. I flashed back to a few days prior, when from the second story of the bus to Gweru, I peered down and double-taked. There were two gentlemen in the front seats of a car, greying hair tucked under flat-brimmed black hats, grey beards grazing their chest, grey ringlets dropping in front of ears. I think I saw them, I said! The fathers, anyway, in a small Japanese car puttering up Robert Mugabe Avenue. Philoni, giving me my first walking tour of downtown, explained, “The Indian stores, man. They stick around. Even after 2008, they were still there. The Lebanese left when the economy crashed, but the Indians stayed. If they leave, we should all leave, because that’s the End Times.” Down the road from the old synagogue in Khumalo, now police station, is the Hindu Cultural Center, not always the Hindu Cultural Center, but adorned now with an Om, set on generous grounds, with signs that proclaim “No Alcohol,” and v-divergent driveways that braid around a hexagonal building. It serves the Indian families that run towns in shop, importing goods from wholesalers in Kenyan ports. I don’t see cars there, driving past in the morning on the way to the university. But the gates stand open, welcoming all and sundry. 9/18/2017 2 Comments Margaret and Them “Where is your wife? Do you have a wife? Where are your children? Do you have children? Will you have children? Do you cook? Clean? Tidy up? Where is your dog? Who takes care of you?” Who takes care of you? [“What would you like for lunch? Rice and chicken and vegetables? Stew? Soup?”] In America, we make a fetish of self-care; it’s the neoliberal way: you’re responsible for you. You do you. I know plenty of bachelors and bachelorettes, and frankly, most of them have better life-skills than I do. I came of living-alone age living in giant cities, where cheap restaurants and prepared-food markets supplied me with all of my non-cereal needs. I still live like a graduate student. I’m thrifty, close-fisted, but curiously not when it comes to the extra expense of eating prepared foods, as opposed to cooking for myself. Boxed pastas are my friend, and I can knock down a box of child-delighting Kraft mac and cheese (I enjoy the Disney-shaped ones) in a single intense, mouth-gumming sitting. I can make a sandwich, and a mean omelette. I figured out shaksouka, and I enjoy following recipes for pies. I’m good at following directions, generally. Cooking meat scares me, and generally speaking so do leftovers (how long are they good? Are they stored healthfully? Will I die of botulism?). [“Prof James? We should buy a cooking paddle for the sadza. And perhaps boxes to store food so that you will have food on Sunday, too.”] Besides, I’m always tired. I work hard at work, and I get home to my dog, and play, and I answer all the emails I didn’t get around to, and finish up the writing I couldn’t finish at work, and read the small circle of websites I read, and watch the few episodes of the few TV shows I make do with online. Besides, there are manifold financial pressures of bachelor life in America – the taxes, the credit card debt, car loan, car insurance, gas, health insurance, electricity, water, sewage, internet, cell phone, dog food. Cigarettes. Coffee. By the time all these have claimed their share, there’s little left. Produce and meat seem expensive, although I know they’re good for me. “The middle-class everywhere complain about poverty; for some reason or other, no matter how much money they have, it is never as much as they are due. This is not an original observation, but on this trip it was being given startling new life.” (Doris Lessing, African Laughter) [“Please, Prof James? I need to buy onions, tomatoes, potatoes, and cabbage. May I go to the market to get these things?”] Besides, I’m relatively healthy. I got over junior-varsity cancer (testicular; check yourself before you wreck yourself). There is diabetes and heart issues on both sides, but I inherited my mother’s impossibly low blood pressure, and in spite of the excess weight I carry, seem to be in no imminent danger of the sugars. I smoke, and that’s bad, I know, and I’ll quit, like everyone says they will. I have quit a couple of times, but it never seems to stick. And besides, cigarettes suppress unwanted hunger. “The couple I was visiting were both getting on, like me. They were in their sixties. They had retired from civil service jobs. Both were full of health, energy, and complaints. Their house was a large bungalow, many-roomed, with verandahs all around it, and it sat in two acres of land, full of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers.” (Doris Lessing, African Laughter) For the first month I was here, I stayed at the university guesthouse in the suburbs of this big city. It was me – and whoever else was visiting the school that needed a place to stay. A kind and genial radiology professor from the UK; a stolid and searching forestry professor from the Eastern Highlands; a snuffling, snoring, darting, bird-like Singaporean professor; a busy-busy big man from Harare who played tuneless white gospel music and prosperity gospel preachers from Texan megachurches. And sometimes it was just me. “This couple employed two servants, men… The servants cleaned the house, grew the vegetables, tended the fruit trees, laid the table, served the food. When we had finished they cleared the table, served the food. When we had finished they cleared the table, made coffee and washed up.” (Doris Lessing, African Laughter) But it was never just me. There was “Margaret,” the incredibly witty and loosely gregarious and teasing housekeeper. “DOKH-tah Zhjames,” she’d crow, loudly or softly, but musically and smilingly. She fell in love with the idea of my dog, Phineas. “Phineasssss. Such a nice name for a dog!” She would ask about him, sometimes I think just to see me get a little distant and misty. She taught me about mopane worms: to remove the flaky chitonous shell, to rehyhdrate them, salt and fry them, eat them with sadza. Although I still haven’t eaten sadza, because she was certain that I would want traditional foods. [Panting, softly, “Prof, here is your change.”] She worked all day, in fits and starts, sweeping mopping scrubbing; then draping herself languidly over corners of couches in corners of rooms just out of sight. One day, I caught a glimpse of her, feet up in the busy-busy big man’s desk chair, reading his discarded newspaper avidly. I caught her eyes and burst out laughing, and she shuffle-jogged into my room, and threw herself on my bed, guffawing at being caught out. The washing line was always hung with clothes flapping in the breeze. She would leave and come back with armfuls of cauliflower. She painstakingly labored over ironing, and cleaned up the perpetual stains on the part of the tablecloth where only I sat. Evening meals were cooked in four, sometimes five, shifts. Mine first. Then hers; then the guardener’s; then the guard’s. Sometimes the guardener’s kids came in and cooked a later snack. “The back yard, a space of bare dust enclosed by parallel hibiscus hedges, was a triumph of individualism over communal living. Eight separate woodpiles, eight clothes-lines, eight short paths edged with brick leading to eight lavatories that were built side by side like segments of chocolate, behind an enclosing tin screen: the locks (and therefore the keys) were identical, for the sake of cheapness, a system which guaranteed strife among the inhabitants. On either side of the lavatories were two rooms, built as a unit. In these four rooms lived eight native servants. At least, officially there were eight, in practice far more.” (Doris Lessing, “A Home for the Highland Cattle”) [I just shuffled into the kitchen, and clumsily pouring water from the pitcher in the fridge, globules leapt out and splattered around my bare feet. “It’s okay!”] At 7am, the university bus dropped off Mrs. Moyo. She had a kind, impassive face that cracked wide open into a smile when she was tickled by something, which was much more often than her resting face suggests. She also washed, ironed, mopped. She shuffled the paperwork, the receipts. She made the phone calls on the crackling line full of deafening static, and knew everyone in every office. She liaised with the transport drivers. She parceled out the monies for the shopping. And then there was the guard-ener, an old man with a perpetually goofy smile. “Hohhhh-raity,” he said to just about anything, a common local version of a cheerful “Alrighty.” He teased me gently with his demeanor, looking down and away with his nearly-blind eyes when talking to me, but peeking at me intently with the corners of his eyes until I pulled his gaze upwards and he smiled. He has a family in Malawi, and children that stayed with him in the house behind the house, where “Margaret” also lived with her husband Clive. The trash was emptied, and my scattered things realigned on an ageing, fading plastic serving tray. My clothing – my shirts, my pants, my tshirts, my underwear – was ironed and hung in the closet. Ironed underwear is a hitherto unknown pleasure, the stiff starchiness staving off swampass and holding up bravely against the sweat that trickles down my back. The bed was made every morning with tight hospital corners I had to wrench to squeeze under, just the way I liked it as a kid, cocooned tightly, pinned in. “Everything in the house had the sparkling cherished look which is not often seen in Britain, where women work, or do not have the time for this level of housework. It is the look that goes with servants.” (Doris Lessing, African Laughter) When I was leaving for college, my mother taught me how to do laundry. Separate the colors and the whites. Treat bright colors as if they’ll always bleed pink into your undershirts. Stain remover in advance; detergent poured in first, then clothes, then a tiny wristed dollop of detergent on top. Clean the lint trap, always. Shake out the dense cold wet blobs of clothes, turn rightside out, throw in the dryer one piece at a time. Choose the correct setting, but better yet, never buy any delicates if you can help it. Never choose too high a setting unless you want everything to shrink. Let go, but at the buzzer, immediately pull the clothing that you didn’t want wrinkled – button-downs, pants. Shake them out vigorously and immediately fold. Stack into laundry basket, and return to closet. She offered to teach me how to cook, but I shrugged it off; meal plan. She sent me to college with cups of Easy Mac and Hi-C orange juice boxes, which I would drink two at a time, granola bars. She didn’t come with to drop me off; instead, my father loaded the UHaul and we took the familiar route – I-20 to I-45, change to I-10 in the awkward Alexandria exchange before pulling across the interminable causeway to New Orleans. This past summer, my mother admitted, “I didn’t go to drop you off at college because I needed you to feel self-sufficient. I didn’t want you to think that I would always be there to pick up after you.” [The two women in the kitchen laugh to each other in Ndebele. Pots and dishes clang into the sink and water runs and I hear the squick of the scouring pads.] This past summer I was 36, and spun out into a regularly scheduled depressive cycle (three times a year, unlunar, signalled in advance by a growing sense of detached dread, a dulling of the colors of the world and a jangling of nerves). This time, exacerbated by the tumult of packing up my house to move to Zimbabwe, leaving my dog behind with my adoring colleagues, leaving dear friends. Bethany and Josh, and their little babby Noah, hosted me at least once a week since we became fast friends when I had just moved to Chattanooga. She cooked me pasta bake, and meatballs, and burritos, and breakfast burritos on the Saturday mornings I’d pop over to their house. And they threw me the most wonderful party when I left, quiche-themed, because I like quiche, and they love me. “I don’t mean this the wrong way,” Bethany began with a slightly raised eyebrow. “But when you’re in Zimbabwe, who’s going to take care of you?” She would send me home with leftovers from dinner, to Josh’s protestations that he needed a lunch. I ate them 70% of the time, and the other 30% was haunted by their slowly mold-furring glistening. She knew that most days I heat up a Lean Cuisine, or grab fast food. “I mean, we have you over every week. Don’t get me wrong!” she immediately protested, raising a hand to God, “We love you! I’m just worried about you, that’s all.” [Mr F wandered into the room, looking at the postcards I tacked up on the walls. He moved behind me, “You type quick-quick-quick! So fast!” I mumbled something in bemused agreement. He stayed behind me, I suppose reading what I’ve typed, squinting at the laptop screen.] At the guesthouse, I would often perambulate the yard, peering into deep holes for hints of snakes, plucking peppery, hexagonal nasturtium leaves and chewing them, gazing up at the azure-breasted finches and iridescent doves and the scimitar-beaked bee-eaters and punk-crested woodpeckers. But I kept my transits limited to the left, the front, the right. Not the back. There is a house behind the house. It was behind the driveway and carport. And behind a wall behind the driveway and carport. The kitchen had a half-door, the top half always open letting in scented breezes from the robust lemon tree in the backyard. I wasn’t meant to be in the kitchen, either, but I took to pouring myself water from the fridge, tucking away yogurt cups next to the wilting cauliflower or rooting out a teaspoon to stir up a cup of Nescafe. “When Marina, a woman who took her responsibilities seriously…looked inside the room which her servant shared with the servant from next door, she exclaimed helplessly: ‘Dear me, how awful!’ The room was very small. The brick walls were unplastered, the tin of the roof bare, focussing the sun’s intensity inwards all day, so that even while she stood on the threshold, she began to feel a little faint, because of the enclosed heat. The floor was cement, and the blankets that served as beds lay directly on it. No cupboards or shelves: these were substituted by a string stretching from corner to corner. Two small, high windows, whose glass was cracked and pasted with paper. On the walls were pictures of the English royal family, torn out of illustrated magazines… At home, I live alone with my dog. So never alone, but his purpose is emotional, not functional. I’ve lived with roommates throughout university, and all of my roommates have been better people than myself, which is a blessing for me, and an ultraminor curse for them, as my disorder crept around corners into communal spaces, and my low-key slovenliness meant I too infrequently scrubbed the tub or toilet. My home in America is too big for me, generally, but it’s on the small end of American houses. That I have a house for just me is a luxury, I know, but I wander and mutter and sprawl and sing and talk to myself, I pump music while I write, and bellow show tunes. And my house is cheaper than most apartment complexes, anyway, and there never seems to be enough money. There’s no such thing as being alone, generally, in Africa. (At the Open Book Festival, the Congolese novelist Fiston Muzila commented, “In Africa, there is no personal space. You are always on top of people, rubbing up against them, hearing them, smelling them. Sometimes when there is an electricity outage late at night in Lubumbashi, my mother says, ‘I am worried. Something is wrong. It is too quiet.’” Petina Gappah agreed, “The thing that makes an African city an African city is that there is no privacy.”) I’ve certainly never had a housekeeper or cleaner, other than my mother. She was a housewife, and so the business of her day was not unlike servants’, although she didn’t get the little pay afforded domestic help. She says she didn’t mind, but I know I would have minded, staying at home cleaning up after children who were run around town every day for extracurriculars. Taxi drivers, janitors, housecleaners can form unions. Housewives? Even if she said it was fine, it doesn’t feel fine to me in retrospect. [“We have finished the meal. Would you like to come serve yourself?” The rice. The chicken stewed in tomatoes, onions, pepper, oil. Blanched marrows, carrots, cauliflower. The Slaw of Competence, with hotel-precise shredded cabbage and tiny cubes of carrot and a light touch with the mayo, thinly sliced cucumbers scaling the top.] “This was the hour of heat, when all activity faded into somnolence. The servants were away at the back, eating their midday meal. In the eight flats, separated by the flimsy walls which allowed every sound to be heard, the women reclined, sleeping, or lazily gossiping… Marina yawned. What a lazy life this was [she had]!” (Doris Lessing, African Laughter) I was in the transient guesthouse for a month. It was perfectly lovely; the birdlife was tremendous, the stars on a clear, moonless night unsullied by the warm ochre glow of the city center. But I was relieved to move to the apartment the university had been fitfully preparing for me in their downtown classroom building. It’s a marvellous old building, whose lobby whooshes cold air into the gritty street, and bathes the wifi-pirates, stockstill and alit with their devices. There is a terrifying elevator in the lobby, and the locals still call it PriceWaterHouse, with what I am sure is a capital ‘H.’ All of the streets in Bulawayo are lined with blue blooming jacarandas, but the ones on my street are spectacular, fed on the composting cast-off cabbage leaves from the produce market. “onedollaronedollaronedollar.” “Hey, ROONEY.” (Everywhere in the non-European world that I travel, as a white man, I am likened to the most adjacent pale football player. I’m chagrined to have grown into a Rooney, when I was for one shining moment a Schweinsteiger, but everyone ages.) [“We will go to the other side at half-past three?” she asked hopefully. “To get the sadza paddle and the lunch boxes?” I nodded eagerly, “Yes!” “You will be finished then--?” she gestured to my laptop, open on this screen, my books splayed around me, a half-finished glass of Mazoe and a pack of cigarettes next to me. “Ye-esss,” I said self-consciously, and then self-importantly, “I mean, no, the work never ends, does it?” I asked with a sick-making chuckle as I heard myself.] The morning I leave, I’m sad. The flurry of the activity of the morning, throwing things into suitcases and boxes, shovelling wet toiletries into shopping bags, leaves me feeling conflicted; independence and a reclaimed bachelorhood in the center of the big city! But no one puttering around the house and teasing and flouncing. This morning, The Big Man is taking his time packing up his things, playing that weak, warbling, white gospel music in the room next door. “Margaret” and Mrs Moyo have committed to going with me to the new apartment – which they haven’t yet seen, but have heard of in great detail from the university grapevine. “It has TWO bedrooms!” Margaret crowed in the driveway, before rolling her eyes and jerking her thumb in the direction of the malingering Big Man, who is dragging his feet on checking out. “It is niiiiiiice,” she said, drawling it out. “But we will MISS YOU.” She mimes kicking the ground and hanging her head. “It will be so looooooonely,” she crooned. “I’ll have to have you and Mrs Moyo over for dinner. I will cook!” I said boastfully, thinking of the three dishes I could probably toss together, none of which have meats, and no meal has no meat here. “Oh, YES.” The Big Man finally leaves, and “Margaret” and Mrs Moyo climb gleefully into the transport truck, while the female driver, a relative, tucks a unspotted bromeliad under the tarp. All the way there, the driver tries to teach me Shona, while “Margaret” and Mrs Moyo have the chattering and irrepressibly schoolgirl air of an outing. An Outing! When we get there, “Margaret” is impatient to find the janitor with the keys. We were a half hour late, so I’m reminding myself to be patient, even as she is chomping at the bit to get in. He lets us in, and the apartment unfolds. We open the first door to a sitting room with a chaise couch and large armchair. “Margaret” throws herself onto the navy blue sateen chaise, leaning on an elbow, giving cover girl realness. She mugs, and then her face falls, and she says softly while the janitor and Mrs Moyo proceed to investigate the bathroom, “But Dokh-tah…who is going to take care of you?” “‘But I am afraid poor Anne has to do some of the cooking these days.’ ‘Yes, I am afraid it is a bit of a burden.’ Meanwhile my friends of thirty years ago complained. The Monologue, of course [about being unappreciated]. But they were also complaining about their poverty, their deprivation, and in the nagging peevish voices of spoiled children. There was a Christmas day air – or, I shuddered to realize, a Boxing Day air-- while we unpacked my books and tucked them onto the shelves. The two women marvelled as I pulled out clothes they’d never seen from the bag I’d never unpacked. They fingered the clothes, admired. Some of the clothes still had tags on them; my usual wardrobe, I explained to them, was much shoddier, and I had to buy new clothes to come here. Mrs Moyo admired the prices, too, knowing she’d pay the same for lower quality synthetic goods in the Indian shops, the Chinese shops. “Ehhhh, you are what, an Ex-El? Ex-Ex-El? My husband, he is an Ex-Ex-El,” Mrs Moyo said, with perquisites in mind. “Margaret” chimed in, “You are going to have to sell us these things before you leave, Dokhtah.” Mrs Moyo looked thoughtful and said quietly to herself, “No, he will give them to us,” as she hung up an overdyed peach Target oxford. We worked for a bit in silence, me pulling things out, and shaking them out. I moved small things into assorted drawers, shuffled out to the living room, giving them a chance to whisper and marvel in quiet Ndebele. I waited a few extra beats to let them have it out before returning. I plopped down onto the vanity’s stool, rubbing my face performatively to signal something – I don’t know what, I was tired, too tired to help, not actually supervising?. It was short work, and they pushed the layers of dust out of the apartment, and arranged a coffee table and chairs in the kitchen. A coffee table and chairs in the kitchen? There was a square dining table in the living room with springed chairs. [“How was the meal? Was it good?” he asked with a comically proprietorial air, rubbing his hands. “Yes, yes, very good,” I said patting my belly. “Good good good” he laughed, gasping. “You are lucky to live on the first floor, and have these ladies.”] I took “Margaret” and Mrs Moyo to lunch at the art gallery. We perched at a bar table in the shade, and made small talk, pushed things around on the table. Mrs Moyo was impeccably sweet with the waitress, who in turn recognized a master of her trade and responded with absolute respect. I half-turned to “Margaret” but couldn’t quite make eye contact. I peered past her into the air above her right shoulder. I swallowed a lump. “Okay, Margaret. I feel really, really bad. I realized a week ago that you have a couple of names.” Mrs Moyo chimed, “Eh-LIZ-eh-beth,” and nodded firmly. “Yes, Elizabeth,” I agreed. Mrs Moyo said, “And Beh-lo.” She said it like “Beryl,” but if you rolled the ‘r’. “Behlo,” I agreed, and Elizabeth nodded. “But not one of your names is actually ‘Margaret,’ is it?” I finally asked. She shook her head neutrally. “But I’ve been calling you ‘Margaret.’” She shrugged, “But it is a niiiiiiice name.” I made equivocal hands; “Yeah, it is. But I should call you by one of your actual names.” “Elizabeth,” she said, nodding. “They sat blinking, unable to believe I could be so treacherous. ‘In Britain you’d have to be rich to live like this. Even in America, to have two servants, you’d be rich. Your way of life is an unreachable dream to ninety-nine point nine per cent of the world’s people.” (Doris Lessing, African Laughter) Today, I got two servants for my new apartment. “Servants” is the wrong word, a violent word, but I don’t understand how this happened, nor do I understand the etiquette for this. I grew up American middle-class – the world-historical 99% for what it’s worth – and I had a mother who cleaned our house, and cooked, and didn’t get paid.
The building manager (a better title than “Janitor,” which is what adorns his door) supervises a cleaning staff of two people per floor, women mostly, but men too. This echoes the arrangement at the university, where every articulation of the Great Conjoined Building has a different cleaner for each floor. The young woman wearing schoolgirl greens with the close-cropped hair and East African bone structure; the youngish man with scholastic looking glasses and suspenders who does hasty work; the old woman with a jutting front tooth, and charmingly multicoloured wig who sells biscuits in the courtyard at lunch for fifty cents. The supervisor explains that the two women in front of me, whose names I couldn’t pick up, are the cleaners for the floor, and so they will clean my apartment every day. This wasn’t a question. I froze, unsure of what to do; I beckoned them in and proceeded to walk them through the apartment, explaining what was obvious. “This is the living room. I just put up those postcards… I hope the double-sided tape doesn’t give us trouble when I move out” I rushed, before giggling awkwardly and shrugging. Nqo--- (it pains me but I lose every Ndebele word after a click; I hear the click; I hear the click as a click, the tongue popping against the palate before fluently sliding into another syllable. This does not happen for me; my tongue gets stuck to the roof of mouth as with peanut butter. I go through this every time I hear a click.) Nqo--- gestures at my laptop and nods approvingly, “You are working hard, Doctor,” she said with none of the theatrical jokiness as “Margaret” did, but with no less warmth. “But you do not watch television?” She looked quizzically at the silent screen. Nqo--- and Tvsi--- (it pains me but I lose Ndebele words after the sharply aspirated “tShh(eh)”. Ofeibea Quist-Arcton gives us a gentle lie when she pronounces Morgan Tsvangirai’s name as “Svhvv-ANG-ee-raI.” I practiced saying that for weeks before I came here, only to be confounded, then delighted, by the “tShh(eh).” tShee(eh)ng-ee-wry!) Nqo--- and Tvsi---- left to investigate the other rooms, and I heard the surgical PLOP of rubber gloves, and then running water. Mr. F stood there rubbing his hands together. “Would you like for them to cook? They will cook.” Tvsi--- offers from the kitchen, “She is a GOOD cook!” Nqo--- chimes in happily, “I will cook you lunch. You take us to the market, and we will get food.” I laughed “heh heh, yeah, I just have a couple odds and ends,” having bought most of the foods that would keep me minimally – yogurt, cereal, milk, juice, fruit; butter, bread. I wrung my hands; thinking in my terribly middle-class way that surely this must cost something? And that if it did, I wouldn’t mind? “heh. heh. Uh, sure? Uh—are we going now?” Nqo--- chuckled, “We are cleaning now. Then we will come back at twelve.” “What would you like for lunch? Rice and chicken and vegetables? Stew? Soup?” 9/11/2017 0 Comments Shelter in PlaceIn Cape Town, all of the stores have roll-down grates, bars on windows, signs that proclaim “ARMED RESPONSE TEAM” with images of snapping Dobermans. At night the streets are empty, and more than once I was asked by concerned festival goers where I was staying and advised to “Walk safe.” The apartment was on the eleventh floor; there was a doorman downstairs. The front door had an extra iron grate that I was advised to keep locked at all times, even when I was home. The interior bedroom had another door, with a deadbolt. And in the bedroom, an ageing electronics panel that signalled that it was once an extra layer of security. I used to live in this little yellow apartment in a little yellow apartment block just off Cross Street. The wooden floors creaked, the way wooden floors do. I was once the target of a threat against my life. In Afghanistan, there were guards. Three for each guesthouse; they split their time pacing inside the perimeter of nine-foot-tall walls or listening to the radio in the guard shack. A third was present nights, but would sleep rough on the floor of the guard shack. The Durawalls were topped with concertina wire. The streets around the guesthouses were left deeply pocked with craters and potholes and speedbumps and t-barriers forbidding straight-shots. Every window had bars, every bedroom additional locks. The guesthouses had panic rooms, and a designated building warden with a radio to the main security room on campus. A colleague remembered her own experience in a previous stint in A-stan, when she had to hole up in a basement for a full day, going stircrazy from jangled nerves and invented rumors. She had been glad to bring rubber exercise ropes to yank and stretch and exorcise. Our security manager flagged me on campus one day. I was standing by the old greenhouse, behind my office block. “Are you enjoying your cigarette?” “Yeah, I am,” I responded with a cocked eyebrow. “And at the guest house, where do you smoke?” “Ehhh, on the second floor balcony. More often, the roof. Sometimes, the garden.” “Look, we’re going to have to move you.” I was staying in the oldest guesthouse, but the one closest to campus; it was convenient; it meant that the university shuttle picked us up just before the final stop on campus, and it meant that we were usually the first people dropped off at the end of the evening, on the shuttle home. “The guards were told that if the neighbours saw you on the balcony again, they would shoot you.” My breath caught. “Seriously? When were the guards told this?” “Apparently they were told this a week ago, and forgot to tell me.” “Jesus. But doesn’t that mean they weren’t serious? I was out there last night, a week after they made the threat.” “Yeah, but why chance it? Apparently they’re connected to a government family, and think that you’re spying on them.” (I am not a spy, but I am not gonna lie that looking out over the neighbourhood was a big draw to the balcony and roof.) “It’s just best that we move you.” I took the day off from work, peeled down the postcards I had tacked up only two months previous. I shoved clothing into suitcases, and boxed books up. I waited for university transport to come and help me schlep a few blocks away to another guest house, which on the surface seemed a lot less safe, being on a busier street and near a minor embassy. The office block I was housed in was, a few years later, the point of entry for a team of terrorists who swept into campus, past the students’ entry, past the ineffective guards. They riddled the office block with bullets, shattering blinds and glass, hitting flesh before storming the main classroom building, where they left more death behind them before the hours-long ordeal finally came to a close, several students and staff dead. In the security briefing at the embassy in Harare, I was given a breathtaking slideshow on all of the procedures, the layers and layers of security built into every American residence. Any and every thing you can imagine. There’s no question that no chances are being taken, and there’s no question that these homes and lives are nearly impregnable. I raised my hand, wondering –what do I do? Will my home have any of these protections? All of these protections? None of them? I thought, at least these guys could live in houses; in Kabul, the Embassy staff were housed on site and in nearby fortified camps, were not allowed to travel through town without an extraordinary entourage and many advanced permissions. At the university, we had comparative freedom, envied by some in the protected sectors of the Western shadow government. We relished it, but still played as safe as we could, going to restaurants that were vetted in advance by security, haunted places that had layers of guards and a good reputation. We cultivated relationships with local taxi drivers, like my Taj, who we could trust to drive us around discreetly. We notified security every time we left an enclave. It was mostly enough, but would also never be enough. “Outside, the trees were swaying menacingly in the wind and the moon was covered by low-hanging clouds. The black wall of the forest seemed closer than Mr Adams remembered, as he peered from his window, but otherwise everything was quiet. The curtains in my temporary room here keep falling down. They had been jerry-rigged a half dozen times, dropping from a wire wrapped around a nail; the heavy fabric muted the cold that crept in on the tail end of winter. I also like to think they discouraged mosquitoes who may be daunted by the folds of faded flower print. They were utterly dysfunctional, and then, I suppose, even less so when they fell for the last time. I keep leaving my door open in the guest house as I pad around to charge my phone, fix a Mazoe, find another perch to read from. Margaret walked by the room, peered in, gasped. “Doctor! The curtains are finally broken. You must leave.” I laughed. “My apartment is almost ready, so soon enough.” “No, you must leave right no-owwwwww,” she intoned. “Now? Why? It’s 7pm. All of my things are unpacked here.” “Preciiiisely, doctor. A t’ief could look into the window, see you here. They will see all of your things. They will come in and murder you and take your laptop.” “Well, my laptop was already stolen. This is the university’s, so I guess that’ll teach them to invest in better drapes.” “They will kill you for the laptop, though. You must move rooms.” “So these...thieves. They’ll be bold enough to break into a room they can see me sleeping in, but will be deterred if the room is suddenly empty. They won’t suspect that I’ve simply moved to another room? Is the guard extra sleepy tonight? Do you know something I don’t know?” “If they are watching they will think you have moved out.” She plunked herself down in my desk chair, staging stubbornness. “So I am to move to another room.” I’m irritated; I’ll be that much farther from the weak wifi. “It is a nice room, though,” she wheedled. “And you’ll help me move, all these loose things.” “Yes, dokh-tah. We must do it now.” The Theory of Oblivion, by the Angolan novelist José Eduardo Agualusa, is about a woman scarred by her previous experience of violence. She moves with her sister from Portugal to Angola, into an eleven-story apartment building. There is a second story with a wrought iron spiral staircase; there is a terrace on which they plant fruit trees – pomegranate, banana, citrus. When the Angolan war for independence finally encroaches chaotically on Luanda, from the edges of the country, full of soldiers fighting under different banners for different causes – Cubans in favour of a communist redistribution of property; South Africans and Rhodesians to preserve a white state; American mercenaries seeking thrills and cash after tours in Vietnam rendered them unfit for official service; black Angolans desperately seeking freedom from under an oppressive colonial regime that impressed them into service for white Portuguese under the ridiculously false pretenses of invented debts. “Turbulent days passed. Demonstrations, strikes, rallies. Ludo closed the windows to prevent the apartment from being filled with the laughter of the people on the streets, which burst into the air like fireworks.” Ludo, who would prefer not to leave the apartment at all, anyway, initially finds comfort in their vantage, and lives surrounded by books and in the company of an albino German shepherd, Phantom. Her sister and brother-in-law seem poised to stay while the other white Portuguese fled. Margaret came knocking on my door just now. “Dokh-tah,” she called softly. “Are you a thief?” I shrilled jokingly. “No-ooo,” she said as she entered, holding high a plug converter. “You can use this to charge your phone.” I charge my cheap Zimbabwean phone on a singed power strip in the living room, where she often draped herself to be nearest the Wifi, and where the gardener sat while he charged his own phone, and watched European soccer games. “Okay, Margaret.” “You cannot just be walking back and forth in the house,” she chided. I rolled my eyes and padded barefoot behind her to the living room, where I have spent, would like to spend, a good deal of time, reading and writing and fussing on my lowest-end tablet, whose screen I’ve already cracked. As she plodded ahead of me, she raised a finger in the air, declaiming: “PREVENTION! It is so much better than the cure, which is murder.” “The first gunshots signalled the start of the big farewell parties. Young people were dying in the streets, waving flags, and meanwhile the settlers danced. Rita, their neighbour in the apartment next door, traded Luanda for Rio de Janeiro. On her last night, she invited two hundred friends round for a dinner that went on till daybreak. ‘Whatever we can’t drink we’ll leave for you,’ she said to Orlando, pointing at the pantry stacked high with cases of the finest Portuguese wines.” Ludo has always “sheltered in place,” the kind of well-meaning advice given to those in the path of disaster. I can smoke in my new room, which is something. “In the first few months [in the Luanda apartment,] she did not even dare to approach the windows. ‘The African sky is much bigger than ours,’ she explained to her sister. ‘It crushes us.’” Ludo doesn’t concern herself with the rationale for the Angolans’ revolution. And she doesn’t even necessarily fear them, in particular. She is instead haunted by a violence that she cannot set down, that she carries with her every day. It’s a personal fear, a personal violence, a personal history. When her sister and brother-in-law disappear one night, and ersatz robbers come to the door of the apartment seeking rumoured wealth, her life catalyzes. She walls her apartment off from the rest of the building, locks her doors. She lives the next decades off of her wits, and gardening, and pigeons. “One night, Ludo dreamed that beneath the streets of the city, under the respectable mansions in the lower town, there stretched an endless network of tunnels. The roots of the trees wound their way, unimpeded, down through the vaults. There were thousands of people living underground, sunk deep in mud and darkness, feeding themselves on whatever the bourgeoisie tossed into the sewers. Ludo was walking amid the throng. The men were waving machetes. They were striking their blades against one another and the noise echoed down the tunnels. One of them approached, brought his dirty face right up close to the Portuguese woman’s face and smiled. He whispered in her ear, in a voice that was deep and sweet: ‘Our sky is your floor.’” These things happen.
In Agualusa’s Foreword to this remarkable novel, he explains “Ludovica Fernandez Mano died in Luanda, at the Sagrada Esperanca clinic, in the early hours of 5 October 2010. She was eighty-five years old. [I was given] copies of ten notebooks in which Ludo had been writing her diary, dating from the first years of the twenty-eight during which she had shut herself away. I also had access to the diaries that followed her release, as well as to a huge collection of photographs taken by the visual artist Sacramento Neto (Sakro) of Ludo’s texts and the charcoal pictures on the walls of her apartment. Ludo’s diaries, poems and reflections helped me to reconstruct the tragedies she lived through. They helped me, I believe, to understand her. In the pages that follow, I have made use of much of her first-hand accounts. What you will read is, however, fiction. Pure fiction.” These things happen. 9/3/2017 0 Comments the broken earth
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AuthorFulbright Core Teaching/Research Fellowship to Zimbabwe, 2017-2018. Will teach at the National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and conduct research on the city's literary history, its cultural infrastructure, and its outlets for creative writing. Archives
February 2018
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