12/19/2017 0 Comments Kissimus TreesThis weekend, I went with my friends King Dee and Pinky, and their 3-year-old son Hunter, and Gogo, on a brief search for Gwayi pots. These are fairly standard issue red clay pots of various heights and widths and with varying geometric patterns adorning their rims. There are animal statuary vases, particularly one that shows a fish in mid-wriggle, the plants emerging from its mouth at a spilling angle. We also had the mission of picking up starter mango trees from the city park to take out to King Dee’s aspirational orchard out in the bush. Gwayi is on the road to Hwange, on the Victoria Falls Road north out of Bulawayo. I passed it and marvelled at the sudden vista of fields of pottery, but failed to stop on the way up or the way back down to my infinite regret. For I’ve had plants sitting on my balcony in their plastic wrap since I moved into my apartment. The same roster, intermittently diminished by my brief absences – three small mints and a creeper; a jade tree out of which has also emerged elephant ears; a philodendron; a rusty orange bougainvillea; and two succulents, one plump, one spiky. They languish a little, because the sun never makes it over the lip of the wall of the balcony. I’ve been meaning to pot them for ages. So we went to the Makokoba Market. A smallish market replete with small worked-iron goods; tons of cowbells, the likes of which I imagine are all tuned slightly differently; wire cages of sad chickens and guinea fowl, for sale for breeding, perhaps, or laying, or more likely, magic. The far corner of the market is taken up with a ring of stalls selling small clay beer pots (in which traditional beer is brewed, and served communally), but no Gwayi pots. But plenty of magick herbs and paraphernalia. I’ve been to voodoo markets in New Orleans (tourist and nontourist), Ghana, and Morocco, and now, I suppose Zimbabwe. Although “voodoo” is a stupid catch-all term for syncretic and animist religions. Morocco’s market was easily the most terrifying, but that’s because you also had to wade through the Djemaa el’Fnaa plaza full of charmed cobras to get to it. New Orleans’ are the most commercial and eclectic, evincing a unified aesthetic that is distinctly local and also generically commodifiable as folk kitsch. Bulawayo’s market was small and sedate. Here, in Bulawayo, it would be a market for sangoma, one of the many catch-all terms for witch, faith healer, animist, spirit channeller, etc. There were no tourists here at all. In fact, King Dee and Co made a point to point out how many people were staring at me. Mukhiwa! The dried grasses and herbs and small bones and skulls and such were pragmatically displayed. But each stall also had a compliment of symbolic and ritual objects – fly whisks made with sable hair, or carved wooden sticks, or bangles or scraps of game leather. Which made me think, in an idle way, that even such durable spiritual goods must be bought on occasion, hey? I feel like there’s probably a website where priests order cassocks, or a wholesaler of chausibles in some northern Italian industrial city. While I scanned the dangling ponytail whisks, Gogo Cynthia stalked off to find her spiritual pharmacist. She came back with a knotted plastic bag full of what looked like chamomile. I resisted the urge to ask to smell it. A lot of people here mix Christian beliefs with animist or localist beliefs. When you drive past almost any plot of bush in the suburbs of the city, there will be white-clad worshippers communing under trees, performing prayers. There are ‘greens’, too, who do the same in green. Plenty of people don’t mix them with Christian beliefs, too. “She watches the woman’s hands; one grips a reused glass jar and a small leather patch wound with what looks like a blood-dampened thong, and the other a bunch of herbs. Tsitsi is perturbed by the jar’s contents: what looks like a shrivelled and pickled body part in some kind of oil. She narrows her eyes at the jar, trying to ascertain whether it really contains a body part. It looks like a hand. She suppresses a gasp...Maybe it is just a small hand of some animal. A small animal, yes. Yes, an animal—like a monkey. They’re quite human-like, aren’t they?...the n’anga places the jar in her hand. She is told that it is to eliminate her nemesis. As she grasps the cold glass, Tsitsi feels herself boil into guilty excitement.” We drove out to King Dee’s place in Cowdray Park, far-far away from Bulawayo, a half-hour by gutted and rutted roads. The red clay and sand lay on top of sedimentary rock domes carved with runnels from rainwater. When we got there, the hunter green city trees mingled with the spring green bush trees, and King Dee spread his hands to demonstrate where he wanted to plant his mango orchard. Hunter ran around my car, begging for the keys to the mota, where like a certain president he wanted to sit, dwarfed by the steering wheel, and toot the horn and make vroom-vroom sounds. Pinky brought out a notebook in which she’d been writing stories since I started lending her books; they sound Victorian; she’s been reading Eliot and Forster. The neighbour, who it turns out Gogo knows from years ago, brought out his untuneable guitar and started crooning. Neighborhood kids walked in the dirt paths between homes and gawked, and the sky was absolutely larger than any sky I could remember, the sun sinking slowly over communal plots of maize growing alongside a trickling ditch, shooting the clouds through with gold, then peach.
I had to get home before dark, or I’d get swallowed in one of the car-sized potholes on the way back. I waved. Merry Kissimus to all, and to all a good night.
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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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