The Crystal River
What a croc. This river
is the crooked line between
rand/dollar. Neither is ours.
We cannot even afford our own money.
This river plays the national pastime, hunger, like a champion.
This river wears our national dress, nzara, like a string of hip-beads.
This river teems with crocodiles evicted from their farm.
Now they are just swimming in the Wild Wild.
To bury your Ambuya
send one thousand USAs
for the morgue to release the body.
It has cracked up our sincerity.
Best to live far, far from the extortionist’s ministry of health, the indefinite suspension of power, the reliable humiliation of hunger pangs,
and subscribe to the national philosophy: remittance.
Shall we gather by the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river?
Once there were njuzu swimming in the Limpopo,
water spirits to charm but yes truly, to charm.
They were the magical traces of spirit worlds I could graft myself into –
their sirens were more beautiful and more serious than the
revelations of
Rev. Bitchington
et al.
Those njuzu might choose a favorite,
whose morals would survive, floating in tact.
That favorite, maybe me, might wander lustily.
How this river has crossed us.
It has done what it was always doing: it has flowed.
It has overflowed.
It has flooded with crocodile’s drool.
It has flushed bright crimson, a sea of severed limbs.
Ah, border hunger. Look at you.
You are just eating money, sitting there,
bedazzled in Capricorn’s tropical light,
a muddy swirl to confound tourists.
You are just seated there, guzzling us down:
first our eldest, the one we ground dovi for so he could sell peanut-butter
sandwiches to raise bus fare,
then the daughter who did not tell us she was pregnant, nor by whom,
and now our old science teacher who can no longer afford transport to school.
O dark river of crystal, your hunger exceeds ours.
Your borders are more absolute, your demands more ravenous.
O Limpopo, you fisher of men, with your flock
of women are disciples, bellies full mud:
the rich you have sent emptying away, across Beitbridge, to Plumtree, then Sun City.
But the true believe they will scrape by in the land of ExDorado.
They come with nothing noble in mind,
no moral edge, no ideological vision, no song.
Hunger is the bare banal.
Here, swimming with crocodiles,
we are among our own: all ravenous mouths,
all skin hardened into allegory,
all thiefs of the pronouns of others.
You did not have to cross the Limpopo to have severed limb from limb.
To remit love at the Western Union desk is no simple matter.
Do you want to know what they call a coloured in Shona?
Muzukuru, the child of your sister.
They don’t ask where it came from, they just integrate it into the family.
So you want to know what they call a coloured in Shona?
My friend, sometimes it is the child of your brother.
Your mukoma.
And it must learn how to do those things only Sekurus or Maininis can do.
It cannot just be a muzukuru.
It cannot just be a secret keeping secrets, shut out of the meeting place of adults.
Limpopo, border river, our very own Rio Grande.
I cannot call this exile, but I do not know what else to call home.
After the Coup (or Not)
Some are dancing in broad daylight, in the street,
like before revolutions were televised,
when jokes were told out loud. I am watching
as if someone I loved was gravely ill, as if dancing
would damage the child I am carrying between
bouts of sleep and cynicism. It would appear that this
business of one passport and two homes has not worked
as well as I dreamed. One cellphone, 9 Western Unions
twelve news apps, and none of them reliable.
My cousin-brother sends pictures, on WhatsApp,
the kind a man paid out of his own pocket can afford.
His sister plies the road between her daughters’ schools and
her own, reading as if knowledge could bridge the gap
between bond and dollar, bleak and bright, that and ours.
Our generation opens the messages, occasionally we
kikikiki in private, in Cape Town, or in North Carolina.
We know what looks fake, what is sassy, what is sloppy.
We know nothing. We say nothing. We have not been asked
to punt, to opine, to pronounce. We know
enough to know that what we read is not the whole story,
enough to know history makes better reading than the news.
Children’s Swings
Zinder, Niger 1994
after Robert Lyons, with Chinua Achebe
Three slack wooden seats
bless the photographer
who left out the children’s
bare bottoms. Against the wall
a bicycle leans, smug and real,
unwooden, unridden.
Its chain is ensconced in silky blue
painted metal. A yellow tangent
against green bars dust.
Above, the masjid’s domes
fade, too serene to be
blue as well. The muezzin would
spill his nasal electric currents,
synthetic as wall plaster, if sight
were sound. Noiseless thorns and
weightless leaves surveille the wall. What
are they tracking? The ditch
below each swing is dug patiently
by the day labors of Chinese-made
children’s shoes and patched with
blunt dry thorns. The light is slant,
the metal links hold fast.
In this land without rain, rust
harbors no intentions. Peace only.
Unaccompanied Minor
Section 26, Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya 1996
after Robert Lyons, with Chinua Achebe
Stand still in the hot shade, poised, sweatless.
See how the curtain sifts sand from sun
through paisley print.
See five orange lozenges
paint light onto his profile.
The thinker: here is a boy whose thighs have outgrown him.
Soon this neatly striped Old Navy shirt will not fit him either.
Notice that his shoes are still new enough
to stamp a grid on each resting place.
Let sentiment blur the outlines of a rondavel
through the curtain. Read a word, MASKANI, stamped
in stark, block capitals, as if on a ticket.
Fuss at the curtain, a veil against flies.
Count the trees here, as you lean against geometry.
Catch them catching the light, as you square the threshold.
Sense the slope of his cottoned shoulders,
the dance of print on skin. Know
his eyes are unquiet.
What is the name of the book in his hands,
his sanctum’s seam, that wild unaccompanied
outer world, whose hem you may not mend?
Camp here, in this dwelling.
Relaxing with Miles
trading fours with Jason Moran
Never met anyone seem so much
like granite burning from the inside
Jackie Battle, seven years.
Bless you my brother.
*
The two largest heads I ever seen:
Al Sharpton and Muddy Waters
Lonely? I get so lonely sometimes
I talk to an apple.
*
His hair was so glorious;
His hair was so glorious
It had body
and soul.
*
Honeysuckle Rose swamped Paris. And
all that tape was was James Brown. —Mm.
That was a lesson right there, man:
silver sap and who you know.
Marvin in Stereo/Right Ear
When Marvin Gaye
was a little boy
he never dreamed in color.
His teachers thought that little
Marvin would never learn to spell.
Ain’t that peculiar, baby.
When Marvin was a boy,
his daddy whooped him hard.
He cried alone like a little girl
til sleep came and carried him home.
His daddy said he was just giving Marvin
a sure foundation. His daddy swore
those whoopings hurt him
more than they hurt Marvin.
Marvin in Stereo/Left Ear
When Marvin was a boy,
he’d steal away, way out
where the river flows.
Then he’d sing like a girl.
He sang like a doowop band. He sang
like a tram run a red light. He’d sang
like a busted screen door. He’d be saaaanging
like the ocean sound like. He be saaaaahynging
like the noise over to the Ford factory.
When Marvin was a boy,
his daddy whooped him til he screamed.
When Marvin was a full-grown man,
his daddy shot him
for his own good.
Daughtering
When the dune crests, she finds she has too much body left. To reach
the drowning fields she will have to shed muscle, shear breasts, cap off
her boyhood. This banter must shrivel into a loop of repeating wind rush,
while the stutterer insists his thought would resurrect if only the other words
would be still. She thinks her thighs have doubled, so she pours them down the drain. Now is the time to carry only what fits on her spine. There is more than one way
to become an Amazon. If she plans to outlast the burials she must level with the panther
who deserted her before it showed her how to bare teeth. On the hunt, it always claimed
the lightest foot, the surest kill. But this is madness: what stalks them now is not silence but
memory’s sloth, giving its all away. She will need to stay here, fix her eyes. First
she must ease the steering wheel into the grave. She will need to stop wanting for time, stop fussing at what snaps or fumbles. When the wave crests it litters silt, not gold.
It was never going to end that way. Wealth feeds on decay, like loam.
To walk them away from the proof of that first Florida banana tree will be the true ruin:
to lay sack to a rhizome of roots, to grant neither net nor fountain sway, to give away
the bed to the wrong person, to discover the table is unwanted, the cloth, too,
unwanted, the cactus celebrating the wrong season. There will be nothing left
to make a gift of. Still, she comes to share the pall, with eyes like stones. Her spine must be
her only flask. She sees the wisdom of black veiling lace. She sees there was never enough
water: the sandy crest broke long before the first prophet lit up her hair. This is love.
Tsitsi Jaji is the 2018 winner of the Cave Canem / Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for her second book, Mother Tongues, excerpted here and to be published in 2019. Her first full-length collection, Beating the Graves (African Poetry Book Fund / U Nebraska Press, 2017) was a runner-up for the 2015 Sillerman Prize, and her chapbook, Carnaval, appeared in the first New Generation African Poets box-set. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Black Renaissance Noire, Harvard Review, Boston Review online, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series and elsewhere. Jaji is a professor of English and African & African American Studies at Duke University. She has taught writing workshops in her home country, Zimbabwe, and is the author of Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2014). She has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Schomburg Center (NEH), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.