Tag: Storytelling

It took me a moment to recognise him.  When I did, I was overcome by the shyness of seeing a friend after years, suspecting that he was scrutinising me to see how much of the old me I still retained.

K was a friend from school; we had been in the same classes all four years that I had attended Motalaote Lekhutile Primary School.  He was one of the three classmates with whom I had maintained a friendly rivalry over grades—after every test we turned to each other to ask what was your answer for number six.  After every exam we checked with each other to see who had topped the class.  It was always one of us four.

This time I ran into him at the Serowe Bus Rank, where I was to board a bus to Gaborone. We would have been in our late teens or early twenties.  The buses were running from the new station, which was newly paved, with booths set out for vendors.  The vendors ignored the booths, swirling around us with their trays of fried chicken and chips and the bowls of roasted maize and boiled peanuts that they balanced on their heads.  The bus stops and light poles had been painted the sky blue of the Botswana flag, to coincide with the Serowe Centenary celebrations.

He looked different, of course, older, as I must have looked myself.  His light skin was dotted with dark pimple scars.  He was cultivating a thin mustache that he kept scratching.  His coat was heavy and long, going all the way past his knees.  It must have been cold, although I recall a sunny day, flooded with light, the sky clear above us.  We talked briefly, asking each other about our former classmates.  He still laughed easily, his eyes narrowing and almost disappearing when he did.

I was reluctant to ask him where he was going, what he was doing these days.  Part of me was always reluctant to ask this of my friends from primary school, absurdly afraid to embarrass them.  At 14, I had been awarded a partial bursary to a private boarding school in the city, which got its prestige from selling itself as an international school, thus attracting children of ministers, ambassadors and the wealthiest in the country.  My single mother was a primary school teacher, with a permanent government job, so in primary school I had been considered fairly well-off.  As a boarder, I was one of the school’s poorest students, often called to the principal’s office because my mother had missed paying her share of my tuition.  The fact that I attended this school, taking French and Drama lessons, around students who spoke English all the time and talked back to their teachers, meant that the trajectory of my life had taken a sharp turn from my primary school friends.  Whenever I saw them, I worked hard to reassure them that I had not changed, that I was still the same person who had gathered with them over the soft sorghum porridge we ate at break time.

My wariness around K went further than that.  I had heard that although he received excellent grades, he had foregone university— or was it senior secondary school —and gone to live at a cattle-post.  I had heard that he was now married, with a child.  The person who told me this had said, I am not surprised, the cattle-post is what these people know. 

*

K’s ethnic community is understood to have descended from the first inhabitants of the Southern African region, now made up of countries such as Botswana, South Africa and Namibia. Complicated and unresolved discussions still abound over the correct name(s) to use for these ethnic communities.  The terms Bushmen, Basarwa, San, Khoikhoi, Khoe, Khoisan have been used interchangeably by academics, civil groups, anthropologists and governments, but each term has been found derogatory or inadequate.  In Botswana, Mosarwa (singular) and Basarwa (plural) are the names in official government use.  In daily use, these names often become weapons.  If people are thought unruly or uncivilised—if they show bad manners—they are said to be behaving like Basarwa.   Often, the prefixes ‘Mo’ and ‘Ba,’ used in the Setswana language to denote people, are replaced with ‘Le’ (Lesarwa) and ‘Ma’ (Masarwa), to signal something less than human.

In Serowe, where K and I grew up, it was not uncommon for very wealthy families to ‘own’ Basarwa.  I may hesitate to use the word ‘own’ but the verb used in Setswana – go rua – implies ownership.  It is used to say one owns and takes care of cows, goats and dogs, for example.  A wealthy family would own Basarwa in this way, looking after them, considering them a part of the family while in exchange they worked at the cattle-post, as herdsmen taking care of livestock, or in the village, as domestic help.  In my childhood, this kind of ownership was an open secret; as much a part of life as having to go to your neighbours’ funerals and weddings.  We attended school with the Basarwa children and were friends with them, but we understood that their being Basarwa was not something to be brought up.  It was something embarrassing and shameful that they could not help.   Only an ill-mannered person would bring it up and force everyone to reckon with it.  The polite thing was to not talk about it.

K’ s family had been in such a relationship with the family of a man high-up in government, a distant relative of my mother’s, with whose grandchildren I had attended boarding school.  I was afraid that if I asked K what he was up to these days, all of this unspoken knowledge and history between us would tumble to light.

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We gather here
and feel the weight of the world
on our shoulders.
It does not feel like
we’ve inherited
commonwealth.
But rather
common problems.

If we are to heed the words of poets
Ben Okri said yesterday,
“We have entered the garden
of nightmares and wonders
the giants have woken
and they are stirring
we need to be roused
from the beauty
of our sleep.”

Indeed, we’ve entered this
strange garden
in this city,
epicentre of epitaph,
epitome of empire.

The stones in the squares
remind us
that we all died for this.
The war memorials murmur
numbers not names.

We bring our dead with us
and they are already here.

Not just the ones marked by marble.
But our ancestors,
the original inhabitants
of the lands ‘discovered’.
Who lie in the unmarked graves
and unmentioned massacres,
in battles unspoken of
in untaught wars

We carry them like stones
in our bodies.

They too contribute
towards this commonwealth.
They gave more
than they should have.

Commonwealth.

We come with twinned sides
of the same story.
Either trauma or gain.

Both of it pain.
Two sides
of the same coin,
heads or tails,
the head is the same
on most of our money.

The commonwealth.
Some days
it does not feel like riches,
Although we gather
to speak
of fairer futures.

Truth be told,
It is the fear of future
that we most have in common.

I did not come to sing a siren song
on the sinking ship of empire,
I come to sing of sinking islands
in the South Pacific,
on the blue continent
where I come from.

What is at stake,
Is the very land we stand on.
The earth itself rejects us.
It renegs its responsibiliities.
It has retreated
back into the deep.

And if the ocean could speak
in that choked overheated throat
gagged with plastic bags
in the way she once spoke to us
and we could listen,
she would say,
too much salt on her tongue,
she would say

rising with a surety
that we have never seen before,
she would say,
ENOUGH!

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I

I write to tell you that

the walls of my bones

are made of contention and

I am always situated between desires

that threaten to break

or mould me.

 

II

I write to tell you that

I am not the cartographer of memory

and that sometimes,

I forget my way home and

stumble into women who offer

to teach me the ways of water:

How to be soft,

how healing comes in waves,

how to open my body into the sea and

drown all the things that hurt.

 

III

I write to tell you that

my love is a nomad and

while wandering here in Ibadan

it fell into the hands of a woman

wearing your face.

 

IV

I write to tell you that

the second name for movement

is uncertainty.

 

V

I write to tell you about hope.

How it is a dream

where children grow into the belly

of a barren woman,

how she wakes in the morning

smelling of loss and longing.

 

VI

I write to tell you that

scars are a lot like borders.

How my body is a map filled with

dirt and death and

there is a sea in my eyes that takes

and takes and on moonless nights

how I ache and ache beneath my hills

and valleys and call all the names of

god painted on my tongue for the touch

of mother and fullness,

how my prayers come back to me

dressed in a void.

 

VII

I write to tell you that

while writing this,

language betrayed me and my mind

assumed the form of a tabula rasa.

 

VIII

I write to tell you that

silence is the name

for protest and prison.

 

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Run time: 57.06
Chair: Tony Murrow, Little Island Press
Panellists: Steve Percival, Mere Taito, Tracy Assing, Katherine Reki, Dijone Fonite, Lani Wendt-Young

Sit back and listen to an exclusive panel discussion featuring esteemed island writers, filmmakers and other guests involved in some of the Commonwealth Foundation’s recent capacity development projects. This recorded discussion covers a range of topics including the power of film making, the trials of the creative process, the overlooking of indigenous stories in national narratives and the difficulties facing story tellers hailing from island communities.

The discussion followed the Pacific launch of the So Many Islands, a collection of literature hailing from 17 island states around the Commonwealth, and the Samoan premiere of Commonwealth Shorts: Pacific Voices, the latest cohort of short films from the Commonwealth Foundation’s film making capacity development project. Artists who contributed to both projects were represented on the panel which also included guests Steve Percival, Lani Wendt-Young and Dijone Fonite.

This discussion was convened in December 2017 at the National University of Samoa and hosted by the Commonwealth Foundation and Little Island Press. 

At 11.42 pm on 1 November, 2016, Peter Abraham Stanhope sat at his family’s old mahogany dining table and slit his wrists. He had folded three clean bath towels to place his hands upon so as to not make a mess. He watched the news first; switched on to Fiji One Television crackling against the sudden rain, part of the storm approaching from the east. The islands of Wakaya and Makogai were already cloaked in rain well before nightfall. He showered first, of course. Ate his dinner of fried pork sausages, three sausages to be exact. Some cassava, fried to a crisp. Just the way he liked it. He folded his laundry – one cotton shirt, one pair of cotton trousers, one well-worn polyester underwear he had bought from Gulabdas & Son two years before.

The fragrance of citrus – lime and oranges from the soap powder permeated the living room as he meticulously laid out his clean, folded clothes. He opened a can of skipjack tuna chunks and fed Sona, his old cat – the cat’s name meaning ‘Arsehole’, the result of a lost bet with old Maciu Smith, Mac, his old diabetic workmate, now house-bound in Vulcan’s Lane with both legs amputated from the knees down and addicted to Korean soap dramas on Sky Television. He had visited Mac during the day; said he was going to Suva on the morning ferry, if Mac could see to Sona who ate tuna chunks and appreciated the odd belly rub.

“Fuck you!” Mac had roared into the quiet afternoon, “Yeah, I gonna send one of the kids to feed Sona. If you stay longer, I’ll make them take me up the fucken steps and I gonna stay until you get back. And answer your phone when I call you!” They had both worked at PAFCO, the Pacific Fishing Company, driving forklift loads of frozen skipjack, albacore and bigeye between the Korean fishing boats and the cannery. That was in a better time, when the Japanese still ran the cannery, before the Government took over. At least, that was the general opinion in town.

He remembered to sweep out his toe nail clippings from earlier in the day, fold it into an old Fiji Times newspaper page and put it into the rubbish bin. He knew the Wesleyan Chapel deacon, the Vakatawa, would find him on Sunday morning. He wanted the house, and himself, clean.

His daughter, Caroline, married to a snivelling American who sold computers, lived in Maine. Peter had the fall postcards and winter Christmas cards pinned on the kitchen walls. His son, Jona, was dead. The men who killed him were now on trial. He had watched them in the news for two weeks. Then rung his nephew Samuela in Suva. He received the diver’s knife from Bob’s Hook, Line and Sinker a week later. It did not need sharpening. He read his Bible before he put his wrist on the towels and cut. His hands lay limp; as if he were holding a knife and fork, his wrists momentarily resting from a dinner of baked chicken and potatoes, as if someone at table were telling an interesting story, about an elopement maybe, or sharing a sermon from a Sunday past, and the hushed table was all ears. Were it a painting, the title, ‘Abraham’s Dinner’ would be apt.

His people have been in the town for one hundred and fifty years.

Let us begin with that. The town.

Levuka sits on a black rock, the Pacific at her toes. A tiny row of clapboard stores on its main thoroughfare. With no declaration to creativity, the name Beach Street stuck to the Macadam road that once was igneous pebbles salted by the sea. A few stores are of old coral and limestone patched with concrete. There is a Catholic cathedral of modest proportion. A Wesleyan chapel of even more modest proportion. A Masonic temple, oldest in the South Pacific, razed to the ground by good, I-am-born-again-and-the-rest-of-you-will-burn-in-Hell Christian folk. A tuna cannery a rabbi from Baltimore comes to cleanse to kosher twice a year. A little powerhouse hums electricity into the cannery, into homes perched like limpets onto steep, craggy volcanic slopes, into streetlights guiding nightshift workers back home or cigarette-puffing boys jogging to the bakeries for rising dough, and morning buns and loaves.

There is no drone of a first fly. They must be at the fish cannery at the southern end of town, drunk at the mixing of fish meal for pet food and fertiliser. The whole town cowers under this regular stench. It slips into the wood walls laying termites intoxicated; sinks into oiled mahogany floors, into the snake beans outside the Steinmetz’s kitchen on Church Street; into hand-washed PAFCO, FEA, and PWD overalls on clotheslines along the 199-steps of Mission Hill. The only sound is a mud wasp smoothening the walls of its mud house behind the old German-made woodstove. He lives alone. Stopped going to church thirty years ago. If no one finds him within a few days, he will bloat in the tropical heat. Then there will be liquid on the mahogany chair and on the mahogany floor.

He knew the church would not permit him a Christian burial – how awful that he took his own life! Burn in Hell! So he wrote letters. One to Mac telling him to have prayers in the living room – he had cleaned the room, gotten to his knees and polished the wood floor. Washed and ironed the curtains. Fluffed out the cushions. Put his wife’s best crochet piece on the coffee table. On all the palm-stands and side tables, little pieces of crochet-edged linen with embroidered daisies. He wrote another letter to Caroline. When you come to your senses and leave that American, home will be waiting for you. Do not believe any superstition. My spirit will not be here. I am going to your brother.

The last three things he did that night, before sitting to watch the news, before moving to the mahogany dining table, was to wash and season the cast iron skillet, put a fresh roll of toilet paper on the holder, and call his son’s mobile telephone number. His son was gone, as was the phone, but he called it every night. He had called it for the last three years. He had never been able to sleep without calling. He knew he called more for himself than for Jona. But in a very deep, hidden place, he wished Jona to know, if he were watching at all, that his father was still here. Still calling. He hesitated at the telephone. He knew it was the last call. He wanted it to be right. He dialled the numbers very slowly. His eyes fixed on the lights of Levuka, at the foot of the hill from him, this little bastard of a town that had kept his family for two hundred years, as a voice came over the line: The number you are trying to call is not available. Please hold while your call is diverted.

He held the line until it clicked. Then he stood to walk to the mahogany table in the next room.

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