Versione Italiana | Nota biografica | Versione lettura |
Metal giraffes march up the bluff
toward the lighthouse. In the moonlight,
whales, or their ghosts, litter the sand.
There is a museum by the park that houses
apartheid; contained in stiff wax dummies.
The tour bus stops on the road’s edge.
On the right a black town, the left Indian.
Pointing he says: this is the racial divide.
Stopping at the bar, the drink menu offers-
Red’s Divas only five rand each.
Each night the pounding sea reminds me
that, here, women are older than God.
These people carry their dead with them,
plastering them onto every met face.
Yet love hums like tuning forks
and the fading spreading sound
is the growth of something more.
Their absence is loud and I long
for the confetti flutter of butterflies.
Abattoirs litter the landscape with the sinister
air of murder, signs proclaiming: Zumba Butchery,
as though this is where the Zumba’s blood-
lust got the better of them.
The air conditioner in my room hums
a dirge to a sea too busy spreading rumors.
Death skips between street children
playing hopscotch in the traffic.
The woman singing in Zulu, in a Jamaican bar,
is calling down fire, calling down fire.
There is no contradiction.
Downtown Harare. Pavements and nice trim islands feel like the white Africa it used to be. Its fading beauty arrested in the late seventies feels like Lagos in the fade of colonialism. -- But Yvonne says: Butterflies are burning. Here. This is kwela. -- In the Quill Club, black journalists hold court, say, Bob uses this land as his private safari. The kudus are nearly extinct. They play pool, chafing against the government. We could be in The Kings Head in Finsbury Park; a cold London night. And the locals complaining over warm pints about the native problem. -- The still young woman smoking a pipe against the wall of the museum was once a guerrilla. Says, The men here fear me. She knows all about killing. Also about blowing smoke rings. This is kwela. -- In a market adjacent the poorest township I finger useless trinkets, displaced as any tourist. All the while ogling valuable-in-the-West weathered barbershops signs that I am too afraid to ask for. -- Everywhere people wear cosmopolitan selves but tired, like jaded jazz singers reconciled to loss. Hats are perched at that jaunty angle that makes you think that all washed-out things, like Cuba, are cooler than they are. Is this kitsch? -- And everyone says: The trouble with Bob is… And this is kwela. -- In the Book Cafè, a vibrant subculture: Art, music, and poetry are alive and well. Rich whites slum with African: for a moment we all believe it is possible. This. Here. Now. -- A Rasta in Bata shoes does the twist to a Beach Boys tune played by a balding white man in a night club. This is kwela. -- The older white farmer in the five-star hotel still calls this country Rhodesia. Says, No offense, but you bloody Africans can’t run anything right. I have him removed. -- It was not always so, and still I have questions. Yes. Yes. Even this is kwela.