Whats for Dinner?
We used to ask “what’s for dinner”
like we were investigating a homicide.
Mama’s alibi was “I’m too tired”.
The fridge confessed of empty shelves.
The air smelt of two-day old hunger.
I was six when I learned to interrogate my stomach.
It would growl as I’d torture it for answers.
Promised that it had no relief to give me,
just a bag of acid worth survival
for now. I’ll eat leftovers of my resolve.
Pain is what you eat
after the world leaves you for dead.
Lost in Translation
Perhaps, survival is its own kind of death.
Like a silence that strangles the spirit.
Like a double-edged salvation,
for which, one relinquishes the world
or at the very least, their continuity.
At the price of our forebearers, we lived.
Forgot who it was that gave us our names.
Forgot that the river of blood we outswam predated the horror of our yesterdays,
and became
untethered.
Miracle
Up until I was eight, my father was dead.
In my mind, he had endured the fate of prophets.
Mama always said he was alive, but so too was Jesus.
I thought of Africa the same way I thought of heaven:
a beautiful place for people too holy to be alive.
“Notre Père qui es aux cieux” was the beginning of a eulogy,
the Lord’s Prayer was a letter to the continent.
My father’s resurrection disappointed.
He passed under the ‘Arrivals’ sign without a smile –
his face ominously stoic like a man staring down a firing squad.
I had prayed for a father, and though I now had one,
I felt forsaken.
After greeting mama with a musicality
that proved he too had seen other dimensions,
he nodded towards us, his children.
I do not remember what I said – perhaps nothing.
But I remember seeing a stranger,
where my brothers vaguely recognized their father.
I remember realizing, although only for a second,
what it meant to have been born displaced
from that world mama so proudly claimed.
I was the foreigner.
The River that Swallows all Rivers
My mother calls me Canadian as if I stole something from her.
She used to speak about Mobutu and Kabila like they orchestrated the theft.
If listened to carefully, you would hear an elegy about the worlds we once knew.
One that explained how birthrights could be stolen.
How acronyms, radio-waves, noses, and tongues could be weaponized.
How cities could fall, and homes could be left vacant after nights of premonitions and prayer.
La Guerre a pris tout sauf Dieu.
1994, 96, and 98 always meant more to Mama than the birth of her youngest sons.
In 94, our neighbours converted to the cult of slaughter – lake Kivu became a tomb.
In 96, genocide gave birth to civil war – Zaire swallowed the earth.
In 98, we fled – the sky collapsed, the sun vanished.
In 2000, Kisangani fell – along with 6000 artillery shells.
Kingdom Come
Church taught us to dance as if only Dieu was watching.
Speaking in tongues was a prerequisite to membership –
unless one was lucky enough to be given a translation.
Rhythm was worship; the wrong steps were sacrilegious.
Losing focus was forgetting where one came from.
I was young enough to believe we were related to all the men and women,
mama introduced to us as ‘tonton ou tante,’
when I learned that outsiders could be distinguished
by their offbeat movements and discordant claps.
For us, belonging meant perfecting the two-step, the shoulder sway, and the pace of praise.
Once mastered, movement gave way to voice.
Voice brought with it harmony and harmony purged our collective disbelief.
Prayer became tumultuous –
the sound of a dozen orators competing for the lord’s ears would reach a crescendo.
The pastor would exclaim ‘Hallelujah,’ to which the congregation always replied,
Amen.
Pokea Sifa
Mama refers to police and demons in the same sentences.
The possessed patrol us for fear that we might exorcise their followers.
We drown out police sirens with gospel music
and sing until the demons meet their quotas.
“Pokea sifa
Bwana pokea sifa
Jina lako litukuzwe
Bwana pokea sifa”
Mama calls evil a sickness of the spirit.
Her metaphysics don’t leave room for meaningless murder.
Says Satan always attacks the family first – as if he were the reason she crossed the Atlantic.
Tonight, we cleanse the projects with our voices.
“Pokea sifa
Bwana pokea sifa
Jina lako litukuzwe
Bwana pokea sifa”
Mama taught us to cope through harmonies and to break in silence.
We learnt the logic of rhythm to the beat of doomsday.
When the apocalypse came we sang –
offered our tears as libations and prepared for the worst.
The Bourgeoisie of the Eleventh Hour
Smoke-filled rooms and afro-letariats.
Before the philosophy of self-medication took hold of our chain-gang,
we coped by externalizing our dreams on football fields and in lecture halls.
That was before the whistles lost their music, back when DC4 was gospel,
and The League seemed plausible.
Before The Ivory Tower lost its warmth.
Before emails, eviction notices, and missed payments
warranted sending the least fortunate of the unfortunate
back to the hoods, ghettos, and caves from which they came.
Those of us who remained, gathered, made homes of neglected places.
48 Union – a sinking house with a void for a basement – became a citadel.
A refuge for untouchables, a fortress so radical
that the descendants of slaves, the colonized,
and the nearly ethnically cleansed could, in it, practice the full-range of their humanity.
There we fostered our resistance, some through the poetics of taking space,
others through more illicit means – though no less prophetic.
When The Dream met Reality, I was a third year standing over a grave.
My helmet now dusty,
or sweaty with the work of another man willing to pay for his fever dream with head trauma.
The grave belonging to men and women, whom I had never met –
yet I imagine I would recognize their faces.
I imagine I would recognize the chains that bound them to this land.
Different in weight than my own, but of the same manufacturer.
