Love – Page 3 – PurplePretoria

A big tourist-lodge operator recently shared a list of questions he is most commonly asked by tourists about the country. One of them was an inquiry into why there are so many people standing or sitting idle by the roadside. I have an answer to this, I think. It is because standing or sitting by the roadside is just an African thing. People love to be in community most of the time. I see it in the early morning when men gather at trading centres to drink tea and eat chapati and sumbusas from the woman who passes by the same place at the same time daily with a bucket and a packet of thin see through kaveera. I see it in the camaraderie at wedding launches and every and any cause for a celebration. Also, everyday, is market day. Someone is always selling something to eat and the street or roadside is the perfect place to find customers.

I began my 31st year with sleep-laden eyes, many kilogrammes less in weight, [the same old] abstract thoughts of running away and equipped with a new breast gadget to extract a milk supply that had already started to dwindle within four months. I went to the only place I could think of, a spa. I had been taking care of a new born and a three and a half year old, with no hands or voice besides mine for hours and sometimes, it seems, days at a time. I needed someone to take care of me.

When I finally sat down, my ears were sharply attuned to the sound of flowing bubbling water in the small fountain nearby. I was a fugitive. Nobody was going to hand me a crying child, nobody was coming to ask mummy-mummy-mummy for anything. I was just any other human being on the outside. On the inside, I was the woman who had burst out of a hospital door, 4cm dilated with contractions, with my suitcase, ready to fight, for the first time in a long time, for who I know myself to truly be. I had been a victim once, at the first hospital, after the first birth. I was not ready to be one again. I hoped the nurse would try and push me around this time, call a security guard to come hold me down.

I spent most of that night awake, watching a woman and motherhood talk show after washing my hair with the full wrath of beautiful smelling golden-orange coloured sodium sulphate in singular use bottles. I had been meaning to wash it a month or so before, but time had been a luxury too great to afford. So I looked up at the ceiling, wondered if baby would manage to sleep, if someone had found the duvet I had left on top of the car. Two hours beyond the time I had planned on leaving, I had run out of the house hurriedly without looking back, just in case my main support system at the time, suddenly had something more urgent to do- something about turbines, discussions and meeting bosses and friends. A few kilometres away, I turned back. Stealthily running back inside the gate, I threw the duvet which I had in the moment decided to pick up, on top of the car. I contemplated taking it to the door and quickly changed my mind. It was hanging in one direction so I straightened it, took a glimpse at the balcony, looking for a sign of upheaval, then, willing myself to walk away, I walked back outside unnoticed and drove away.

…

Church street, Pretoria, is silent, lined by trees and the sidewalk is paved by white sand and stones. I could walk for three minutes or more and not see anybody. Any scampering in the trees meant that I was about to be robbed on knife or gun point. Every now and then, a car with loud shouts of menacing white superiority occasionally grazed the road at super speed.

There are no people selling Kabalagala or boiled maize on the streets or the roadside. The roadside is for hobos and other unemployed people with cardboard boxes asking for any kind of job. Nobody sells pineapples or mangoes from a wheelbarrow. Nobody talks to you. You seem to disappear unseen in the dry windless air, the scalding sweat-lessness in the summer, which is when I usually walked, from my residence to the only African salon that side of town.

…

I slowly lunge backwards onto my pillow and stare at the ceiling behind the mosquito net. I think about the child I once was. The child who was terrified of the dark, who could not sleep alone in a bed by myself. That was even long before the soundless footsteps in the dark, the door I thought I had shut swinging eerily from side to side, long before it became a part of my subconscious; the memory of me following them with a faint smile and humour, thinking it was one of the children, a funny story I would tell later, only to come face to face with the black night, opened up by the empty space where the back door should have stood closed.

There is a smell about new beginnings in new places that is etched in every memory of that place. Our first apartment was like that. It was solely ours, new and novel. It was home, because it was ours and it was ours even though, I spent most of our time there, a lone soul staring through the glass balcony doors where most of the sunlight came through, centering the rustic wooden table in the kitchen where two more beings would eventually sit. They were the same glass doors through which they would enter, those who work while others sleep and sleep while others work. A small cough here and there, breathless, there was something in the air. One child was in his room, door closed but not locked, the child who had wailed all day, red faced, was in the room opposite ours, door wide open so that we could hear him when he awoke. The television was, large and black and still, the laptop lay shut on top of the armrest, the tea in the cup left half drunk in the cup, next to the phone next to the book I was attempting to read. They left empty spaces and a souvenir of cement-grey fingerprints and an array of knives on the chair where we had once sat and talked and smiled and laughed. … My four year old recently told me that he was afraid of the dark. Attempting to logicize his fears, I promptly asked him what he feared about the dark, and he said, “The dark”.

I wake up most days feeling tired. I don’t know if it is because of the red light of the night lamp next to me. Sometimes I wake up just in time for the lingering presence of hands upon my neck to disappear. Sleep paralysis it is called. The power has been off every few days. Just like many things here at home, you must know somebody or be a somebody before someone performs a job that they are paid monthly to provide. Most times, you must be a someone from the same tribal grouping, otherwise you are too proud and need humbling. You are to consider yourself lucky if you receive anything on time or up to a standard of any level.

I lay still and wait for sleep to whisk me away. Sometimes I turn to the side and glare at the residential unit of the big commercial complex they built next to us. Sometimes I see the glow of the TV. Most times I just stare at the still indoor plant in the glass windowed corridor. The glass is a light reflecting glass so I can only see through it with the light of the moon. My ears lay at the foot of my babies’ beds and I whisper constant incoherent prayers hoping God is close enough to hear me. Many times I have turned to the emptiness expecting lifelessness and loneliness to consume me, and I have instead found power, love and sound mind.

Pickled an avocado by mistake, and true to form, in an hour, it looked like it had aged at least 20 years

God, my source.

Where did I hear this? Or did I come up with it myself? That the children of a successful [or famous] man are usually unsuccessful. And I added the reason behind it being that they no longer have a cause to fight for.

A lack of scarcity leads to a scarcity of effort. A scarcity of effort, leads to poverty. Poverty leads to hard work and so the cycle continues. I saw a picture on the internet comparing the generation of people that went to war and their offspring today, too heavy to leave their seats due to obesity. It may have led me thinking about that, about what happens to the children of men who conquer the world, of men who change the world, of men who lead the world.

Is it true that there ever is a time or season when there is nothing to fight for?

For a long time now, I have been sitting in a season, where I suspect that some bees in my hive decided that it only makes sense that one can only shine domestically or professionally but never both. It disrupts the flow of the Universe and that apart from their regular duties, it is their job, within normal work hours, to maintain the status quo, by becoming a cause of disruption themselves.

I have been pushing back long before I even knew what I was pushing back on. How did I miss the portrait of concern when I could not come for weeks? Lately though, I feel the simmering jubilation, the slip-up of joys in what are supposed to be heartfelt observations.

It was in their express verification that I was out of the way in everything meaningful that was within their power. Power. Power. Power! It was the consistency with which someone could lead the band and play the drums disparaging your name with a wide helpful smile and a kind mouth, all the while, busy in the work of frustrating all progress tied to you. Many a Christian mannerism has deceived an unsuspecting heart. Yet, it is hard to hide a mastermind- a vortex of uninhibited slyness, darkness, bad expectations and an endless dredge of hand over mouth slander suppressed as girlish giggles, sucking in everything good in its path; a hand that is quick to blow up the ship, with everyone on it, if it makes their enemies look incompetent.

How someone truly feels about you is not usually a word of mouth expose. You can see it in their best friend, the people under their docket. You sometimes see it in their biggest moments. Sometimes you see it in their lowest moments. Some people say you can see it in how they treat you when they think they need you. Some people say you can see it in how they treat you when they think they don’t need you.

So, there is something to fight for…

When I was younger, I wished I could disappear, blend into the wall or curtains to escape danger. Later, I found that I could fly, in my dreams. I could fly over fences. I could float above the earth, low enough to keep a good watching distance but not high enough to hurt myself if I fell.

Not so long ago, I was reading Luvvie Ajayi’s The Fear Fighter Manual and she said that if she had one, her super power would be being “super-independent” and I shook my head immediately and just as I was about to think how different we were, it occurred to me that right now, I would not mind having that super power. In fact I no longer wished to shrink behind curtains and I no longer dream about flying but I could do with being superwoman. Maybe, I already try to be.

Between little fingers tugging at my clothes, sometimes for nights on end, seemingly months on end, years on end, sometimes with coughing, sometimes with noses blocked with flu, sometimes with a temperature that does not need a thermometer to tell, and driving to the place where the planes park on a pale grey evening to send my closest companion away for an endless amount of nights unknown, I have learned to do without feeling too much.

I have decided to feel again. Between when I started to write this and today, I have decided to feel again; and it hurts. But, I also feel a lot of the joy, a lot of gratefulness, a lot of the curiosity of recent entrants on to this spinning globe and I catch a lot of funny things- funny sentences, funny words and strange interpretations of things. Some nights I wake up between [brief, abrupt, short, unusually long] stretches of sleep, and find my older baby having a conversation with me as he stands next to our bed. Sometimes, he steals his little brother out of his crib, if he feels he has stayed in a second too long and then I hear the pattering of little footsteps stumbling around coming to find me.

***

I think all Bakiga should have ‘Mukiga’ as their last name since so many already love to hyphenate their identity with the word. The pretty Mukiga, Pink Mukiga, The Handsome Mukiga, The Romantic Mukiga, The Mukiga w’ekiniga, Shine Omukiga.

I have noticed that Ugandans feel free to enter into an official situation with shoes on, sometimes even with socks, and then take them off nonchalantly, politely, neatly, confidently, and set them to the side as soon as they sit down- at a church prayer meeting, at an IELTS exam, at a moot court session.

Whereas in English, one is only allowed to have one name, one complete static borrowed name, as in “My name is…”, it is appropriate when Africans to say ‘my names are’ because a child was named their own name, many names sometimes, and they all were independent names, gifted by different people sometimes, heralding different things, and easily changeable- rebelliously at youth or symbolically in war,, different when inside the homestead and different if you found yourself a foreigner far away from home.

I talked about Winnie Mandela sometime. I still believe in a drought of kisses, one becomes either a victim or a warrior, I would like to be a warrior. There is always a cause to fight for.

Kitt Kiarie and her mother were talking about life in general and on the topic of her mother’s over thirty year relationship [marriage] with her father, her mother said that, you need to make room for who he changes into over the years. He does not remain the same exact man and neither do you remain exactly the same woman.

Tag: Love

The Year of the Night Lamp

THE ABILITY TO FLY