Shadows. Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

      Sing song sung for many suns

      Sung in fluttering hearts,

      Dying in glare of sun

      Speak up speak up! Yet –

      Soft sound cedes to serpent hissss

      Sweat – red as blood – seeps through hatred sores

      Sows seeds of sorrow

      That

      Sway in wind like stalks in

      Mourning

      Speak up speak up! Yet –

      Several suns later here we are

      . . . Once more

      Slopping through soapy waters of

      Sorrow

      Sun shines shanty like silver

      Beneath

      Chanting masses fisted hands

      (Pamberi! – Have we been here before?)

      Punch in gut

      Insipid stares

      As

      Death dances

      In delightful seduction

      . . . (Varoyi naked on grave) . . .

      Sing song sung for many suns

      Sung in fluttering hearts,

      Dying in glare of sun

      For when new sun rises on the morrow

      To stain sky with pale-lit sorrow

      We shall – you and I –

      Have forgotten

      Have forgotten

      That man we watched die on the brow

      Bludgeoned black by brutes we saw before

      Bitter day back in 08 –

      Life Politics

      I want to be alone.

      But a man is never alone in the township. The township is like a loud woman who follows you everywhere, staggering with a Castle Lager in hand, she will not let you alone. The children are standing in the street with their tongues stuck out to taste the precious rain. But there is no rain just yet, only the smell of it in the sullen air.

      I arch my neck; the sky is a ceiling of silvery sheets. They reflect a light that stings my eyes. If you look at the people as one throbbing mass, they blur into a collision of colour: fleshy buttocks beneath a sarong; pink Madonna stretched taut across bouncing breasts, nipples visible through the flimsy fabric. Some­where, colour becomes a stench – I’m stumbling past Nyoni’s house, where a sewer burst several nights ago: the family woke up to find shit bubbling through the cracks in the kitchen floor.

      I walk. Past Kaduna Shops, where a newly arrived mealie-­meal truck is wreaking havoc. Faces I have known all my life – Dlomo, MaMloyi, Malaba with his bald head and Mupostori church robes, even Poppi with his comic face squashed into stupidity – they all distort into monsters, hungry for so long that all they now know is how to be greedy. I walk. Past MaG’s shebeen, where I ignore the greetings. In the gutter, a stream of shit flows. And there, in the midst of all that shit, clumps of wild sugar cane flourish, their stalks pumped full of sewer water.

      The houses shrink before me until I come across the one I’ve been looking for. It’s a brick facade with plastic sheeting in the windows, and an asbestos roof with a hole gaping at the sky. There is Nomsa, dark-chocolate skin bent over a fire under a lemon tree. With the dishevelled hairs on her head running in and out of one another like a commotion, and the cakes of sleep in her eyes questioning the existence of this morning, she’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Her face is narrow, her nostrils flared, her lips full. It’s as though I am noticing her for the first time, her slim neck, slight breasts and the curve of her hips filling out her sarong. A rosary dangles from a necklace bronzed by rust, tucked into the space between her breasts. I wrap myself into her, as a boy into his mother, as a lover into his love, and fight the urge to weep.

      She sways me to the rhythms of her body and begins to sing:

      There’s a rainbow,

      Ayo ayo, ayo ayo

      Over the hill brow down

      Ayo ayo, ayo ayo

      If you listen closely

      Ayo ayo, ayo ayo

      You will hear the birdsong sung

      Ayo ayo, ayo ayo

      The birdsong sung.

      “I think my mother is about to die,” I say.

      Her eyelids flutter.

      “Hold me.”

      The scent of a woman is a comforting thing, motherly and erotic at the same time. She smells of Geisha. When I was a child, Mama used to lather my skinny brown frame in Geisha soap. Whenever the Geisha advert aired on Ztv, I would run into the house in time to mime: Geisha, lasts and lasts like a mother’s love!

      “Mpho? Are you sure? You know, you’ve said this before.”

      “I know. But this time I really think she’s about to die. And she won’t let me help her.”

      “Are you all right?”

      I am not all right. I am hard and limp at the same time, aroused by the hope of her, defeated by the troubles of my life. I push her into the house even as she protests, into the single room I rent for her, onto the mattress I have given her. The room smells of paraffin. It’s a modest space, with a two-plate stove in the corner and clothes spilling out of a battered suitcase. A poster of Mariah Carey, cut out of a People magazine, is sellotaped behind the door. I grope for Nomsa. My hands are shaking. My plunge is rough. I can tell this from the way she cries out, in pain rather than pleasure. But I am limp again, and the smell of her is nauseating. I roll off her, onto my back, so that I’m staring at the tin roof. We remain like that for what seems like hours.

      The rain begins, at first a slow, cajoling drizzle that calms me.

      Pitter-patter, sings the rain. Pitter-patter. Pitter-patter Peter Piper. Peter Piper picked a peck o’ pepper pickles. A peck o’ pickled peppers Peter Piper picked. Pitter-patter Peter Piper.

      Down it comes, like sullen spit. My whole body becomes limp. Nomsa runs her fingers through my dreadlocks, the way I once told her soothes me. I swat her away.

      “You cannot keep doing this,” she says. “Talking to me, ignoring me, running to me, away from me. Talk to me.”

      I get up and leave. Nomsa tries to run after me, but she cannot, not in the rain. She becomes a blob of mud in the distance, standing in the middle of the street like a madwoman, her arms curled over her bosom. Her