You Have to Be Gay to Know God. Siya Khumalo
her over them.
In a suspicious show of concern just after they started planning to get married, paternal stepmother V4.0 nit-picked all the ways Mom was bad for Dad. Traditionally, a marriage is incomplete until there’s a first child. A son, if the couple can see to it. As if in rebellion against the stepmother’s resistance, my mother and father saw to it. Quite unaware of the controversy I was stepping into and all the expectations that come with being a son, I made a deal with the devil and agreed to be born.
My first name, Siyathokoza, means ‘we are happy’. My second name is Thabani. That means, ‘be happy’. I was my mother’s victory cackle made flesh, padding about on two infant feet. Incidentally, Thabani is also the name of a gentleman who scooped my toddler body out of the way of a speeding construction truck. Doesn’t the Lord have a funny way of making his providence known?
‘Doesn’t he just?’ I replied to Mom as she told me these stories, saying nothing about her emphasis on her own fabulousness. I was a teenager of an age I won’t disclose, and she was trying to get me drunk because I was highly-strung and could go a worrying number of years without doing anything rebellious. What happened instead was she got drunk, spilled the beans, and I was too busy hanging on to every word to touch my drink.
I also had an older brother through Mom’s prior engagement with a now late gentleman. That baby passed away before she and Dad were a couple. Mom described the baby as tall. When she speaks about him, she becomes a different person animated by a set of costumes she never got to try on out in the world. When I was born with difficulty swallowing, she panicked and thought I was also plotting an early exit, which I’d have given good thought to had I known better. She was especially freaked out when I, infant of days, yanked the feeding tube out of my nose. I distinctly remember doing this. The nurses at the hospital thought she’d done it and had undiagnosed psychiatric issues that caused her to blame the baby for her actions. So, I’ve been landing Mom in trouble since I was born.
As unconscious as they were, I’d sensed my spiritual and sexual awareness was intertwined by the time I was a pre-teen. At eight, my GP recommended that I get circumcised. My parents and I were as excited about it as anyone can be about the Abrahamic cut, but the procedure was postponed for months because I had a dream. When I woke up and told them about it, I didn’t anticipate the disruption it would cause.
My dream day began like any other school day. I was helping pack my lunch into a hard-cardboard briefcase with metal fasteners when I realised I hadn’t seen it in years. Jesus Christ, why was my old baggage popping out of nowhere?
Anyway, I had to go to school. It was a sunny day, and I walked past dream-trees waving in the wind, haloed in liquid sunlight. They looked like slow-motion fireworks’ displays of chlorophylled life dancing in the sun. Along the way, I met an old lady. She dropped her walking stick and asked me to pick it up for her. As I began reaching for it, it stretched out of my reach. It also expanded to dominate my field of vision, becoming the tilted focal point of a dolly-zoom effect. It looked dark, viscid, alive — an electric nimbus around it warning me to come no closer.
Naturally, everything in my being was drawn towards it. I was shifting, its gravity calling to the cells within my cells — a part of me that had been clothed and hidden as far out of sight as possible. But now it was emerging, right there, in the open.
The old lady looked expectantly at me. Conflicted, I pushed my hand through the field surrounding the stick. It pulled me in and annihilated me with a powerful charge. No, I realised, I hadn’t been annihilated. I’d been split in two, one part of me dead on the ground, school things and lunchbox tumbled out of the school bag; the other part of me had been wrenched up into the air where it was flailing.
I was barely through the whole story, and in far less detail than I’ve shared here when my parents figured they didn’t need to hear more. As soon as the sun was up, they phoned the GP to postpone the circumcision.
‘These two sides of yourself …’ Dr Govender would say years later, his hands up in the air like mine. I would see him shift them closer together, slowly — and I’d panic. He couldn’t do that! They couldn’t be allowed to meet. That would be a disaster. Didn’t he understand?
But his face was peaceful; his voice was reassuring. So, I let him finish his question. ‘Is there any way these two sides could ever … merge?’ He let the suggestion hang. ‘Can you imagine them ever being at peace with each other? Wouldn’t that alleviate a lot of tension?’
‘No,’ I replied, and he seemed to respect that.
But something about how he’d asked the question told me I didn’t have to know how it would happen. I just had to let it happen when it was ready to. His words had softened some ground. Although dear God, what was trying to sprout from there?
My paternal step-grandmother was our family’s fall-back suspect for all domestic witchcraft. Her broomstick’s runway was probably the arid dirt strip in her backyard where tough, hawk-like neighbourhood chickens — proper local and free range — scavenged leathery worms. One of my nephews said the lady kept thirteen roses on her mantelpiece. That was one for each of us in the extended family born to her late husband. Each time someone died, one of those roses would fall over.
‘I don’t think grandmothers normally do that,’ I replied, bug-eyed.
In black township and farm lore, a witch’s job is to keep things interesting. If you don’t secure your bloodline through at least one son, you’ve handed your legacy over to them for annihilation. I was Dad’s first son and how his bloodline was to triumph over the reign of his evil stepmother. According to my grandfather I was to meet a nice girl, get married and raise 2.4 kids in a house with a white picket fence. But I had to be careful about the family she came from. There were ancestral feuds to remember; there was inbreeding to avoid and undercover sorceresses to watch out for.
‘Yes, Grandpa; I’ll make sure to remember that,’ I’d reply, my eyes meeting with his greying ones. Both pairs silently said we were bullshitting each other, but we had to perform this ritual to give his hopes an outlet. After he passed, a neighbour told me he’d requested that on my wedding day (to a woman), ‘amusinele’ — that she perform the traditional Zulu dance on his behalf. He didn’t see me getting married in his lifetime. I also found out he asked for change when he gave offering money in church (good!).
A few years ago, my mother fired a helper who saw it fit to say, ‘Akukho makoti ozoza la’; you’re not going to get a daughter-in-law from this son. I had mixed feelings as I was told this story. My mother couldn’t see how it cut me to the quick to find out. Maybe she saw but thought I needed to know. Who knows what else she’s shielded me from?
Back then, if I had a health issue — if I knew in my gut I was fundamentally different — and the doctors said it was the psychosomatic symptom of an unexplored anxiety, my shrewd elders would nod submissively before saying amongst themselves, in Zulu, ‘Westerners don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s ancestors. If not them, it’s sorcerers. Those bastards are trying to kill the children so their houses are never established.’
But I think we all knew on some level that born as my parents’ answer to a witch, I was a form of witchcraft all of my own.
After my mother and her stepmother-in-law had their spat, we left for my maternal grandparents’ house on the small block off of Main Road in another section. This house was ‘the funeral home’.
While there, I managed to get my chubby little one-year-old hands on a home-made ice lolly we called is’qeda. Before anyone knew what had happened, the ice blew a minor cold into bronchitis or pneumonia. It seemed the sorceress’s muti had followed me across the township, landing me in hospital with more pipes going in and out of my body than my family thought was possible. To Mom, this was frighteningly like the time my older brother died. The prognosis was hopeless. Then she heard the step-grandmother intended to visit me in hospital — ‘She wants to do what?’ She wasn’t allowed to come roaring up on her broomstick.
I survived the medical odds stacked against me, inadvertently