You Have to Be Gay to Know God. Siya Khumalo
to account for all the brats and adults — amen! And we, too, were under the furniture but because we were small we didn’t have to stick our bums in the air. We could disappear completely under the dining room table where we’d always played hide-and-seek indoors. It had always been safer to play indoors.
One day in 1994 the rain tried to wash our seven-year-old bodies off of the township streets. By the time I arrived at school, classrooms were half-flooded and half-littered with rain jackets and kiddie umbrellas. The teachers were talking among themselves. We all hoped they’d let us go home early, but we wouldn’t put much stock in it in case we were disappointed.
‘Bazosigodukisa,’ some kids were saying. ‘Ngeke, abasoze,’ others replied. They’ll let us go home; No, they won’t.
One of the teachers stepped forward to talk to us. They were announcing their decision sooner than I’d expected. ‘Children,’ she called. ‘Due to the weather, we’ve decided that we’re cancelling the whole day. You can all go home right now.’
The Rapture couldn’t have gotten us out of there faster. All I wanted to was watch cartoons on TV and eat food.
The wind picked up as we braved the hills to our different streets. But the gusts became strong enough to lift me off the ground, bits of people’s yards hitting my face so fast I could barely see the way forward. I was on the open road without a lamppost to hold on to.
Luckily, there was a church along the way. I pushed against the wind and the rain to get to it, running for the door because the clean, stark-white edifice had nothing to hold on to. And as I tried to push it open, I discovered something my seven-year-old mind couldn’t compute: it was locked. I’m not trying to be cheesy but I asked myself, ‘If church doors can be locked, then where do people run to from the storm?’ because that, in a nutshell, was the start of my journey with religion.
The wind was so bad I wouldn’t move away from the doorway. Which was also how I would deal with the prospect of losing religion. I decided better the devil I knew than the one I didn’t even as I silently prayed for divine assistance. Not two seconds passed before a boy I didn’t trust very much came running by, promising to get me through the winds and floods in one piece if I went with him. Much to my surprise, I got home with his hand holding mine as he’d promised (he also made it home safely)! And that, symbolically, is my current journey with faith and spirituality as opposed to religion.
When I got to my grandmother’s house, I was duly fussed over and fed. Dry, warm and full-stomached, I lay under some blankets, drifting off to sleep with my extended family members chatting and eating soup with bread around me. I woke up later and noted the sun was out and the world scrubbed so sparkly it could have starred in its own toothpaste commercial.
One of my cousins had also gotten home from high school. He was telling a story about how he’d put a guy in his place. He described the guy as is’tabane.1 The scene he was describing flashed before me; I envisioned it happening in a dip on the road where kids walking from high school passed people coming from town in the afternoons. I cringed in embarrassment at the intimations that this gentleman failed to act like a ‘real man’. I shuddered with disappointment as I sensed that my extended family members’ compassion for all living creatures was tempered by this idea that this guy could and should have made life easier for himself by not being in danger’s path; by not acting so … gay.
The boy on the bike rolled, uninvited, into the darkness under the blanket over me. The vision was not just the product of the sleepy dimness I was wrapped in, nor of the pinpricks of rain-flossed sunlight threading through the fabric. He was projected by a piercing desire in my soul; a dreaded yearning that threatened to push up from inside to erupt over my body. This time, I was lying facing up on the same bed I’d first dreamt of him, feeling a bittersweet need to mean as much to him as he did to me. With voices talking around us, he climbed on me, his bike tossed aside. His ghost hands pinned my joints down; his weight crushed me in a way that was relieving and deepened the need for release. That climbing feeling crept up through me again; I fought my body’s urge to stretch up; I pulled the overwhelming longing to erupt back in; I resisted the urge to draw a breath.
I didn’t know whether to stay hidden with the vision of him or throw the blanket off and expose us to the soup-eaters and gay-bashers. He would probably disappear because not being flesh and blood and passions, he was more sensible than I; I was in this all alone. He’d never acknowledge what he’d called forth in me and until then, there wasn’t enough room in the world to hide us.
All that, from a story about is’tabane. Why was I feeling all these things?
If I tried to turn over, I would overturn him while calling attention to myself. So I lay still, not knowing whether the boy on the bike was really there or just my fantasy. Either way, anyone who looked in my direction would see the unaccounted-for lump of him on me sticking up from under the blanket.
CHAPTER 3
The Grim Reaper’s Work
A long-awaited episode of Hlala Kwabafileyo aired on TV 1, which at the time of writing this is SABC 1. The series title means, ‘Remain among the dead’. It featured talented cast members like Don Mlangeni Nawa and the late Daphney Hlomuka. A character who’d supposedly been murdered was in a casket. Now and then, we’d have glimpses into his coffin where his fingers trembled in what looked like blood. The music was petrifying. I tried to cover my eyes. The cop’s daughter-cousin said, ‘Don’t be scared. It’s just tomato sauce.’
After around-the-TV supper dishes had been cleared away, we got involved in a lively conversation about funerals, death and murder. Grandma then made the gloomiest of predictions. ‘Death is coming to this house. We’re due for a funeral or two.’
That’s how our version of ‘The Purge’ began. Not a month passed before the first of those two funerals happened. A male cousin, the youngest of Mom’s seven siblings, was accidentally shot in the head. Now years after his death when I walk past mirrors, I catch glimpses of his face where mine is supposed to be as though he’s stealing bits of the life that was stolen from him. His service was attended by crowds that spread three blocks down the road. Somebody hired a sound system to match. Thankfully, black neighbours don’t complain about noise to police; they endure.
In hindsight, it surprises me that my siblings and I got to view the body; we were very young. We were lifted to see into the casket sticking out of the back of the hearse. What was there was so strange, so incomprehensible, the memory is possibly a product of my imagination. He was covered from the collar down in all sorts of coffin drapery and funeral things — you know them; they have that garish finality you get when eternity meets consumerism. There was a giant stitch running down the side of his face. His lips and eyelids were swollen; his skin was dark and grey. He didn’t look like himself. Nowadays, citing ‘respect’, we hardly ever view the actual body. He was nineteen.
Next, the cop uncle passed. His daughter of the tomato sauce comment clocked out after him, also at nineteen. She predicted her death two weeks before it happened while we were watching the movie Red Scorpion. The movie had an appearance by actress and game show hostess, Nomsa Nene. Two other people had a dream in which her cop father said he’d be coming to fetch her because where he was, he had no junior to send on errands. ‘Anginangane engizoyithuma’. Black readers will understand that not even death is an excuse not to convey messages or do chores for your parents.
I was crushed by her passing. Being my most attentive child-minder, she had given me room to experiment with who I was. I could wear anything, play with any doll or toy truck I wanted, and she would accept that I was just different. She never suppressed or ‘corrected’ me.
A born storyteller, she’d made another formative contribution to my life: she was the first person to read and explain John 3:16 to me. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.’ She also re-preached sermons from the church services and Pentecostal revivals we went to, scaring more hell out of us than the pastors had. I would stare at pictures of this white man, Jesus, and would wonder