You Have to Be Gay to Know God. Siya Khumalo
with in the neighbourhood. I visited Grandma’s house almost every weekend. It was late spring when we started living there, the strange landscape often overshadowed by otherworldly storm clouds.
After Thembi (‘tomato sauce’) passed, so did her infant son. Then Grandpa died and Grandma followed. She’d loved Thembi’s baby something fierce. I was told his name was the last thing she said before she passed, her face reacting like he appeared in front of her a moment before she clocked out.
We reached a point where not all the funeral things would be put away. Eulogies and funeral programs were recycled and spliced into one another, the process being simplified each time. We started out catering on porcelain plates; these days, we serve food on Styrofoam take-away containers to save people the trouble of washing their Tupperware after taking extras home.
In those lighter moments when they joked about death and about how dramatic some people (many of whom were in the room!) had been with their crying, the grown-ups also spoke about the hymns they wanted sung at their own funerals. ‘Alehliki ibhokisi,’; That casket isn’t going down, they’d threaten. It would only descend to the very orderly sound of everyone singing the hymn they’d chosen.
Did we remember the song, once the person died? Ha! We were so shocked and busy I’m sure we got it wrong half the time. Writing it down somewhere wouldn’t have helped because we’d simply have forgotten where it had been written or, if we could find it, how to read. We learned to prescribe left-out details for people’s funerals. ‘So-and-so really loved this song,’ an adult would say, ‘We’re singing it at their service.’ I’d nearly fall off my seat, having never heard so-and-so so much as talk about that song let alone lip-sync it.
If Grandma’s house was the dwarves’ home from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, then dinner would have begun with someone calling out, ‘Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy, and Dopey! Supper’s ready!’
With each death, our household’s list of names shortened. Sometimes the person serving would stop just before calling out the name of someone who’d passed. You could hear the pause without listening for it; you’d look around discreetly for hearts that would have been crushed by hope that at the mention of that person’s name, he or she would come bounding in from around the corner. I remember asking who’ll bury the last person on earth to die. The question landed more dispiritingly than I had intended. Some of our deaths were AIDS-related.
An uncle’s hearing-impaired wife passed away when I was in my teens. I’d always felt intimidated by her. My mother told me, without knowing about my anxiety, that I’d always held a special place in her heart from among the hordes of children all the adults were raising together. She and I didn’t talk, but we did communicate. At her funeral, her son was expected to share a few words. It was barely noon and he was tipsy. So, he sang (remarkably well) a famous song about the Father’s love. In his rendition, he substituted the word ‘Mother’ for Father. There wasn’t a dry eye in the audience. He didn’t say anything else.
When he was dying, the girls he’d been dating took turns nursing him to a dignified end. The last I heard, one of those girlfriends had lung cancer, and a third one was fighting HIV/AIDS. His dad, my uncle, also passed away after one of his sisters nicknamed Queen, and after Queen passed, that uncle’s older sister, who was my strictest aunt, departed after him. Growing up, I’d been intimidated by her disciplinarian ways, her waddling gait and permed hair. She chewed pink gum and wore red lipstick. Her shirts were irredeemably ugly, awful things, and I’m sure they were buried with her as it’s sometimes done.
When we went to the rare funeral at other people’s houses, we probably thought, These amateurs to ourselves. Likewise, when they came to our funerals they probably whispered, ‘These okes die every other weekend; haven’t they run out of people yet?’ under their breaths. But the Grim Reaper was firmly resolved on making our house Death’s neighbourhood refreshment station, eating scones and drinking lukewarm tea from metal cups among mourning candles and the living. The accusation of witchcraft dangled in the air, which is an all-too-common and dangerous story in black communities.
Kangaroo courts were convened. Sangomas were consulted. Ancestral grudges were dredged up for explanations. Church groups were called in to pray (or they invited themselves). Some family members were born-again Christians and subscribed to an expression of faith that didn’t mix with anything not in the Bible (or what the church in Acts did in the New Testament). Even then, Christianity boasts 40 000 denominations because of interpretative differences. I once asked an ex-boss what denomination she was in. She replied, ‘I’m Presbytebaptistlutherancatholievangelical’ and that pretty much covered her bases.
Other family members were traditionalists and performed Zulu rituals. Some of these traditional ceremonies call for everyone under the affected roof to participate, which adds to tensions and despair. Some people agree to the spiritual group effort; others sit it out. The ritual conductors tacitly accuse those who don’t do the work of being ritualistic freeloaders, while the pastors of those who don’t do the work tacitly accuse those who do it of spiritually tainting the terrain (by showing a lack of faith in the biblical God). With us, these sides clashed with each other in what the family began sensing were religious and spiritual entrepreneurs playing sides off against each other.
Many churches pick what’s socially accepted from the Bible and syncretise that with what culture dictates, the resultant variations making for enmities across the religious landscape. The danger is bits and pieces of religious law are invoked and inveigled in people’s personal morality crusades, which are then seen as a prerequisite for being healed and stopping your family members from dropping dead. One of the women who prayed for our family told us of her dislike of women who wore heels in church (‘Are they stomping Satan further into the ground?’) and mini-skirts (‘Are they blinding him with glory from their holy of holies?’). She and one of the gentlemen she’d brought along spoke of the good old days in which women walking past taxi ranks in mini-skirts would have them ripped from the slit up by bystanders in protest of how they were dressed (or rather, not dressed). The gentleman also suggested that the only ‘person’ God created was man. Woman was the derivative helpmeet, but not a person. Now, this man wasn’t some buffoon. He was a varsity student.
‘But this female non-person brings male persons into the world?’ I enquired.
He laughed, seeing my logic. ‘A cell phone carrier bag,’ he pointed out, ‘is not of the same status as the cell phone it carries.’
‘I know God lives in the heart,’ the praying woman would explain, ‘but surely women are disrespecting him in the way they carry themselves nowadays?’
‘What about the way men carry themselves?’
Ah, ‘but the nature of a man can’t be helped’ while that of woman can. The logical conclusion of her argument was that if a woman reported a rape, we’d have to ask what she’d been wearing and demand she wear the same outfit to court to be judged in it. ‘If I were the judge and her clothes appeared immodest, I’d sentence her and the rapist to jail!’ the praying woman declared.
Then why did God create Adam and Eve naked?
At any rate, when a woman goes to court to seek justice for being raped, it’s historically likelier for her to be punished instead of her rapist. So if they’re incarcerated in gender-separate prisons, as per the praying woman’s logic, the rape survivor would at least be kept from the perpetrator. Deuteronomy 22:28 and 29 prescribe this instead:
‘If a man finds a young woman who is a virgin, who is not betrothed, and he seizes her and lies with her, and they are found out, then the man who lay with her shall give to the young woman’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife because he has humbled her; he shall not be permitted to divorce her all his days.’ She’s stuck with the guy who called first dibs on what many cultures view as her family’s honour — if they’re discovered.
Cherry-picked and amalgamated into a cultural context that checks women for virginity, such scriptures may lend religious credence to the oft-repeated suggestion that such issues should be dealt with using ‘African solutions’ that call for the family to