Friday, September 07, 2007
A letter to my family back home
This is a piece of fiction by Bart Wolffe, reflecting the sense of displacement felt by the Zimbabwean diaspora. Also a reflection changing values, and the nature of life in 21st century London. Click the link in the title box to view his online store.
I write to you, my dear family, to tell you how it is for me now, after some years in England. At first, I used to sit on a bench and watch people walk by. I thought I had lost my skin. My head felt sick. I could not recognise a single bird or tree. I stopped to sleep at night. It is better now. As the river flows in Africa, sluggish, slow, I know my blood’s arterial pulse. Serene, beneath the sun, once. Now comes this roaring tide, the Tube, or the traffic of Marleybone Road, a language shouting against my centre, displacing the settled stone I am who sits at the river bottom, so hard to stay still when everything pushes me like a pebble in the flood. It erodes, and with it, the cost of Freedom’s survival, so hard to find the spaces in between where I can dream the languor, the poet and the peace. I have dances of Babylon instead, the thousand heads about me of faces and places, signs and times that are not home. People listen to football every night or shout in places where coins and beer are exchanged without measure! Liverpool, you will be glad to hear, are doing well. Did you get the T-shirt I sent you? You remember, Baba Mukuru, how the children could never get any paper too play with or write on. How paper was for the rich and we used to save the cigarette boxes for schoolwork. Well, here, they push forests through your door, each day, all talking about money. Brightly coloured as the shops in Camden market, or the fruit stalls at Mbare Msika before the Government bulldozed them.
I write to you, my dear family, to tell you how it is for me now, after some years in England. At first, I used to sit on a bench and watch people walk by. I thought I had lost my skin. My head felt sick. I could not recognise a single bird or tree. I stopped to sleep at night. It is better now. As the river flows in Africa, sluggish, slow, I know my blood’s arterial pulse. Serene, beneath the sun, once. Now comes this roaring tide, the Tube, or the traffic of Marleybone Road, a language shouting against my centre, displacing the settled stone I am who sits at the river bottom, so hard to stay still when everything pushes me like a pebble in the flood. It erodes, and with it, the cost of Freedom’s survival, so hard to find the spaces in between where I can dream the languor, the poet and the peace. I have dances of Babylon instead, the thousand heads about me of faces and places, signs and times that are not home. People listen to football every night or shout in places where coins and beer are exchanged without measure! Liverpool, you will be glad to hear, are doing well. Did you get the T-shirt I sent you? You remember, Baba Mukuru, how the children could never get any paper too play with or write on. How paper was for the rich and we used to save the cigarette boxes for schoolwork. Well, here, they push forests through your door, each day, all talking about money. Brightly coloured as the shops in Camden market, or the fruit stalls at Mbare Msika before the Government bulldozed them.
It is the god of money who is king in England. True, they have a queen, but the King is the pound sterling. You should know from the Western Union transfers that keeps the family alive back home. What did you say one pound was worth last time we spoke? Was it 5 million Zimbabwe dollars. I forget and it’s hard to keep pace with your inflation back home. I shall celebrate the sacrifice of safety. The cost of this Brave New World is debt, begging and fear for the need to pay, to sit and drink a cup of kindness has tax attached, no open fallow lie of land unless I declare myself as homeless and join the addicts in Euston Square by the station like Platform 5 in Harare or Porta farm’s squatter camps of plastic and make-shift love affairs and AIDS, so some other kind of measure comes in place that forces me to be acceptable.
Are my papers in order or must I hide beneath the curtain of the close circuit television cameras and duck away from the scrutiny of Big Brother in the fame hungry whirlwind of a land where Mr Nobody is never safe. You look different, even to yourself when you look in the mirror. You try to remember who you are. My libido does not work anymore. Perhaps I need some Mazondo and herbs from the nanga or witchdoctor back home. Or some Viagra , maybe? Who knows. - .I think it’s a result of the diluted sunshine and lack of maize porridge and okra that grandmother cooked with peanut butter and pumpkin leaf too. We have Mcdonalds here.
Unlike in Harare, you have the right to remain silent. In fact, people never ask you anything. You even have the right to say Mugabe is an idiot. But you can never go home. So this is how it is, my friends; from fear of the one kind of stasi, the Central Intelligence Organisation to fear of the debt collectors and the fact that no longer is there a family to support you or talk with, you barter yourself.
Pray to the unknown gods of the Lotto who never answer. Put your head in at the betting shops and find what the German government calls the “Arbeitlos”, or here those on benefits, as long as you are legitimate or English, the acceptable unemployed and dispossessed. So, you want a loan. OK – fine, you want to start a new life. Your credit rating? What is that? How many cows do you own? - No. It means, brother, you bank balance, your mortgages, your property and your higher income in the reaches of the upper echelons you will never know. Ever heard of Whitehall. Being black, it is not the place for you, I guess. A bit like a white boy from Africa in ZANU PF Headquarters. It doesn’t exist unless for interrogation. But no-one asks you anything anyway. In fact, everybody in Golders Green looks down at their shoes as they walk on the pavement, not at the sky or the horizon of which there is none, and on the Tube from Leicester Square, only the tourists really laugh and talk. They give you papers to hide your face behind, free newspapers, can you imagine, Aunt of mine? Everyone can have a paper of their own, every day. Not one that is passed around secretly a hundred times like a rare copy of The Zimbabwean in Highfield to try and stay informed. Everywhere, people cover their faces with someone famous on the front page rather than show their own image.
I’m sure, my sister, you would have noticed. Perhaps you would have also noticed the best time to buy buns is about half-past four in Tesco or Sommerfield when the yellow labels of the reduced prices come down to 20p. You can even find the 20p on the street if you walk along for a few hours as people throw away their bad luck sometimes for the poor to collect. Mostly, the gutter coins are pennies but sometimes you get lucky. At least we have our daily bread, unlike in Zimbabwe where the millers have been bankrupted by the price control measures of the Mugabe government and the lack of supply of wheat for baking in our agricultural land of non-productive farming where so many army generals and ministers of the ruling party may sit and survey the tranquil scenery at sunset without the need to grow food for the masses.
Public transport is really good here and the workers are even allowed to strike and then, of course, it is not so good to try and keep your job and get to work on time, especially if you are cleaning for more than one household in different areas on the same day, no questions asked, no tax, no papers or national ID necessary as an asylum seeker maybe, but anyway, at least as I was saying, the workers are the moving parts of this machine called London. They keep moving but never sit in their castles like Buckingham palace because they will never own such a thing nor any space between dwellings as is the case back home in Africa.
We have wall-to-wall people here. No room for snakes . No thorn trees either. No sounds of crickets at night or frogs or fruit bats or nightjars or owls. No Mujanje trees to steal fruit from, although apples may be found hanging over the wall of someone from a different class.
The pace of peace? I guess it’s a question of forgetting who you were once and moving on. After all, my dear ancestors, I will never return to the land that rejected me in the first place.
A pity I can’t win the Lotto. I would like to be as rich as Mugabe also. Or any of the other fat cats and chefs like Mbeki and the rest of the AU ministers who meet for breakfast.
