VUYOKAZI NGEMNTU

Final Will And Testament

Write me no dirges when I breathe no longer
no verbose obituaries 
recited in tents filled to capacity
with strangers who’ve had the sudden epiphany
of how noble a heart I had.
Lay me in no extravagant oakwood coffin
Sing no haunting church hymns on my account,
serve no feast at the service.

Let my friends with green hair, tattoos and facial piercings
play umrhubhe, bust rhymes and sing me to my ancestors’ arms
Serve red wine, gin and space cookies
Drum so my bones retrace their way to the beginning of time
let each of my lovers speak of the hedonistic pleasures we shared
Give whomever I wronged a chance 
to speak ill of me and spit at my grave
Do not cover my children’s ears.

I could have done better
but in the end, all that matters
is that I 
lived.

Shadows

We 
were mouths full of 
teeth and no diction
All clutter
No arrangement
No images to 
Reconcile
With the marvelous horrors we
Had witnessed.

Well and alive
The nightmare would bare
Its fangs at our dreams
Now puny under the new threat
Afraid to become
We retracted into
Ourselves
Our shells
Broken.

We had nowhere to hide
Naked
We forgot to be
Ashamed
That we were
Lies.

Nobody saw us and
Told
We were consumed instead
Into the communal myth
Accepted into
The creation story
Our genesis

Never once authenticated
Accepted

On sight
Though we were invisible
To
Ourselves.

Thus have we
Died 
In plain sight
The crime scene
Unbarricaded
Uncordoned from
The footsteps of passersby
The curious eyes of children’s hands
Who touch us in play
Tickle our bellies
Protruding with a hunger 
That feeds on the emptiness
We memorised
When we began to live
As the dead
Outlawed by history 
For our poor elocution 
Our garish decorum 
Our lack of culture.

We collected their sins
Their murderous jealousies
Their banal hatred
Their dissonance
And made a fire
In their souls
Doused in the fumes
Of their desires it
Spread to their auras
And they attacked their shadows
Upon sight
They wrestled their 
Guilt
In the dark
And eventually
Each other.

Unnamed
Unseen
We caused
Havoc
In their wakeful lives
Daring their gods
To admit to 
Our existence
As though this christening
This admission to light
Even in our decrepitude
Would reanimate
Our ravaged limbs

Alas
The only thing the dead
Know how to do
Is to haunt
The perception
Of the living
To distort reality in favour of
An endless dream.

An Ode To Mambush

Mathapelo Lekoetje (Ma: prefix denoting the feminine; Thapelo: Prayer.  
Ergo : Prayerful Mother)
Carrying the fruits of their passion
Asive, ( ‘May the *insert either god or the clan name of the Noki family* hear us’ )
Was wed to Mgcineni Noki in 2010-
Two years before the 16th of August 2012. 

The girl is twelve now, Asive is.
I wonder how conversant she is in loss;
How accustomed she is to absence.
Asive was two when newspaper headlines read
‘Killing Field’, ‘Mine Slaughter’ and ‘Bloodbath’

The man in the green blanket, motif that he has become,
Was not Mambush to her.
He was Tata and she, his world.

In my attempts to reanimate his memory,
I imagine the two of them on his last December-
She would have been one then, doddering adorably.
He would have come home, dust embedded in his pores,
Eyes dancing at the sight of her-
Now surely bigger than the infant he’d kissed goodbye-
Not yet a toddler,
Though he could probably imagine already
Missing her first day of school while working his bones bare;
Digging platinum, filling other men’s pockets
To send home from his R4000 to R5000 monthly salary
the R3000
That for the past two years
Usurped his return.

I imagine the grin plastered upon his face; 
the coy smile, the irrepressible joy
Barely contained by Mathapelo at the sight of her benedict,
Green blanket across his shoulders,
her only place-holder,
Rucksack in hand,
A fluffy teddy hidden inside-
An offering to his princess,
Inadequate in saying
“Even when I am not with you
Do hold me in your heart,
Always,”
In the way that his widowed mother,
In lamentation of the dreadful fate endured by his similarly employed father,
Had demanded of the world:
‘Mgcineni!’
That widow- there is no record of her name known to me-
Makhulu to Asive,
Now cultivating, since 1996,
The same garden grave as her beloved
For being denounced a witch and butchered in the fields
On a sunny Thwalikhulu afternoon,
Would soon receive her boy;
Body perforated
By 14 R 5 rifle shots
That left the sinews of his flesh
Broken.
His head,neck, calf, elbow, buttocks, thighs,
Wounded.

Would Makhulu visit the girl in her dreams
To kiss her cheek 
And sing ‘Thula Bhabhana, mus’ ukulia utat’ uyeza nezombiwa zomntana’
Mathapelo!
Consistent with custom, someone would have to whisper
To the sleeping baby’s ear
‘UTata usishiyile’
To quell her grief
They say
So she may process
Not what Rehad Desai’s camera vividly documented
But the loss of a man
Who would not be 
Clapping his hands, 
Beaming with pride
On her graduation one day.

R12 500 against the life of a breadwinner,
Brother to Nolufefe, Nomaindia and Nobomi.
Brother to Mbulelo.
R12 500 a month:
‘A better life for all.’
Matamela!
What is the price
of a daughter’s grief?
Asive, when she grows older
And finds herself wanting,
Will demand of us.

Long after ngoana Lekoetje has shed the garbs of mourning
and undergone ritual cleansing,
She will find a gaping emptiness where Mgcineni’s head used to rest
Upon her left breast
Listening to a heart
That beat solely for
The man in the green blanket.
Glossary:

‘Thula Bhabhana, mus’ ukulila utat’ uyeza nezombiwa zomntana’: ‘Hush, child, for
daddy will soon return with baby’s precious metals’

‘UTata usishiyile’: ‘Daddy has passed away.’

‘ngoana Lekoetje’: ‘(the) child of (the) Lekoetje (family)’

Bleeding Archives

Mundane in its sacredness,

The monument whispers its screams

To deaf ears, young and old.

The language of festering wounds,

Too complex to be spoken by the young.

Too forgotten to be sung by the old.

Traces of an inconvenient truth

Consecrated in marble,

Draped in indifference

Plastered on a busy main road…

Invisible.

Changeling

If you be girl-child,
black and sensible,
do not be strange
and convince yourself
that the man
in the black-and-white photograph
moved from his pose
and back to position
when you yelled ‘mama!’

Spare yourself 
the shame
of recounting
 your surprise
at the sight
of an elderly neighbour
perched nonchalantly
mid-air
at your bedside
long after mama
had tucked you in
while your siblings
snored in oblivion…

and if the voices
whisper a secret
you can’t have known
and you, being you,
should relay it casually
(to your parents’ bewilderment)
pretend you saw
something similar 
on TV.

Do not repeat
the angry words
of a late great-grandmother
whose unspoken name
unwraps the unwanted gifts
she cries will perish
if you too refuse them.

Be a normal child,
if you can attempt it:
be adorable 
and compliant
and quiet
and happy.

Black Son Shine

Little boy
Don’t let them call you a man just yet.
With your agile wire car hands
And your needle point eyes
They will teach you to stop dreaming soon.
Teach you that brown boys make better thugs than astronauts
Trade the sports cars of your dreams for taxis;
They will break you and call it manhood
Replace the sunshine in your voice
With a lump in your throat
And tell you real men don’t cry.
Don’t believe a word they say.
Why, the earth thirsts for your tears
To rinse her loins of the blood
Of the many black boys they thrust inside her
Wounded and bleeding
Spleens torn and spines bent
Wings broken before they knew they could fly.
These boys become stains
Upon heaven’s crisp white clouds
So the ringleader of the gang in the sky
Throws them all the way down
To Nyanga or Sao Paulo
Where they rehearse their obituaries
In the wombs of mortal women
Themselves ghosts in waiting
Singing supplications to a Virgin Mary
Who doesn’t know how suicidal desperation can suddenly become
When hungry babies cry in perfect harmony to the sound of gunshots
Counter rhythm to an anxious heart beat
When faith falls short
Like the supply of fathers
And like the wheels of the bicycle
Of the postman you hope has a prison letter from your father on your birthday
The world keeps turning
And it takes a stronger pill to make your head dizzy
Enough to forget.
Little boy, please remember
It’s all been a bad dream
And you can choose to wake up
A god.