Born in a Taxi by Blk Sonshine

 You are absolute!- Brian Fleet

Well

Don't leave me behind
'Cause I'm afraid of not seeing
You can't leave behind
A baby born in a taxi

Give me all you owe the world
Let's pretend I could be spoiled
'Cause if it's all in what you say
Then won't you change my world today?

I can spend my time loving you
If that's what you want me to do
You just have to say I do

You say I'm like a dream
Planted far from water
You make it out to seem
Between us there's a border

Think of all the games we play
Tell me we're both trapped in this clay
'Cause if you're sure that's here to stay
Then help me change my world today

I could spend my time loving you
If that's what you want me to do
You just have to say I do

Don't be afraid
'Cause I'm not here to take away
It's not a shame
Let me show you how to play
Take my arm
I'll lead you to this groundlessness

An excerpt from Dream Count by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie

Some Thoughts On My Brief Time In an American University, marginally related to being on your side, dear men. 

America is so provincial, like an enormous giant of a man from a bush village who blunders about with supreme certainty, not knowing he is bush because he is blinded by his strength. If you’ve lived your whole life in a sensible part of the world – that is Africa or Asia or Latin America – be careful going to America for a master’s degree in the liberal arts. Science is fine, and an MBA is fine as long as you are happy to become a parroting robot. As soon as I started my program, so much I said was wrong but I did not know why it was wrong and they did not tell me because even my asking why was wrong. They expected me to know. Welcome to the world of the Americans of the pious class. We’re talking about race in Europe and I mention how Lord Haw Haw who was a British Nazi claimed that Churchill’s father had African blood and suddenly somebody cuts in: “this is an intellectual game for you while black people are trying to stay alive!” I was puzzled. From outside, America makes more sense. They want your life to match their soft half-baked theories and when it doesn’t, they burst out with their provincial certainty. 

Somebody was reading a novel about the Nigerian-Biafran war and said, “it’s really fascinating, but honestly I’m still a bit confused about why the Igbo people were massacred?” And I said that to understand Igbo people in Nigeria, think of them like the Jews. People say don’t trust Igbo people because they want to control everything and they love money and they’re too pushy. A woman said, ‘Oh my God, don’t say that, you can’t compare anything to the Jews.’ What do you mean by ‘can’t?’ What in the cultural genetics of Americans makes them think they can decide for the rest of the world how they should think? I never knew that there existed in this world a class of people who feel so securely entitled to the minds of other people.

London was the center of my childhood dreams and even though I went as a child to Cambridge with my father, I didn’t feel I had seen England until I saw London so as soon as I could afford it, I went, and I was disappointed that the staff at my posh hotel were all Polish and spoke poor English because it wasn’t the London I wanted. And an American bursts out: How can you be so fascist and anti-immigration and perpetuate a dangerous nativism?

The professor didn’t say ‘let’s be civil.’ They love that word civil by the way. But when this White woman was mocking White women for paying Jamaican nannies to raise their White children and I said that was regressive nonsense, women throughout human history have always had help caring for their children, it’s the relative or the husbands relative, it’s the village, and now it means paying for it but then so what, the Jamaican nanny is building a small house outside Kingston for her parents – and then the professor said ‘let’s be civil.’ Let’s be civil indeed as if their quiet evil isn’t the real incivility. The incivility of quiet evil.

There was this Chinese-American woman with a pretty pious face talking at a bar about her Chinese parents and how racist they were for not wanting her sister to marry a Black man. She said, “I’ve cut them off and I’m mad my sister still takes their calls,” and everyone in that godforsaken circle told her she was so brave. I could look through her and see the glow of her sanctimonious soul, she thought she was resplendent in her righteousness but she was just a person unable to love. They don’t know how to love, these pious people, and they don’t know love. Even the way they help each other is so cheerless and earnest.

I said I loved Kigali, and they said oh my god it’s a dictatorship. But the policemen are trim, the markets are clean, people stand in line and I am proud of it because it is African and I am African. I asked them -- Can you understand that love and pride complicate? They can implicate as well but first you must see how they complicate. But they can’t see because their hearts lack eyes. Their hearts are blind. They are so dead to human foibles, these Americans of the pious class. And they don’t laugh. I mean actual laughter, that sound nature made to lighten our hearts and calm our blood pressure.

One day I mentioned my driver Paul and a woman with a nose piercing said you mean exploited labor, call it what it is, all Third World domestic staff are exploited labor. She was a famous academic feminist but she didn’t like women. She liked only the idea of women. She posted cryptic quotes about feminism that you were supposed to feel guilty about but not understand and vaguely threatening conditions for how to be a feminist like if you don’t know blah blah blah about Bangladesh then you’re no feminist, if you don’t liberate this and that then you’re no feminist. Her followers loved her for her bitterness and even if she ever wanted to let joy in, she couldn’t because she would lose the applause. And anyway it would have to be joy as resistance. Or joy as a subversive anti-patriarchy project. Never just joy. As joy. 

One day we’re listing the many horrors of Facebook and I say for full disclosure, I just put up an ad on Facebook for a logistics person for my company in Abuja, someone 35 and above. An American bursts out: It’s illegal to mention age in job ads! Well, it isn’t in Nigeria. You Americans need to climb out of your cribs. You think the world is American, you don’t realize that only America is American. To be so provincial and not even know that you are.  

Praise the Lord for all dead things by Ama Ata Aidoo

 

First course: 

Cream of asparagus soup

Thirty months in an aluminium 

Tin

Second course:

Chicken moritus under

Pre-mixed curry from

Shepherds Bush

And since we are learning to take

Desserts- true mark of a leisured class

canned prunes

canned pears

canned apples

Apricots

Cherries

Brother, 

The internal logic is super-cool

The only way to end up a culture vulture

Is to feed on carrion all the way

You cannot achieve the moribund objectives of a dangerous education by using living forces

Therefore, since

'Ghosts know their numbers,'

Dr. Intellectual Stillborn

-with perfect reason-

Can break his neck to recruit

Academic corpses of Europe

Wraith-like with age or 

Just plain common

Red Moon

 What do you know about rolling in the deep? 

Masked Astronaut

I'm hoping that now that I have unlocked this anger

That has wrapped its serpentine and lithe essence 

Around the fist that is my heart, it's damp and musky lair

With the tail rattling at the very thought of your name 

My tongue has become forked with the tangled lies

Growing from the roof of my mouth, pointy stalactites

Of great lengths vining their way towards a soft tongue

Recoiling into a swallow and a blocked passageway 

Torturing my taste buds with the threat of piercing 

A confession: I have half-truths stuck between my teeth

Making onlookers uncomfortable when I smile  

The two Ivorian incisors as pillars keeping reality shelved

My splitting spitting tongue red with smouldering rage 

A flare of nostrils when my betraying brain airs the carpet

And memories of you rise in the beam of the light 

Suspended brilliantly before remembering their weight

With a thud, they land on the floor of my psychology

Like the elephant in the room felled by a poacher 

Lifeless, on its side, I cover it with the clean rug

Wondering what Exupery's children would draw now

The slackening anger unfurls its fingers on my vitals

And its heat rises painting walls and windows copper red

Bloodshot eyes; as the sleep I've missed goes on a bender

Waterboarding my soul, being questioned but it doesn't talk

I've lain awake keeping the sun from setting on your name

A vigil of love, I still pray for you, and your dreams 

The blood churns and breaches strongholds and progress

All seven steps of grief are rearranged like a Picasso

Square one is a puddle of emotion, a Rorschach inkblot

Losing its edges but retaining its sharpness, a test 

But my emotions have forgotten their names, I fail

In the heterogeneity of melee, the red is freshly dyed 

This is anger's last gasp numbing my arms in pain

Does this anger not yet know who I am? It has failed

Undulating my body within my phone's range of hearing

I fish for the words with my teeth tossing them into a text

Alexa! And my digital companion delivers on its promises

The screen brightens, you always respond to a text with a call

I cough out bloody phlegm on my sheets, sthandwa sam' you say

I sob and the red moon once again adorns the shade of its summer 

The Greatest Love

Nothing exists but you and I/ And if we two be not/ Then God is no more God/ And down must fall the sky

- Angelus Silesius

The demons sought to dispose of your sorry heart

Still being precious, they put it up for auction

Brittle for being broken, it didn't transport well

Sorcerers, the world over, scrambled for the pieces

They knew I would come looking for you

Hearing rustling in the wind of our great love

Relying heavily on the degree of dispersion

As further discouragement to an aggrieved heart

It became the athletic tape holding tendons together

Keeping sternum and spine upright in purpose

Like the rod of Moses in hand, not on the ground

And the voice without words offering direction

The sweat of my brow condensated into clouds

With the downpour, a portent of an unwelcome arrival

Heard my resolute footfall on the stairs of the world

Turned to Vulcan for reinforcement to temper my will

Pieces of him found in glass cases within red rooms

Indecent displays of wealth, conquests and spoils

Ordering the sand in the glass back to the sea

The reflective surface disappeared with its allure

Then there were impenetrable cryptographic safes 

Pythagoras and Aryabhata took back their inventions 

The primes were gone and so were their music

Only sound heard is the click and creaking of the door

One occasion boasted of a three-headed guard dog

Descendant of Fluffy with bone crushing jaws

The music returned in the form of flutes playing

Lulling the dogs to sleep, putting jaws out of service

They speak of a work ethic labouring for a few pennies

This labour of love is my magnum opus in the oeuvre

The work that speaks for itself in itself against all that has

Sought and sometimes succeeded to hurt me in my heaven

Taking on a new name, inaugurated as The Greatest Love

My sermon on the mount, ministering to the hearts of all 

Men by redeeming this one as though it were the only one 

This heart precious beyond estimation broken on a rock

Imbokodo: When the strength and might of a woman 

Parallels the abject humiliation of a good man trying 

I'll stand by you, even in hand-cutting smithereens

Caloused hand not heart, I'll hold you ever so close

Reduced to the grains of dust from whence you came

With drops of water, I'll thicken and substantiate you

Offer you back a rib to refashion yourself out of and a

Loving word cleaning out the desert sands from your ears 

 

When the Lord Restores by Catherine Feeny

Life cannot be repaired, it can only be recreated through symbolic repetition of the cosmogony, for, as we have said, the cosmogony is the paradigmatic model for all creation.

- Mircea Eliade

When the Lord restores the fortunes of Zion

We are like those who dream

Our mouths are filled with laughter

Our tongues with songs of joy

It will be said among the nations

Yah has done great things for us

He has done great things for us

And we are filled with joy

Restore our fortunes Lord

Live streams in the Negev

Those who sow in tears

Will reap with songs of joy

Those who go out weeping

Carrying seeds to sow

Will return, with songs of joy

Carrying sheaths with them

 

The Hero Alive in Me

 Heroism is a word we only use at the graveside

- Mahmoud Darwish

I stare at my body in the mirror looking for signs of heroism 

Muscle tissue filled with water, and glycogen, poverty conquered

But who can say for sure? For tomorrow? Such are wars of attrition

Relying on favourable economic conditions, and the strength of the Rand

Does the adequate fulfilling of macros make me a hero? The striving?

Would kwashiorkor tremble at the sound of my name? The thriving?

Or look me up and down with a scorching disdain and in reproach

Ask me what I would know about hunger? One dollar a day, a living 

I stare at my body in the mirror looking for signs of heroism 

There are dark bite sized marks on every part of the landscape 

Of somnolent one-sided battles with ravenous mosquitoes

I sleep as though going on nightly vacation in Death Valley

Having their fill without so much as a swiping hand in disturbance

Ectoparasites that have wreaked havoc in the name of malaria 

Am I a hero for having survived the African summer nights

That the taste of my blood is umami and gorge they must 

Can a reluctant donor of blood to the ecosystem be a hero?  

Is there not a special place in hell reserved for cheerless givers

As it has been written, so with little and then with much as well

I stare at my body in the mirror looking for signs of heroism

I see a temple but there are many men sipping whiskey in the lobby

Is it heroism that none have made it into the holy of holies 

Or am I implicated for atrium like glass that men can see through

Can an intombi endala speak for heroism or are the stretch marks 

Of women who have carried another human to term the zips to shut me up

For good. Have my nipples turned to nails for having never lactated milk

Am I disqualified as a nurturing and nourishing hero although willing?

I stare at my body in the mirror looking for signs of heroism

I bear no signs of violation, an absence of a sign as a sign 

I don't have rope lines around my neck from being hung from a tree

A noose of untidy and loose ends: Tshegofatso Pule

My limbs are still intact; parts of me cannot be found in a freezer

Once torn apart and opened, please refrigerate: Tshepang Pitse

Or the clue for my disappearance has been a missing bathtub

Earthworms have no need for Palmolive: Noluvuyo Ndema- Nonkwelo

Or have four bullet holes through which you can see bathroom tiles

Every day is for the thief, and the murderer: Reeva Steenkamp

Where love can be lethal, am I a hero for loving still, in spite of

For holding out hope for a masculinity with a different qualifier?

I stare at my body in the mirror looking for signs of heroism

And feel the G-force of living in this skin wringing out my organs

Poised articulation from a wit's end, is to break the sound barrier

Exercising a freedom of expression is one giant leap for mankind

Sitting up in bed every morning in the face of a weaponized entropy 

Draining you of life, draculean in design, draconian in deployment

An ecosystem with the dermatoglyphs of the devil all over it

The draculin in the mouth that salivates at the destruction of this DNA

The drool of a dog in proportions of dams we can drown in

Genetically, the bone mineral density of black people is higher

Am I a hero for not giving into this sinister sinking feeling?

I stare at my body in the mirror looking for signs of heroism

And look beyond the flesh and into the ark of the covenant

This dwelling place of power, glory, and certain victory

Flattening the tails of scorpions, death has lost its sting

The tabernacle that cannot be allowed to touch the ground

That has a sacred protocol of how to be handled or approached

The moving cloud before me that shows me the way 

Withstanding criticism, withholding judgment, with God and is God

A golden courage with the words of Frederick Douglas inscribed on it:

One man and God is a majority, rendering a life lived abidingly, heroic