Re-rout(root)-ing

 "After the final no there comes a yes. And on that yes the future world depends. 

- Wallace Stevens 

Am I fit to cluster with others around the tribal drum

That used to bring me into seance with myself

With this European language that has scrambled 

For the territory of my mental African map 

And colonised it for all my resources

Will the drum revivify or repudiate 

Instilling a trepidation for a fire that throws me back

Into the shadows like a lone hungry wolf 

Will the crocodile slit its crystal ball of an eye open

In recognition when I chant "kwena" 

Or will it drag me under and choke me in the silt 

Accusing me of being an imposter

Am I too existentially burdened

For this psychic levitation?

Too entrenched with the education for the hypnotic 

Rhythm and flame to lull me into a reverie

And out of a self that has taken modernity 

Far into the great indifferent Kalahari Desert

Have I become a paradox like Laplace's Mecanique Celeste 

And carry an ambiguity of the Sphinx or Ananta

That my forebears are unable to make head or tail of

Can the stars provide the carbon strength 

To prise open an old connection sealed mechanically 

By the civilizing agenda that places in highest esteem

Heady IQ over the grand bodily rootedness of a baobab 

Take up an eloquence that I have long envied

In the touching and rumbling cadence

Of the verbal fencing with sheathed swords 

That is Stone Seate and Tumelo Kepadisa

I have been given a moiety of a culture  

Only to have erroneously homogenized 

Into one talent, the parable takes a dark turn 

How do I retrace my steps to a primordial 

Order of things without disappearing into 

The yawning vastness like de Saint-Exupery 

Throwing out baby, bathwater and tub

Will my tongue wrap itself around a surname

That is a flowing river in the sub-Saharan

Or will it squeeze too tightly leaving

A lineage lifeless and with lungs floating on the surface