And then her voice rose, high and fast, and for a moment, she lost the blind man. She waited, tapping her foot, swaying, until he caught up with her. Her old voice rose yet again — soft and hard, resolute but searching — above the testosterone-driven krar, sax and drums. This voice in sound and not words was asking all of us to have a little more fun, just kick back.
At times, she would fall behind and playfully skip along until she caught up to the band, and then she would soar again. She was flailing her arms, but there was a pattern — her hands were playing, or dancing, or even imagining something I could not quite understand until I thought of her dead sister. And then it made sense; her hands were singing her dead sister’s parts, filling in and giving life to her dead, absent voice.
The blind man, it seemed to me, had uncovered the secret to the krar. The krar, this four-stringed instrument with no frets to change keys and tone, was not for dazzling slides up and down a scale or for Jimi Hendrix play-with-your-teeth-then-burn-the-guitar kind of antics. The krar with its four strings — what you see is what you get. But that does not make it a simple instrument. Hold a krar in your arms, these four strings, and they will remain mute, even in their simplicity, unless you know. The secret had something to do with speed, timing and suggestion — all of them one and the same thing.
She — they — had conquered the audience. Everyone was dancing slow, holding tight to someone. I was missing something in me — love, perhaps, or my other lives — very badly. The song came to an end, and a triumphant Miriam came back to our table.
‘I am ready,’ she said as I hugged her.
‘Your sister and your family…?’ I asked her, wanting her story then, with the Tizita still floating around us.
‘Tell me more, but do not depress me in a fucking wedding,’ she answered.
I felt my heart flutter as I doubted my ability to tell her story — was I a voyeur, slumming her story for my tabloid?
‘Tell me about singing with your sister. I listened to your recordings, your tapes,’ I said, knowing what I wanted — and selfishly — was to feel her story, what Jack and I never had.
We were now sitting next to each other, alone in a wedding.
‘You found her — you needed to find her,’ she said. ‘I hoped you would — the gift of memory. I can remember because you asked.’
‘Singing with her?’
Miriam looked up. ‘It was heaven. I hope you find that, to be in heaven with someone while on earth.’ She took a sip from her drink.
I did not say anything.
‘It’s not memory. This is what the Tizita is telling you: “I am ready to bring them back.” Tizita is a memory that is as alive as you and I now. I will bring them back,’ she said and waltzed off with her friend, back to the dance floor.
28
‘Ask anything — but you have to really ask it, if I am to answer.’
I was at the hospital, visiting my father. He had just come out of a morphine-induced sleep long enough to call me Jack before correcting himself. I wanted to tell him that his beloved Jack was abroad making money, but instead I watched silently as he drifted back into disappointed unconsciousness. My mother tried to console me. And it was then that I was seized by anger — it was time to ask about the dictator, my name and whatever else I was going to be able to dredge up.
‘Listen, Ma, I have to ask you something,’ I said to her as I sat up straight.
She tensed up. ‘Ask anything — but you have to really ask it, if I am to answer,’ she said.
And right at that moment when I could have asked anything — the dictator, my name, her relationship with my father, the choices they had made for themselves and my brother and me at the expense of thousands of others — right at that moment when I could have asked anything, and I believe she would have answered honestly, I realised how little any of it mattered. None of it mattered. My parents were never going to change; they had watched the growing democracy movement, and it had not changed them. In fact, they had warned us against being involved in anti-government strikes, and to my shame, I had listened. Democracy came, and they still bribe their way through anything. Democracy came and left them still wealthy and powerful. They were who they were, and they would change only when the circumstances that had created them changed.
And I was never going to love them any less. I was not a saint, neither were those around me — far from it, in fact. And working for the dictator, or cuckolding with him, that was their choice, not mine. I did not have to inherit their shit, so to speak. I was just in an orgy, for fuck’s sake. Yes, I was marked by their choices, as we all are by the choices our parents make for themselves, but I did not have to inherit their guilt. Maybe I just did not want to look too closely at my own life and choices. What I needed to do was figure out my own life.
‘Listen, Ma, when Dad is feeling well, I want to tell you about my trip to Ethiopia,’ I said, instead of asking all the questions pent up inside me about them.
She gasped, in relief perhaps, and grasped my hand. Right at that moment, my father willed himself into the conversation. He painfully pulled himself up and asked my mother to leave us. She wanted to protest, but something about the way they looked at each other reminded me of those days when they would exchange looks that said it was time to implement whatever agenda they had agreed upon. And so she left, and I sat down and pulled my chair closer to him.
‘Manfredi, really ask what you want to ask. If I die — I could have died….’
I leaned in closer. ‘It’s okay. It no longer matters. Ethiopia was really good for me,’ I said, trying to stop the conversation that was about to happen from taking place.
‘The 2,000 dollars…,’ he started to say but caught himself. ‘I could have died. And then where would you be? If something is not said, it still matters. If you leave this room without asking what you want to ask, then the rest of your life is on you,’ he said, sounding more like my father from a distant past, when his love for his children, for me, was visceral.
I felt angry. I wanted to hurt him. ‘Since you insist, then I must. Did you know the dictator was fucking your wife? You must have known; you went with her there, even took us along. Did you like watching?’ I asked him, surprising myself at the words I was using.
I felt relief, then fear that I had damaged our relationship beyond repair. And best and worst of all, I welcomed a panicked feeling of superiority. That startled him. He reflexively tried to hit me, but the tubes that were giving him morphine and other liquids held him back. He leaned into his raised bed in pain. Several emotions radiated from him, and I could read each one of them — shame, a flash of voyeuristic pleasure, anger and then indignation. And then one I could not see coming, could never have seen coming — humour. He started laughing.
‘Well, son, when I said you could ask, that was not what I had in mind,’ he said.
I started to laugh too, but he started coughing.
I filled a glass with water and gave it to him. His hands trembled, and I held the glass of water to his lips. He sipped, leaned back and composed himself, back to the father I knew. He reached out a sickly, tired arm ridden with IV tubes and valves and placed it on my shoulder.
‘Son, I love your mother. I love her more than my own life, or even yours or that of your brother.’
‘Is he really my brother? Am I truly your biological son?’ I asked, now that I had found an opening. The answer did not really matter — I was not going to go around claiming my dictatorship heritage. And, in truth, while I entertained the thought to drive myself mad, I never thought it could be true, deep down. It’s not like male infidelity matters politically — dictators love their property, especially if boys, and I am sure he would have come collecting. But still….
He leaned back onto the bed, turned his head so that he was looking right at me.
‘Yes, you are. That has never been in doubt…. But what I am trying to tell you is that we put too much premium on sex; sex is not an expression
of love; sex is for pleasure, and she can get it from someone else. Why would I stop her? You know what they say — the vagina is not like soap that gets finished, neither is the penis,’ he added lightly but seriously.
‘But that is not just it. You supported the dictator. He was killing people, and you did nothing. You profited. You let him fuck my mother and kill people so both of you could profit,’ I said, feeling the words come out of me in spite of myself.
‘Yet you take our money, no? You are a grown man, and yet you take our money. Why, if it’s that bloody?’ he asked.
‘So now you are blaming me?’ I threw the question at him.
‘No, I am just pointing out your hypocrisy. If you truly believed what you just said, you would not take a single shilling from us. What I am trying to tell you is that there are no answers for your life here,’ he answered, sounding like a father. ‘But you, you have lived your life. There are no answers for your life here,’ he tried to clarify. I did not know what to say, so I kept quiet.
Of all the people who should have understood the Tizita, it was my parents. The anguish that is love, the love that is selfish, the love that can create life and watch others die, that is itself. Somewhere between the pragmatism of needing power and money to survive and being married, my parents were one fucked-up Tizita. But precisely because they took so much life from others, they could hear the Tizita without really listening to it.
‘It is just sex. Surely, you are old enough to understand that,’ he said, and I could feel him watching me, trying to gauge my reaction.
‘Did you ever fuck the president’s wife?’ I asked, to his laughter.
‘No. I only….’
In that second, in slow motion, I wondered what was coming next after the ‘only,’ what other possibilities — I only watched, jerked off, cried, laughed, fucked other women, the president’s sister, maid and so on.
And then he said it. ‘I only fucked the president.’
We laughed so hard that I started worrying about his health — death from laughter would have made a nice headline at the Inquisitor.
‘Son, I am not joking. Think about that every time you see him on TV.’
It did not change the politics or the extent to which the ruling class had fucked up Kenya, but still, what a thought! He was fucking the dictator while the dictator was fucking my mother. All in all, I think he had a point; we put too much premium on sex.
It was good to finally talk.
I had to make it to the ABC for the final competition. I told him I had to rush off, and he asked me if I could come back in the morning.
‘It might be a late night,’ I said to him.
He tried to wink.
I stepped outside the hospital room. My mother was standing out in the hallway, her hands rubbing her belly like she was in pain.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, yeah, I am fine. How did it go?’ she asked.
‘Well, it was good to finally talk,’ I said, trying to answer a question that she had not verbalised.
‘All I want for you is to be happy…every now and then,’ she said.
‘I have to go, but I will be back as soon as I can,’ I said.
‘You mean that? That you will be back?’ she asked.
‘Of course, Ma — can we not do this? Of course, I mean it,’ I said to her, beginning to doubt myself just a little bit.
‘Wait!’ she whispered urgently.
I stopped.
‘I love your father. I have always loved your father,’ she said.
‘Maybe then you should not have been…,’ I started to say but checked myself when I saw the look of pity start to cross her face, the kind you give a child you have unavoidably hurt.
‘Well, maybe he needs to hear that,’ I said and smiled at her, conscious of just how little over the years I had shown any affection for her.
She shook her head from side to side, smiling. We hugged, and I was off to the ABC.
29
‘Tizita, how will I caress my lover with these hands That killed her brother, or sister or father Or mother, Tizita, Tizita, Tizita…’
Like the last time, the ABC crowd was a mixture of Ethiopians and Kenyans (from the slummers to those who were being slummed) busy talking about music and who would win. It was a hot night, and people had come up with all sorts of ingenious ways to keep cool, like placing the cold beer on their foreheads or fanning themselves with money before handing it to the bookies. There were a thousand and one stories in here waiting for me.
I was sitting at the counter, looking over my notes, wondering what happened to the story I wanted to write. It was as if instead of writing about a hurricane, I had been drawn inside one, and I was fighting for my very own survival. Now that my Tizita journey was almost over, I had some fast thinking to do about what I was going to do next.
I had not seen The Diva/Kidane or the other musicians, except for Miriam, for a few weeks, and I was anxiously excited, like I was waiting to see old dear friends and ex-lovers. This time, Miriam was not at the bar; she was busy getting ready in the back. Mr. Selassie had hired a temporary bartender whom he kept watching to make sure he was not pocketing some of the money.
I was realising some things, or rather, they were floating to where I was standing, with my feet planted in this lake, or ocean, of life. What attracted me to places like the ABC, and why I had not amounted to much, why I was never going to win the Kenya journalist of the year award or the CNN Africa journalist of the year, was because what I loved doing the most was writing about the weird, that which exists just outside the edges of what we want to know. The weird, but not so terribly weird that it becomes newsworthy and trendy.
I was drawn to writing about the crazy old guy who wore nylon sisal sacks and nothing else, even though he could have worn clothes donated to him by a local church or walked about naked with his crazy licence. He would wear only sisal sacks. He just felt more comfortable in sacks, he would say when asked. I should write his story.
Or this other guy who had been a newscaster before madness caught up with him — and now he sits in a bar in my hometown, where he reads newspapers as if on TV for free beer and food. I had told Maaza the story, imitating the crazily groomed, moustache-twisted-at-the-end, fast-talking crazy newscaster with the uncombed, dreading afro. I should write his story.
Or get this about the Kikuyu. Traditionally, women could marry women. One of the women had to be propertied, preferably be a widow, before being allowed to marry another woman. Some women had multiple wives. When I was growing up, a neighbour to one of my relatives was married to a woman. Everyone wanted to believe the marriages were asexual, but common sense would suggest otherwise. I should write about it; it would be perfect for The National Inquisitor. Why should I care about digging dirt in the city sewers when I could write about lesbian sex and marriage amongst the Kikuyu? Life itself was a tabloid!
Mr. Selassie got on the mic and thanked all of us for coming. With fanfare, he opened a briefcase. ‘Five million Kenya shillings in dollars,’ he announced. He could have said, ‘Fifty thousand or so dollars,’ but it would not have had the same ring to it; the purse in dollars would have felt lighter. He called up one of his bouncers to come and hold up a boxing championship belt that read in big gold letters ‘King of Tizita.’
‘Queen!’ the audience yelled, almost in unison.
‘A king is also queen,’ Mr Selassie said, trying to get away with it. More boos.
‘The rules are,’ Mr. Selassie paused for maximum effect and yelled, ‘there are no rules!’
A roar of approval followed.
‘Except one,’ he added. The crowd jeered him.
‘On the pain of death, there will be no recording,’ he finished.
No one at the ABC would break that rule, unless it was someone who did not know Mr. Selassie.
‘May the best man or woman win!’
And with that, the competition started.
The Talib
an Man
The Taliban Man walked briskly towards the stage, stopping two or three times to bow to the near-hysterical crowd. He was dressed in a business suit, his hair braided and pulled back into a ponytail. He was in sharp contrast to the humble and chaotic ABC; he was a walking island of perfectibility — youth, looks and self-possession all rolled into one. He waved as he jumped into the boxing ring stage, walked to his guitar, raised it up for all to see and kissed it.
He said he was going to warm us up first by doing a version of his “Taliban Man’s Song,” but this time in Amharic and rapping only the chorus (which he had tweaked since the last time I heard it) in English. By the time he was doing the chorus a third time, the crowd was ready to join in, missing some of the words but not the spirit of the song — a coliseum of voices rapping, some falling out and others joining:
The Taliban Man is here to stay
But my love is always ahead of me
I follow her, and we drink and love
From the river of this life, in hell or heaven
You strike a child, you strike The Taliban Man
Strike me and you have struck my woman
He waited for our laughter to subside. ‘Now you are ready…. This Tizita is by the lovely Bezawork,’ he said as he adjusted and clasped his capo onto the guitar’s neck. He strummed once or twice to make sure it was still in tune and got to it. He slipped into Bezawork’s Tizita, with echoes of The Diva’s rendition in front of 60,000 people back in Addis still ringing in my ears.
One would have expected the bravado of hip-hop to carry through into his music, but his voice sounded like it was straining against a hammer that was beating it down at every note as it tried to soar alongside his guitar. And yet, maybe because what we could hear was his vulnerability as his voice searched for something it could not quite get to, it was beautiful. He was still not quite there.
He slid the capo up, narrowed down the distance between sounds, his fingers moving so furiously that time came to a standstill, and then he let his voice rush into the slowed-down waterfall.
Unbury Our Dead with Song Page 17
