Embodying

Chapter Two - Killer Killer

Chizvinzwira's Story

You'll never get to know me. Not really. You're an absolute outsider. You're outside my mind and my body and my culture and my country and you'll never get inside any of those no matter how many novels you read about Zimbabwe's Bush War or what the freedom fighters were made to do to their 'enemies' in order to prove their loyalty to commanders who had over them the power of life or death or, worse, a life of disfigurement or disability or exclusion from manliness even having reached that age. You can imagine if you like, but you'll not be able reach inside my mind because even imagination has its limits. It can reach into the events but it can't replicate the experience. Imagining slitting a woman's belly open because she refused a command is not the same as being inside the experience where you have no choice but to take in the awful odour of her last meal as it exits her body through the gash across her belly and the knowledge that you opened that hole and that it'll never close and neither will the person-shaped hole in your life. No, you'll never know.

It twists you. Something like that twists you so that your head is always facing backwards. You measure everything that happens afterwards in the dark, muddy light of what went on back then. You get a job in a supermarket in the UK where the aisles are clean and your boots have no mud or blood to slip in, or any root or torn limb to trip over. You see the shelves filled with goods from all the places in the world including South Africa but even though you look for the name Zimbabwe on the packets and cans you'll never find it, because in your beautiful motherland there is not enough food for the people there and so why would farmers send food from there, where the air is naturally sweet, to here where the air is conditioned to be sweet in these aisles full of food that makes the people here think that there is a glut in the world. But there isn't. There never was. All lies.

I'm tall. I stand straight. I look far away . I don't have to look at your face. I can look through you. I want to look through you. I never want to see a face I might love again. If I love again ... but I won't. If I love then you will tear a part of me away when you die. And you will die. Everyone goes away and I have had enough pieces torn from my heart to fill a world. My world. There's no way to ... I can't tell you what I mean. I have words but they stick in my throat. No, they don't even get as far as my throat, they stick in my mind. I have the names of flowers that I learnt as a child as I walked with my father. My father. Stuck. I don't want to talk about my father. He is gone. There's nothing I can do to bring him back. There's nothing I could have done to keep him with us. Nothing. I would have joined him if ... Yes, I should have joined him. I should be dead. He should be alive and I should be dead. I don't even have the decency to remember him. I can't. Everything is coloured by blood. His blood. My blood. I can't. I just can't. All I can do is stand tall and look far away. If I look far enough away then maybe I can ... I don't know what I want. Only to live. Only to make it all worth it by surviving. Not even living. Just surviving.

I don't think about my age. Maybe I'm in my fifties. It doesn't matter. My family are all gone and there are no papers. The government is corrupt in Zimbabwe. I paid for my passport in a different way. The official channels are all unofficial. There are people who take over. They don't work for the pay from their bosses. It wouldn't be enough. They make their pay from the people. They all do. We have only the right to make whatever payment they demand. We must do only what they tell us we must do. If a document needs printing then it gets printed. Records are then made afterwards. Marks of a pen on paper to make a record of us who we are after money has been paid. Who knows who we were before. Who cares. I had to pay in a different way to get my paper. To get my passport. To get away.

If you think that I love when you see me laugh then it's only because you can't see my heart. It's built on lies. If I cut myself then the blood looks red. It's not. My blood is as black as my heart. We are all born bad. Some get lucky and find ways to cleanse themselves. To get redeemed in the name of something or someone holy. I tried to do that but it didn't hold. It melted away in the sun's heat. Burned from me by the river of black that flows through these veins. Black as my skin. Ebony, like the tree. Not like a living, breathing tree but like the pieces that are carved in hobgoblin shapes to sell to the tourists. I smiled and held out my hand. We are always smiling and holding out out hands when the tourists come around with their wallets endlessly full of money. Cut the wood, carve the wood, sell the wood and show your  white teeth, boy. Boy, give me water. Boy, move. Boy. Always a boy. But at night, I grind my teeth like a man and the hate springs up like the muscles in my jaw. And I dream when I can sleep. I dream that you will all be gone and that we will rise. I will rise. Then nothing. There's nothing. Empty dreams with no voices except those of the people that are gone from me.