Mputhumi
Ntabeni
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QUEENSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - My father died from peptic ulcer last year this month. I went to my computer as usual for some catharsis and wrote these words when I heard the news:
There's a harsh finality about death that changes one's angle of looking at certain things. Let alone remembering the days when you were young. The memory of those days crowds everything I do. My father's tired face, patient smile, withdrawing silences that never trusted in the patterns of life that are accompanied by noise and slogans. The way he seemed to observe life with a tired compassion. My father was never a town person. He spent most of his time in his rural home where we shall be burying him this weekend.
When death of the loved one comes neat words and phrases go dead. Only a wounded heart remains.
There's a vague sense of incompleteness that my father's death has left me with. I cannot expect to express a lifetime of emotions overnight, no matter how hard my limbs and how it makes my head throb. I write only to reclaim what I've experienced and disperse the ambiguity of those experiences. The tenderness I feel for him is locked somewhere in a place where, due to my neglect, I now have no ability to access. It is hypocrisy and an attempt to flatter vanity trying to say things about the dead we couldn't say to them when they were still alive. Why must heroes always lie in graves? He was one of us. That's all I can say in this unexpected grief.
I thought, like Tupac, that my anger will never make me feel for a stranger. Like Tupac, it seems my life is driven by tragedies. We're all driven by instincts that transcend our own volition and understanding. There's an all encompassing Reality that shapes our rough-hewn desires.
Thinking about my father's life is like paying tribute to defeated things. It was in thinking about his life that I felt the whole lot of us who call ourselves educated blacks are mortgaging our future to the highest bidder. It made me want to visit defeated things (African culture included) because neither victory nor defeat is ever complete. Something of the victors dies in their victory, as something of the vanquished triumphs in their defeat. And the poet must reconcile things. It's because of that I left the windy city (Port Elizabeth) to try and understand my life by starting at the beginnings.
When I try to measure my life (withdrawn, defiant and reticent) against my father's openly approachable and humble life, I'm dumbfounded. My father was one of those uncannily calm people who deliberately expose themselves to the disgraces of the world. Who uses those disgraces as disguises for their inclination to natural goodness. I used the platform his funeral gave as my last attempt to understand his attraction to humble scenes.
My father's home stands on a lonesome rocky hill that overlooks craggy, rugged mountains. Standing there in owl's light, I was visited by a vague sense of loss two days before his funeral. Nkonkobe River sent dinged melancholy sighing notes from the foot of the mountains. A feeling of hollowness embraced me as a gleeman's song came from the riverside mixed with a shouting at cattle. I knew someone had just drawn water and was urging spanned cattle to climb the hill towards the house. Hewers of wood and drawers of water my people are. My father, their son, preferred to die with that harness on his back. To die as he lived, with a hovering spirit of poverty around his life, no more by circumstances as by character. He was a toiler by nature. Perpetual toil was the only cage he trusted. It's appropriate to let that ancient pastoral poet, Theocritus, speak of things only they understood better: No wide domain, nor golden treasure
Nor speed like the wind across the lea
I pray for: here I find my pleasure,
In this cliff-shade embracing thee,
My grazing sheep to watch at pleasure
And sing to you Sicilian Sea...
My father could have uttered those words.
What of us who live the drill of stabbing mortality we call "urban life?" Us who measure success by ledger books. We're suspicious of that exquisite simplicity; of that frugal neatness in living. For my father it was in his veins. He lived it. I grew up being told that rural society is brutal and savage. That in its customs it dictates manners and need justifies means. If you ask me I see more elements of amoral Darwinism in our urban way of life than in the rural.
My father was disillusioned by the hype of modern living which imprisons by its achievements. He followed the spirit of his dissatisfaction. It brought him back to the point where he saw anew with different eyes the life of his youth. He trusted that life more so he stayed. His actions lowered his esteem in the eyes of the worldly. His life pricks my heart.
It was extremely cold the day we buried my father. The wind blew snow flakes that refused to melt on our shoulders and heads. Mountain tops looked like something off a postcard from Switzerland. Lord knows when the cold wind blows it'll turn your head around... (James Taylor).
Eulogies are the worst part of African funerals. They're lengthy, irrelevant, monotonous rants. Noisy gong and clanging cymbal that signify nothing. My father's neighbour rescued us from that drag. He was of old tribal wisdom and blunt dignity. His eagle face looked frail and full of tingling sincerity. His speech was of remarkable economy, deliberate emphasis from the heart. You could feel his words were informed by life. His frugal neatness cut through cant with an eminent rapidness and definiteness of a praise singer, curt without sacramental gravity. I adored his blithe indifference to death (a sign of a healthy personality or a lunatic). I'll utilise my poor Thucydidean skills in interpreting his speech, even though I might loose his bluff humour that undermined a too solemn approach to death while retaining the essential seriousness and the pristine intensity. That's something only those who live with a carry-over of the realistic detail from oral culture can manage:
"Today my soul is filled with heartbroken revolt against my own life. I do not know why we should be spared when our children are felled. To bury your child, as Mzoli was to me, is a harsh fate. Mzoli, you 'feign-hell'."
A thunder of laughter came from everyone because "feign-hell" was my father's saying whenever something went wrong. The old man went on, stammered slightly with slight lisp in his speech. After an hour of turgid rhetoric and sanitized euphemistic vocabulary of vague devotional speeches he was pure fresh air. He helped introduce a mood that was frivolous and sublime at the same time.
"I don't know," he continued, "who you think will turn my fields, sow my seeds and pluck my tares while you decided to join those fainéant you call your ancestors. Alright then Ndlovu (our clan name), have it your way, but the worms will be at you tonight. We're coming too, so don't be too comfortable and occupy all the space before us, your elders, have not allotted to you. It makes no difference that you go first we're still your parents.
"Your departure shook our hearts but did not agonise them. Nobody is isisimaphakade [1] in this world. It did not happen to you what does not happen. You suffered the fate of all mortal men. There's no resisting death. It levels all and calls all bluffs. In this village I'm old as the hills, my hair is like ewes on the field, but yesterday I dug your grave with a spade in my own hands against the protest of my family and friends who feared for my health. What do I need my health for if the likes of you are dead, I asked. Nothing made me more happy and proud as digging your grave. We're even then. Don't you be asking for any favours when I get there where you sleep with those striplings you call ancestors.
Your wordy and obsequious friends from town here say you were going to be a preacher. That's bunkum. Iyilo[2] like you. Still you were a mast in our villages. We're the people who'll feel the loss of your departure most."
All the time he said this his eyes were trained on the coffin. Then turning to face people continued.
"Allow me, people of my hearth, to leak my wounds in quiet. Nobody should drink this common crock more than a mouthful. It's on its dregs now let us bury uMzoli. We're getting fewer by the day. Damn this land shall not see the likes of us again. May God give us the light of His wand in this death journey."
With that he sat in deliberate silence.
The bard accuses us of living "deaf to the land beneath us." During the interment I stood very close to my paternal grandfather who is eighty-nine this year. So close I could see myself in his rheumy eyes. The bonding warmth and affection between us at that moment no wreaths could define. We were both aware of standing on the ground of our dead. The pall-bearers treaded lightly too. The funeral cortege trampled.
The journey home was uneventful except for the sliding of cars on sparse snow that lay dingy all over the road. Progress has caught up with our rural areas since we've had a change of government. Bridges are built over rivers, electricity installed for those who can afford; water is purified at some places and fetched from communal taps instead of rivers. Things are changing for the better. I wonder what Dr Samuel Johnson would say about that. The change of government has certainly made a difference to the happiness of ordinary individuals here.
Even my mother, who has a propensity to gratify spite in her nature, sees the improvements. Perhaps she finally realised that marriage failure is seldom an achievement of one party. It's sad that growing up must also mean our parents loose their cynosure quality in our eyes. All be it, I saw a dead man win a fight that day with his invincible humility.
"If you have been foolish, exalting yourself, put your hand on your mouth." (Prov: 30:32).
[1] This word is untranslatable to English. It means one who stands in the world forever
[2] Opposite of eloquent.
