Exile

I am an exile, I live amongst strangers now.  People who don’t know my words, my stories, my tongue, who don’t understand how the smell of cinnamon can conjure up my grandmother long dead, her cracked calloused little hands folded on her breast in eternity, only someone who grew up with me who lived my life amongst my people know what cinnamon dumplings is and how it can comfort you on a day of no consolation. That is how we describe a day when the weather is as grey as your heart, a day of no consolation, when nothing can console you for the loss of your world.

I walk amongst these strangers and although they look like me there is nothing about them that I understand. I can’t understand their coldness for others who look like them.. and their false love of those who don’t. Their pretend love for those of other races who do not even pretend to love them back, who just come to their country to take and take and take. Noisy yellow and brown skinned people, invaders. Like the mynah birds that came to these shores with them, the way they cock their heads and look at you with their black bright aggressive eyes.. as if in wondering amazement at the stupidity of these people who have a country of great beauty which they just carelessly throw to them like it’s just a worthless toy. Not something generations before them sweated and suffered to tame. Not something they can also lose.. like I lost mine.

I tried now and then to tell these strangers who look like me. To tell them of the people of my lost world, of the women I grew up with. Whom I played with as children, whom I baked mud pies with, cried with over skinned knees. Whose voices now call out to me at night in my dreams.. call me with their broken voices.. broken bodies, broken eyes from their graves and from their broken lives, in ruins around them while the blacks who came in the night to violate them skulk away with the morning light.

I can nearly see them as they walk away.. that cocky looselimbed walk.. hat pulled low over cruel eyes, red eyes, red from the marijuana they smoke and the millet beer they like to drink.  Sniggering and quarrelling over the loot of the night and of how comical the white woman look when you forced the broken bottle into her vagina, how her eyes broke in death when finally you tired of playing your games with her body and tire of her whimperings through her broken lips and teeth.

I hear those women’s cries as their heart breaks inside them when “THEY” come to tell them that their child is dead. Oh.. it was a “botched” hijacking missis, botched.. yes botched as this sick country where a young man’s bright light of life is snuffed out for a cellphone.. or because some black man decided that the young white man's car although not new are just the kind the hijacking syndicate he works for wants. This black man do not care that this young man has a mother who carried him in her body and cherished every smile and saved his baby teeth in her jewellery box because she couldn’t bear to part with them. He called her “moekie” her darling boy, it was his petname for her when he was trying to wheedle some treat from her. Now he lies on a marble slab like a side of beef. His one eye hanging from the socket where the bullet entered his temple. And her life is over now, she will go through the motions. Eat drink sometimes smile with others later. But never will her world be whole again. It is forever gone and what is left is a dreary grey life to get on with.

I hear their voices as they try to comfort their children in the middle of the night when their children’s screams of unforgettable horrors wake them up night after night.. after night. Hush now baby, hush now, go back to sleep. See? I looked under the bed, there are no black men with black hearts hiding under your bed to hurt you like they hurt daddy. Daddy is not really in the coffin we lowered into the ground. He is now with Jesus. Really I promise, Jesus will make his heart whole again where the butchers knife ripped it apart. In heaven he is smiling down at us. He wants you to be a big boy and look after your sister and me. You are the man of the house now. Forget the orgy of violence that ripped your little life apart. Forget the blood that poured out in a seemingly unending stream from your father’s body. And how his eyes looked when he was choking to death on his blood.

And when they come again one night there is no daddy to throw himself in front of his family in a desperate attempt to save their lives. And the little boy has to lie with his hands pressed to his ears so he cant hear as the black men in turn grunt upon his mother whose awful eyes are on his and her hand stretched out to him.. be brave my son, be brave she whispers through her bloodied swollen lips trying to smile for his sake. It’s nothing it doesn’t hurt very much. And nobody hears when something breaks in the child’s head. Something that can never be whole again.

Nobody hears the last broken whimpers of the mother as the lifeless body of her redhaired baby is thrown into her lap. There is your child white woman, you can kiss her one last time until the bullet will take you to the same place she is already. Her little head is hanging to one side like a doll with a broken neck. That is where the panga severed the tendons.  This was before they lifted her up by her beautiful red hair..( the hair that her mother used to wash with sweetsmelling baby shampoo) and then blew her small brain out of her skull like you would shoot some rabid dog. And her mother insane with grief by now... cradles the tiny lifeless body to her heart as the pangas and the bullets put an end to her life as well. Her husband a piece of broken dead meat where they chopped him into pieces outside the house.

The hoarse voice of the women who were set on fire.. one never identified, she was young and beautiful if you look at the identikit of her young face. They raped her first, for hours one by one.. and then took her to the veld outside a black township and burned her alive, her voice gravelly and hoarse in my head as her screams of horror tears from her throat. Unknown.. just another dead corpse of another dead white woman.. there are so many so many. Women’s broken bodies tossed into stormwater drains. Their hands and hair seemingly alive as the filthy water move the hands about while the long hair swirls around their dead bleached faces in a parody of life.  Their last words were why me?? I want to live.. I wanted to love .. why?? Oh WHY??

Women trying to pull their torn clothing around their bruised broken bodies to hide the shame.. the hurt. Crawling away from the black monster who just violated their body whom they told their husband on that blithe sunny day they were wed that they would use only to worship him. Now that body, that temple has been spat upon, urinated upon by wild brutal black animals. Nevermore will their loved man reach out to touch them in desire without seeing a moment’s revulsion on his woman's features.. nevermore just open trusting love for him. Always now the fear of a man's touch on their flesh.

I tell these strangers these stories, it is all the stories I have now. We used to have other stories. We used to have happy stories of a people who despite so much suffering in the short lifespan of their nation managed to love and live and laugh. But we were hated and scorned by the world for treasuring our people and our culture and our GOD. For this we were given into the hands of our black enemies. For being lovers of God most of all, this is not a world which tolerate those who wish to keep themselves white and untainted by corruption and sin. No.. in this world keeping to your own kind is unacceptable everything that is white have to be dragged down into the mud, tainted corrupted and filled with hate of their own kind. So I have stopped now.. what is the use? These strangers have cold hard eyes. If I tell them these stories their eyes slide past mine.. they look past me  and through me and tut tut politely. Oh how awful, but then I suppose that will happen if you don’t let black people ride on the bus with you.