Shadows

By Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma has won international acclaim for her short fiction. In this, her first collection – consisting of a novella and five short stories – Novuyo displays the breathtaking talent that has seen her win numerous awards. She sketches, with astounding accuracy, the realities of daily life in Zimbabwean townships and the peculiar intricacies of being a foreigner in Johannesburg. Vivid, sparse and, at times, tragically beautiful, Shadows is the work of a major new African voice.

In the novella, Mpho, a young artist, wanders the streets of Bulawayo, wondering at the savagery of his neighbours. Their drive for survival has turned them into animals. Jobless, powerless and angry, he watches his ugly, ageing mother leave each night to prowl the streets in search of Johns, of love and of youth. When his mother dies alone in a hospital of AIDS for which the clinic could not provide ARVs, Mpho flees to Joburg to search for his girlfriend Nomsa. He finds her doing what he so hated in his mother – taking off her clothes in front of strangers for money. She wants jewels, diamonds, nice cars. Things he can’t provide. He returns to Bulawayo and is charged with “insulting and undermining the authority of the President of the republic of Zimbabwe and causing prejudice to the creed of the state as a whole” for his unwittingly controversial paintings. Standing trial for treason, Mpho wants nothing than to join his mother in the shadows.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: Jun 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780795704819

Book preview

SHADOWS

Sing song sung for many suns

Sung in fluttering hearts,

Dying in glare of sun

Speak up speak up! Yet –

Soft sound cedes to serpent hissss

Sweat – red as blood – seeps through hatred sores

Sows seeds of sorrow

That

Sway in wind like stalks in

Mourning

Speak up speak up! Yet –

Several suns later here we are

. . . Once more

Slopping through soapy waters of

Sorrow

Sun shines shanty like silver

Beneath

Chanting masses fisted hands

(Pamberi! – Have we been here before?)

Punch in gut

Insipid stares

As

Death dances

In delightful seduction

. . . (Varoyi naked on grave) . . .

Sing song sung for many suns

Sung in fluttering hearts,

Dying in glare of sun

For when new sun rises on the morrow

To stain sky with pale-lit sorrow

We shall – you and I –

Have forgotten

Have forgotten

That man we watched die on the brow

Bludgeoned black by brutes we saw before

Bitter day back in 08 –

Life Politics

I want to be alone.

But a man is never alone in the township. The township is like a loud woman who follows you everywhere, staggering with a Castle Lager in hand, she will not let you alone. The children are standing in the street with their tongues stuck out to taste the precious rain. But there is no rain just yet, only the smell of it in the sullen air.

I arch my neck; the sky is a ceiling of silvery sheets. They reflect a light that stings my eyes. If you look at the people as one throbbing mass, they blur into a collision of colour: fleshy buttocks beneath a sarong; pink Madonna stretched taut across bouncing breasts, nipples visible through the flimsy fabric. Some­where, colour becomes a stench – I’m stumbling past Nyoni’s house, where a sewer burst several nights ago: the family woke up to find shit bubbling through the cracks in the kitchen floor.

I walk. Past Kaduna Shops, where a newly arrived mealie-­meal truck is wreaking havoc. Faces I have known all my life – Dlomo, MaMloyi, Malaba with his bald head and Mupostori church robes, even Poppi with his comic face squashed into stupidity – they all distort into monsters, hungry for so long that all they now know is how to be greedy. I walk. Past MaG’s shebeen, where I ignore the greetings. In the gutter, a stream of shit flows. And there, in the midst of all that shit, clumps of wild sugar cane flourish, their stalks pumped full of sewer water.

The houses shrink before me until I come across the one I’ve been looking for. It’s a brick facade with plastic sheeting in the windows, and an asbestos roof with a hole gaping at the sky. There is Nomsa, dark-chocolate skin bent over a fire under a lemon tree. With the dishevelled hairs on her head running in and out of one another like a commotion, and the cakes of sleep in her eyes questioning the existence of this morning, she’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Her face is narrow, her nostrils flared, her lips full. It’s as though I am noticing her for the first time, her slim neck, slight breasts and the curve of her hips filling out her sarong. A rosary dangles from a necklace bronzed by rust, tucked into the space between her breasts. I wrap myself into her, as a boy into his mother, as a lover into his love, and fight the urge to weep.

She sways me to the rhythms of her body and begins to sing:

There’s a rainbow,

Ayo ayo, ayo ayo

Over the hill brow down

Ayo ayo, ayo ayo

If you listen closely

Ayo ayo, ayo ayo

You will hear the birdsong sung

Ayo ayo, ayo ayo

The birdsong sung.

I think my mother is about to die, I say.

Her eyelids flutter.

Hold me.

The scent of a woman is a comforting thing, motherly and erotic at the same time. She smells of Geisha. When I was a child, Mama used to lather my skinny brown frame in Geisha soap. Whenever the Geisha advert aired on Ztv, I would run into the house in time to mime: Geisha, lasts and lasts like a mother’s love!

Mpho? Are you sure? You know, you’ve said this before.

I know. But this time I really think she’s about to die. And she won’t let me help her.

Are you all right?

I am not all right. I am hard and limp at the same time, aroused by the hope of her, defeated by the troubles of my life. I push her into the house even as she protests, into the single room I rent for her, onto the mattress I have given her. The room smells of paraffin. It’s a modest space, with a two-plate stove in the corner and clothes spilling out of a battered suitcase. A poster of Mariah Carey, cut out of a People magazine, is sellotaped behind the door. I grope for Nomsa. My hands are shaking. My plunge is rough. I can tell this from the way she cries out, in pain rather than pleasure. But I am limp again, and the smell of her is nauseating. I roll off her, onto my back, so that I’m staring at the tin roof. We remain like that for what seems like hours.

The rain begins, at first a slow, cajoling drizzle that calms me.

Pitter-patter, sings the rain. Pitter-patter. Pitter-patter Peter Piper. Peter Piper picked a peck o’ pepper pickles. A peck o’ pickled peppers Peter Piper picked. Pitter-patter Peter Piper.

Down it comes, like sullen spit. My whole body becomes limp. Nomsa runs her fingers through my dreadlocks, the way I once told her soothes me. I swat her away.

You cannot keep doing this, she says. Talking to me, ignoring me, running to me, away from me. Talk to me.

I get up and leave. Nomsa tries to run after me, but she cannot, not in the rain. She becomes a blob of mud in the distance, standing in the middle of the street like a madwoman, her arms curled over her bosom. Her body bops up and down as she makes sounds that the rain snatches and gobbles up. I imagine she is screaming my name, over and over, her vocal chords vibrating like the keys of an mbira.

I angle my face away from the raindrops. Very soon I am soaked, and my dreadlocks are soaked, and my spirit is soaked. The people at the shops are now clambering onto the mealie-­meal truck, grabbing willy-nilly at soggy bags of mealie meal, heavy with the weight of rainwater.

I sit on a stone across the road. I take a joint from my pocket. I shield it from the rain. Light it. Smoke it once, twice, thrice, before it, too, is soaked. I watch them, these people I have always known, screaming and kicking and kicking and screaming, turning into people I have never known. Pretty grins and waves at me from the scuffle. I wave back. She is wearing a yellow frock that clings to her curves. I used to slink into her house whenever her mother was away on one of her cross-border trading trips, and fuck the nonsense out of her. When Pretty came back from Jozi, her body had filled out, with rolls around her waist that the men at MaG’s joked would make for better handling. The dimples had sunk deeper into her cheeks, which slid up her face each time she smiled, adding to her countenance a deceptive, childish sort of innocence.

Have you seen the way the girl now rolls her hips when she walks? Dlomo said. Mounds of flesh rolling to her step, khwa khwa khwa on the virgin streets of Bulawayo in those gi-gi South African heels! His eyes bulged as he said khwa khwa khwa.

Oh, somebody has already taken the virgin out of her! Shoko said. Probably some gun-slinging njiva with a 325i – a gusheshe, you know – and a big house. Or one of the juju-­peddling Nigerians – the poor child must have heard the man say ‘ma sista-oh’ and gone all gung-ho!

Pretty had been all innocence before she left, steering clear of boys such as myself loitering at the shops, whistling at her as she walked by. Now, her sweet voice, which used to make the Pentecostal ladies weep with its spiritual crescendo, has acquired a husky quality.

I stare at her nipples pushing against the wetness of her dress, and lick my lips.

She grins. She puts her thumb to her ear, her pinky-finger at her lips.

I laugh. Of course I won’t call her. She’s fucking Tendai, the baker, these days. He gives her as much bread as she likes, even when there is no bread on the shelves.

Tendai must be fucking half the township, ever since he got the job as a baker.

The rain stops suddenly. I look up and there is a rosy sky. But there is no smell of cleansing in the air. Just the wet smell of runny shit.

Luther, the township vagabond, staggers past, pushing his Scania. He grins and waves as his metal trolley trundles by.

Hey, s’phukuphuku, give me a piece of paper.

Luther’s eyes dance in their sockets. His tongue hangs from his mouth, like a dog’s. He claps his hands and fishes a dry receipt out from the debris in his Scania.

Good boy, s’phukuphuku. Like a good little dog. There’s a good dog!

Luther claps his hands again and scampers off, leaving his Scania behind. From my pocket I retrieve the Eversharp pen I always carry, the pen my friends say holds my dreams. I turn the receipt over and begin to scribble. I should have told you at the beginning: words flow from me like shit running from buttocks:

Big-hearted woman

Vein of gold! Vein of gold!

See how her legs scatter as she walks

See how her legs scatter as she walks!

Tripledoom be falling down her thigh

Oh, Tripledoom be falling down her thigh!

Her heart her bladder and a knife

Heart bladder and knife!

Somebody gone done stabbed her heart

Somebody gone done stabbed her heart!

And now she done gone falling apart

Trickle down thigh, falling apart!

I look up. A fight has broken out between Mai Nyari and Ma­Gumbo over a bag of mealie meal. They squawk and claw at one another, splashing in the mud like a pair of happy-go-lucky children. The people laugh and clap, egging them on. There is nothing to laugh about, and everything to laugh about:

     Oh, big-hearted woman

                  Vein of gold

Flesh shake ’n shiver ’n shudder sorrow

         Smooth peanut butter roast in sun

Do anybody know where she go?

   Morning in, morning out

All she do is stagger ’bout

    With Tripledoom trickle down her thigh

       Tripledoom trickle down her thigh!

Do anybody know where she go?

That big-hearted woman with vein of gold

With hips that span century of heartbeat told

See her gold trickle down her thigh

Trickle trickle like rain in July!

See how the children from her fly

Firefly trickle dying in dark.

There’s a queue for the men and another for the women, then a special one for the women with babies, but none for the elderly. So everyone is borrowing a baby and scrambling for special privileges.

 Big-hearted woman vein of gold!

She try bend over catch her heart

But see how her gold seep through finger

     Do anybody know where she go?

See how her gold trickle down thigh

Tripledoom trickle trickle Tripledoom trickle

        See how her gold seep through finger

Do anybody know where she go?

That big-hearted woman

    With gold vein of old.

I fold the receipt and pocket it. Stand up and make my way home. Mama’s house stands second from the corner. It has walls the colour of avocados that have stayed too long in the sun. Its asbestos roof is pulled low over its window eyes, like an experimental design from the book of an apprentice builder. It is a semi-detached, and shares one of its walls with its neighbour. It’s Mama’s crowning achievement, the one thing she has managed to acquire in her life. I have tried before to burn down this house, and I think one of these days I shall try again.

Mama is standing by the full-length mirror, prancing this-a-way-and-that.

How do I look? she asks.

You look like a Barrow Street prostitute.

She laughs. It is hard to miss the cynicism.

I do not exaggerate: today she has managed to squeeze herself into a black pencil skirt. Her breasts sag like flat bicycle tyres beneath a red blouse made from see-through material. She is not wearing a bra.

I don’t know why I bother to ask.

You look like a Barbie doll. Chinese manufactured. Those Fong Kong types that melt in the heat.

She laughs again, harder this time.

Her wig slopes over her head, so that the fringe misses its mark. She’s put on fake eyelashes and there’s pink blush on her cheeks.

Mama is a veteran prostitute. Past retirement age and still forging ahead. Still clutching at illusions about her beauty. She was beautiful once. Now she is just old. Not too old to be pretty. But too old to be a pretty prostitute.

We hear the car before we see it by the gate. It’s Holly, Mama’s friend. They met wherever it is that prostitutes meet. Holly is Nomsa’s mother. They do not speak. Holly is six years younger than Mama and drives a battered Honda Ballade with an idling problem. So Mama rushes outside the moment we hear the car.

Leave me supper, she shouts.

And then she is gone. The cloying scent of Fever perfume lingers after her. I should be used to this. But we both know that Mama is very sick, and so this has become difficult for me.

Ten minutes past one, and Mama finds me in the gloom of the sitting room. There is no electricity and everything is bathed in darkness. There is no moon in the sky. Holly’s Honda Ballade arrives like a frightening fart from the heavens. Then it