Tsitsi Ella Jaji

Plant twelve date palms in a ring around the tarmac. Make them tall, slight towers, leaning into the wind as princes do. Fear that the sweetness of dates will churn your stomach. Plant them anyways. Plant the pudge of his fuzzless face in the arrested time of a school portrait. Plant his exotic name—found in a book that spelled dreams of eminence and hope for an uncertain coupling—in your ear. Know that whether it leaches into the soil or not, this ground was watered with his blood. This tarmac turned a rioting red. Strike that. There was a screech of brakes, and sirens howling like a cliché, then a volley of pops that might have been a game if only what came next was not such utter silence. The tarmac was red. There was no riot. Build a circle of palms and something to keep them safe. Build a greenhouse around the twelve palms. Yes, a green house. This land is not our land. Dig up the tarmac, the dark heavy loam of this side of town. Be sure to wear gloves as you dig through the brownfield’s mystification. Once the Cuyahoga River was a wall of fire. God knows how rain melts metal. Dig into that earth and build a foundation. Quarry it. Let the little boys and little girls of Shaker Heights and Orange bring a Game Boy or cellphone, or other toy made our of coltan that, chances are, a little boy or little girl dug up by hand in the DRC. Let the children lay their shiny toys in the foundation. Seal up ground with molten lead. Die-cast its melted weight. Yes, make a typecaster’s mold, and leave it a dull grey, like flint. Stamp out a broadside, only set it in the foundation’s floor. Let us read the letter that says this officer was unfit. Let us go over it step by step, every time we walk toward the green house of imaging what this boy’s boyhood should have been, the fulfilling of his name, his promise. Plant an oasis here. How is not my problem. * Let someone who remember how cook de rice. Let she cook de rice with palm oil ’til is yellow an sticky. Of course dem have palm oil in Cleveland. Dis no Third World we livin in. Let she cook she rice an peas. Let she say how she know to do it from a film she seen. In de film, dem people from de sea island gone to Sierra Leone and dema find dey people, dey people dat sing de same song with de same words. Come to find out dem words is not jes playplay words, dem words for weeping. So dema sit down together, an weep together, dey South Carolina an Sierra Leone family. Dey weep over de war, an de water, an de fresh and de forgotten, an dey cook dat rice ’til is yellow and sticky. Dey nyam it with dey hand, outta banana leaf and de old, old man, him say, you never forget the language you cry in. Let all dem little girls from Shaker Heights skip the gymnastics meet. Let dem come and eat rice and eat rice ’til they don’t want to eat rice no more an let dem still have rice to eat. Let them lose their innocence. Let horizons settle low. Let dates and raisin and apples and nuts seem a strange mockery of the new, the sweet, the hoped for. Let us share the matter. Let us sit here under these date palms, and haggle over whose fault it is. Let the rage that says tear this shit down tear this shit down. Let us start with the glass walls of the greenhouse, as a demonstration. Let the rage that says I cannot speak not speak. Let it suck speech into its terrible maw and leave us shuddering in silence. Let the rage that says, black lives matter matter. Let that other rage that says all lives matter be torn down. Let the matter with how we don’t all matter in the same way churn up a monumental penitence. Let the date palm offer us shade. Let us ask why we are still here. Let us lower eyes as we face his mother, his father, his sister.

Oyehe heeeeeeeh. MotherPoet! Your fatha taught you to be bold. If something is true, keep doing it. Ah, you, Doctor Patricia Jabbeh Wesley! You are the mother of four children. Mama Wesley, you have raised four black human beings in this thicket called America. You, Grebo woman. You have done well. You have raised four human beings in this thicket of words and wordless slights. Ah, who can say you are timid? Who can say you do not know how to throw your voice into the air? And who would have pushed that air aside, if not for you? Who has come to the door asking for Liberian womanspeak poetry? Hehnnnn, they want to know, who is listening-o? Ayi! Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, we are standing on your shadow. Forgive us, mother. We have been crowing like johnny-come-latelies: Maonaka? Ndasvika panyika iyi nemakumbo angu, ndega. What! We are saying what? That we have arrived? Is it?

Tete sits me down and tells me the story of our ankestors. She says it with a hard K.I squelch my sass, and listen. Our ankestors were hunters, of the zebra totem. There were two brothers and a very beautiful sister, as sweet as a sugar bean. So they called her VaNyemba. They came all the way from Mozambique to this place, tracking wild game. When the chief saw VaNyemba’s beauty, he granted her brothers leave to hunt on his land. They set out to hunt early, leaving VaNyemba to tend the fire. She was very beautiful.              The chief surprised her. She screamed, but her brothers were far, far. He was a heavy man, and as he thrust himself inside her he found her penis. Our VaNyemba hanged her busted bare body. When the chief saw it, he was afraid. He stripped off his regalia and fled, leaving the land to her brothers. That is the land they buried her in. And that is how we came to live in Chihota, the land of sweet potatoes. I am sitting next to Tete, wondering if I will ever eat a sweet potato again.

It is so goddamn hot in our country that blooms —jacarandas, bougainvilleas, flamboyants— erupt in a shock of fuchsia from pipes laced with rust. Hokoyo! Step too close and your skin will crisp up like a chicken in hot Olivine. Everyone will see the fat sizzling from your innards. It is so hot that locusts drop in pools around your feet, their musical legs all melted. In our nation a waterfall is a cauldron of steaming falsehoods. S m o k e    t h u n d e r s … Maize simply withers in the miserly shade of thorns. Men quiver at cock’s crow and hang their cattle out to dry. Pumpkins turn to gourds. Midnight flushes out hunger. Ngozi dart in disregard across the oozing tar. Ach man, spare us your sermons concerning our weeknight brews: the problem we are facing now is the drunkard who drains his own water pot, leaving the mother of his children with one thing only: pure grit. Rhinos are shrinking Filthy crawfish bloat. Our grandmother is just seated as if death were a bus running late. We have now reached the stage where lackeys are openly trafficking dragon fruit, smuggling them through customs as if they were Marange diamonds. Meanwhile, at the small house, their scrawny young girlfriends are just hassling the houseboys. Our eyes run all through October, slash-and-burnt like rhizomes. We hear the drum’s skin crackling as it curls. We smell the coming rain. Archangel, your time draws near.

It is not like going to the bank. There are no hard candies in a basket made in China, and no Kleenexes on the counter. There is no refund if someone forgets to wish you a good day. There are no chairs for the aged, no toys for two-year-olds with earaches, no supervisor to speak to in case of the Absurd. There are no meal vouchers if it takes all day, no list of local hotels with a negotiated rate. No one wants to know if you are a doctor. Plastic is not magic. Seals are not signs. Your cousin-brother’s wedding is not relevant. Hell, there is no such thing as a cousin-brother. And it is always your fault: not enough planning, the wrong color passport, the misplaced stress in a word.

Walk through the edges, circumvent the center. (Circle the square, so to speak). Having parted ways with the crossroad, take each path offered, and unite into a thousand thousand fragments. Stutter in the tongues of men and angels. Spit out the honorific truth: rave stark as a mad woman. Destitute, discover the ancestral home and sit down to fast sumptuously at the high table. Comforted, stare into the mirror that divided all these years, the mirror that melts in the mouth. Now, speak clearly.