The Militance of a Photograph in the Passbook of a Bantu under Detention

Peace is the active presence of Justice. The wrinkles on the brown face of the carrying case conform to the buttocks, on which the streaks of water from a five-gallon can dribble on the tailfront of the borrowed shirt he would wear if he could drain the pus from his swaddling bandages, striations of skin tunneling into the photograph. This is no simple mug shot of a runaway boy in a training film, Soweto's pummeled wire, though the turrets of light glisten in smoke, the soft coal hooding his platform entrance, dull and quiet. His father's miner's shoes stand in puddles of polish, the black soot baked into images of brittle torso, an inferno of bullets laid out in a letter bomb, the frontispiece of one sergeant- major blackening his mustache. On the drive to Evaton a blank pass away from Sharpeville where the freehold morgans were bought by a black bishop from Ontario, Canada, on a trek northward from the Cape in 1908, I speak to myself as the woman riding in the backseat talks of this day, her husband's death, twenty-three years ago, run over by an Afrikaner in the wrong passing lane; the passbook on the shoulder of the road leading to Evaton is not the one I have in my hand, and the photograph is not of my great- grandfather, who set sail for Philadelphia in the war year of 1916. He did not want a reception, his letters embarking on a platform at Queenstown where his eloquence struck two Zulu warriors pledged to die in the homelands because they could not spin their own gold. These threaded heads weigh down the ears in design of the warrior, Shaka, indifferent to the ruthless offerings over the dead bodies of his wives, childless in the campaigns with the British, who sit on the ships of the Indian Ocean each kraal shuddering near the borders; her lips turn in profile to the dust rising over a road where his house once stood; one could think of the women carrying firewood as an etching in remembrance to the silence, commencing at Sharpeville, but this is Evaton, where he would come from across the galleyship of spears turning in his robes to a bookmark; it is a good book, the picture of words in the gloss of a photograph, the burned image of the man who wears this image on the tongue of a child, who might hold my hand as we walk in late afternoon into the predestined sun. The press of wrinkles on the blanketed voice of the man who took the train from Johannesburg is flattened in Cape Town, and the history of this book is on a trestle where Gandhi worshipped in Natal, and the Zulu lullaby I cannot sing in Bantu is this song in the body of a passbook and the book passes into a shirt and the back that wears it.