Tlotlo Tsamaase Read online

  Eclipse our Sins

  — by Tlotlo Tsamaase —

  I pray to You, Mother Earth, Mama Earth, Mmê Earth:

  Sun, hide your eye, eclipse your birth from our sins.

  When Climate Change came,

  It tore into Your womb, Mama Earth, sodomized it

  —and we watched.

  We stood and watched You, Mama, crying.

  Still we didn’t listen:

  We were the wildfires

  The sky’s mouth was wrapped around smokestacks and tailpipes,

  muzzled, Your lip hog-tied around that foul,

  folding the poison into Your lung,

  burying it into Your oceans, making fire of soft bodies, perfumed in oil.

  We slit Your womb to throw out the children who lay in Your bellies across nations,

  across oceans,

  across skies,

  distances they sacrificed,

  as if Mama Earth is not their own,

  Claiming the crime as many names like xenoph—I don’t want to say it.

  Reality evolved to punish us for it was us who solicited climate change as Your murderer:

  We have sin-fever

  Your oceans swallowed continents.

  What was once a relic, is our savior.

  We can’t rely on technology when it relies

  on electricity wi-fi fossil fuels that are no more.

  A relic relies on nothing but itself.

  Our souls were the only things we could rely on; from solar energy to soular power.

  We had no other hope but to use them to light the streets and

  our homes to give warmth in the long, rainy heat wave-winters.

  Soon our actions, our thoughts became our enemies.

  Mama Earth, we heed Your warnings, forgive us, forgive us for our sins.

  The morning prayers ended, and we dispersed from the heat wave of the mosques the churches and tents in our respirators and cooling suits and the skyscrapers that raised their fingers to God’s eyes. Maybe one day Mama Earth will hear our prayers, maybe one day She will forgive us, and maybe She’ll set Her hound dogs—reality and the new culture—off from our bloodline.

  a-burning-soul

  It starts like always, a burning soul, a still sky, a quiet universe. A white rooster croaks, a death has been foretold. A quinquennial affair. The earth moans under our breath.

  It is dusk. The sun is menstruating, smearing a rosy tinge across the bleak industrial skyline. It has teeth. Teeth to catch. Teeth of metal and jagged glass. Nothing homelike about this city. The smoggy vapor of every citizen’s breath obscures the soular-powered streetlights. I gaze out our cinderblock apartment windows at the masked commuters below in the streetways unable to tell who’s human, who’s not. Every machine’s gait is seamless, the joints oiled with the occult of the upper-city citizen’s desire and our rigged poverty. In the misty-sandstorm-laden morning, I watch some of the commuter’s smog-voices and smog-words rise into the air, like round shiny balloons, turning the skies rowdy and gray, tearing open the ozone layer. Even the poorest don’t have access to at least one basic human right: a respirator.

  I lean against the window. Huff my breath until the glass fogs, and with my index finger, I draw the words “freedom is extinct.” My breath is smog. The window clears. I replace my mask, listen to the intermittent buzz-buzz sound of the breath purifier, the air purifier in our household, a secondary precaution in case the former fails. Every apartment window is a widow, staring back with lack of want and light, carved too deep into the façade to protect tenants from the penetrating hot eye of the sun, its fingers always hot and abrasive. We know it too well, for it probes our thighs, molests the unknown parts of ourselves.

  It is morning, burning with too much sun. But in the other room, a darkness segues into a deeper dark, the air humid with a breath laden with too much evil that our masks rust by the second. Mama is in death throes with an immense force we can’t see, but we can see the slashes it leaves on her arms, back, and legs. It wants to silence her. But her voice has been to God and back, nothing can stand in its way. Even the shaman takes his shit and leaves, his shame tucked in between his legs.

  “Fuck,” I yell, grabbing him. “You can’t do this! You can’t just leave. We paid you. We paid you.”

  He lifts his palms. “Sorry, sisi. You paid me for the work, not its success rate.”

  “What kind of bastard are you?” I shout. “Save her. You can’t just leave her like this.” My glare turns to Mama, her skin wet with sweat, exhaustion an axe in her mouth.

  “I’m not God.” The shaman struggles with me by the doorway. “You can’t force me to be God.” My grip is viselike, so he snarls at me. “Aren’t you the hypocrite? How can you force a stranger to be her savior when you couldn’t live up to the task, yet she got you, birthed you for that reason? So you save her. You can’t just leave her like this.”

  “Don’t talk about my birthright.” But my voice is weak, not as poisonous as my anger.

  “Fong-kong human,” he spits, and the words wash over me like acid.

  “I swear this is going to come back and haunt you, like all these diseases,” I say, my voice wet with pain. He pauses at this; for, an unfair treatment begets the owner a fatal disease. “Isn’t that how your wife died? She was racist, wasn’t she? She maltreated someone because of their skin-shade. The disease got her. It’ll get you, you fucking swindler.”

  He falls to his knees, misery torn across his face. “I can’t be God. I can’t save everyone.”

  My sister’s tiny arms wrap around my waist; her lisp weepy. “Tsholofelo, no, please, we’re burning up the minutes we have with Mama. Just let him go. Let him go.”

  My grip slackens. The shaman shuffles and disappears out the front door.

  Mama’s giving birth to death; 13 hours so far of labor. Our uncle, he stands in the bedroom threshold, the daylight from the other room sharp against his back, promising to bring a hopeful help. That bastard man. From the nook, where each of our melanin hangs, my uncle yanks his skin-color coat, throws it over his shoulders, it ties to his bone, taut as ours, black as ours. He wears our skin color, but he’s not like us.

  “I’ll be back,” he says gruffly.

  My sister, Botshelo, nods politely. My head refuses to move, but my palms fold into rage. The coat belonged to my brother who lost the war to this family. My uncle wears it proudly as if he faced the war. Bastard. He has a slew of habits, terrible habits. My uncle, his terrible habits have become the sewage of our city.

  Mama screams again. So I have to pin her down from breaking more bones. And I remember how it started. When she returned from work two weeks ago. I’d visit her at work, bringing her lunch I’d cooked. I’d watch her as she sat in her factory chair with knotted fingers, her illness weaving the time-holes, the laptops, the eye-held for the rich, the bones in her back screaming out of her skin. Her skin was too tight to hold anything. I stare out her bedroom window at the shock of sun’s glare, refusing to enter. I stare at the miles of the city, sprawled out. The city rests on tribal land in a metallic voice devoid of adobe sultry notes. Architecture is a refugee of this torn world, unable to run, its feet frozen to the ground. The city has teeth, and it devours the land with its politics and materialistic gluttony. Its devoured its way through nearby villages, upheaving homes for “better” franchised architecture. It’s not urban sprawl, its rural devouring; sharp glamorized buildings glooming above shacks and poverty. We, the city, stand in the tribal land of Kang.

  The country is the city, and it’s devouring its way into my mother’s body.

  Mama’s back cranes as she screams. Her teeth gnash, a few topple to the ground. I collect them quickly, shake them like d
ice for a miracle, and put them in the jar, place it on the shelf next to my great-great-grandmother’s. Mama refuses to die. Not yet. “Please, Mama,” I cry. “Please.”

  Her skin sizzles with boils, her scream penetrates everything, like steel boring into my bones. Something beyond us harbors in the air. Botshelo foolishly tries to plead with this thing.

  “Please, we’ll give you anything,” she cries, spinning around, unseeing. She’s naïve. She doesn’t know that to give is to sacrifice soul-blood. I cup my hand around her mouth.

  “To live is evil,” something in the air says; maybe the air is not an accomplice, maybe it’s the victim to the voice-holder that hides itself in its folds, camouflaging itself to taunt and haunt us. But that voice came when we hurt the earth; now Mmê Earth hurts us in turn. In our tribal land, the human soul is tied to the land; what hurts the land hurts the soul. I listen to the burrowing screams, seismic, of mama’s cries as she gives birth to death, fighting it too. Trauma punches a hole into our family’s time—time-hole—because he left, my father.

  “To save someone, it is better to kill them,” the voice in the air says.

  But why, why why why?

  This urban sprawl continues to eat into Mama’s blood, bones, her mind, destroying the culture that once disseminated in her bloodline. The still night is mixed with the sound of rattle-shakers, like cicadas imprisoned in beads, singing into a heated crescendo. The mourning voices of the choirs, a funeral song, as they beat their palms and thrust their illegal unfiltered breaths into the balmy air. The treetops inhale the wind, tossing it back and forth, collecting sin-dust and disposing it into our mask-less faces.

  Mama bleeds and screams, breaking bones that recalibrate themselves. “Someone is killing our land. Someone is our enemy. Someone in our midst hides in our color. Catch them! Catch them; if your land dies, you die.”

  Those were the last words as Mama fought death, a death that tried to silence her, but her voice rose higher than any flesh, a bigger purpose than us. Her voice, her words are immortal, lived longer than the people who thought killing her would stop her entirely. But she lives in those words and many more:

  “Only non-sinners cast stones,” Mama used to say, “which is why I cast my voice to you.”

  “But how do I cast my voice when it was stolen from me?” I’d ask her.

  My world ended on my mother’s tongue. She was the only one whose voice wasn’t a murderer. Mama wasn’t a believer, but she survived on her beliefs for a while. “Nana, I will only believe what I see,” Mama used to whisper as she kneaded bread, “therefore all these superstitions are just make-belief hallucinogenic kak that people like to eat.” Kak; crap, shit. We covered her corpse to prepare for her burial, but hours later we found it twisted; the apartment yanked the voice box from her throat, and days on end, the apartment whistled a hazy dark into the folds in between our legs. I hate this apartment. I hate this architecture.

  I don’t know why she had to test reality like that. Now she’s dead. She’s left us alone. And I wonder if she became a believer when she saw what was happening to her. Sometimes faith keeps you alive, but sometimes it kills you. So I hardly hold on to things or people. There are those before us who have sinned more than we have sinned, but they enjoyed the mercy of Mmê Earth, unlike us today.

  Our sinful habits are the cause of everything that’s happening in our city—every action must birth a more powerful insidious reaction. Our sins are here to reap our sorrows into our corpses.

  Mama’s gone and we are without her protection. We are demons; we can’t be exorcised.

  Each week, on a Sunday, we rose early, went to church, sang hymns, waited for the priest to slap our heads desperately trying to extract the demons in our bodies. We’d return in our Sunday church-anointed bodies, and in dark rooms and secret-encased closets, we’d remove our skull-covering, clean the sticky residue of toxic thoughts. Sometimes we’d lick them, gluey and chewy, push them down our throat, wondering how something sweet and delectable was a danger to the environment.

  Sun, Hide

  I pray to You, Mother Earth, Mama Earth, Mmê Earth:

  Sun, hide your eye, eclipse your birth from our sins.

  Earth’s hands taste like smoke and suicide.

  We held our unborn,

  lay open beneath the cirrus veils of sky,

  catching sunlit stars without knowing the death we salt their throat with—

  our babies, their eager lungs slurping, thinking all is oxygen, all is milk.

  In the mornings, we pray.

  Because of infertility from this global war,

  men have taken children from the streets, to have their children.

  It’s sick; Sun, hide your eye, eclipse your birth.

  living-as-an-orphan

  My bed is a comforting grave at times. The night is still, sleep is a villain, taunting me to lull in its quietude waters. Death is a silent walker. I am drowning in a room full of oxygen. Oh, dear God, no, has the sickness come to get me? Has Mama Earth’s hounds come for me?

  I don’t want to die like my brother, Itumeleng. Mmê Earth was angry. Her tides were high, her labors strong. She was purging a group of them one by one by their sins. By their lack of consideration for the other. The natives who looted the foreigner’s businesses, burning them down, beating them up—they were found walking about like ghosts, in incomprehensible chatter. My brother, Itumeleng, was one of them. We pulled him home. Several days later, he died. His xenophobic predilection killed him. Sin-fever is fatal.

  But no, I am not sick. Something else must be the problem. A loud siren flares in the darkness, my bedroom, supported by intermittent flashes of a warning red light. My respirator screeches into the midnight hour, wailing. I sit up, pinwheeling; my lungs burn with pain as I gulp for the excruciating unfiltered air that scrapes its way through my nostrils, frying my alveoli. The respirator continues to cry, clamped to my nose and mouth, a gaudy beast, unlike the sleek expensive models that my friends have. It has a chute leading into my esophagus as thick as a python that swells and assesses the safety of food that enters my body. Tonight, it gags me.

  Warning! Replace your respirator immediately. I need to change it. Warning! Pollutants rife in the air, in the city: carbon emission, racism, oil spills, sexism, deforestation, misogynism, xenophobia, murder . . . I’m not the only one screaming in our neighborhood tonight. Someone is dying because of a simple skull-escaped thought, and as they exhale their smog-breath into the air it contaminates us all. We hurt the earth, and so shall we hurt each other.

  I fall onto the floor, banging my fists, trying to reach for mercy, gulping for air, but choking from its excruciating asphyxiation. I yank open my side table drawers desperately looking for another respirator as I would a sanitary pad when I leaked onto the bed. Dear God, I don’t want to die, not today, please, I’m only eighteen years old. Please, God. I’m hiccupping and sobbing, desperately pleading to God that I hope I didn’t forget to at least leave one spare respirator. Several rustic ones sit aside for return-and-exchange purposes.

  As I rummage, the glinting eye of a respirator calls my attention as my bedroom’s soul-light licks its reflective surface. I yank the current respirator off my face, and it swivels to the ground, the chute covered in mucus as I choke out stomach-sac produce. Sin-dust quickly steals entry into my nostrils, making me sneeze and cough. I slowly dangle the new respirator’s chute like a spaghetti string into my mouth, and slowly slide it down my esophagus, and to avoid a gag reflex I attempt to do this with ease as I’m dying; it is a skilled art I learned the hard way.

  Eventually, the mouthpiece fits snugly into my mouth and nose. A green glow fills my face, the new respirator hums gladly, filtering the air that enters smoothly and cleanly into my body. Fresh air is as rare as a non-manufactured human being. Respirator installed into the body successfully! I made it in 2 minutes 39 seconds, but the poisonous, unfiltered oxygen slimes the surfaces of my lung sacs, deteriorating them f
urther.

  I fold into the floor, tears dampening my face, panic gripping me. The soul-lights in our home flicker. As renewable as they are, the bandwidth of our souls is bone-thin, in need of being replenished. Darkness will fall soon. Life, for the generations before us, used to be easier, air floating around their bodies, easy to inhale, easy to exhale. Mmê Earth, You used to be so healthy for us . . . until we destroyed You. I understand now why You want to purge us from Your womb. But it is unfair. How come we are the ones to suffer for the before-generation’s desires that smoked our future? I hate them. I hate them all. And now this is who I have become; I sinned by breathing more pollution into Mother Earth’s belly. Nonetheless, I must show gratitude to Mother Earth, God, and the Universe. I prostrate, take a deep breath, glad and desperate for clean air.

  My respirators last only a month each. This is my last one. I need to buy a new one, tampons, period-pain medication, anti-depressant medication, food, water—these are all necessary things that I can’t do without. Maybe I can do without food for a bit, but with my anemia, I need some iron at least. All my uncle has to worry about is food, Chibuku, and porn. Normally, Mama was the only one who’d remind us to change our respirator the day before they expired, or when we needed to buy more food supplies. These are the holes in our families, the holes we must survive with. Even now, I can’t maintain the tasks she managed. How did she even manage our water harvest, for when we open our taps, the droplets grip to the metal mouth, refusing to release; how did she ration and stretch our food storage for months long?

  When Mama died, I had to become a mother to people and grown-ass men I didn’t even give birth to. I only care for my sister. But my bones are tired, they want a rest I’m too afraid to give.

  the-time-hole

  Every girl-child is given one of three roles: warriorship, housewifery, birther of death. My sister is neither, so she is considered useless. It’s only been years since my mother died, but it feels just like yesterday. The time-hole initiates the memory every month. We can’t run away from it. My cousin is rattling through the house, carrying away dust and sin, which coagulates to the upper-roof of the soul-blood, slick and sticky. She came when the time-hole reported my mother’s funeral to every family member. Everyone is here. She keeps bustling about every room. I want silence and shadows.