THE EASTAFRICANPOET

(Manisha – the Hindu god who symbolises intelligence and desire; also symbolises state of being – where you mind is, there your heart will be also) . We are driving home from a party when my teenage daughter Zawadi points, “Look, Mummy, Daddy’s new car….oh, oh,…” and then starts to fidget with my skirt, trying to distract me. It is 9 PM. I slow to a crawl. Sure enough, there sits my Lucas, in his beloved-above-all-else black BMW. He’s smooching a High Hairstyle. A style where wet hair is saturated with ultra-gel before a bushy horsehair chignon is plonked on top. When it dries, the hair is so hard it can dice unwary fingers….or lips. Nasty hair. Obviously nasty woman. Up to nasty business. Lucas took me to a place like this. Once. It is the kind of lowlife joint open 24-7-365 where you’re greeted by the happiest party of houseflies in the world. You then walk past the bar to a counter to select your chunk of raw meat. Behind this lies an enclosure euphemistically called KITC...

The day it happened dawned normally. Something should have warned me, I should have gotten an omen of sorts, maybe an owl hooting, or a dead lizard- or dropping the hot pot of Okro soup I was taking off the stove on to the table- or, hitting my left foot against a stone solidly buried in the ground. Anything. I remember clearly the first time I met her. I was eight years old and waiting for a quick breakfast of spaghetti and tomato sauce which Mama was preparing, before I could go to school. Papa looked at me over the top of the sun newspaper which he was devouring. ‘Sandra ’He said ‘Get me my glasses. I can’t read some of this…this thing they print these days. My eyesight is getting worse’. I quickly went to his room to do that. The drawer where Papa kept most of his prized possessions was the location and I opened the first partition as soon as I got there. I saw the case where he kept the glasses. The familiar fading coffee-brown colored case which beckoned at my hand. I almost ...

It was a departure of sorts, last time I saw them. Or maybe not at all. I had left sigh by sigh, breath by breath over the years. By the time my leaving party came, I was somewhere else entirely. From this place, I watched fairy lights being looped low over long tables and rose bushes being pruned. The matching china came out with the crystal glasses. The guards in our gated community were paid off to pre-empt noise complaints, as were the local police. Our racist neighbours were invited in time for them to book a night away. A credit card and a note on the fridge told me to go and buy a new dress (“At least knee-length, Kaba!!”). The entire dusty front yard was swept. Forthright, our maid, swept it once from the middle to the left and once from the middle to the right ensuring even distribution. She minced around the edges of the yard until she reached the right spot. Then she lovingly gave the earth a centre parting, like she was doing the hair of the daughter she seldom saw. Deftly,...

The first thing I did when we got to Leicester was ask Precious to use the bathroom. I did my business super quick, because I wanted them to think I’d only gone in for a long piss, and her loo had one of those inexplicable doors with frosted glass. I flushed, washed my hands, gave the room a blast of the good ol’ Glade, checked the bowl for skid marks and got out of there. Z and I had come down from Newcastle where we’d been slugging and whoring for a couple of days until the natives ran us out with pitchforks. He was a little off with me, because all the way down the M1 I’d stopped him every half mile or so for a pee—not my fault, I have a condition. The problem, as he put it, wasn’t so much my non-stop pit stop requests, rather the fact that I refused to use the verges like a ‘real man’. I admit, I was stoned and paranoid, but I’d heard this story from a mate about a bloke who had a mate who was answering nature on the verges when the ngonjos pulled up from nowhere, and get this, coz...