Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2 page)

Our mother has banned her from saying God’s name.

The Kitchen

Half a papaya and a palmful of sesame oil;

lately, your husband’s mind has been elsewhere.

Honeyed dates, goat’s milk;

you want to quiet the bloating of salt.

Coconut and ghee butter;

he kisses the back of your neck at the stove.

Cayenne and roasted pine nuts;

you offer him the hollow of your throat.

Saffron and rosemary;

you don’t ask him her name.

Vine leaves and olives;

you let him lift you by the waist.

Cinnamon and tamarind;

lay you down on the kitchen counter.

Almonds soaked in rose water;

your husband is hungry.

Sweet mangoes and sugared lemon;

he had forgotten the way you taste.

Sour dough and cumin;

but she cannot make him eat, like you.

Fire

i

The morning you were made to leave

she sat on the front steps,

dress tucked between her thighs,

a packet of Marlboro Lights

near her bare feet, painting her nails

until the polish curdled.

Her mother phoned–

What do you mean he hit you?

Your father hit me all the time

but I never left him.

He pays the bills

and he comes home at night,

what more do you want?

Later that night she picked the polish off

with her front teeth until the bed you shared

for seven years seemed speckled with glitter

and blood.

ii

On the drive to the hotel, you remember

the funeral you went to as a little boy,

double burial for a couple who

burned to death in their bedroom.

The wife had been visited

by her husband’s lover,

a young and beautiful woman who paraded

her naked body in the couple’s kitchen,

lifting her dress to expose breasts

mottled with small fleshy marks,

a back sucked and bruised, then dressed herself

and walked out of the front door.

The wife, waiting for her husband to come home,

doused herself in lighter fluid. On his arrival

she jumped on him, wrapping her legs around

his torso. The husband, surprised at her sudden urge,

carried his wife to the bedroom, where

she straddled him on their bed, held his face

against her chest and lit a match.

iii

A young man greets you in the elevator.

He smiles like he has pennies hidden in his cheeks.

You’re looking at his shoes when he says

the rooms in this hotel are sweltering.

Last night in bed I swear I thought

my body was on fire.

When We Last Saw Your Father

He was sitting in the hospital parking lot

in a borrowed car, counting the windows

of the building, guessing which one

was glowing with his mistake. 

You Were Conceived 

On the night of our secret wedding

when he held me in his mouth like a promise

until his tongue grew tired and fell asleep,

I lay awake to keep the memory alive.

In the morning I begged him back to bed.

Running late, he kissed my ankles and left.

I stayed like a secret in his bed for days

until his mother found me. 

I showed her my gold ring,

I stood in front of her naked, 

waved my hands in her face.

She sank to the floor and cried.

At his funeral, no one knew my name.

I sat behind his aunts,

they sucked on dates soaked in oil.

The last thing he tasted was me. 

Trying to Swim With God

Istaqfurulah

My mother says this city is slowly killing all our women;

practising back strokes at the local swimming pool.

I think of Kadija, how her body had failed her

on the way down from the block of flats.

The instructor tells us that the longest

a human being has held their breath under water

is 19 minutes and 21 seconds. At home in the bath,

my hair swells to the surface like vines, I stay submerged

until I can no longer stand it, think of all the things

I have allowed to slip through my fingers.

Inna lillahi Wa inna ilaihi Rajioon.

My mother says no one can fight it –

the body returning to God,

but the way she fell, face first,

in the dirt,

mouth full of earth,

air, teeth, blood,

wearing a white cotton baati,

hair untied and smoked with ounsi,

I wonder if Kadija believed

she was going to float.

Questions for Miriam

Were you ever lonely?

Did you tell people that songs weren’t

the same as a warm body, a soft mouth?

Did you know how to say no to young men

who cried outside your hotel rooms?

Did you listen to the songs they wrote,

tongues wet with praise for you?

What sweaty bars did you begin in?

Did you see them holding bottles by the neck,

hair on their arms rising as your notes hovered

above their heads?

Did you know of the girls who sang into their fists

mimicking your brilliance?

Did they know that you were only human?

My parents played your music at their wedding.

Called you Makeba, never Miriam, never first name,

always singer. Never wife, daughter, mother,

never lover, aching.

Did you tell people that songs weren’t the same

as a warm body or a soft mouth? Miriam,

I’ve heard people using your songs as prayer,

begging god in falsetto. You were a city

exiled from skin, your mouth a burning church.

Conversations About Home

(at the Deportation Centre)

Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? When I meet others like me I recognise the longing, the missing, the memory of ash on their faces. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. I’ve been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language. I know a shame that shrouds, totally engulfs. I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I’m bloated with language I can’t afford to forget.

*

They ask me
how did you get here
? Can’t you see it on my body? The Libyan desert red with immigrant bodies, the Gulf of Aden bloated, the city of Rome with no jacket. I hope the journey meant more than miles because all of my children are in the water. I thought the sea was safer than the land. I want to make love, but my hair smells of war and running and running. I want to lay down, but these countries are like uncles who touch you when you’re young and asleep. Look at all these borders, foaming at the mouth with bodies broken and desperate. I’m the colour of hot sun on the face, my mother’s remains were never buried. I spent days and nights in the stomach of the truck; I did not come out the same. Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.

*

I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officer, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.

*

I hear them say
go home
, I hear them say
fucking immigrants, fucking refugees
. Are they really this arrogant? Do they not know that stability is like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second; the next you are a tremor lying on the floor covered in rubble and old currency waiting for its return. All I can say is, I was once like you, the apathy, the pity, the ungrateful placement and now my home is the mouth of a shark, now my home is the barrel of a gun. I’ll see you on the other side.

Old Spice

Every Sunday afternoon he dresses in his old army uniform,

tells you the name of every man he killed.

His knuckles are unmarked graves.

Visit him on a Tuesday and he will describe

the body of every woman he could not save.

He’ll say she looked like your mother

and you will feel a storm in your stomach.

Your grandfather is from another generation–

Russian degrees and a school yard Cuban national anthem,

communism and religion. Only music makes him cry now.

He married his first love, her with the long curls down

to the small of her back. Sometimes he would

pull her to him, those curls wrapped around his hand

like rope.

He lives alone now. Frail, a living memory

reclining in a seat, the room orbiting around him.

You visit him but never have anything to say.

When he was your age he was a man.

You retreat into yourself whenever he says your name.

Your mother’s father,

the almost martyr,

can load a gun under water

in under four seconds.

Even his wedding night was a battlefield.

A Swiss knife, his young bride,