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i see a tanzanian at heart, forged of the indian ocean.

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Contents

dead rhythm

saba saba

ghosts of lumumba

revolution

love letter to daressalaam

Coal on Eyelids

Jugu Man, 1967

Mnazi Moja Park, 1967

Chairs on Head

Askari Statue

The Photographer’s Studio

decolonization

Walk into the Night, 1973

Slip of a Life

1975

Vegetable Gardens

Shamba

Anti-Asian Years

Conflicted Belonging

Departures

Bagamoyo

bereft

waterline

vembanad

waterfront

cochin journal

thangassery

beatrice

son of africa

acknowledgements

for Dad, in memorium, for dragging me through Kariakoo market in search of the best fish. 60s Tanzanian socialist, killer cook, we miss your Daressalaam mishkaki, and your remarkable letters in India ink.

ONE

dead rhythm

dead rhythm.

entrails of the city

bagamoyo to manhattan

port city dreaming

now, gargoyles and ghosts inhabit the undertow

the stench is an inchoate memory

there is no place outside the whale

TWO

saba saba

black streaks weathering the cracking building

a family of three huddle in fear

crouched under the bed in their coldwater flat

outside, the revolution

rats on the stairwell

soldiers in the streets

daressalaam 1961, a colony of the british

i was born of uncertainty

uncertainty of sovereignty

uncertainty of futurity

uncertainty of independence

i watched uncertainty on my father’s face

as he struggled to become a citizen

i watched uncertainty in my mother’s eyes

as she weathered the racisms of the street

it was with relief

that we the less than human

embraced African becoming

becoming African

no longer embarrassed we were not European

no longer embarrassed we were not privileged

no longer embarrassed we were the generation

who would invent the postcolonial state

sixty years later

i watch my father die

i see a man who dreamt in swahili

and longed for daressalaam

i see a tanzanian at heart, forged of the indian ocean.

even in those last moments bidding him farewell

in his anesthetized open casket

i see a man who loved a country that exiled him

i think

this is what citizenship means

a deep longing

for an idea of place

i stare at the frozen, shrunken face of my adventurous father

born in the malabar, lived in tanzania, died in the malabar

and under my breath i whisper, always a tanzanian

why does this matter?

this embrace of a cultural identity

becoming tanzanian

why does this sentiment arise for me now

in an era of placeless, stateless, nationless belonging

my father’s slow dying

captures the end of the colonial era

now forgotten

era of lost generations

mine and theirs,

sacrificed, playing catch up

without reparations

without apologies for colonial servitude

without regrets for centuries of lost living

on a new england summer’s day

wild turkeys wander the forests around me

i seethe at the senseless violence

a civilized rational “Europe”

a shameless plunder

sometimes

despite my rationality

my scholarly training

i face the haunting anger

the colonized cannot admit

among the wild turkeys in their resplendent calm

a deep-rooted bile, a melancholy my parents never

allowed themselves to feel,

froths among the verdant ferns

wild mushrooms, moss and lichen

the four-hundred-year old oak trees

ensconced in their own witnessing

their own withering stories

lost lives, erased cultures.

i hear the sigh of the forest

i hear its sway,

its wounded quarry of limestone

rambling brush, eroding wetlands

surging towards the now tilting landscape of stone,

mud and silt.

every july seventh

i silently mark Saba Saba, seven seven, peasant’s day

the day tanganyika merged with zanzibar in 1964

the day that Tanzania emerged a new nation

the day we began inventing a new

very small

life

out of economic nothingness

no infrastructure

no centuries of development

no educated population for nation building

no, we were the revolution’s casualties

walking to school hungry and bookless

peasants from the countryside

we were the forgotten generation

THREE

ghosts of lumuba

i walk into a walmart

its packaged drinks with POLAR scrawled on them

startle a forgotten thought: an image of its first

salesman in the congo

patrice lumumba

i grew up on lumumba street

in the city called haven of peace

you, lumumba, were a beacon in my father’s heart

the spirit of anticolonialism

seeker of african sovereignty

the man they tried to kill, but would not die

the man who was disappeared

but not your ideals

so, when i came to the land of the free

and found that no one knew your name

i was shocked

how was it possible that no one knew the beacon of

my childhood

congo’s first idealist

how was it no one knew the inspiring name behind

so many african revolutions?

i reach into my childhood

your history

the early years of african decolonization

i remind america of a man they murdered in

1961

i use my childhood

teaching your history

i remind america of their secret wars

i write about my childhood

thinking about your history

i remind america how much blood they have on

their hands

i write and teach

haunted by the ghosts of lumumba.

FOUR

revolution

the word revolution now sounds strange

emptied husk of a sentiment

strange to think entire childhoods were lost for empty causes

marching to the socialist revolution, saluting the communist cause.

are you, or have you ever been a communist?

i recall this line in my immigration papers

i thought, how does one answer such a question,

is it a joke?

how would any second world subject answer this honestly?

revolutions are chaotic

as schools become social experiments

as peasants become teachers

as bullies become prefects

as soldiers become presidents

as children become cogs of the state

as streets change names

as people disappear

revolutions carry the fallout of real lives

new rules, new laws, new fears:

fear of being on the wrong side of a revolution

fear of being the guinea pig in a failed revolution.

i could smell the unwashed earnestness of marching to the revolution

i wondered when the marching would stop and the reading would begin

as a child of revolution

i had to prove my africanness

deny my oily indian roots

beg my mother not to douse my hair in coconut oil

not to gunk up my eyes with eyeliner

as a child of revolution

i had to flee the kids waiting to pounce on me

wanting me to dance the “indian dance”

as a child of revolution

the world appeared kinetic, unpredictable

as a child of revolution

i got used to no sugar in the stores, no milk

i recall the sweat of peasant commitment

wondering when the farming would stop and the thinking begin

as a child of revolution

i recall in melancholia

the cynicism by which our youthful solidarities

were doomed to failure

even as they started

yet, the revolution did live on

freedoms, dreams and practices

FIVE

love letter to daressalaam

malaika, nakupenda malaika

naminifanyeje, kijana mwenzio

nimesahau how to speak kiswhaili, lakini

my life is experienced in your sweet memories

my sensations are rapt in my childhood longings,

sijasahau the languid days of watoto picking kungus

and cycling the back streets of upanga

ah, daressalaam

i miss your clear light

the long afternoons in the blistering sun

doing socialist drills in jangwani and azania secondary

schools

you may not remember, but i was virtuosic

excelling in maoist calisthenics with a passion reserved

for bharatanatyam

i recall when ndugu fatima and ndugu stanley

thought i was hilarious

in the blistering heat of the afternoon sun

no water to drink if you didn’t have any of your own

how did my comrades, only thirteen years old, survive those

dusty hours?

long days in the parade grounds

for what? make us better socialists? better farmers?

these were my questions, daressalaam

siku izi, ninapenda kuandika

i think of you more now than ever

kwasababu dada yangu ame kufa

lakini, he always longed for you

kept your makonde carvings

and an emerald ring of your elephant hair

SIX

Coal on Eyelids

Grey dust floats, grainy like a black and white photograph. Up it drifts, filling the railway shunting shed with coal. Honey, three years old, waits for the familiar haze of glinting coal to fill the air outside her window. Inhaling the scorched smell of coal spewing from the shaft of trains trundling past her home, trembling. The coal smell singes her nostrils, leaving her gasping for air. She takes acrid pleasure amidst the shouts and rush to scramble onto departing trains.

Forty-five years later, on a wintry New York night, a trace lingers in the peculiar stench of gasoline and burning coal; a child playing in the heavy haze of Tanzanian independence. A mirage now, she inhales its iridescent odor.

SEVEN

Jugu Man, 1967

Honey’s brother cries in excitement, “Jugu man, Daddy, jugu man.” “Can we have some jugus?”

Keeping rhythm at brisk pace, the Jugu Man walks every evening down Lumumba Street, Indian dancing bells wrapped around one leg. The vendor’s approaching feet evoke excitement amidst the lurid ochre light and decaying, colonial era worker flats.

The Jugu Man never ceased to bring pleasure with his hot roasted peanuts carried in a palm frond basket. Piping hot and aromatic, the savory nuts the Jugu Man served were the most delicious ever. Salty, warm and seaweed tasting, they offered a calm in the glowing twilight of the Indian Ocean sky.

Sometimes, after a blisteringly hot day, the sound of the receding Jugu Man’s dancing feet would fill the sea air at dusk. Tingling into the polluted night sky of diesel fumes, the early years of decolonization were full of hope and promise.

EIGHT

Mnazi Mmoja Park, 1967

It is 1967. Revolutions resound around the world. Algeria. Lumumba and the Congo. The Americans invade Vietnam. In Dar es salaam, new hopes are being spun. New identities are being invented. The modern Tanzanian. The Pan Africanist. The Afro Asian. Styles are proliferating. We haven’t landed on the moon yet. Youth crowd Mnazi Mmoja Park. It is the moment of the Arusha Declaration, a blueprint for an imagined future. Daring, utopic.

Students buy colorful ices in the melting sun. Magenta, toxic blue, acrylic green, sulphuric orange. They suck their ices hard, aware that the country is changing. Unsure of what it means, they wander, they wait, and then see a dapper man climb the concrete stage. He speaks.

Nyerere lays out an idea for a new kind of future that is impossible to realize, yet beautiful to imagine. A little girl sits on the lap of her school teacher mother. The sun is scorching. The President is charismatic. The time is delirious.

Years later, she reads righteous critiques of Nyerere’s era. She remembers the elation, the festivities, the hopeful conviviality that propelled her school days. Mostly she remembers the kindly man shaking hands of school children after church on Sundays.

NINE

Chairs on Head

Waiting for her hopped up and hyped up Greenwich Village child to catch up to her, iPod touch in hand, headphones in ears, Honey recalls, somewhere in the recesses of childhood, a distant image of children carrying chairs on their heads, stumbling to school. Decolonization had left a vacuum of infrastructure. Not enough chairs for all the students who needed to attend school. Someone had issued a decree that students carry their chairs to school. The imaginative idea was attempted briefly, leading to the surreal spectacle of children with school chairs on their heads, walking to school. The new policy of carrying your chair to school had a short term impact. It created a new battleground for the most comfortable chair in class. Names were embossed with flourish on chairs. Many mornings ensued with a quick struggle for the most comfortable chairs. Chairs that did not rock. Chairs that had a good seat. Chairs that were clean and not worn with graffiti. Chairs that had a thicker frame than the cheaper chairs that began coming in with the influx of student contributions of chairs. Chairs became emblematic of the educational crisis that primary school students were going through during the first decade of decolonization.

TEN

Askari Statue

Walking home from Forodhani Primary School toward Mnazi Mmoja Park in 1969, the sight of the Askari Statue always meant home was near. It was evocative, hugging the horizon. But who was the soldier who had been immortalized in black stone, or was it bronze? What was the dramatic incident forever captured in movement? It had such a colorful roundabout where fresh flowers offered a note of hope to the passerby of the busy junction. As a child, crossing Independence Avenue was always a nervewracking feat. Wandering home with school boxes on our backs, this was the intersection of farewells for the day. Through the chaos, the Askari remained an image of comfort, a symbol that colonial indignities were gone.

ELEVEN

The Photographer’s Studio

Along Independence Road stood an old German colonial building. Spookily dilapidated in sepia tones of burnt umber and mold brown, a first floor overlooked the main road, and it exuded an airy loft feeling. Walking to school, Honey’s attention was drawn to the building’s crumbling colonial facade alongside modern constructions. This was the home of Honey’s best friend Theresa.

Theresa was the smartest kid in Standard Three. Her mother had died tragically, and this invisible mark lent her a wistful air. She ran like the wind and was a math whiz. Theresa’s Dad was an established photographer, and the chemical residues of his trade lingered along with cooking smells. After much besieging, Honey was invited over to Theresa’s house for a playdate. Ascending the dark, moldy, hollow and narrow wooden stairwell, Honey experienced an unease. She had heard about the scary stepmother, but this prelude into Theresa’s life exuded a clinging odor of decay.

The playdate was filled with unusual possibilities. Loft living with curtains for walls and a photographer’s paraphernalia strewn around the large studio with a splendid view of the street. Somewhere between eroding walls and artistic disarray, Theresa’s life seemed so much more interesting, more open in its flow across different spaces. It was 1970, and Theresa’s home embodied the flexible lifestyles the era seemed to offer, far more interesting than the staid lives of Honey’s parents, a number-cruncher father and schoolteacher mother.

During their playdate, Theresa’s stepmother left the home to do errands, leaving her brooding brother in charge of the two children. What ensued were a series of sinister games that Theresa appeared adept at playing with her uncle. The most terrifying one involved Theresa sitting on her uncle’s lap, being rocked furiously back and forth. It was a game Honey had watched with fear and was soon forcefully foisted onto the man’s lap alongside the rocking Theresa. Honey began to cry. She knew fear when she felt it. Something had gone terribly wrong. It was under her and she had to flee this place. “I want to go home now,” she whispered in fear. “Not now. Your daddy’s going to pick you up later.” “No, I want to leave Now.” The man refused to release the child. Honey started screaming.

Finally let out, she ran down the terrifying dark steps, fumbling at the heavy colonial-era door. The man followed Honey, while Theresa looked on, visibly disappointed by the sudden end of a playdate. He reluctantly opened the door. Honey slipped out the grating wooden door, and into the shadowless light of a perfect Daressalaam afternoon. She never looked back. Getting home was the main thought. She had never crossed Independence Avenue without a grownup. Honey ran all the way home. The Askari Statue was her welcoming beacon.

TWELVE

decolonization

segregation is a neurological sensibility

its cordons are invisible,

but pernicious

you grow within its fearful boundaries

never realizing how it has structured your being

in its minutiae

your possibilities

your dreams

your fears

decolonization

implied segregation

fifteen years after independence

i still had not seen the european parts of town

decolonization

cultivated segregation

if you were not white

you never drove into the european part of town

it was the seamless barrier of exclusivity

colonial mentality

means roads are designed

to never cross paths with the less than human

decolonization segregation

life around the city

new circuits of possibility

to unlearn unspoken rules of imperial power

decolonization

contaminated by segregation

my friends and i walked to school

africans and a handful of asians

to classrooms with broken windows

broken desks

no chalk for the teacher

no college for the teacher

decolonization

hid segregation

somewhere across the city

white kids had plenty to eat

white kids had clean water to drink

white kids had interesting books to read

white kids had chalk in their classrooms

white kids had textbooks

white kids had trained teachers

decolonization

became another name for the impoverished

postcolonial predicament

of populations historically dispossessed

now left in penury

see, we told you

africans are not ready to rule themselves

see, we told you

africans need to be colonized

see, we told you

africans are not ready for independence

i think of these words, decades later

as i wander through european museums,

witnessing the signs of pillage

the reasons for enslaving populations

the reasons for my parent’s segregation

the reasons for my lost childhood

decolonization

was segregation

its roots lay in

the elegance of colonial lisbon

the wealth of the victorian english

the boulevards of brussels and paris

the gilded ceilings of the vatican

the churches of portugal and spain

decolonization

abnegation

where ruin by europe

left a continent to retrieve its painful path back

to historical becoming

THIRTEEN

Walk into the Night, 1973

The revolution had delivered everything it had promised for Mary Kimani. Bourgeois bliss, lavish company housing and lavish parties. It had been hard, living in the shadow of colonial warfare. Her father would disappear for long periods during the skirmishes against the British. He had been in and out of prison. But, she had not dared ask him about it. She spoke to him with a searching look on her face, seeking answers to questions she could never ask. The silent leavings, the strangers passing through, and a mother who kept the world simple. But chaos was all Mary could remember. It was with relief that she left Kenya for Dar-es-salaam.

It was the 1960s, and Dar was the hotbed of revolutionary zeal. Mary settled into the hectic life of a corporate socialite. The historic novelty was not lost on her. She was the manager’s wife and there were Europeans, Asians and Africans under her husband Hiram’s management. This was unthinkable during her childhood. Glamorous, with a powerful husband. Distractions were everywhere.

As the utopian headiness of the Sixties began to draw to a close, the buoyant days and heavy drinking nights began to wear away the veneer around the Kimanis. Beneath the bonhomie and boisterous goat roasting parties seethed a darker current. Mary began gravitating towards spirituality, and by the early 1970’s was increasingly uninterested in Hiram’s weekend binges surrounded by office cronies. Hiram increasingly stayed away from home, and Mary would call my mother frantically in the middle of the night asking if she knew where her husband was.

Mother had been Mary’s confidant over the years. There had been comfort in their shared knowledge of colonial trauma and a catholic upbringing, one Gikuyu, the other from Kerala. They had bonded together, exchanging African and Indian clothes and food, sharing their fears and hopes for their futures. Both women shared the silent humiliations of botched up marriages with men who were first generation executives in the newly independent Tanzania, and forgave them for that. They realized they were the generation of experiments.

One evening we were at the Kimanis’ sprawling ranch for dinner. Things did not seem right. We were accustomed to a well-appointed dinner table at the Kimanis’, with the latest Afro American music from the United States. A roasting goat, or at the very least, a barbeque spit with the aroma of roasting charcoals always welcomed us. This visit seemed different.

Mary had been crying. My parents had been summoned as mediators. As we children played, the voices escalated. At one point we heard a thud. Shortly after, Mary ran naked, howling past the children onto the verandah and into the balmy night. Her clothes remained strewn on the tiled floor.

Mother never did explain what happened that night. It was a time when things came apart across East Africa, with Idi Amin fomenting terror around expatriate Asians, leading to hasty departures of Asians from Uganda. The fallout in Tanzania was visceral, as anti-Asian sentiment escalated to random violence and leavings, my parents included. Mary Kimani had been a vivacious, cheerful woman with a gutsy laugh. What reduced her to this distraught, inconsolable woman?

Through the lens of time, the long brown legs of Hiram’s Goan secretary Jane surface in my memories of Mary’s unbecoming. Jane was a luscious, miniskirt attired distraction in bold colors and platform shoes. I always felt embarrassed seeing her as a kid. Her clothes were too tight, too loud, and the skirt way too short for her voluptuous thighs.

A particularly striking photo in our family album of Jane with beer glass in hand at one of Hiram’s interminable parties - leaning against the metal post of a slaughtered goat strung on a metal hook-took more sinister undertones in the subsequent years. A gourd of warm blood sits beneath the inverted goat’s slashed throat. Lusciously vermilion, the gaping serrated wound fills the spot where the goat’s head ought to be. Shortly after Mary returned to Kenya for treatment in a sanatorium, Jane moved in with Hiram. Mary subsequently took her life. For Mary, that walk into the night was darker than I had imagined.

FOURTEEN

Slip of Life

Mrs. Rebello taught English at the St. Joseph Convent School in Daressalaam during the 1960s. She was what one would describe as a groovy chick. Clingy stretchy shirts across her pointed bras and stretch pants with straps across the heels were her thing. Her height, unusual for a woman of Indian descent, lent her a particular beauty more in keeping with Western fashion magazines. Mrs. Rebello was stylish and poised, and so we were surprised when she showed up at our home one afternoon dressed in a ruffled saree, with her son who was about six years old at the time. Dishevelled, and puffy around her cheeks and eyes, she sat at my mother’s kitchen table, talking to mother as her son played Snakes and Ladders with me. There was an aura of tension about Mrs.Rebello that made her different from the languorous, smiling woman I had seen many a time in our family album. Children weren’t allowed in on the juicy stories. It was always difficult to decipher what was going on in the adult world. The scene remained in my memory as a strange, shadowy moment in contrast with the toothy woman grinning from my memory.

Years later, Mother narrated that Mrs. Rebello had lost her little son in a terrible accident. He was found dead in a cesspit tank. The thought passed through my mind how casually the deaths of children seem to crawl into our consciousness as accidents. There was no question of more sinister possibilities, just the awful image of a child floating in sewage in a hard-to-get-to death trap. The thought of the real story of Mrs. Rebello’s loss crosses my mind. What happened that sunny afternoon leading to a missing child’s death by drowning? Cesspit covers are heavy to lift, and just large enough to squeeze into. What game led to such a conclusion?

FIFTEEN

1975

Namy was my friend in Ninth Standard. She had bow legs and long satin black hair that dropped to her butt. Namy’s father was the Cambodian Ambassador to Tanzania in 1975. This seemed like a glamorous job to a thirteen year old at the time. Namy’s shyness drew us together, as we found similar respite in quieter hobbies than some of our more boisterous, extroverted classmates. I also envied Namy’s impeccable, serene home, with its elaborate service staff, its manicured garden, its aura of quiet diplomatic elegance.

April 1975 remains etched in my brain as a day when I sensed an impending terror I little could comprehend at the time. I was invited to Namy’s residence, escorted through quiet manicured gardens to the beautiful villa that served as both Namy’s home and the Cambodian Embassy. It was a playdate we had been trying to schedule for a while, one that had taken a very long time to materialize for her. As I walked up the cool steps to the first floor, I was greeted by a frightened Namy, who whispered in my ear that we had to be very very quiet. The hallway had two soldiers in attendance and even now I remember Namy teary eyed, saying things were very scary for her because her Dad had been called back to Cambodia and he was apprehensive of what lay ahead. It was also the first time I heard the name of Pol Pot.

The playdate was very tense. I have a blurry recollection amidst the regal Cambodian wooden furniture with serpents ominously winding their way up sofa legs and banquet edges, and the terrifying presence of soldiers with guns in attention around Namy’s house. And later, Namy’s constantly weeping presence in school.

Namy transformed from a bright, beautiful thirteen-year old to a red eyed silent child who would only cryptically say she couldn’t talk about anything, which didn’t make sense to us school friends baffled by the stark changes in Namy’s persona. Soon after that tumultuous visit to her house, Namy disappeared from school. I wondered how she could have just gone in the middle of the school year without saying goodbye. We were told Namy had to go back to Cambodia.

I think of Namy Bun Thong a lot. I have googled her name in its variations. Tried tracking possible political leads. Fruitlessly. Now, forty-five years later, I search for her, wondering if she managed to escape or survive going back home. I see her striking face, thirteen years old and eternally beautiful; she haunts my thoughts as the inauspicious date of April 17, 1975, opens again and again on my computer screen. The day Namy’s world changed.

SIXTEEN

Vegetable Gardens

Ujamaa was an utopian experiment in social engineering, but it quickly devolved into an authoritarian form of social control. A critical aspect of ujamaa was its enforcement of cultivating gardens, or shambaas, as part of the project of self-reliance. This peasantization of culture was in opposition to the urbanization of Daressalaam. On the one hand, the city was positioned as a new kind of socialist imagining that drew from Soviet and Chinese models of villagization; on the other hand, the city was evidence of individualistic mercantilism and the entrepreneurial potential that threatened socialism’s vision. Even to the untrained mind of a thirteen-year old, despite its utopian rhetoric and altruistic goals, the future of vegetable gardens as a way of life seemed questionable.

Cultivating vegetables as part of an academic curriculum seemed a legitimate goal if one’s future lay in farming, but if this was not the desired goal, then the pressures of agrarian labor seemed a joyless and punitive chore. In this scenario, I found myself trading skills: I would draw the botanical and entomological images for my green-thumbed comrade while he worked my tomato patch into a passable stretch of cultivated land. This arrangement, while provisional, provided a deeper insight into my own inability to be a good socialist—which was synonymous with being a good farmer. However, it opened a scenario in which art could potentially be a more suitable engagement for my own utopian ideals. This path did not have the grandiose claims of socialist futurity, but at least it would allow for the creative exchanges of skills.

SEVENTEEN

Shamba

I miss the sweat of the afternoon sun. The clean feeling of languid exhaustion from digging in the Shamba. I remembered this sensation when I picked up a pair of garden shears for the first time since I left Tanzania. Leaning forward, my head in the thicket, pruning the unkempt garden. My garden. A notion that escaped me until this summer, when an immersion into the landscape of New England opened up a forgotten longing. A longing for the languid heat of the Arusha sun burning my back as I strain forward with my jembe. Too big for my small girl hands. Something about the smell of earthy sweat in the sun, hands in the earth, of one’s own garden, opens up the world in ways I hadn’t known before. A grounded submission to the warmth and grain of malleability. An engrossing commitment that had evaded me for so long because of those years I spent tilling vegetable gardens without passion. And yet, the digging and tilling and chanting and planting had produced a deeper memory of landscape. Of soil and earthy locatedness I carried forever as a forgetting, a refusal to remember. So many afternoons digging in the blistering sun. A Tanzanian longing that gnaws on me now, a placeless return.

EIGHTEEN

Anti-Asian Years

Around 1972, the emergence of a distinct anti-Asian rhetoric began to infect the public sphere in Daressalaam. Kenya had already expelled its Asians. This along with a growing awareness of the impact of colonial land distribution amongst the natives and settler communities generated an aura of dissatisfaction that bubbled into open anger. In Uganda, Idi Amin triggered the explicit display of xenophobia by expelling Asians from Uganda. Tanzania was soon to follow with policies that covertly extracted every Asian corporate manager, as well as entrepreneurs of every stripe from the daily functioning of Tanzanian economic life.

NINETEEN

Conflicted Belonging

African citizenship is a concept fraught with contradictions. Depending on the region, this abstract notion is imbued with peril for the hybrid African subject. Early years of decolonization were the crucible of an economic nationalism that pointed fingers at the structural forms of class and race production in African states. This brutal geography of ethnicity and power fostered a seething undercurrent of suspicion and anger. Asians were the middlemen who fit easily into the category of accountable pasts. Predominantly merchants and burghers of considerable material wealth, during the first decades of postindependence in Tanzania, Asian Africans juggled an intricate dance of allegiance and alienation. By investing in the country’s business futures they staged their loyalty to the state; but simultaneously, they planned a swift, clandestine exit should the edifice of nationalism come crashing around their frail inroads into expressions of African citizenship. Socialist lifestyles demanded a flattening out of race and privilege. This playing field was grounded in peasant movements. There was nowhere to hide in an agrarian educational experiment.

TWENTY

Departures

It is 1973. Uganda is awash with Indians leaving East Africa. A handful come to Daressalaam in fear, seeking a new plan of what to do. An unfamiliar physical fear creeps into the daily world of people going to work, children going to school. A new foreboding of uncertain violence, and sudden attacks on immigrants. Amidst this chaotic period of public anti-Asian expressions of hate and a tightening economic culture of ethno-nationalism, family friends begin to flee Tanzania. I recall one incident in particular. A friend of mine, Krishnan, whose father worked for the United Nations in Daressalaam, was leaving as part of the exodus. This really hit home. Krishnan was my closest Indian African friend. His family and mine were tight. We were beach buddy families, driving in tandem to Bahari Beach or Kunduchi Beach every second weekend for swimming in the salty sea and long, biriyani filled days. Krishnan’s family had everything my family aspired to. The UN job. The international school for the kids. Their comfortable, mint new Swedish-style United Nations housing complex in the “European” part of town. Access to the West. A brother in the white bell bottom pants, studying for the bar in London.

Suddenly and unceremoniously, they were leaving. Because his Dad had the best job in town, it was hard to fathom. Here they were in a state of shock; the family with a pile of suitcases at the Daressalam airport.

Years later, I ran into Krishnan on Hundred Feet Road in Bangalore. A guitar playing drunk, he didn’t look so good. Krishnan and I had been best friends growing up, and I wanted to reach out to the now remote teenager with the bloodshot eyes. He remained a link to my childhood days in Daressalaam, now so wistfully lost across oceans. The introverted Krishnan deteriorated before everyone’s eyes. Last I heard, Krishnan crashed his car on Hundred Feet Road. He died at thirty-five, in front of his mother. And then I read in the papers that his hipster brother with the flared pants stabbed his son eleven times in the basement, in Canada, and then set himself and his home on fire. Since then, a darkness has contaminated those sunny recollections. A rotting secretive darkness.

TWENTY ONE

Bagamoyo

Edging the inhabited route to elsewhere, the innocuous town stands sequestered, and secretive flora fringe its borders like muslin. The mullah calls to prayer from the medieval mosque in the distance by the road. Filigree windows. Arabesque walls. Wrought iron gates of Omani detail. Compressed time and tempered distance shrink the pain of dislocation etched on the furrows of stone like wrinkles. Here lie cold tales of unnamed children. Teary mothers stagger, bound toward brutal slabs of concrete, a stage of stone that robbed people their history. A serpent scurries along petrified by memory of fleshed theft, pure terror made distant by the green of forgetting. Shadowless torment mottles the floor; blunt pillared grief is a testament to the terrifying encounter of mortar and maps, whittled scarrings of the past. It is a quiet scene. Bodies stolen in the stealth of night trudge in human caravans through slumbering villages bound by murderous clasps and wooden weights towards ships with onerous pasts. On the edge of the watchful ocean, a wordless accounting as Arab Asian African collaborate in their deadly human cargo of forgotteness. Liverpool. Kingston. Goree. Manhattan. Iron rings cold stone. Afternoon winds warn of fates deadlier than serpent or sting. Bagamoyo, a wail of diasporic memories. Mothers torn from children, families ripped from homesteads, children born in dispersal, siblings separated at birth. Cannibal consumption. A tale dimly remembered. Bagamoyo, a whimper of history.

TWENTY TWO

bereft

uneventful the passing away is

a single phone call in the middle of the night

uneasy haunting

news of death arrives like junk mail

dev devoured by crocodiles outside bangalore

raj unidentified for three days

mridula blown up in lockerbie

ian blasted on value jet

sensational collapse of thousands

glittering light and cloud

made casual though unspeakable

as disaster tourists stuff hot dogs at ground zero

how to mourn a photographed abyss?

bereft, the embers glow

TWENTY THREE

waterline

i

hemmed in by stonewalls

made impressive by sludge and slough

this city of islands recedes and rises

like its waterline

ensconced with hulls of sisal and coir

between lanka and india

etched with stone marking

chinese, arab, african, persian

the sounds of portuguese

the signs of hebrew

densely framed by dutch urban planning

a manhattan in malabar

ii

cochin

ancient city of crossings

of stormy contradictions

from macao and mombasa

mecca and rome

they came with dreams and dervishes

ibn battuta and vasco da gama

captain kidd and huen tsiang

to invent a traveller’s city

where mussalman, christian, hindu and jew

buddhist, jain and anarchist

jostle a modernity sped fast into the fulcrum of

maritime economies

lured by silk, cardamom, cloves

the treacherous pepper

that which bewitches time and intoxicates

history

decaying the waterline with distant desire

iii

cochin, monsoon city

of minarets, cupolas, spires and modernist

hopes

whose roofs erode the dank of dark pasts

fervent conversions

rapes of the pagan

concubinage without consequence

the mystique of the franciscans

the intensity of the jesuits

the severity of the syrians

the legality of the romans

their names speak

netto correya abreu vieira

decunha menezes lobo

invoking lusitania and malabar

the south china seas and the indian ocean

soviet communism and cuban socialism

here lenin and mecca

cell phones and outsourcing

shudder a city in convulsion

cochin, mendicant city

nerve of the world

TWENTY FOUR

vembanad

stench

the stench hits you first

millennia of fish drying in the sun

deep penetrating sea stench

of salt, dried skin and chinese fishing nets

hanging out to dry

now, the fish are mostly gone

japanese trawlers out at sea

hug the coastline like sea leeches

overfishing the oceans

the sushi economy of depletion

except there are plenty of boney fish

thin scales of delight

hairs of bones dusted with meat

fragile, tender, intense

TWENTY FIVE

waterfront

i loiter the medieval city of yellowing facades

vagrant desires wander

the smell of seaweed consoles

that history will be contended with

what can i write in the afterdrift of salt and mold?

distant chugging of diesel boats stain the sky with disillusion

fractured imaginations coax a visit to the frescoes

stone edifice, visage of imperial longing

i look to the edge of the waterfront

and wonder how long this calm can contain itself

TWENTY SIX

cochin journal

i

what i saw

children squabble on the water’s edge

glistening weary fisherwomen

heavy lidded silence of the afterthought

tormented torso of the howling dog

fish caught in chinese nets

beggar woman’s scraps

hush of dawn

drone of rickshaws

relaxed widow

ii.

what i did not do

get to know the nun in the rickshaw

write every day

dread the night

hear the trucks

hurry through breakfast

scream

talk frenetically

shrug nervously

cross the road surely

need to weep

hear the street

phone someone close

say sorry

hold my breath

scream

iii.

what the city said to me

ask no secrets

touch the walls

smell the sea salt

stay

rummage the past

speak to ghosts

lift veils off shrouded faces

stay

buy a towel

eat cake

inhale aromatic dreams

stay

suffocate, shout, touch the water

stay

iv.

what the city did

build a red brick wall to keep the ocean out

reclaim land

lure strangers

build mosques

invite the new

tantalize the traveler

resist sectarianism

molding facades speak of desire to migrate

ancient dream of the antique city

v.

why the monsoon wept

a terrifying wave

perilous warming

islands in danger

a terrible deluge

of depleted oceans

wondering what’s left

after oceanic disaster

waiting fearfully

the ocean’s wrath

vi.

where the city reminds

a society of socialist communes

experiments in utopia

filled with failed promises of democracy

outsourced lives

reek faux egalitarianism

even as absolutism in the united states

hastens the demise of real possibilities globally

a country of entrepreneurs awake at night

sleep while the sun shines

vii.

when the city compels

old economies of coir and pepper

perfume the air of commerce

as citizen and migrant mill

exchange currency and news on Jew Street

it is hot and the street exudes vapors

the collision of medieval and contemporary

dailiness

startle the haze of a harsh eyed sun

i ask if i can photograph the muslim merchant

on spice street

“nay” he answers firmly

immersed in the ledger books

i leave my desire behind

viii.

how the city remembers

a fractured town

devoured by layered logics

colonial space of small streets

meander into the small-scale sprawl-scale

of urban influx and rural idylls

no shanty towns or cardboard cities

but formal densities and clustered living

national highways parallel colonial seaside

pastoral roads

geography is palimpsest

memory a fragment of old traces

TWENTY SEVEN

thangassery

in an old fortress city

above the crumbling gunnery

lies buried a toddler’s aranyanam

a gold chain strung along a child’s hip

marking innocence

below the formidable landscape

of cement battery and storm washed lookouts

a vast beach of fishing boats undulates

festive and mournful in the stark light of the

empty sea

clawing the white soil

with raw hands

the child conceals

her gilt violence

metal coolness

that strung

a pain of silence

in the ramparts of the old fort city

TWENTY EIGHT

beatrice

god is dead

i whisper defiantly

watching the kneeling figure

pray in her white nun’s robe

during her visit one stormy monsoon night in

1978

my aunt beatrice shares my bedroom

she recites her novenas

framed by voluptuous posters of omar khayyam’s

verse

surrounded by russian bookcovers of tolstoy and

dostoevsky

ghostly and serene in the bangalore half-moon

light

her devout figure throws a shroud of doubt over

my teen angst

her meditative murmurs lull my drowsy eyes shut

forgiving, unjudgemental

as the hidden onslaught devours her insides

in my darkened room, a strange calm

beatrice died shortly after. she was forty.

they say she was in great pain

that she suffered greatly without complaint on a

sparse bed

they say that the tiny streets of alleppey

were thronged with the destitutes and the orphans

she cared for tirelessly

now i realize

maybe aunt beatrice knew god is dead

yet, her benevolent figure remains a reminder

of intimate compassion

TWENTY NINE

son of africa

it is 1975

my father sits shellshocked

a deep melancholia has swept him into a silence

of many years

forced out of tanzania

now in india

he sits a husk of himself

unprepared for this startling new reality.

prominent among his most cherished books

remains an unsigned copy of julius nyerere’s

writings.

in it, in dad’s beautiful flourish, a dedication:

“to a great son of africa.”

like the sankofa sign,

looking back toward africa,

father is now gone

Acknowledgements

Thank you Ira Livingston, Duncan Hamilton and Poetics Lab, for realizing this book and opening up a forgotten history. Your editorial brilliance and design creativity infused this project with a potential I never imagined for it. Kristin Prevallet, thank you for your editorial eye. The creativity and friendship of many writers lie behind this book. I am indebted to my wonderful teachers P. Rajani, Robert Burns and Josef James for generating a passionate environment for poetry and theater in the lush forests of Madras Christian College, India in the 1980s. White doves on balconies, open air theater and latenight rehearsals filled with poetry – a delirious time filled with possibilities. To Shirley Lim, Mark Nowak, Maria Damon, Russell Leong, Alana Rubin, Marjorie Tesser, The Bowery Poetry Project, Saint Marks Poetry Project, Bob Holman, Edwin Torres, Ammiel Alcalay, Anne Waldman, Tracey Morris, Smriti Srinivas, Neelima Jeyachandran, James Cascaito, Jim Elledge, Yvette Christiansen, Manthia Diawara, Patricia Clough, Fred Moten, Randy Martin, Michael Taussig, Allan DeSouza, Nirmal Selvamony, Kate Newman, Karin Shankar, Zhivka Valiavicharska, Ethan Spigland, Jennifer Telesca, Barbara Browning, Brian McGrath, Elsa Alexander, Sheeba George, Dimpy Krishnan, Nahid Alikhan, Munira Jamal, Lisabeth During, Patricia Hoffbauer, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Cisco Bradley and the enduring spirit of Meena Alexander, I owe much for inspiration and energy along my writing journey. Gloria Zimmerman, thank you for the walks in the park. To my Daressalaam friends from Upanga, Gaurav Desai and Pat Nayar, big thanks for helping me retrieve a minor history. Finally, thank you to my daughter Celine for always being my first reader.

ghosts of lumumba

may joseph

Published by Poetics Lab, NY

Illustrations by Alanna Conway

First Edition, Summer 2020

eBook ISBN 978-0-578-74745-3

Poetics Lab

Dept. Humanities and Liberal Studies

School of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Pratt Institute

200 Willoughby Avenue

Brooklyn NY 11205

718.636.3600