Sometimes I ponder this question: how does one make all that one knows, all that one does and all that one feels noticed in this ever-expanding world of noise?
As I started to write these words, I was struck by their sheer insignificance. Yet I thought I would toil and type them into existence, then scatter them to the fringes of time.
They will pass scrolling eyes and dopamine highs, begging for attention. Tattered grammar and misspelt words carry frustration and anger. Each is a vagabond pleading, “A penny for your thoughts,” buying a moment of someone’s attention as it flashes across the page. My brain fishes on the shores of infinity for words in a soup of clouded judgement and chosen experience, trying to express itself.
I have reached a time in my life when consequences and finality burden me. What mark of a life am I leaving for history? One blip, one speck, one grain of dust, one molecule, one atom, one memory, then gone. Lost to the wind, gathered in the sails of time’s voyage.
I am a six-foot-something man, growing shorter as the years pass. I am bearded because I fucking hate shaving, and I am writing this in my forties. The years leading up to this point have tested me in so many ways that I sometimes find it difficult to tell whether I am merely a passenger in my own life.
Boyhood, as I recall it, was freedom.
As a youngster, underpants were an optional extra. Roaming the farm where I grew up in Zim, kaalgat, or bare-bummed, was the order of the day. These are not true memories for me. Stories from family, and photographs of me in a white shirt with a pot belly and blond hair, barefoot and bare-bummed, made them true.
I recall a story about our maid, Esnut, who cared deeply for me as a child. And like the pickanin I was, she would carry me asleep, strapped to her back with a towel keeping me firmly in place, until the hopping and balancing act of readjustment. She took me everywhere and kept a protective eye on me.
My dad, Alan, would raise his voice for something or other, at which point Esnut would whip me up and disappear with me to the farmworkers’ compound, returning only when things had quietened down. I wish I could remember these moments and not have to borrow them from others.
Those early years were so carefree that my memories of them are barely visible. There was no heartache to scar a memory, no turmoil to justify remembrance, and no pain a young boy would ever have to try to forget.
When I think about these things, a light smile glimmers across my face. As a boy, in the world I lived in, I was blissfully careless.
Zimbabwe, the land in which I was born, would soon grow so distant that it became a documented fact I would write when asked:
“Where were you born?”
“Zimbabwe.”
“What town?”
“Harare.”
I search my memory for a relationship with those places.
Rhodesians, and now Zimbabweans, have an unmistakable pride in being a “When-we”. To me, these are fascinating stories of a land, culture and community that I am part of through birth, family and history. Yet I know I can contribute only from the fringes of the “When-we” clan.