Dignified violation- The letter
Sometimes I sit and wonder when it all began. I wonder whether things would have been different if it were someone else who found her body. In my dreams, I feel the grass making my back itchy and my skin is clammy. I feel a pressure on my bladder, and my chest heaves painfully with each breath I do not take. I am dead, looking out at the world from eyes that do not move in their sockets. I wake up from this dream, every day in the same way. I hope to find something, a speck of hope that this is just a dream. It will be all right.
When I die and you find my body, perhaps I will be riddled with bullets…or maybe I will be hacked to pieces…Show me to my mother. So that she does not sit at our doorstep, anxiously waiting for my brothers to return from their daily trips to the hospitals.
I imagine that everyday they will come home, with the stench of hospital casualty wards clinging to their sweat stained shirts. I wonder if the sweat will draw the map of Kenya under their armpits. Show me to my mother when you find me.
But I beg of you, if you find me on the side of the road, with my tattered blood stained underwear wrapped around my neck and my skirt hitched under my buttocks and my legs sprawled as they left me, please pull my skirt down and remove the underwear from my neck. Close my mouth as best as you can and let not my mother see the twist of my mouth in anguish and pain, when you take me to her. Cover the welts on my neck with a scarf and my hair; make sure my mother does not see my forehead devoid of the braids pulled out in their climax.
The stench of disease and gunshot wounds, mixed with fear as men wet their pants pleading for the lives of their women. They had inched closer. Close enough to know that I was there, just not to find me. The blood in the river heralded the coming of my last day.
I know that they are coming, and I am ready. I have seen the hunger in their eyes, when they searched for me. I have seen their faces and what they have done. Presiding over women like goods, deciding who will have the honour and who will close the ceremony. It has been a while since I laughed from the pits of my stomach. Memories of my childhood have gone up in smoke. Friends and neighbours disappeared under the shadows cast by the low hanging roofs, lost in the night with the dreams from my childhood.
They will grab me by my hair and drag me on the ground… Gravel will embed itself in my cheeks and cigarette burns will form a trail up my arms and settle on my chest.
Just do not take me to my mother until I am the woman- child she bore again.
Instances and eras
How long is an era?
They say it’s a moment
That it’s just the end of the beginning
It’s a moment
The moment that you miss death
The blink of an eye
I’ve had moments
Of passing a stranger in the street
And smelling their familiar scent
Hearing their familiar footfalls
Sometimes even of being in love
With swaggers and laughter
Just as
With bloodshot eyes and nicotine stained teeth
I have lived through an era of shiny new-coin love
In an instant
If it were that simple
Only if it were
There have been those times
That I have lived through tattered new-found faded
Dusty crusty rusty brown
Formerly starched crisp white clothes
Been like the planets revolving around the sun
Never colliding
Never sensing
Never feeling
Other presence
Just being
Then who knows what happens in eclipses?
Maybe the planets caress each other
Steal a glance
Steal a moment
Their lips brush
And their fingers touch
Their hairs bristle
Their breath catches
They feel they want to pee
And so do we
In the shadow of eclipse
Then the new smell becomes old
The skin feels just like your own
That era ends as well
The era of warm comfort
Familiarity
Ends in an instant
The ear of the long dead
