A Grain of Rice in the Heart of Genocide – Chioniso Tsikisayi

MAONEI 

We stopped planting fathers a while ago, for this reason. 

Sometimes blood evaporates in the sun like water, and the only evidence that remains are the corpses that condense like rain clouds at the open mouth of the road. Now and again, the earth spits out a body without notice. Without apology. As if to say, go on, sort out this mess. As if to say she is tired of being the proverbial rug under which the dead and all their festering secrets are swept. 

He is found dug out at the roots on the outskirts of the city. My father and many others like him, cut down to the bloody stumps. Moyomuhle felt the pain of the axe falling in the early hours of the morning. Before the phone call came to inform us of his fourth death, we had already bundled ourselves into the orange Datsun. The cool mist of morning dew was fresh on our breaths. The green-roofed house on Jacaranda Street stared back at us from its tired eyelids. Pretty, the old cat, slinked behind the garage, perturbed by all the commotion. We left Zulu asleep, his cricket bat still beside him. 

Nini got up, slipped on her pink morning gown, and came barefoot to lock the gate after us, her oi ois sticking out of her head like needle points, her face creased with adolescent concern.

“We’ll be back soon,” I breathed hastily, holding Moyomuhle, who was hunched over in pain, at the waist and guiding her to the passenger side. I put in an old Mercy Mutsvene CD, and a soothing voice trickled through static, kissing the airwaves. “Nanhasi munongodichengeta Baba, munongondichengeta Ishe- handinganeti kutenda.”

I drive 15 kilometres out of Bulawayo with my mother, into the pleated fabric of farms where the Rebellion resides, to collect his hollowed-out trunk. The horizon is peppered with collapsing power lines, crows circling the sky. Airport Road leads us to an assembly line of women keening outside the warehouses, waiting to identify their loved ones, their pious figures wrapped in kitenge cloth. I feel misplaced in this spectrum of colourful, grief-stricken bodies in my grey biker shorts and Adidas hoodie.

We thought we were safe this time. A grain of hope each had been buried in our hearts – and watered by the rebel groups and the headlines on the news – that we were witnessing a season of restoration. 

“The Zimbabwe Reforestation of Fathers Project in its fourth phase seeks to safeguard men across the country from terrorist attacks. Earlier this year, representatives from Amnesty International flew in to document this new chapter in what is being called by observers a positive turn in Zimbabwean democracy. The United Nations is lifting its sanctions on the nation in light of the ruling party’s co-operation in overseeing the reconciliation of people and trees.”

Growing a father from a seedling is no easy task. The saplings used to regenerate our male population are the remnants of men who were murdered in the 80s, in the first set of killings just after independence. Grafting limbs, suturing skin, bark, and tissue. It could be years before they are seen walking, talking, living. Like the last time, when I heard his voice… We were so close.

So close.

We came to visit a month ago, before the elections. Our men would soon be able to communicate, we were told, and the sky would once again look like a child’s open palm, splintered with the veins of their elegant branches curling upwards into the heavens. Something like the Arboretum I visited in Nairobi in my 20s. A rich wooded expanse of black men laughing gently in the breeze as lovers picnicked on soft quilts beneath them and joggers got in their late evening work out far from the noise of the city traffic.

The government vowed to never again cut a man down at the knees. Yet here we are, programmed by a cycle of violence, staring at the wooden faces of anguish, sectioned into portions as enquiry desks screen us for entry.

“Maonei Mhlahlandlela. Human Forestry Rights Commissioner’s office.” I give my name and ID to a figure dressed in the Rebellion’s signature khaki overalls and hideous headgear.

“Your father’s genus name?” 

“He is an African Blackwood. Murwiti, Umbambangwe.”

*

The Great Deforestation, which no one speaks of and which we did not learn in our history books, began in the Matabeleland province. It is there that the felling of men because of their ethnicity began. It was my late grandmother, Muthi’Omkhulu, who told me, from the branches of her arthritic fingers, that fathers used to grow tall and luscious and green. Before then I thought they were something of a myth. Giant oak fathers. The great ancestral baobabs. The indigenous fathers. The slender ones, like the msasa, the monkey bread, the mopani. The ones that hid the Chimurenga fighters – in both struggles for liberation. Sheltering the guerillas and the chimbwidos. The one from which Charwe’s body, the vessel through which Mbuya Nehanda spoke, was hung like a flag by the British. It was my grandmother who asked my mother to show me the broken stumps of her husband and son wrapped in ancestral cloth at the back of the house. There, stockpiled next to the firewood, were my grandfather and father’s remains, which I had never known. Is this why she had never allowed me near the outside hearth where she brewed her doro from the crushed powder of chimera seeds?

“I feared you would not know which logs to burn and which ones to leave untouched.”

“This was my father?” I asked, teary-eyed. I rubbed the palms of my hands across the brittle bark, kissed the crimson dirt that caked his torso. The blood oxidised. Sticky, as though he had wept a river in his final hours. “Ngiyaxolisa Baba,” I apologise to the dead branches.

They bore fruit for our mothers. Delicious, medicinal, nourishing fruit. Gave them flowers to braid their hair. Our brothers would climb them to the very heights and perch at the top of their branches like birds. They cradled infants on their wooden knees. They sweetened our air. In the summer, their leaves provided shade. Protected our brown scalps from the scorching rays of the sun. My grandmother would say, in their days, they knew no such thing as an absent father. 

But now there are no dads left to watch over the little girls that grow into women. No shade to cover the silky silhouettes of breast-budding daughters beneath the sky’s bleeding horizon. And the boys? The boys have grown to resent their roots. You will not find sweet-scented flowers blossoming from the tips of their elbows. They walk with their shoulders slouched because they fear that if they stand tall, if they look to the heavens, they too will be cut down.

When you live in a country shaped like a teapot, you grow accustomed to the sound of leaves burning in the wind, to the harmonies of a kettle singing when the water inside has reached boiling point. You come to realise there is no difference between that and the wheezing noise a woman’s chest makes after the air has been swept out of her lungs. 

*

All of the world is mourning and moaning all at once. I think of Zulu’s father, whose body I climbed like a monkey bar to orgasm, my toes curling with pleasure as buttress roots sink deep into the underbelly of the earth searching for water in a time of drought. We both had no trees to climb as children and were deprived of touch, of the joy that comes from wrapping one’s arms around the circumference of a trunk. It is with him that I discovered the concentric rings of pleasure. An infinite circle of bliss. The intertwining of arms and legs, waists tangled in sheets. Lips placating each other with the sweetest of kisses. It is with him that I found the circumference of loving.

“I think you might have some co-dependency issues.” He collapsed onto me breathless. 

I looked up at him, half-smiling, my fingers scaling the rippled mahogany of his chest and carving our initials in the dark down to his navel, where lifelines before him were once tethered. “Why? It’s not only girls who have daddy issues, you know? I hate that your gender makes it seem like the Great Deforestation only affected the daughters. What about the sons? Aren’t you the least bit curious to know your roots?”

“No, I don’t go digging for the past. I don’t see the point in causing myself unnecessary pain. The sons are destined for early deaths. The daughters will outlive us. That’s what the prophecy of The Family Tree says.”

“And what if the prophecy is bullshit? Both the daughters and the sons should live. You only believe that because you never knew your father.”

“And I never will. I knew my mother, and that was enough. When will you realise that we are an endangered species and there’s nothing you can do to change the hand of fate?”

“The hand of fate? You call the systematic killings of a people an act of fate’s hand? Then fate is a murderer; fate must be the mother of all genocides.”

“Trees are not people. It’s scientifically inconsistent. Trees are not real men.”

“It’s those shit principles that constituted slavery and every other horrific act of violence we’ve ever witnessed in history. What is a real man anyway? What’s the difference between your cold heart and the lifeless trunk outside?”

“The difference is I gave you some good wood.” He smirked, attempting to placate me with another kiss, but I was already floating down our kite of euphoria, back to earth.

“Thanks for your dick, but apart from that, I don’t think you have much else to offer.” I crawled out from underneath him and gathered my clothes from the floor. 

“Love, all I’m saying is think about what you’re giving your time to. No one has the power to bring men back from the dead, and anyone who tells you they do is lying.”

A month later, in lieu of a circle of rings, two lines stared back at me from a pregnancy stick. I named our son after the sky. He was the branch that held on to me when his father let me fall. My little piece of heaven.

*

The second time the government offered to restore our fathers’ bodies was at the beginning of the new millennium. The year before, we had laid Joshua Nkomo to rest. 

In the year 2000, we planted our fathers’ limbs in the heart of a rainy December. As ears of maize sprouted out of the earth, so did my hips and breasts. I was 18 – a late bloomer – and old enough to vote, to partake in the ritual of soil and blood, my sleeves rolled to the elbows.

The white farmers had been expelled from the land by then.

Close to a decade later, the Reserve Bank ran out of money, and the second set of killings began. This time, they cut their bodies down for the sole purpose of printing new notes. The money was worthless, growing zeros at the turn of the hour. But a paper father is better than none at all, so in spite of the inflation, we kept the notes along with his stump. Others burned in the fire.

“This is the last time,” my mother says as we carry Dad’s trunk into the boot. A blanket has been laid out. She wrapped his amputated branches in Khulu’s ancestral cloth.

“Mama, it will be okay. We’ll try again. This time, we’ll go across the border.”

“I told you before, we cannot resurrect your father. They will never stop.”

“If they keep cutting him down, I will keep planting him again and again, and if it takes a hundred fucking years before he breathes again, so be it.” 

“How many times will we grieve then? We must do a burial for him and let him rest.”

“Are they the only ones whose fathers are allowed to stand? If we had walls as high as theirs, we would grow our men in peace, but we are not allowed gardens.”

“I will soon reach menopause, and then you will know the pain of a man being cut down, from your back. From your uterus. You will feel him snapping in half.”

“Mama, look at what they did to Thulani Maseko in Swaziland. Where is Itai Dzamara after all these years? If we let them disappear, we let ourselves disappear too.”

“Jesus was nailed to a tree. We all have our crosses to bear.” She wraps the beads of her rosary around her wrist and kisses the yellow crucifix. We drive the rest of the way home in silence.

ZULU

Everything stinks in the dry heat of November. Both the living and the dead. There is not enough water in the taps to wash away the smell of rotting. Sewer pipes swell with the bile of suburban households. Kitchen sinks belch in the afternoon, sucking the dregs of murky dishwater from plates bearing the stains of heated leftovers. Water is rationed as faith is rationed, into 20-litre buckets and recycled Mazoe bottles. The ice-cream man is a yellow sun speck on a bicycle skirting the parched neighbourhoods of Bulawayo. His trolley of chocolate cones and strawberry lollies is announced by the ringing of a bell to entice little children out of the houses.

I’m practising my bowling as usual. One day I’ll play for the Chevrons.

The rain stopped coming when the teapot grew full of blood. Rooibos red and Tanganda black. A house of stone built on the bones of disappearing men. My mother prefers coffee to tea. Since everyone knows the fate of whistle-blowers, we do not let our kettles sing too loudly.

Once, our country was a forest full of fathers, but most of them were cut down to the bloody stumps. The birds have nowhere left to land. We have learned, like them, what it means to live out an existence mid-flight. Don’t you know not to stir blood too loudly? The incessant clinking of a spoon on the inside of a widow’s porcelain mind?

One spoon of sugar is enough. One shovel of looted diamonds is enough. One massacre of black bodies is enough. 

I do not ask my mother questions. I know that, like the good china that is only brought out at the arrival of guests, certain truths are better preserved in the dining room display cabinet.

Time is a teacup that begs our silence, so we cannot break it. After they brought Grandpa’s body home the third time, Gogo could not take it anymore. Her good heart was tired, and it stopped beating a month later. Mum got me a suit. I carried my cricket ball on the inside of the trouser pocket. The funeral was a small affair. We watched as they lowered her casket into the ground, and all I can think, now that I’m older, is that my grandmother was another spoiled vote. What is the difference between a ballot box and a casket? X marks the spot of every man’s grave. 

That was five years ago. At the edge of 17 I know two things to be true. I love the stumps of a wicket, and I figure I could outrun death if I bowl out wide enough. Sometimes, my mother looks at me and there are shadows under her eyes because she fears she may outlive me. 

It always amazes me how impartial the sky is to the chaos below it. A beautiful, spotless blue, secretarial clouds floating on its breath. It wears the same azure expression of political correctness at every graduation, every funeral, every christening ceremony. The sky will not lend its empathy to the abductions that happen below it.

Nor will it turn a fiery red, bruised with vengeance. The sky was quiet years ago when the earth was forced to swallow the decomposing bodies of Palestinian children murdered in the Gaza Strip. On the other side of the globe, laughing, running the green scores of schoolyards with lungs full of air and reckless abandon, were other children, like us. Children whose freedom was as wide as a playground. Children whose parents muttered a silent thank you to the sky as they kissed the petals of their infants’ foreheads at pick-up time. My mother was one of them.

The rest kissed the earth below and cursed it for swallowing their babies whole. In Sudan. In Somalia. Those who were destined to parent above the ground and those who were fated to love below the sky.

The earth begs for a little water. “Look at me. I’m covered in so much blood. Won’t you wash me clean?”

The sky responds, “I cannot. I promised a girl in Bulawayo clear skies for her wedding this morning.”

The earth pleads, “And what about the children being forced to dig out the minerals in my belly in Congo? What clear skies have you given them?”

“I am above, and you are below. Let it remain so.”

The earth will writhe in silent agony. The aches of bleeding so many miscarriages at once. Some call it a cleansing, as though human beings are mere soup stains on a table-cloth. “Cleanse” is too gentle a word, too delicate a verb. “Cleanse” is what my mother does when she separates the laundry for washing on Saturday mornings.

Spin, rinse, spin, rinse. Repeat. 

The washing machine beeps to alert her of the first batch of clothes. She lifts a bundle out of the automated womb into a wicker basket. A painless labour. Wring out limb after limb. Hang bone, skin, and gristle on a clothing line. There are no faces to displaced persons. No tags on dismembered corpses. Separate colours that don’t mix – beliefs, ethnicities – lest you become stained too. Bullets slice through skull caps, blotting out existence. There is no space left on the washing line to hang the memories of loved ones. What dignity is there in a plastic peg?

Cleansing.

She is like that, my mother. She believes the only remedy for hurt, for sacrifice, is to soak a thing in water for an eternity. To scrub the dirty necks of collars beneath the burning disc of the sun. 

Erasure is a kind of soap. Washing powder and ash falling from the sky. It all looks the same. 

My mother’s hair creeps out of her bonnet’s edge, unruly, like a field of overgrown grass. Veld-fires consume villages in her memory. They tear through crops and livestock, leaving the rural margins of Matabeleland charred black like the edge of burned toast. 

In the kitchen, the refrigerator yawns its mouth wide open, revealing the contents of its cold stomach. Frozen fish fingers. A tin of amasi, some congealed on the plastic sides where it spilt. Watermelon split open, its innermost parts scooped out, like the uteruses dug out of civilian women by the military. Half-blitzed fruit in the blender. Half-blitzed brain on the pavement. 

The stovetop is burning. Camouflaged soldiers drag daughters by the fraying threads of their dresses. Nini turns the gas dial off and the smell of fire dissipates. A bad harvest of oats or is it doves in the wind? The acrid stench of flesh burning and huts, huts set on fire.

I do not know which memories are hers, which memories are mine, which are Nini’s, which are Moyomuhle’s. There is no one who sits at the head of the table. Only a stump. The cricket stump. My father’s stump. A head without its neck. A tree without its leaves.

“One day, when you’re older, I will hand this set over to you,” Moyomuhle whispers in a dream. She is polishing a tea set, her oval face framed with the halo of a dark afro. She is much younger, smiling as she stacks her wedding plates, the pretty ones lined with pink flowers.

“Gogo, Nini is getting married next week,” I tell her. 

“I know. She asked me to come to the wedding, in her prayers. I’ll be there for my sister’s child. I’ll be there.”

We earn our wrinkles as our clothes earn theirs, except ours cannot be ironed out. 

A book documenting all the missing fathers and their names. 

The bodies that caused outrage. The bodies that were exhumed by hashtags. #Zanu-PFMustGo! The bodies that fell down the algorithm’s bottomless pit. 

And that is how we forget. How the earth becomes a pickle jar of rotting limbs, fingernails, and clumps of hair in blood while we dance to the latest TikTok frenzy. 

The sky will bear witness to a young couple exchanging vows at St John’s Cathedral Church. The weather’s perfection will suggest that the union is blessed, a love aligned only by the stars in the highest levels of the celestial realm. For my Auntie Nini, the 14th of November will be a day etched in beauty and romance. She will be a resplendent bride, the length of her body draped in white, exquisitely sculpted. I will walk beside her in place of her father, hand intertwined with his little girl’s like the vineyards of the Cape. Yellow will be the colour of her bridesmaids’ dresses.

For her, yellow is the colour of sunshine. For my mother, yellow is the colour of rebellion. There is a spectrum. The light refracts through the stained church window. The congregants will gather images of the affair, the crisp resolution of iPhones sealing the moment. Oh, the wonders of technology. No one will think of the Congolese hands from whose efforts our batteries are manufactured. A good battery life comes at the expense of a human life. We know to airdrop images long before we know the cost of sinking underground.

When people speak of destiny, they make it a beautiful thing, but when people speak of fate, they hold a certain contempt for her. They are two sides of a bond coin. We’re only a single toss away from knowing a different set of circumstances. A single toss from being the team to bat first.

Somewhere in the world, in a kitchen illuminated by the evening light, a mother is reprimanding her daughter, teaching her to love a grain of rice in the heart of genocide, not to let a single one go to waste.

Maonei? What have you seen? My mother’s name is a litmus test for the truth. In the heart of a rainless December, we will plant my grandfather’s limbs in the soil again.

THE ROOT

Time is a root that grows in all directions. Backwards, forwards. Vertical, like lovers pressed against a wall. 

Morning light trickles through the kitchen window as water takes the shape of its container, sketching out each warm surface and the silhouettes of two women moving within its confines. A fresh breakfast plate, the yolk of an egg spilling sunshine yellow on toast. Cream linen on the counter where Moyomuhle presses her school shirt. Sixteen and wistful, rounding out at the hips and thighs. She is only a girl, but something of her nature beckons to age-old secrets. A third silhouette enters the hive of activity. Zulu. The length of his arm circles the circumference of Langa’s waist. She turns to face her husband. “Yebo, sthandwa sami.” She sings into the orchestra of his mouth. There is a chorus of greetings amongst them. Moyo flutters about making a cup of tea for her mother. 

“Mamuka sei, vasikana?” Zulu asks his girls.

“Tamuka, mamuka wo.” 

We have risen as you have risen. Language is a song. A call and response.

Chioniso Tsikisayi is an award- winning poet, writer, filmmaker and playwright from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. She took first runner-up for the 65th Kenya Poetry Slam Africa Contest. Her work has been featured in Brittle Paper, Isele Magazine, The Kalahari Review, Ipikai Poetry Journal, Agbowó art, AFREADA, Intwasa Short Stories Volume Two, Imbiza Journal for African Writing, and Tesserae: A Mosaic of Poems by Zimbabwean Women. In 2022, her debut play, A Woman Has Two Mouths was shortlisted for the African Women Playwrights Network Festival of Plays held in Accra, Ghana. She won the Canopus Award 2023 for excellence in interstellar writing in the Original Local Short Form Fiction Category for her short story ‘Gumbojena’. She won the poetry category of the Ibua Bold Continental Call for Climate Change and the 2023 Roil Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Poet of the Year. Her debut novel What It Means To Outlive A Daughter was longlisted for the 2024 Island Prize. She is a Creative Writing Alumni of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.