Bones, p.1
Bones, page 1
About Apollo Africa
The original Heinemann African Writers Series was launched in 1962 with the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Cyprian Ekwensi’s Burning Grass and Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia Shall Be Free, with Achebe himself acting as an editorial advisor. Over the next 40 years, the series continued to publish the best writing from across the African continent.
One of the founding aims of the Heinemann series was to make books by African writers available to as wide a readership as possible. Apollo Africa – a collaboration between Black Star Books and Head of Zeus – is proud to continue this work, ensuring novels, essays, poetry and plays from the original series are once again made available to readers all over the world.
BONES
Chenjerai Hove
Black Star Books and Head of Zeus would like to thank the following organisations: The Miles Morland Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and Africa No Filter. This publication was made possible through their support.
First published in Harare, Zimbabwe by Baobab Books in 1988
First published in the Heinemann African Writers Series in 1990 by Heinemann Educational Publishers
This edition published in 2023 by Black Star Books and Head of Zeus, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Copyright © Chenjerai Hove, 1988
The moral right of Chenjerai Hove to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This reprint is published by arrangement with Pearson Education Limited.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (PB): 9781035900688
ISBN (E): 9781803288901
Head of Zeus Ltd
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM
For the women whose children did not return, sons and daughters those who gave their bones to the making of a new conscience, a conscience of bones, blood and footsteps dreaming of coming home some day in vain.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
1
Janifa
She asked me to read the letter for her again today, Marita, every day she comes to me, all pleading, ‘Janifa, read the letter again for me, please read it, read it all the time for me if you have the strength,’ but I just read it, for the first few days, like those little letters girls receive from naughty boys … I love you, you are my margarine, my butter, my peanut butter for my heart … But she calls me to read the letter all the time without end, even in the night, everybody else asleep in their huts, on their mats, but she still wants to hear what he wrote to me. Marita, I say all the time, you shame me, I feel ashamed when I read this letter, a love letter to me. But for you I will read it, for you and nothing else, but the shame in my heart weighs on me like a stone. Can you think of anything that can shame a young girl more than a letter from the boy? But Marita still calls it the best thing I have ever done for her. To bring that letter to her, just to say to her, Marita, he once wrote me a letter which I still keep with me. Yes, in truth, he wrote me a letter which I will be too ashamed to read to you. I do not know how it is with me, when I read it I smile as if it were the best thing that ever happened to me, just like that. I smile as if to say, I would have loved him if he was still here. Strange, strange really how such small things take us this far. But Marita stares at me, gaping, while the soot from the burning leaves and grass gathers in her mouth as she stares at me … speechless, without a word from her mouth, just her heart telling me that I have something which is more important than I know. The first day she came to me, walking in the sun, sweating on the forehead, to say she wanted a few words with me: Yes, what is it, mother? I say. She stares at her feet, feet cracked with neglect, and lifts up her coarse finger to point at the nearby ant-hill. Can we go out, behind the ant-hill so that we can be ourselves there? she says without any sign of anger in her voice. ‘Come behind the ant-hill so that no one can steal with their ears,’ she says, removing a few pieces of dry meat stuck in her teeth. Then I feel old, like the old women when they have a few words to share about the mischief of their husbands.
I remember one day when two women came to share the secrets of their husbands behind the ant-hill where I was helping myself. They were so full of stories in their hearts they could not wait to see if there was anybody behind the bushes. I just sat there long after I had finished what I went to do. How could I stand up in the middle of their secret? So I just sat there, behind their backs, with the smelly thing under my buttocks. Yes, the men are strange, very strange. They are like children. How could Mungai’s husband be caught with such a slim, ugly woman despised by everybody in the village? As for me, if I am caught with another man, it must be a real man whose thing satisfies me. But Mungai’s husband is something else … You never know, mother of my mother, that woman might have something to her more than we see. Can’t you see he is even more determined to keep with her than before?
He really wants to keep her like a mother baboon keeping its little one. They are now like pot and fireplace, always together like a tree and a leaf. Do you know that some women know how to please husbands more than anything else? Never mind their bad cooking and all that, but when night comes, they know the language of the night. They make a man swear by his ancestors never to leave her. Maybe she is like that, hot blood and other things …
When they left, I had learnt that a woman is not simply her good looks. It was so quick. Like lightning. Just coming from the shivering lips of the women themselves, dangling their breasts right there in front of me sitting behind a bush. Even the smell of what I was doing did not seem to bother them. They knew where they were so they wouldn’t bother at all. Do it in the hut and they scream about the smell of these things, they send you away like a devil, not the child that came out of their own stomach.
‘Tell me about this letter, is it in his own hand, written by him?’ she says to me, froth coming out of her mouth, her blood hot. ‘Yes, but why do you ask? He wrote it to me at the school and the teacher called me names when he found it in my other book.’ … You bitch, all you keep in your dirty mind is love letters, nothing else. Take this rubbish and throw it in the rubbish pit, you prostitute of prostitutes … But I could not throw it away, my blood refused. So I took it outside, hid it in a place only my breast knew. I took it when we left school, and ran home, feeling that I had won something which the teacher couldn’t give to me. That was the first letter a boy ever wrote to me, with his own hands, sitting somewhere, hiding from his parents to write a letter to me. I felt my blood do all sorts of things, then saw how I should hide it even from him so that he continued to think that I had thrown it in the lavatory as the teacher had commanded. They command, you know. They command even my own parents to send this or that, or else your son, your daughter, will be out of school for ever. They command. So I told him one day that I had thrown the letter in the lavatory, right in the smelly mess of all the stomach troubles of the whole school. From that day he did not speak with me … I will kill you, I will cut your head off for you. You bitch, bitching around with the teacher when you should choose people of your age. From that day, he injured my heart in all sorts of ways, as if I had swallowed all the needles on this farm, all of them, pains from even the tip of my breasts. Even when I failed at school, I felt I had also failed with him, failed him too. Failing all of us in one word like that. I don’t know how the heart gets injured, but mine was cut into pieces that day when he said that. He said it over and over again in my dreams, in my food, in my clothes, and I felt death come over me like a flood. Then I felt I should tell you about it, the letter, I have a letter from him, his own words, and I felt a load of fire had been removed from my heart. Yes, I have the letter even though I know that I would never marry him. How can I marry a terrorist, do they not say a terrorist eats people without roasting them? Do they not say a terrorist takes the wives of other men, sleeps with them before the eyes of their very husbands, then asks the parents to roast their children for him? I cannot marry a terrorist, a killer who kills his own mother.
‘But he is my son,’ she says, gentle tears dripping from her eyes. ‘I did not teach him to eat people. I did not teach him to sleep with every woman he met on the way to the water well. I did not teach him to lead the life of a dog. I also taught him to respect the truth, to laugh only with those who liked the truth,’ she says. ‘Can you be kind enough to read for me the letter he left, it is the only thing that can tell me a little about him? Be kind, be kind to those who do not know how to skin a goat. Skin it for them so that they can say you saved them from the mouth of death. You are a well brought-up girl, a girl my boy knew could cook for him without putting poison in the food. A girl who would kneel for him while he talked with other men as if he was not seeing the woman who made him leave his own parents. Be good to me, the woman who would have been happy to be your mother-in-law. The mother of your husband, the one you would kneel for as I did to his own father. A sister to me because I knelt to his own father the same way you would kneel to him. Can you still continue to carry a hard heart when mine has melted into all this begging? …’ I feel my heart melting, tears swelling in my eyes, and I say to her … ‘Mother, wait, I will fetch the letter now and read it for you. It is our letter, you bore the son that wrote this letter, and he would have left you to live with me till his head grew white hairs. I will take you to a secret place where I can read the letter to you all by ourselves. Do not beg me like that, do not make me feel so big, giving me so much respect that it can kill me with pride in the whole farm …’ So I run to my mother’s hut, the one from which the smoke is already telling of the small pot sitting on it. The flies in there have not taken the letter away. I know nobody would take it away, even my own mother stops my father from using any papers in there for rolling his own cigarettes … no, do not use that piece of paper, it’s for the girl, the school girl, child of school. Remember the other day you rolled your tobacco in her school report. You want to do it again so that teachers can laugh at us because of our ignorance? People do not laugh at ignorance, but they only laugh at its owner if he goes around parading it on the whole farm. How do you know what is written on it when you do not know how to write even your own name? Leave the child’s papers alone. She is not the one who did not send you to school. Do you not boast about how you used to wrestle with teachers who tried to stop you from running away from school? Leave the child’s things alone … she says as she pushes his hand away from the letter which I have always kept in the same bag, the nhava which his own brother made for me because he says I am the one who will give him cattle for the bride-wealth to bring home his fifth wife.
I run back into her hands like a child, like a child who has been sent by the other children to go and steal some maize cobs to bring to them so that they can chase away hunger in the forest where they are herding cattle. I run into her with all my body sweating like a spring, pouring out painful sweat and hot breath. She smiles at me and takes me by the hand like her own child … ‘You have removed the things which were in my heart,’ she says, searching with her eyes for a place to sit so that she can hear the words of her long-gone son from my lips.
‘It is good to send children to school,’ she says as she stretches her eyes from bush to bush, making sure that all those who might be relieving themselves there know that she can see them. ‘It is good to send children to school, my child. Children should not be kept at home like cats and dogs,’ she says, scratching the back of her head as if something has bitten her. She does not want to complain about these little biting things. She knows that the pain of the little bitings does not kill. ‘It is this pain of my son which kills,’ she says to me.
I start reading it, putting the boy’s voice into the words so that she can remember how he used to speak. I read and read without looking at her, but what’s this breath that is moving the little bit of grass near my mouth? She is already leaning against me, listening, her eyes glowing and her breath bursting like a harsh wind. She is listening and telling me all about the boy who was good at school, although I know the teacher used to say the best he could be was a thief because for that he would not need any course; that he would spend half his lifetime in jails, with high fences and walls where you need a mountain for a ladder to come out. They lock you in there and melt the keys so that you receive all your little bits of food from a small hole, the teacher would say. As for those who like women, like this boy, the teacher would say, not smiling, they put you behind the walls and fences and then show you naked women through a small hole so that you suffer. If you don’t read your books, then the choice is jail, he would say, smoking his cigarette with the contented heart of one who is enjoying the work of his own hands, something he has made himself with his own sweating hands. Life is hard, vafana, he would growl, with the satisfaction of eating what everybody else thirsted for but would not have …
‘He was such a boy, this one,’ she says, pointing at the letter. My mother will eat from the pot of your own hearth and we will have children, not like the children of the farm foreman, but the teacher Mandindi’s, with small bicycles to pedal … ‘That is him, my son,’ she says. ‘The one who would have made me a grandmother, a good grandmother with children to run around playing with the mud, you, their mother, running after them to remove the mucus on their noses, my own son of this stomach which you see here without much food. His grandfather was like that, always dreaming of hunting trips and spears, sharp spears which he knew how to throw. You see, he was such a man, his grandfather, a quiet man who spoke with his whole heart. Of course, he took large amounts of snuff, sniffing, his moustache dancing all the time, dancing feverishly like a little forest shaken by the wind.’
‘But why am I telling you about his grandfather? Why, why waste your ears with all these things which an ear should not bother to remember, ears have better things to store than this. Better things useful for life. You are only a child with small breasts trying to come out like the small horns of a small bull. The world is still large for you, too many unspoken words, too many unheard voices, so no need for me to fill your head with rags of stories. After all, you have your own dreams to carry you along, dreams of young men and children to walk with you the path of life, not old women like me crying about a lost son, maybe one dead but with no grave to console her. No, I need not do that to you, you, the intestines of another woman of my own age. No, not to spill my own wounds into the heart of a young girl who needs to breed the plants of her own life for herself and for her people. No. Not at all. That must not happen.’
‘Young girl, reader of my child’s only letter to you, my eyes have seen what you have not seen. Many wounds have healed on this chest of mine. Many wounds. Many scars. Most of us women are one big scar, a scar as big as the Chenhoro dam from which farmer Manyepo waters his crops, vast, never drying. I will say this to you, I am one big wound, my child. One big wound without medicines or herbs. You know, they say the medicine for burdens of the heart is talk, but I have talked and talked, and I seem to talk more and more without cure. I once was a girl like you, erect breasts, full of dreams of my people, full of the stories of my people in my heart, craving to nurse my own child, my own seed so that my people will not say that I let them down. I broke the water-pot which my ancestors asked me to bring home. No. But what did I do? I burned to share my nights with a man, that man who would feel he had a queen in me. The one who would drive a whole herd of cattle to my father to say … Here is the bride-wealth, you gave me a bride for whom I am prepared to empty the cattle pen of my father in order to have her come to live with me …’
‘But what happened? When everything had been done, I went to live with him, and for many years, the seed did not come. The man planted his seed in me, but the soil inside me could not make it grow to a plant. Haunting and being haunted. Bad dreams, bad words, bad food, everything took on the colour of blood. And I thought I would cry for ever inside me. Right inside the inside of my heart. Then names came … you witch, you day-witch, you who ate the roots of your own womb, devourer of herbs which no herbalist can reverse … and the wounds of my heart burnt me till I was as thin as grass.’
‘You see, my husband does not even talk about that child. Four years now, he has gone …’ and the woman lifts a parade of four fingers in the air in a manner that makes me think they are withered, stiff like sticks on a dry branch of the mupani tree. ‘Four years but he does not mention the name of the boy unless beer has loosened the knots of his mind. Then he pours out all the dirt he can allow to pass through his mouth without vomiting. Dirty words, dirty curses, dirty deeds of things that cannot be mentioned to live ears. But I shut my mouth and only look as if all that dirt were medicine that I should take for a bad disease. Just imagine, bitter medicine that I should take to cure the illness of my insides, the illness of my womb which refused to take his seed. Just imagine him shivering with fits of anger against me, spitting into the fire as if I have passed bad air, imagine. A hard life, this. A very hard life for a woman left alone on this farm. If my own father were alive I would have gone back to him to ask for his medicine in order to cure his own daughter who has fallen prey to barrenness. But no, I go on listening to the torture of my ears, the torture of my heart by those who have words as sharp as a razor. Words that eat into one like a bad disease which eats even into the bones of the victim …’ she says as she makes the skin of her face wrinkle in my eyes to show me that she still can move the folds of her work-hardened skin, alive. Alive, breathing the soot of Manyepo’s harvests. Walking to the river to bathe in the hot sun possessed here by Manyepo. She sighs her burdens off like one who has known them for too long. One who lives for these burdens which tire the soul. The soul. Marita, she kneels on the brown soil with her cracked knees, and then caresses the few leaves that she tears away from their mothers.
