Scribbles

‘Have we met?’ ‘No I don’t think so.’ ‘Are you sure? Because...’ ‘I’m sure...’ with this I dart off. Except wait, I do remember. You sat next to me in high school; you gave me a lift last week. You were the drunken guy sitting next to me in the kombi. You gave me a lift last week.  And although I had so hoped to never see you again. It’s a small world and I find myself desperately trying to get away from you. I never want to remember the people I meet. I am much more inclined to stick my nose in the air and scurry off. It is not because I don’t like people. I don’t. But that’s beside the point. I seem to suffer from stage fright. The thought of putting up an I-know-you-good-to-meet-you performance is daunting. Smiling, flattering and pretending to be remotely interested in what other people have to say. Frightful. Although I am quite paradoxical about it. If I met you and I knew you and you pretended not be interested then I ...

I managed to convince Allan over at Reality's Dream to Blog for me this week! and I must say he is awesome!! 1. for blogging &  2. because this heat is melting my brain I am a hazard to the blogosphere

  Two weeks I wasn’t feeling well, exhausted, emotional, wiped out, I felt for sure death was knocking on my door. I never thought to blame it on the heat or affairs at home. A part of my brain still believes in pending doom, that African part of me that I cannot wipe out. I took Kombi rides and found myself sweaty and clammy. Not normally a sweater, I was horrified to see pit stains as I emerged. Much like those barbaric men I have for so long turned my nose up on. I held my arms against my body and hoped for my sake that my oh so hygienic reputation had not debilitated into a hot sticky wet mess. I blamed it on the manufacturers of Shield. Sydney won, but sleep took over. That’s when it hit me.   The reason for my wet calamity was not because My Shield deodorant had stopped working, it was because I forgotten to use any. Enclosed in my blanket cocoon I had initially caught a whiff of my armpits, it had started as a teasing stale whiff, and then it had grown into a...

                                         Morn after morn dispels the dark, Bearing our lives away; Absorbed in cares we fail to mark How swift our years decay; Some maddening draught hath drugged our souls, In love with vital breath, Which still the same sad chart unrolls, Birth, eld, disease, and death.                                                                                                               BHARTRHARI And if we remember this with each breath and blink then death wouldn't be such a cruel mistress. It would beckon and we with a smile and relief would fold gladly in it's embrace....

This post begins the  first of my Guest Blogger series... thanks to Doug from World's View for this entry!

Something like this happened somewhere I'm sure I was jolted out of my reverie by the bus going over a hump. That Old Geyser never bothered to show down. Instead, he seemed to increase his speed every time we approached a speed hump. This made the seniors sitting in the back seat shriek in delight. Lucky them, it made my hand jerk so hard I was convinced that one of these days it would pop out if its socket. This seemed to be a family thing. Yemu’s shoulder had dislocated one time as she had been scrubbing the walls. She had wailed like a banshee and I had been so convinced that she was about to die. “Mama! Mama!” Mama, had come running from outside, feet covered in mud for she had been in the garden and her waist wrap almost down to her feet. She had looked so panicked that anyone looking at the two of them would have wondered who was hurting. “What, what is it?” “Mama, my, my...mama It hurts, it’s broken” Yemu had cried clutching her arm, trying I...

                                        My City By Night (Harare) This is Harare. I live there, about 4 weeks ago the city council cut off water supply in my area.  So the local residence went to dig a hole in the ground. with pick axes and hoes, they located the underground water pipes and broke them.  Now the water gushes from a hole in the ground and forms little rainbows in the sun and puddles on the ground. Everyone goes to that watering hole now. Little children with yellow bottles. Mothers with babies strapped to their backs and laundry buckets on their heads. Adolescent girls, with unconfined breasts jingling with each step. Local hooligans, with their trousers to their knees and a street wise gait. And that dirty old man who lives in the little hut by the beer hall. The local MP knows about it. He does nothing. The c...

Neola (6) got her first book today. Typical subject, a princess. Not so typical plot, our little princess goes around the castle, asking people what she should be. So in my mind she is a bit dependANT, not so the things I want Neola to learn. I don’t want her to ask me, I want her to TELL me. Oh well, so much for the emancipation of women. Mother should not have bought a book written by a man, (Tony Ross),  man  for women. There’s only so much these men want us to do for ourselves. Now take Ms X, who I met in a pub the other day. she was all for freedom. happily married with two kids, she had two college degrees and sneered at me when i told her that i only had one under my belt, "At your age? what a shame." I had not realised that at 23 more were expected of me but i smiled and reminded her that she was 36. "Still darling, you need to have a good degree if you want to get more cheddar, where is your degree from by the way?" I t...

                                      The news came on just as I was leaving home. Not in my car, I do not have one. I was on foot and I was listening on my phone. Now normally it is a woman reporter that comes on. Not so this time. It was a very male reporter... Oscar.  I have nothing against this guy really and truly, but h has a way of reading the news that riles me. He comes on and I change channels. Either that or I change channels. Each time he starts a headlining story it is in the same way. He says “meanwhile,” Not meanwhile like you and I say it. Really fast, and move on to the next word. His sentences are constructed around the word. The first time I heard Oscar say “meanwhile” was as he read the evening news on television. It seemed to me he caressed the word, played with it, gave it new meaning. He said to the world. “Hey I am not good...

I had the most unusual visitor today. Not so much because of anything he said, but his face. He had a really wide gap tooth, which I had a hard time trying not to look at. To look or not to look, was the great debate. "Don’t look," i said to myself. I would look. Kinda hard to look away from eh? "Look." I would still look. (I trust you have figured out that this was a debate between the left and right part of my brain) To understand why, I have to explain to you what this peculiar visitor looked like. He had asymmetrical lips Yes I noticed those two. One slightly crooked thin upper lip attached to  a very full-quite sensual- lower lip. These I had to notice first before I saw those teeth I mentioned earlier. So yes, in between those lips which seemed a hybrid of Sylvester Stallone and somebody else who lies tauntingly at the edge of memory- was that gap. Now, I have to point out that from the moment he walked into my office this...

A friend of mine asked me, the other day, to blog in Shona. Easy, I thought to myself, no problem. So I started with the basics. And by basics I mean poetry. Because, unlike prose I didn't deed to follow a set plot or formula. What I came up with was a hostile selection of sentences. I couldn't come up with a single synonym, simile or verb, let alone idioms and verbs. Shocker, I thought, Shona is my native tongue. I mean yes I dream in English and drop my Shona for choice English curses, but Shona is who I am. How then is it that I, the scion of those who never run out of things to say developed verbal amnesia? I have resolved to look into this; even if it means cracking my brain open and poring through it layer by layer, I shan't be defeated by the language that is home! Bodo ndaramba.