the sound of spring

the sound of
birds, a chill, a smudge of orange
light on the horizon.
leaves stirring in a slight
breeze.
the smell of summer, even underneath
the chill.

some insect, tittering.
the brightest stars, left shining
the flowers are still asleep
skeletal trees reaching
and of course, the standard cockrel,
crowing.

the feeling; how I wish my view of sky wasn’t
truncated by perimeters.
salmon fades into blue;
the blue that has always been
there, hidden by the moon.

spiky trees against the horizon; fuzzy trees
and crisp- leaved trees.
the odd rumble of a car, nearby; or far
away.
conversations between birds, and
visibility; i can see the colours in the
trees, and flowers.

then, the bite in the air
that heralds the sun.
if only i had a horizon, unimpeded!
dirty orange and the brown of sand.
the challenge, the space between
mind and hand.
a bird, black against the sky,
and now,
the day has begun.

©ngozi chukura 2010

Bathtime

Bathtime. A very short story.
She thought, as she brushed her teeth: the girl cannot be separated from the mother. They are unified in their Womanness. Their surety and insecurity.
She was born in a bath; slithered smooth and covered in life juice. Rudely pushed from her warm; silent space. Awakened. Her mother used to laugh, “it was almost as if you didn’t want to come out-you were in there for ten whole months!” as if ‘in there’ was somehow dislocated from her own body. So there she was; an overripe fruit. Mushy and slippery. Reluctant. She carried this reluctance with her, through her childhood; her adolescence. “That’s not unusual”, her mother used to say, “even though our innate nature never changes, we tend to change our minds, at intervals”. She wondered about “innate nature”, as a child. It consumed her, pushed the spaces in her mind apart as it took root. An indefinable Something Significant pushing, growing.
She spat out the frothy, minty, “twice as white” toothpaste, and rinsed her mouth out, swirling lukewarm water around her mouth, under her tongue; gargling. She rinsed her mouth out. She turned off the taps, and stepped into the scalding bath water. As she lowered her bottom half into the bath, the water level rose a little. It settled, wavy, just under her breasts: twin peaks, rising out of a hot sea.
©Ngozi Chukura

Becoming Abigail by Chris Abani

The story of the young Abigail unfolds slowly; it meanders, like the maps that she likes to imagine depict her mother. In its unraveling, Abani is descriptive and intense; Abigail’s world is graphic and filled with the translucent ache of desire. It seems as though the younger Abigail is trying to become the older one. Not in terms of personality, but in terms of death; the younger is to become dead. She seems softly haunted by the mother she never knew.

Throughout the novel, Abani gives the impression of her being a walking ghost, and with her branding, she seems to ground herself into her own flesh, as though to reassure herself that she is still herself. And in her self-burning, she becomes an effigy, a kind of tortured doll. But the fact that she inflicts the pain on herself somehow imbues her with power, in a world in which so much has been inflicted on her.

Her story is woven into the city of London, and her actions are sewn up in invented rituals that are both an expression of her grief and a conjuring of death. It is also a poignant look of a black person’s experience of London; her father’s, her mother Abigail’s, and her own. Their relationship with each other and with the city is erotic and violent; death invades each page, each interaction between characters. Through Abigail, Abani reiterates how memory is reinforced through ritual; and repetition is the foundation of all ritual. The ritual of becoming someone that she is not compels her throughout the story. Abani is macabre and bizarre and honest and his descriptions are melancholic and poetic. A beautiful read for a relaxed afternoon.