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The ReturnBy Sofiul Azam QuailBellMagazine.com for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong I Perhaps I’ll come back like a salmon fish to that same estuary again; I may wish to see my newcomers swim on that old stream. Or perhaps I’ll stay away like a statue hewn out of a huge rock, far away from my grandparents’ mountain, on another longitude, alone under another sky. But the return doesn’t mean the return of my body, something more, beyond five senses for sure. Who knows if distance is just steam in a lid-locked pressure cooker? II
As my body gets dry like a split bamboo this summer the sound coming off it like cacophony on the air I remember the old gossipy days. My mind was soft like a bamboo shoot—is that only the past? Or is it the ripe bamboo’s fond love for its memories still green? I still remember that over my roots under my leaves, a toad took shelter during the rains. A few days later, a snake came to announce its rights and satisfied its hunger. Necessity flicked its forked tongue and ate me, too. III The taste of crescent-shaped rice-dumplings on a winter morning, the broth of a curry with swamp barbs and leaf amaranth, a little spicy rice flour slightly fried with margosa leaves on a moonless night-- I’m wondering if all these memories have turned pale under the stone of distance? Perhaps so. Or perhaps I’ve lost all those memories, like marbles lost in knee-deep mud from the knot of my lungi while bathing in a large pond. But some fossils of that time are still preserved in my mind’s museum. IV Bathing in a canal, she got a tiny shrimp entangled in her hair bound tight by a red ribbon. From then on, I used to call her The Shrimp Girl. Sitting on a land aisle between cornfields, she sang, letting her goats graze on. I clasped her breasts from behind her and said: These wood apples are soft. She held her head low in shame. Who knows where she is now? Her mind was soft like a sapodilla, and I’ve remained the fruit-eating bat all my life, here and abroad. V Then I flapped my wings and flew to another language-- the country you can’t catch hold of in a net of longitudes and latitudes. Then I forgot the biological pull of the language I’d learned in my mother’s womb. Some say I’ve lost the silver of Gangetic ailias, as I swam in the other water, caught in weeds. Of course, I talk about the other way around. Trust me: One can’t be a different man with a different dress on. You’ve just stopped before it, sadly never beyond it. CommentsComments are closed.
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