Tendai Mwanaka and Daniel da Purifacação
The Best New African Poets 2015 Anthology
The Following poems are excerpted from The Best New African Poets 2015 Anthology edited
by Tendai Mwanaka and Daniel da Purifacação. While the anthology itself does not focus on disability specifically
the poems that follow by Christopher Kudyahakudadirwe, deziree a. brown, Christina Coates and Hailey Gaunt
whose work is included in the anthology do bear on disability in its broadest sense.
Christopher Kudyahakudadirwe
The Passage
She was a slow red traffic light
At the intersection of the busy roads
Hesitantly, like an aged chameleon
Her walker clicked on the tarmac
Ordering the afternoon traffic to stop.
We sat patiently in our idling cars
As we awaited this apparition
To creep across the road so we could go.
Her age commanded all the respect
While her stooped body told her story,
The story of a life lived long and hard.
It was obvious that in the theatre of her mind
The fear of vulnerability had no place.
While in the silence of her deafness
She had lost the urgency of purpose.
We waited in our cars for her snail passage
By the time she reached the edge of the road
The red traffic light had flashed in our faces.
She looked at us through those ghostly eyes
The wrinkle-singed face cracked into a smile.
She seemed cast into the vault of time.
* * *
deziree a. brown
what jackie’s body told
We loved a woman.
Her body told diabetes
And fibromyalgia, bastard children
With a flood of Holy Ghost fire.
Her insides slowly decayed
on Christmas Day. Doctors
Scraped her tissues into
Glass jars and plastic test
Tubes; studied them.
Scrawled her name on the
Scrap covering, Spat words
We did not understand.
Scorned our blatant apprehension
And shut their eyes to our fears.
Cholangiocarcinoma stretched out
And overstayed its welcome;
When they turned her over, she
Looked into my eyes and I
Wept. Her body told screams.
Too late for a human-fed
Breath of life. Too much mercy
for a God-sent one. I heard mumbles
Of sweet death, dancing in the
Nether regions of what was
Left. It is never beautiful, what the
Body tells. Surgeons cut and paste
Temporary life and still we
Fade into glorified memory.
Silence is what her body told.
Silence and needle-fine
Heartache.
* * *
Christina Coates
House at Kolmanskop
Everybody’s gone;
those who once lived here,
who occupied my flesh,
and I am left with bits of charcoal,
the burnt out fires, the empty grates.
But I pick up a piece and draw
my life – a city of stones –
submerged in sand, it rises.
I’m walking on skin
the colour of a dried out lake,
yet there are acacias near the edge,
but I’m not allowed to call them
acacias anymore;
Australia owns them
and the ones who fled in fear
and the children,
but I stayed
like the dead heads of the cannas,
the agapanthus drying in the garden
dropping black seeds.
The one who desired, who inserted himself,
no longer sees me,
the weight of a cathedral
he no longer worships.
Stained glass and sand bags,
the wine’s evaporated,
the red stains, the breadcrumbs
abandoned at Kolmanskop
so I spend days walking sands,
and I occupy my body
with these words.
* * *
Hailey Gaunt
Thamalakane River, Botswana
Five children by the riverside
tuck behind the girth of a leadwood.
We sit, slinging greetings
to the bark: "Dumela! " "Dumela!"
until one, two, three,
four pairs of limbs stretch out
and the last, a baby-rounded pair.
Each with her own ribby trunk –
and the potbellied one.
They twine around the felled part
at the base where my feet rise
and like this we sit –
spend every Setswana word,
point out every bird,
spell our names in the dirt.
I’ll read aloud, I say, they all grin
but the eldest, who does her best scoff –
turn and flicks her lower legs
all the way to the river’s edge.
When she comes back she’s got five
ivory dials by the choke,
their slender torsos dragging behind her
(how to carry a spray of water lilies?).
At the end of one stalk
she snaps the base with her teeth,
shears the meat from the clear
celluloid sheath, chucks it aside,
repeats this down the flower’s willowy length –
snapping and pulling away,
snapping and pulling away.
When she comes to the white-finger petals
between the v of the split-in-two:
a lily necklace.
She squints, measures it for her neck,
decides it must be shorter,
then tears the strand halfway down –
I don’t know why I thought it was a gift.
The toothless one smiles with her own
lily pendant and soon all of them,
even the little one, are decorated.
How beautiful they are,
how they have made themselves.
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