Posts tagged writing

No one knew how Sylvain died, just as few of us knew how he lived. He always slipped out of the corner of the eye, at dusk, as we walked past him with a brief Mura Mukye – Good Night. His voice resounded back, the deepest bass – Mura Mukye Neza – and a good night to you, spreading reassurance like a carpet before us. It was not twilight, but morning when we heard he had died, the night before, at the hour he usually greeted us. « He just died. » said Rose, the administrator.  He had complained of a headache and a pain in the side the day before, and had been unable to cycle home. The next day he walked about his hillside, and in the evening he lay down and never got up again. 

Dirt road in Rwanda

His fellow nightwatchman Honoré said « in Rwanda there are some bad people. They poison you. Sylvain attracted the envy of someone and died. What else could have killed him so suddenly? » I suggested malaria. « It wasn’t malaria ». I looked to another guard, who nodded, gravely. Mado, the cleaner, confirmed: « He was poisoned. His wife thinks so too. » Here, when someone drops dead, everyone says he has been poisoned. Here, the witch doctors mix poison as well as antidote, and cyanide comes easily in the leaves and the roots of manioc, a common food, an everyday killer.  Had he seen a doctor? No, why? He had never consulted a doctor in his life, nor had Mado, nor the two other guard. 

They told me he left four children by his first wife, who died, and one by his second wife. The widow is young - too young to be stepmother of four. Sylvain’s brother, who would have inherited responsibility for his nieces and nephews, had also died. One sister remained, who lived close by, having parted from her husband years before. I never had the chance to ask his widow what she thought. I saw her once, at the funeral, surrounded by a protective mass of mourners, clutching a baby. She looked straight ahead, dignified, younger by many years than her dead husband. She nodded gravely at the words of sympathy, and moved on to another life.

Children in Volcans national park. 

They held the funeral on a Saturday morning, a day and a night after his death. Twenty or more of us, his colleagues, drove from Gitarama town to Mushubati, the commune where Sylvain lived. After half an hour slidding along dirt tracks, we left the 4-wheel drives and continued on foot, another hour. He made this journey to work, on his bicycle, four of five times a week. We climbed a narrow path that led across the hill into banana groves and scarlet lilies. We saw the mourners long before we came to the house. They sat on the green and red hillside, and saluted us with long faces, a face put on for the occasion. Even Mado, usually so smiling, looked solemn. We walked to Sylvain’s small adobe house, the plain house of the Rwandan hill farmer. Nothing distinguished this house from those around it - no wooden doors, no glass windows, just rectangular and square holes gouged in the mud walls - but many banana trees clustered around the cottage and adobe bricks were stacked by the enclosure, enough for an extension to his modest house. Sylvain earned good wages by Rwandan standards. 

As we reached the house, plaintive singing started. Three barefooted men in white cassocks that did not entirely cover ragged trousers, walked slowly out of the enclosure of the house. One carried a wooden cross, the other two, hymn-books. Behind them, Sylvain lay in his closed coffin - a few boards nailed together - carried on the shoulders of six men. His sister and widow walked behind, and his children, three girls, a boy and the toddler in his mother’s arms. I recognised the sister - the same angular, lined face, the same square nose and long lips as Sylvain. She had swathed a bright orange and green cloth over her head, but her bowed head and tense body made the bold colours as mournful as the funereal purple richer Rwandans use. Her posture emanated anger as well as sadness, she looked about to explode with bitterness. Behind her walked the chief mourner, a friend of the family. He wore a dirty cream raincoat over seamless, too-short trousers, and, like the clerics, went barefoot, but he conveyed an authority and dignity that no fine, first-hand clothes could have bolstered. 

The cortège followed the thin coffin, the chanting clerics,  the silent family, along a path on the hillside. Fifty feet from the house, we stopped. In a clearing of the banana grove, a deep pit gaped. Rwandan law forbids bodies from being buried in unconsecrated ground, but after a million peole had been hacked and hastily thrown into mass graves, rivers and down wells, no-one took that law seriously. “And how is his family to transport him all the way to Gitarama, anyway? Even the priest doesn’t come up here”, said Mado. The men in cassocks were farmers, like Sylvain, who volunteered as church wardens in their local parish. They still sang, and most of the mourners had joined in.  « Oh Lord, though we are all sinners, accept this sinner into your heaven. » « Mary, Mother of God, pray for this poor sinner, pray for his entrance into Paradise. » They lowered the coffin and the clerics sprinkled holy water over it. Then all the men took it in turns to shovel earth into the grave. In ten minutes red earth swallowed Sylvain, the same earth that had covered his feet when he dug for sweet potatoes and harvested bananas, and that crusted the feet of all the people around us. Just then I realised how incongruous we must look, a group of town people in suits and shoes, three of us white. No-one before had remarked upon us, nor followed us, nor even glanced our way noticeably. This was not a day for the bazungu.

Landscape in Gitarama province, Rwanda. 

The burial was over. Two more traditions had to be honoured: the collection for the family, and the allocation of land to the eldest child. The chief mourner stood and appealed, in the name of the family, to its friends and neighbours to help out with the “mourning charges” – the money spent on the clerics, the coffin, the soft drinks the mourners would drink that day; a basket was passed round, which filled with notes. Foreigners and town dwellers were expected to give appropriately, but not ostentatiously: the family did not want to attract more bad luck, more jealousy. 

The chief mourner called Delphine, Sylvain’s eldest child. She was thirteen, a pretty adolescent becoming an adult that day. She was led to the back of the house, where a portion of the banana grove was marked out with sticks. She solemnly walked along the boundaries of her inheritance. When she came to the small group of her father’s colleagues from town, she thanked us in French for attending her father’s funeral. A child again, she smiled shyly, while her father’s neighbours congratulated her, patted her back, and her aunt watched fiercely on, the living memory of Sylvain.

The family walked back into the house, and the sound of many voices wailing rose up from behind its mud walls. Everyone else dispersed slowly up or down the hillside. Faces relaxed, talk turned to farming matters, football, a forthcoming wedding. No-one mentioned poison again and no-one questioned the fate that had struck down another Rwandan, unexplained and uninvestigated, as common as rain on the lush hills. Only Rose whispered – “well, it might be AIDS, you know. My cousin says it is spreading.” Rose’s cousin was a doctor in Remera hospital.  She mentioned AIDS, but without much conviction. AIDS belonged to Kigali, to the colourful posters advertising Prudence condoms, to the refugee camps in Congo and Tanzania that had been dispersed over three years before, to the new Tutsi arrivals from Uganda. Sylvain had nothing to do with any of these. In spite of a genocide which included mass rape, two civil wars, an international conflict, two million hutu refugees who had fled and returned, half a million Tutsis who had come home from neighbouring countries,  and unprecedented world attention, most Rwandans still saw their country as a landlocked island in the Great Lakes, protected by its hills and its ancient traditions. 

In the ancient Armorican forest, Midsummer Eve 2012

Forest green, dark and earthy, overlaying a million years’ undergrowth with the smell of loam about it; light green, as a traveller following a winding path through the woods comes across a clearing of soft grass sprinkled in sun drops; pool green in the middle of the clearing, cool, almost navy, its banks feathered by sedge, and, bare legs splashing the water, a boy carving a flute out of a reed; blue green, the colour of  his eyes, which his mother gave him, along with her musical gift, and the shade of the dress she wore when she slipped away from home - she had to find the truth of her life, she said; she never returned, but she left him a penknife to cut his piccolo.

Brown green, the traveller’s coat, ragged and dirty with barn dirt and road dirt, laid down by the pool like a picnic rug; old green of the cheese that comes out of the coat pocket, with bread and a flask - the man’s lunch, which he shares with the boy in exchange for a tune.  Green the colour of his unthought-of hope as he hears the fugue fill the clearing, rise above the trees, silence the birds in wonder - have I found the child Orpheus?   His feet, as he continues his journey later, are no longer sore and his heart is breaking from the cracked joy in the tune he still hears skimming in the green shadows, becoming black, all around him.

She’s spent so long asleep in this way,

an eternity of moving limbs

while she just lay, not gazing, not thinking -

but she has felt the winds from the sea 

carve her cheekbones,  

the salt on her round thighs caressed

by children, by lovers, by passing  sailors 

who laughed at her inflated hips.

How small she is, they say, how composed.

Don’t  think she would not

disgrace herself. So many years 

of being good, it weighs on a woman.

She longs to move her arms, to stretch

out to the sky, at last to wake! 

rub her infertile stomach, her bottom, dance 

a jig around the town square and see

them stare - how she would roar her huge belly 

laugh, a fart in their faces who have been mocking her. 

Above all she wants to wrap her legs around the sailors 

and squeeze.

The itch in her shoulder will not go,

that just a little movement

would scratch - ah no! she forgets, 

she lost her right hand and must itch forever, unless

they do it for her, the sailors, the lovers, the children

she will never have, who stroke her gigantic 

breasts,  huddle in her arms,

blow their five-year old breath on her old cheeks.

Soon she will lose that as well: they plan 

to place her in walls, bind her in glass, 

stick a label in front of her - Do Not Touch,

Sleeping Goddess, circa 3000 BC, Malta.

She doesn’t feel her age, perhaps because she’s no mind

to feel it, just raw arms, raw legs, raw belly. 

I left my basement flat in a downpour, rushing to avoid the rain that lashed at my face, gripping a useless black umbrella. I was on my way to the green grocer’s down the road for fruit, which I crave all year round, but especially in winter. Mrs McLean was at the front of the shop, in a cheerful mood, and she greeted each customer with a friendly Scots welcome: “Hello, you’re brave, not too wet? Isn’t it awful?” I was damp and grumpy, so I just nodded. 

He came running in, as I had, two feet tall, squealing with glee and shaking his sodden yellow curls, his father behind him. His face was round and pink, not pretty but he had bold eyes and the vitality of a young animal. He explored the shop, holding on to the counter and the stacked boxes of fruit and vegetables. By the potatoes, by the green beans, by the  oranges, flicking the top of a pineapple, clinging to Mrs McLean’s leg and beaming at me, a surge of sunshine in a drowned world. 

- “Nom nom nom nom nom. Apple!” he tottered towards a box of Cox’s orange pippins and made kissing noises, poking an apple with his fingers. 

- “Now Max darling, go anywhere you please, but don’t bite my fruit, don’t leave wee teeth marks all over my apples.” Mrs McLean’s red hand reached down and picked one for him: 

- “This one is all for you.”

He bit into it with a sigh, as though it had been the only food in the world, then waved his apple in triumph. “Apple!”

- “He loves apples”, his father smiled. “Keeps the doctor away!”

Who cares about the rain outside when a child is learning to walk, talk and live before my eyes, so curious and so engaged? I should get out more often. I should meet someone,  have a child of my own. When Max and his father had gone, Mrs McLean and I smiled at each other.  “Children, they make it all worthwhile, don’t they?” she said. 

I wandered home ignoring the weather, with an armful of mimosa I hadn’t thought of buying before the glimpse I had of a little boy. 

*****************

The flowers are still alive, their heady smell fills the living room with Mediterranean winter fragrance. Max is dead. I walked past his parents’ furniture shop today and saw his picture in a new silver frame, with a short message: “To all our friends and neighbours”. Their beloved son Max had passed away in his sleep on Wednesday 1st February and they thanked everyone for their support. That was all. The shop was open but I did not enter. What could I say to the bereaved parents? But perhaps I shall slip this note to them, so that they may know the joy their son gave a lonely stranger, one rainy day. 

A true story (names have been changed).

Lake Malawi

Even from the air Malawi is a lush country, especially now in the rainy season, when it thickens with growth, undergrowth, and mirages of plenty. As far as I can see, small fields laid out like patchwork cover the land. Trees grow densely, in every shade of green – cassava, pumpkin, banana, baobab.

 I think of the children I would meet tomorrow, all refugees, and the endless questions they would cast at me, desperate challenges for which I would have no answer. The modest would ask for more food, medecine, pencils. The bold would want visas for the developed world. The frantic, a passage for “anywhere outside this accursed continent”.  I could only offer them messages to a faraway relative, leading, perhaps, to a reunion, perhaps – miracles do happen – in Paris, London or Montreal.

The next day I drive to a small refugee camp called Dzaleka with Anthony, an NGO official. He is easy-going, sings as he drives, and recounts stories of his grandfather, the witch doctor, who would fly from Nyasaland to South Africa in a minute.   Like all of Malawi in this season, the camp is half hidden by solid stalks of maize and banana groves that hide the concrete administrative buildings and mud houses. Have I come to a garden, where I expected a refugee camp? But here is the Malawian administrator in his bare dusty office. Here are the UNHCR posters on the cracked wall – so they do visit here from time to time! -  and the Red Cross table calendar on a plywood desk overflowing with yellow papers. 

Dzaleka is considered a small, back-water, forgotten camp, for most refugees a way-station or a hiding place. The camp population has grown steadily to accommodate the flow of Congolese refugees. The administrator says that the Congolese are the first to go back. “As soon as there is a lull in the fighting, they rush back, unless they have personal reasons not to, or they are waiting for resettlement abroad. We have great trouble persuading them to stay while danger persists. The Congolese are crazy. They are not allowed to work here, but they still do business. Some have come with bicycles and cycle to Blantyre every week to sell goods!” There are older refugees in Dzaleka, too Rwandans, Burundians, even Somalis, each with their own desolate memories. 

Anthony tells me that in the old days, under the dictator Dr Hastings Banda, Dzaleka had another name and was used as a political labour camp. It was a place so notorious that those people who emerged alive used to swear, upon leaving, “dzaleka!”, which means, “never again!” in Chichewa. Now the camp hosts people who have fled other horrors and have in turn sighed, or screamed, “never again!” in Lingala, Kiswahili, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi. 

I spend the day speaking to children and young men. We sit together in a small school room. No class today, it seems: they have morning or afternoon school twice a week.  French and English pratice sentences decorate the classroom.  “La porte est fermée. The door is closed”, “The bird is flying.  L’oiseau vole”, with drawings of a blue door, a sparrowhawk soaring. The benches creak under the weight of so many people. The arrival of a Red Cross musungu kazi, white woman,  is news that has spread throughout the camp as fast as Anthony’s grandfather. I haven’t been in a schoolroom for 15 years.  I crunch myself on on one of the tiny desks – they didn’t used to be so small, did they? Anthony sits at the back.  He does not understand the conversations in French, but smiles gently, unperturbed by the waves of passion that overtake the classroom periodically. Only once does he intervene, when a row erupts between several boys vying for attention. I don’t know if they understand his scolding Chichewa, but his tone calms them. 

Men and boys have gathered around me, with only three girls amongst them. I am told the other girls and the women are cooking and working their small vegetable patches. I ask the assembled refugees a few questions to which many answers fuse all at once.  What energy is there! The energy of survival, of anger, but also a life-force that not even war has dimmed.  

“Il ne fait pas bon être nègre” , Papy says, a thin twenty-five year old, who still bears signs of Zairean panache - la Sape – in his swagger and his well-kept purple jacket, a size too large for him. 

“How can you say this? how can call yourself that? ” I ask, the brutal colonial word grating against my nice European mind. 

“But it’s true, isn’t it?”, he answered, “isn’t Africa called le continent nègre? Who cares about it? There’s a generation of young growing up illiterate in the Great Lakes because of the war, we live in insecurity at home, the girls are raped, and if we leave, we are corralled in camps, underfed, just kept alive. A kilo of beans a month! And for what?”

“Everyone wants you to go home.”

“I have no home left, he says bitterly. The Rwandan army burnt it down, and occupied my town, they’ll pick me up if I go home because I took part in student protests.  And now, we are kept away from your countries. You can visit Malawi, Zimbabwe or Congo. But can we visit England, France, Canada?  You have studied, haven’t you, to get this job? Can we go to university, buy books, earn a decent living in an interesting job? Or any job? Can we even eat a decent meal? What have you come for today? Africa is dying and we les nègres are dying with it. But you did not come for that. ”  

He is deliberately baiting me now, using that word as a weapon, daring me to resist him, to place my reason in the way of his anger.  I search for words, and see myself, instead. My clothes are new, I ate breakfast this morning, I use a reasonable voice which keeps a proper distance between the refugees and me, the way I was taught when I took this job. Then as fast as the storm erupts, it shifts, whirling me along: “How do I get some books? We are setting up adult classes with some refugees that are teachers - we have no paper, but we can always write in the dirt, Africa has plenty of that.”  “I want to join my brother in Spain, my uncle in Brussels. I want to go back to Goma, to Kisangani” (How did someone from Kisangani land here? I wonder). “I want to find my wife before I forget what she looks like.”  In another change of tone, they cajole me: “Are you married? how old are you?  Will you ever marry? But not a refugee. We know that! None of us have anything to offer you.”  They are daring me again. 

I talk, I laugh, I battle with them for what I will and won’t do - “just give us the means and we’ll do it for ourselves”.  These are not the aid degenerates dear to the armchair critics, nor are they victimised losers. These are gifted,  truculent young men who would be an asset to any country, in bright curiosity, in bravado, in impudent sexiness, now intense and rimmed with sadness, because it’s practically all they have left. Perhaps it’s true that hardship concentrates the mind, sharpens the talents. In European and African towns, Congolese refugees prosper in many ways. Some become law professors, writers or musicians. Some sell Prada bags – fake and genuine, as long as it has a label -  or set up smart scams. None sit down and weep about their fate for longer than a Koffi Olomide love song. 

And the children? After all, I came for them. There are still many Rwandan children, left over from the great flight of ‘96, when the refugee camps in Zaïre and Tanzania were dispersed by the Rwandan Pariotic Army (RPA). A few refugees ended up here, in Dzaleka, after thousands of miles of walking, from forest to forest, bush to bush, camp to camp. Dzaleka is just a stage on an endless journey. Some still limp.  I can hardly imagine what they must have seen, the memories they heave silently about like bundles on their heads. 

These Rwandan children in Dzaleka have had no real carers for years. Most can’t read or write, because they haven’t received any regular schooling. How can there be education where there is no continuity or discipline? Somehow they are surviving. They are hard, unripe fruit. I give a handful of sweets and receive a smile. A few words in kinyarwanda, and it is a laugh. But I have no idea how they live, nor what future there is for them. They live without any sense of time. There are those whose parents we have traced and whom I’d like to send home. Suddenly thrown back in time, they take fright and refuse to look beyond Dzaleka, prefering the safety of the half-life they know to the uncertainty of going home and settling down with a family they have forgotten. Several children do not believe that their parents are really alive. They remember seing them killed. “But look at the photo. Do you recognise your mother here?” Twelve-year old Ephrem looks on silently. He nods, tears pour down his cheeks. Embarrassed to be crying in front of me, he moves to a corner to compose himself. He murmurs something to his cousin, who speaks some French. “He has recognised his mother. But he is still not sure it is safe to return.”

Many of the other children and teenagers are traumatised. Congolese war, Burundian war, Somali war, all have left scars. Jean-Pierre from Bukavu in Eastern Congo can barely see, he closes his eyes downwards and refuses to look at the world. I learn that two months ago, he saw his family sliced up by the rebels, because his father wrote a letter of support for the government in Kinshasa. He was outside the house when they came, and hid in the hen coop. Calliste, a thin young Burundian, streams sweat and shakes like a blade of grass. His mother is Tutsi, he says, and his father Hutu, and both communities want his blood, even  here in Dzaleka. 

Some should be traumatised and are not, another mystery. There is a calm, slightly worried-looking seventeen year-old Congolese boy who has been father and mother to his four little brothers and sisters since the age of fifteen. Two years ago, their parents were killed by the Mayi-Mayi, naked hunter-warriors who started off as resistance fighters and ended up perpetrating massacres, like most participants in that dirty war. He and his siblings fled their home town, Uvira by Lake Tanganyika, returning after three months. As they grew older, the Mayi-Mayi renewed their threats. One day, six weeks ago, he came home and found the death-sign of the Mayi-Mayi daubed on the front door. He picked up the children and ran, this time from the country. “I am worried, because I have no money for the little ones. My elder brother is in Canada and could help care for us. We can’t go back, the Mayi-Mayi want to wipe out our family”. 

There’s a story in that, but I’ll never know it. His eyes give nothing away but immediate concern for the future. All he wants is help in getting organised. He writes a Red Cross message for his brother in Canada, gives me the latter’s email address and takes down the address for the nearest Canadian High Commission. Some of the Congolese laugh around him, one boy drums on his desk, one gets up to dance the ndombolo. The Rwandans and Burundians look on, immobile. 

Anthony and I drive back to Lilongwe exchanging impressions. Some we can help, others not. Some will find their own way, some will compromise their dreams, some will give up. Many will refuse to give up, and shout out “never again!”  Dzaleka.  I am angry at the neglect, the waste. The North expresses guilt about the oppression of Africa: but what is killing Africa now is not only oppression and exploitation, it is indifference. L’abandon. That’s what they call it. 

Papa Wemba, cover photo for Le Voyageur

Back in Lilongwe, Papa Wemba, rumba king from Congo, is singing Le Voyageur (the Traveller) on the radio: 

“Bolingo Lingo Eponi Ekolote 

Lingo Lingo Mboka Te 

Lingo Lingo Mundele Te 

Lingo Lingo Moyindo Te” 

Love has no country 

Love has no village 

Love has no Whites 

Love has no Blacks

When I left the camp, not one person forgot to wish me a merry Christmas and happy holidays. A year later, sitting in an office in Kinshasa, I received a letter from the young man who looked after his four brothers and sisters. They had reached Canada. 

© Sophie Nussle

A short story. 

Jan shouldn’t have come to the party.  Simon is heaping food on his plate and gulping down champagne, he’ll be drunk soon and embarrass her. She ought to leave. She’s not wearing the right dress. She doesn’t want to hear Alex dismiss Simon in that irritated way of his, or roll his eyes at her because her husband’s voice is too loud and he laughs like a horse. 

Then she sees Alex across the room, surrounded by a golden haze. The light is shining from him, a halo of triumph and intoxication, like those portraits of his namesake just after the conquest of Asia. Men and women approach him, push aside the curtain formed by others, to luxuriate in that glow. Jan thinks, what has happened to him? What have I done? The feeling is voluptuous and fills her limbs with pain. People bring him his book to sign. He obliges with a flourish - is that a new fountain pen? He smiles his coy, sly grin that women like, because he loves above all to captivate women. A girl is hovering, a girl with long fair hair, long brown legs, a long elegant neck, which he stoops to kiss, moving his arm around her. 

- Do you know Freya?

So this is Freya. He dedicated his book to her, though he had no even met her when he was writing it, when Jan was typing and editing it. His hand rests on the girl’s hip, lightly stroking. Jan sees the way their bodies flow into each other and she tightens the grip on her champagne glass. The golden couple, they are called. Not very original, she thinks. But they oblige the cliché, being both tall and blonde, and lithe in the way of panthers. He’s approaching, his hand in the curve of Freya’s back.

- Thank you for coming, Jan. I know this is hard for you, to leave the kids. Simon is… he seems to be having a good time. I see he’s found the champagne. 

- He likes people, she snaps. 

Simon is guffawing and slapping someone on the back. Jan winces. It’s hard for her to stand there, listening to Alex talk to her in that trite voice, like a stranger. 

- Umm, Jan, this is Freya. You remember? I told you about her.

Jan looks up in the younger woman’s face. 

- Freya’s just been picked for a play at the National, and for a BBC adaptation of Great Expectations. 

- As Miss Haversham?

Oh no, that was  a stupid thing to say, what’s got into her? Alex frowns. Freya smiles with languid pity, her eyes mocking Jan’s unfashionable dress with its ill-fitting waist around a plump figure.  

- Maybe later, when I’m your age, Jan. 

*************

Alex thinks, why is Jan behaving this way? Why is she looking at me like this, as though she hated me? He stares at her. How dare she? I’ve worked for this! For years I’ve given up comfort, prosperity, family life. And she understood. She can’t do this to me, not Jan. It’s not fair. How can she let me down like this?

- You’re doing very well, Alex.  I hear you’ve sold the film rights already. People like your book.

- Yeah, well, some of it’s over the top, you know. 

- The new Amis?

He laughs, not quite freely. 

- I rather liked that one. 

He’s drinking too fast and holding on to Freya as though she were a life buoy. He asks Jan if she’s met his agent, a tall woman in a black trouser suit with ink-black hair and red lips, who’s standing by the window-seat. Why doesn’t she go up and introduce herself? he suggests. 

************

Jan doesn’t want to meet the agent. All evening she has encountered people who ignore her until they realise who she is, then they slime up to her. Was he gifted as a child? You must be so proud of him. What’s it like to have a little brother like Alex? Will you introduce me? They say there’s going to be a film soon. 

Yes, I am proud of him, she admits. I made him. I honed him, I nurtured his talent, a horse trainer with a thoroughbred.  I taught him to look, to listen, to record it all. I edited, corrected, sent him back to rewrite, refine, bring out his best. I typed his handwritten manuscripts, because he can never be bothered to type two-fingered. I crippled my back and my neck and put his work before my own because I knew how good he could become. 

Alex is moving away. 

- Did you show her my poems? She asks. 

- Show whom?

- Your agent. Have you shown her?

He looks self-conscious. His eyes flit around, resist her. 

- Well, you know, she doesn’t really do poetry. It doesn’t sell. 

******************

He had not even known that she was writing poetry, until six weeks ago, when she’d handed him a file full of them. He’d read them in the bath and had been shocked. Where had she found such power and scorn? When? The images she drew had chased him in his dreams and in his work, and when he excised them, his words were flat. 

He watches her sipping champagne, looking down at her flat blue shoes. So out of place. Dumpy little Jan. How had she drawn down that voice?

He’s ashamed of himself. Freya has moved away, he sees her talking to a film producer, her hand on his arm, throwing her laughter like a golden net around the man’s bald head. His agent is moving up towards Freya and the producer, she also wants to grease up baldy. 

- Listen, I’ll call you, OK? Maybe I can do something about the poems.

- Right. OK. Right. 

**************

Jan is alone now. She walks away towards Simon, tired as people are after great anger or anguish have raged through them. She chats cozily, quite herself again, except for her limp body, too much champagne, she says. 

There was a colour-blind artist who loved to tramp through swamps and paint the moon. He painted purple skies and orange grass and the sea forest green and blood red. Wherever he looked, he saw what others saw not and stole it for his canvas. He roamed and painted at night, because he said that colours and shapes had so much more power in the dark, when only night vision and madness can see them.  He saw many things, but he heard very little: for he was also deaf and taken up by his own thoughts, which imposed themselves, like trumpets, on the words and songs around him. As a result, he had a wide vision but no hearing and his paintings shouted out in the silence of crimson stars  - look at me!

~ Sophie Nussle

A poem about a Rwandan genocide prisoner. I visited many of them in my year there, held in cachots throughout the province where I worked.