Back to my Roots
Inspiration.
That is the price you pay for being famous. Everybody invites you to a retinue of tedious ‘lectures’ where you are supposed to inspire your awestruck audience to greatness.
Inspired to change your fortunes; like hell they say.
Hell, I hate these gatherings, not especially because most of the time I am the subject of attention. Why can’t people just appreciate the fact that we are more than seven billion on this earth and that there is NO defined formula for ‘success’. That one man’s success could be another’s downfall?
(Come on, man; you are supposed to inspire these kids; not depress them).
I have no qualms, though, about today’s lecture; it’s kinda impromptu and I am in my home turf, flanked by my former favourite teacher (she is my friend now, and she asked me to give a word or two to her current demoralised class) and in my former favourite classroom – a perfect setting for an ambush speech. There is a maroon desk in the corner over there – the three of us used to sit on it, our hands keeping the tabula rasa heads up as we pretended to make sense of what the teacher was saying. But if ever there was anything I and the kids I used to call classmates in this class found most expensive to pay for, it was paying attention. We just could not understand why the man or woman in front of us would wake up every day and honestly believe he/she was making a positive change in our lives.
You have to cut us some slack man; we were being initiated into puberty and adolescence! The only thing we knew to be important was other same age human beings we ogled at from the safety of our class room. We thought of girls, and girls thought of us. And it was one of the things I learned very early on that girls wanted a lot of things from one boy; and that boys wanted only one thing from a lot of girls. I have since grown a beard and thankfully missed the skull of my boss with my laptop during one of my temper flares (what do you want me to say; my blood sometimes has a mind of its own). But for boys and girls, nothing changes.
Now, there is one missing ingredient – my former favourite class is not here. I mean the one with which my former favourite teacher said I broke hectares of new ground in my four-year sojourn at this lovely place. Take your pick – noisiest class, most undisciplined, highest female turnover rate due to premature pregnancy (we lost about six girls in the last two years of high school) and highest male turnover rate owing to expulsions (these were for various crimes ranging from statutory impregnations to drug and alcohol slavery). And in between, we managed to sneak the tag of brightest class in the history of the school as well. Haha; those kids, I loved them. Loved with them, argued with them, fought with them, chased one into romance.
Yea, we did make history didn’t we. That history was to repeat itself at every other school unlucky enough to admit me into its corridors of education. Like those four years spent at university, where my class snatched the coveted accolade, among others, as the most drunk since independence. And they did notice that our schoolwork, though always submitted late and with some molly-codldling mula-wrapped request for submission, was something of a phenomenon. But people just could not figure how we found the time to do our assignments when we spent virtually all of our college days bingeing at Sanganai Bar. And for that, we were most popular.
Or those six months I spent looking for discipline at the college of the disciplined forces. Guess what – we graduated with the record of the worst drilled pass-out parade ever! Yes, even when the BSAP was included, we still emerged the worst. And I’m quite sure that for our troubles, we got into the Guiness Book for getting the ‘rev’ after pass out. Talk about being revved up for the entire six months while exorcising the ‘povo’ ghost in Depot; nobody would bet an eyelid. But being made to roll all around the green square in that immaculate FD suit after pass-out? After pass-out! You gotta be kidding.
I stand to greet the kids. My former favourite teacher smiles; so fond of my history she is, what with her taking the laurel as the most rebellious, most outspoken and most cantankerous teacher in the history of this school. She and my former favourite class; we were two of a kind. No, not were. Are. (I mean just the two of us now).
It’s just like the other day when she asked my former classmates the most significant contribution we made to any new schools we visited. She was sorry she ever asked – the guys and girls – being as ‘hot’ as they thought they were – extolled their virtuous romancapades and sexcapades with counterparts in their new environs – how they snared and charmed and wormed their way into their friends’ hearts. Hearts they would gladly break as they made a beeline to the ever-welcoming warmth of this classroom. God, those were the days.
And I, being I, had only one story to tell. See, my friend Flower Girl (I will spent the rest of my life wondering why it took us so long to realise that the ‘just friends’ tag hanging from our necks us was an understatement – a big no no) once teased me, saying I was the kind that would have an erection every time I found myself at a new school; because at every one I visited, even for a few hours, I stole a book. Every fucking one of them.
(Oh, JJB, come on! Surely you must have stolen some girl’s heart somewhere)?
I am serious. Watching my childhood study at my home, you would get an idea of how many schools I have visited in my life. There are rows and rows of stolen books in there. Walls upon walls of stolen books. So many stolen books I even wondered whether I was a stolen book too.
That is my history. But my former favourite teacher here and I know it is not the kind of history that these kids want to hear about. They obviously cannot know that I was being inspired to write awe striking humongous bestsellers by ogling at foreign libraries and daydreaming of the day I would ransack them. It’s simply not inspiring. They want to hear about moving lectures in world-class lecture theatres, wild campus parties only an elite few of these children have seen in films. Of romance and friendships that last a lifetime, and, after all is said and done, a first class degree. Success. Who among us has not dreamt of such a life script?
I look at them and my eyes mist over. I am their hero; their world-beater. When writing their essays, they try to match my standards. Keeping up with JJB. For obvious reasons, they cannot know that I went for a whole year playing hide and seek with college authorities over non-payment of tuition and hostel accommodation.
“Tell us what inspired to you write your first novel,” one of them asks.
Oh, that word again. Inspiration. It makes me feel kinda sick.
Her question is typically journalistic, but it pains me to give the girl a typical journalistic answer.
Still, I wonder whether I should tell the truth – that an angry rumbling young stomach of an angry rambling young man was the seed of my first work, The Things I Do For You. Three years of fruitless quotidian journeys to the National Employment Council and it dawned on me beyond reasonable doubt that they had indeed uprooted me from my SRB – Strong Rural Background – and tossed me head first onto the stony parts of the heartless city where, with no work and no money, I was withering with each passing day.
Having been thoroughly indoctrinated in the traditional Karanga way, adaptation to the ‘salad’ life was indeed a toll order, much akin to forcing a river to flow uphill. It was an uphill task. Herculean. So I, being I, engaged the only language I understood most – I rebelled. That was how my classmates and I came to make history for all sorts of wrong reasons. We wanted to form a circle and play ‘Sarura Wako’, but we just could not do it in a city campus surrounded by city people. ‘Sarura Wako’ is a rural game for rural people. So we travelled 450km to play ‘Sarura Wako’ in its fitting place. A place like this – like home. Oh, we did it under the guise of having gone to learn ‘Rural Reporting’ of course.
I smile wryly as I reminisce how, growing up in this district; we struggled to cope with the old conservative traditional ways of our elders and ancestors. What was worse, we could not wholly embrace the new secular ways of modern Zimbabwe either. I think we made history as the most confused generation in the history of the word confusion.
Take Christmas for example, which is what brought me home to this expectant, thoroughly naïve (of course I cannot tell them they are naïve) young group in the first place. Having grown up inherently scared of this grand old man with this great white beard, quite peacefully reposed on some great white throne somewhere up there, my religious credentials have become quite secular, even quite questionable.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in God. Which means I believe in Christmas. But which Christmas – the one with Christmas trees, Christmas lights, an imaginary Santa Claus, a turkey and family?
Or the one that pumps up my adrenaline – alcohol, tea, ‘fat-cooks’, music, chicken. Family. More alcohol. Now, that’s my kinda Christmas – a Christmas with nothing Christian about it. I do have a very dated memory though, of some old women displaying pink, edentate smiles, with yellow ‘muzeze’ flowers hanging out of the pockets of their frayed Methodist Church, Dutch Reformed Church or Roman Catholic uniforms. Their ‘hoshos’ in hand, they would return home from a Christmas Day worship to help Paul Matavire through his evergreen hit, ‘Kisimusi Yatosvika’.
Besides, who can forget the spectacle of children invading the local township like ants descending on a spilt lump of peanut butter?
For ten years, while the beloved country blindly navigated in the wilderness, it was the thought of a homemade Christmas that made most of us going. Now, watching these kids watching me, I remember the friends with whom I had treaded the wretched trenches. Friends who are now just a memory; for they could not make it to this Christmas resurrection with me. For some, it was not by choice (I wonder whether my prayers for their peaceful rest were answered), while others just up and decided that my company was bad company.
I have suddenly gone quiet. So have my awestruck audience. How can I tell them that my most vivid memory is not about the first time I set my feet on Heathrow Airport, and the subsequent surprise I got from the biting cold of the colonial motherland. Neither is it about the prize I received for my first novel.
Actually, The Things I Do For You is not my first novel. First published work – that it is. But my first literary work, the one which carries my vivid memory to date, is still right here in this classroom, etched under that maroon desk in that corner over there. I almost screamed with joy yesterday when I sneaked in here and stooped low to read the best verse I had ever seen.
There is my name and hers, and under the names I wrote: “It was just an accident, but for what it is worth – wow.”
I had hoped that that wow would capture my inner feelings after my first, very illegal, very public, very nerve-jolting encounter with her voluptuous bosom, for it was my first with any female – of course excluding the daily duels I had with my father’s niggardly cows as I tried to glean milk out of their stingy udders.
Oftentimes I think about her. My flower. My first crush. My first love. How I thought I could never live without her. So I guess it is amazing that I have gone ten years now without even seeing her – even going to the extent of managing a happy smile when I heard that she now has performed her own miracle of producing two kids from her own womb. Sure, the lord works in mysterious ways. Maybe it is time I got married myself.
Should I tell them all this – that when I came to this place I was actually feeling homesick? That when I arrived home I realised that it was not the home that I was missing, but my childhood, the damp atmosphere of the dung-infested pastures, the loin burning memories of high school?
I don’t know. I just kind of surprise myself when I hear my voice preaching about the splendour of life at university. The satisfaction of being a lump of pitch-black coal on an immaculately white wedding gown called Oxford. And the feeling that you have ‘arrived’ as you patrol the streets in that convertible Beemer.
They start to clap; I must have really inspired them. They don’t know that after all is said and done, they will still want to come back here, where it all started.
They will miss home.
They will miss their childhood.
And they will miss these four silent walls. God knows I do; all the time.
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