Arafats in D
(after Chris Abani)
how cool they looked, the boys who could afford them—
safari boots, tight denim, those funny hats,
hard boy brooklyn bridge stance.
by now they had started smoking, had girlfriends (wives),
would soon be teenage fathers—
they’d join a gang, kill for the fake silver chains around their necks,
later afford cotton nappies for their kids.
the early age of khat and big g’s and chain links, menthols, sportsmans,
patcos, sumuni, eh baba si tuende ivi alafu ntakurudisha home,
the last words my father said to me before the police gave him a choice:
go up state or next time we see you not even dental records will be reliable.
myself, much younger, watched them in awe, heroes, later comatose,
wanted to be them, even started walking like them, les mangelepa.
shuffling, drunk on some pheromone, dogs,
still, we didn’t know the meaning behind the name Arafat:
Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini.
the war, the war, the war, the war, amen.
amen, the war, the war, and we are in underwear getting fucked by our maids.
we were happy under our dictator, unaware of the world,
mistaking tadpoles for fish, skinning rabbits, stealing molasses from freight trains
my mother asking me to pass the spitoon, expecting a girl in a few weeks,
the great poet’s words above the headword,
Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī: the light is where the wound enters you.
decades later, on the news, newspapers, al jazeera,
gradually we came to know Arafat,
how silly we had been, in D, ignorant of the world,
tiny mercenaries waging fake wars against our own—
how silly still, now, watching the bombings in khan yunis,
thinking we know what it all means.
ask this: what is the relationship of desire to memory.
where’s the river, where the sea?
Kanda Zinguri writes from Nairobi. His work appears in Peatsmoke Journal and Down River Road.
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