Nica Cornell
Milkbox Tray
I perch in wet grass
sucking chocolates I can’t afford
wondering if I will marry
the fiancé next to me
I wedge in wet dirt
lifting the girl
whose sight has just slipped away
telling her help is coming
hoping this sticky world
won’t make a liar out of me.
How
No-one taught me how
to do the loving
Father hugged Mother from behind once -
it made me feel peculiar -
why was he touching her?
Aunts married boys
Uncles married wives
Mother and Grandmother are women alone.
In the news, women are paragons or corpses.
“He’s a keeper,” Mother says
How -
how do I keep two people alive?
Virus 2.0
It slips past in a Natural Science classroom when you are 14.
It is familiar already - the second cousin who brings an open bottle of vodka to family occasions.
But now it is the sentence subject.
Your diligent right hand notes it legibly in blue.
Ah, but your left.
Your left palm has a drummer boy’s fingers prancing upon it.
So, you miss it that first time.
That word – virus
Which pins you in the city of your grandmother’s comedies
Young, newly wed, alive
Afraid.
Part II
They say it’s like drowning
You think, ‘That’s alright, then.’
You remember sinking in a foreign feudal town
When you took your body swimming in pinched nylon
To try to remind your lungs how to move.
You thought you’d need a swimming cap
They laughed
Silly child
Here, someone is paid to pick hairs from the anchor’s chain.
Travelling with Kapuscinski
The first place I read Kapuscinski Travelling with Herodotus was the Hospital at the foot of the mountain. He describes becoming infatuated with the idea of crossing a border, any border. Where everyone sees snakes, he sees ladders. I am walking a ward: psychiatrist’s office, nurse’s station, bed with blue curtain, bathroom with flooded floor, Occupational Therapy room which catches the sun as it sets. My mind is in hiding. When they take me to the park, the colours scald my neurons. But I can read. For the first time in months, maybe years. I can read for the brunch of it. I read Kapuscinski decades before, as he reads Herodotus centuries before that.
I have read him before, on another bed, in a tiny town heaving with history. Where I come home from my first African Studies lesson abashed by how many countries I left unnamed in the introductory quiz that shamed us all. Or should have, anyway. I write them out in black permanent marker on thin white paper, puttied to the cobbled, bleached lemon walls. I read him on the Soviet Union as it breaks apart like icebergs on a Warm War. He seduces me pinned in a tiny loud plane – and then frightens me in a silenced speck of a town. I give the book away for fear of looking too close at the silent world cracked open. It’s contagious, you know, the end of silences. I still need mine.
I read him again in a queue in the desert, as I wait to climb the (hu)man-made structure they’ve built to set alight. I hear the silence of noon in the Somalian desert on the walk from Berbera to Laascaanood – and the ballad, “My country? My country is where the rain falls,” as I stand apart at an occasion with the hubris to name itself ‘Africa Burns.’ She does – and there are no medics on standby.
I am grateful for the medic when he finds me on my hands and knees, glasses broken, with the pulsing blood pudding spilling from my mouth, a cup of bitter boere koffee churning with the sand of a different desert or two.
I sit chuckling at the absurdity of holding the book with bandaged hands and learning through a broken lens about a coup in Liberia – Kapuscinski sees the film of Prince Johnson’s torture of Liberian leader Samuel Doe in a bar. I see the richest of the people playing at poor take off at the airstrip. I am pleasantly surprised to find I can once again laugh.
I read him on my carefully timed lunchbreaks from selling my soul – typing captions and metadata for paparazzi agencies in other countries. I learn that Love Island, Tommy Robinson, Lisa Curry, and Winter Wonderland exist.
I find a stack of his books in the first ever Oxfam bookshop. It’s a small, warm, and empty store. I use scholarship money to buy them. I don’t look at the prices which I find novel and glorious. He writes about borders – turning them over on his tongue, letting them fizz like sherbet in a small secret packet. Customs is an apt moniker, for those who guard the gates, and dictate where a state begins. In Kinshasa, they wonder aloud which of my parents is African because of my curvy flesh. It could only be one, they’re sure, because the white skin has to come from somewhere else. In the no-man’s-land between Ghana and Togo, he asks why I am wearing a wedding ring. When I explain it staves off men (who only see my exotic body), he offers to marry me with my passport under his thumb. In Tankwa Town, two lithe naked white people throw sand over you and laugh. In London, they are jovial. They can afford to be. They already have my English test and lung scan for TB on file.
I’ve lived here two years now, married to a citizen of the as yet still United Kingdom for one. My visa has floated for a year and a third, 16 months, 500 days…my body, African white it is, requiring three psychotropic drugs on a good day, could create and birth a new life in less time than it takes the “WORLD-BEATING SYSTEM” to decide how far into our home the South African border comes.
No family member stood by me at my civil ceremony. My brother did not walk me down the aisle (they did not believe his South African university education was sufficient proof he would leave again.) My sister has gone from child to teenager unheld by me. My best friends have left a space where their bridesmaid would be.
I cannot leave while they debate my future. But I am travelling again. I am in Uzbekistan with Colin Thubron; on the Mediterranean with David Abulafia; in Cairo with Amitav Ghosh; with Kapuscinski at the foot of the mountain.
Nica Cornell is a South African writer with her Masters in African Studies. Over the past 13 years, she has published poetry, academic research, and opinion pieces, both online and in hardcopy. Most recently, her poems Grace and An Oshivambo Patsy Cline were translated into Spanish and published on Libero America as part of their Voices of Fire: Contemporary African Poetry edition. Her work can be read at www.nicacornell.com. She currently lives in London with her husband and grumpy cat.
