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  • from Four Movements
  • Chris Abani (bio)

History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce

Inganekwane

<Zulu. n. Fairytale>

What possible harm can a story do, you tell yourself, as you fetch the small photo of your father from the mantelpiece? You don’t have a fireplace so it really isn’t a mantel-piece, just a rickety shelf on a wall. There in the small cramped living room with a bare cement floor painted red by your mother because, as she says, poverty is no excuse for uncleanliness. No harm at all, you tell yourself, this story you tell, as you nearly knock over the small plastic vase that holds the plastic flowers your father gave your mother on their first date. You have seen her dust around it carefully, wiping each petal with a soft cloth, every Sunday while she sings softly under her breath. You right the vase and dash into the kitchen, although even to you, that word seemed too big for this space.

Here, you say, showing the woman the picture. She is stirring a pot of beans on the stove in the small kitchen cum pantry. This is my real father, you say. I know that for a fact, you insist, although no one is arguing. The one in the fairytale I’m about to tell you is not real. But he too is your father, but you can’t know that, not really. I mean, he has to be the father you hope for, but he can’t be your real father if he is in a fairytale, can he? It is just a story, like Red Riding Hood and that isn’t real, and telling it never hurt anybody did it? Although if the truth be told, Red’s big mouth did alert the wolf to grandma and though everything worked out really well in the end, there can be no joy in being eaten by a wolf, swallowed whole. Even if you are old and it is temporary.

Tell me more, the woman says. Each time you have lunch, since you first told her the story, she presses you to tell it again. And you want to because she comes to you while your mother is still at work and feeds, and you want to because she is your mother’s special friend. It’s the same every time; you always begin with the photo that is your real father, not the father in the story. Because what harm can it do? What a rarity; a grown up who wants to hear the stories of a child. Not just any grown up, but a white woman too, although that is not immediately obvious when you look at her—she looks more colored than white, but this is South Africa in the 1970s and who can tell for sure. This you can understand, because your mother is Zulu and your father is Indian but there is nothing clear about that when people look at you, especially in this land where you are [End Page 682] what your father is. But only women surround you, and so there is no clear proof that you are who you want to be. Especially since everyone thinks you are just another Zulu brat with a father lost to the mines, the war, the struggle, the bottle, or all of them, and this story your mother tells is a lie which makes her not the slut she really is, and this photo of a Sikh man in a turban, this photo could not be real. Who would admit to a marriage, a relationship that clearly broke the anti-miscegenation laws? And you know children are just being cruel when they say this; you know it’s not true because your mother told you it isn’t, but it hurts nonetheless. And then your mother adopts this strange woman who claims she is white and brings her home and says, here is your Aunty Alice, even though everyone else calls her White Alice.

So what harm can telling her this story do?

And like always, like a game she plays with you, this lonely...

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