—
Save for the monkeys trying to make me their woman, most of the animals leave me alone. Birds chirp and warble but none come close, not even owl or hawk. At the river the hippopotamus don’t charge, nor the rhinoceros. The forest hog chase me once but the wind (not wind) slam him against a tree and he don’t come for me since. The elephant didn’t care, even when I walk between her and her young. The colobus monkeys didn’t want me for wife or sister, but they did want me to stop eating their fruits. Especially the females. They piss and shit all around the house and even inside until one noon when my arrow kill out of the sky a hawk about to snatch one. Same story with the gorilla. I stay away from wherever they keep, didn’t eat where they eat, didn’t shit where they shit, didn’t go north in the forest where they be, yet still I run into a pack who was quick to see me as enemy. I take to the trees, swinging from branch to vine, but they beat me to the entryway. I draw my bow. The silverback leader shuffle left, then right, then strut on his two legs and beat his chest. Two days later he rush me, but I stay still and remain so when he do it two times more. That same night, the three monkeys give me two chameleons, then huff and puff and beat their chests until I hear what they trying to tell me. You should see how he scream, the gorilla, that is, three days later when he burst through the bush only to see me dangle a chameleon. The silverback back away so quick that I was the one now chasing him. Yet even after a year of chasing and pocket full of chameleons he wouldn’t stop until one wet afternoon when another, not the king, take to chasing me as well. Some young boy want to prove he is man too, and me being the fool I run up a tree. But where this silverback chief would only charge, this one look set on doing more. He leap to grab me, but his jerking crack the branch and we both fall into the river. Only one thing gorilla fear more than chameleon, this part of the deep river. Watching him splashing, screaming through choking, then sinking, I leave him to drown thinking this would teach the others. But the voice that sound like me decide then to bother me and wouldn’t stop. I swim back out, wait until he tire himself out, then grab his arm and drag him close enough to the bank for him to pull himself out. One did tell the other after that because since then they leave me alone. More, they guard the path that lead to the clearing that lead to my house. I teach them to leave women alone. I didn’t care what they do to men.
* * *
—
In those first years I didn’t leave the bush much. Truth, it was only on a trip south to Marabanga that news reach my ears that five years done pass. Five summers since I see somebody who was neither monkey nor gorilla. Five summers since I last see the North and five years since I think about it, I whisper to myself though that was a lie. That man. Those children. Marabanga. So I was in Marabanga, the seat of the southern King. Your city in the middle of the Black Lake that one can only get to by boat. Marabanga speak a language I don’t know, something like Dolingo, when they was nothing more than cow herders. But Marabanga is not like anywhere south or north. Masi rise tall, as do Nigiki, with Go rising so high it break from the ground and float. Marabanga sink low. Where other lands build on grass plains, this place was a rock in the middle of the Black Lake. Young men will say it was science and slavery, while old men will say it was the hand of the gods that build it. But these hands somehow hew through solid rock to carve and shape an entire city. Four-side towers, egg-shape obelisks, temples, houses, palaces, and roads. Weme Witu rise higher and higher, but Marabanga sink lower and lower, carving living stone until they reach water. It trick the eye from far, for the island look unspoiled, but two hundred paces from the shore the paths and steps take you down into a place like nowhere else. Every time I about to think, this place rise high, the voice say no, this place sink low. And far off at the edge of Marabanga is the shrine, almost as wide as the city itself, and the only structure to rise above the rock. Built by the gods, which is what priests say when they mean by the death of tens of hundreds of thousands of slaves. As for this shrine, it look like a giant man with a giant head leaning against a wall, trying to brace himself as he grasp his massive cock. Two merchants see me looking and shout that I either too early or too late.
“For what?”
“Barren women only come out at deep night.”
“Oh?”
“You must come from far to be the only woman who don’t know. Women sneak round in the dark to rub their koo against the rising cock,” one of the merchant say. “Word is the chief prefect almost kill his wife until she rub herself one night. Now she do nothing but drop children.”
Marabanga and the rising cock tell me more about the South than any record keeper could. All the cities of the South look so alike you could mistake one for the other, though the people surely don’t think so. But despite all them mad kings, the territories of the South are brothers, joining together out of their own will. Most of the North join together by force and resist any move by any North king to make one land just like the other. But I don’t know why I was in Marabanga, for I have no business there. The forest long smudge out any interest I would have in people, that is what I say to myself even though I been following a group of laughing children across ten and six streets. What you looking for, you won’t find here, say the voice that sound like me. I not looking for nothing, I shout back, which the children hear. First they slow until they reach the mouth of a lane, and then they take off. I peep behind a wall to see two men watching the children, then looking up straight at me.
At this shrine of the rising cock, I vow to never come to this place again. Two times now I run to a city and two times that city drive me away. Fuck the gods and their people, I tell myself. I going back to the bush to hunt river fish and gather fruits and nuts, and nobody would bother me but monkeys looking for a lover. Time was no friend so I decide to be an enemy of time. Not even enemy. I choose to forget it altogether. Banish it. So when I notice that the monkeys coming to my house was not them but their sons, then their grandsons, I remark about it the way one would sunfall. Snake replace snake and hog replaced by what eat the hog. The great silverback who become friend and guardian die. I was the one who take his body to the river and send him down the falls. After him was another leader who didn’t like me and make it known by running me from their nest. After him come another, who murdered all of that leader’s children, but treat me like his mother. Beasts arrive and depart, birds stop flying, and even the elephants who was with me the longest pass on to child and grandchild of elephant. On a good day I was a friend, otherwise I was just part of the bush.
* * *