Paper-clip Supplications

In prayers

pliant hands

mould submission

in acceptance

of our forms.

I always watch what I eat. Like when I stare at chocolate cake until it feels uncomfortable and then eat it as a kindness. — saaleha (@saaleha) March 28, 2013

Poets win hearts, not bread and must marry wisely to stay fed. — saaleha (@saaleha) April 11, 2013

— Favourable Flickrings

High Tea at Belle’s Patisserie in Birnam.

Playground battles.

The Realisation of Doughnuts.

Naan.

Wish these came in halaal, Argentinian steak burgers at the Market On Main.

Endless Pools. Jabu Nene Ceramics.

This is how you eat a stroopwafel; the rising steam from the hot coffee softens the wafer and activates the sweet stickiness of the sandwiched stroop.

Colour me cream and scone.

Arabic Lessons in Egypt

At a masjid in Madinat Nasr
just before Maghrib
I find jidatee with her nose
in His signs
while a metronome
of bone on bone
keeps time with
each fatha
each kasra
she breathes
those knees creak as much
as the scuffed plastic
of the chair under them
she’s not really my grandmother
I hear only one word out of her hundred.
Ana la atakalam arabiyya the guidebook told me to say.
Ana talibah, min junoob iffrikiya was from today’s class lesson.
jidatee, who’s not really,
fingers the dark cloth of my jacket
before pointing to my skin
she’s trying to figure it out
South African but you are not black?
Ummi’s ummi’s ummi min Hindeeyah I stumble
I haven’t yet learnt the Arabic word for great-grandmother
jidatee brings her finger to her forehead
makes a little circle with it in the middle
La, la, Muslim I say
sounds a bit like a song
and we laugh before we pray

–

Translations:
maghrib – the sunset prayer
jidatee – Arabic word for ‘my grandmother’
fatha – Arabic grammatical mark
kasra – Arabic grammatical mark
ana la atakalam arabiyya – I don’t speak Arabic
ana talibah, min junoob iffrikiya – I am a student from South Africa
ummi – Arabic for ‘my mother’
min Hindeeya – Arabic for ‘from India’
la la- Arabic for ‘no, no’

I was told you are buried in the row

alongside the highway

under a tree

along the fence I walked to them

reading names heavy with someone’s longing

none of the Khadijas I found were you Katy

I saw a man with a prayer book in his hand

standing as still as the trees and

I didn’t want to break what he had by the

leaves that would have crushed under my foot

and I left

not having found you

but knowing that the prayer I sent from my car

will get to you somehow

we could picnic in your cemetery

the sweeping spaces clipped green

and neat

the benches good for cupping us

between the hum of traffic

and the slow hush of grass

sectioned off by census of faiths

in death too we choose to lie close to our own

you would have told me so

perhaps it is that when we rise again

it will be among comforting commiserators

or if we did happen to call upon God by a rightful name

there’d be no rubbing our neighbours’ noses

in more dirt than they were accustomed to

red mounds of heaped soil for most Muslim graves

green perspex stenciled names

prayers for the highest stages in Heaven

among the few entombed and headed by

granite supplications more adamant

and then there are some with a clutch of

scratched-on plywood sticks

like plant markers

these grave gardens

grief wistfulness tend

careful beds of succulents

blooms flourishing both wild and contained

in pots and vases like

ornaments in your mother’s display cabinet

I will return to look for your tree

in this nursery of loving wives devoted husbands

dear friends and fallen angels

I will look for you  in the golden hour

when the day draws over your grave

gentle and warm God tucking you in for the night

and it feels like we’re nearing

the end of something perhaps

a hope that Death will not sneak up behind us

but walk towards us giving us

time to prepare.

I do have pictures though.

Click here for the full New York In October (pre-Sandy) Flickr set.

If you’re flying Turkish Airlines with a transfer in Istanbul on the same carrier and have more than ten hours of in-transit time ahead of you, you’re eligible for a free city tour. Our exploration of this iconic settlement straddling Europe and Asia began with a two hour appraisal of  its airport as we shuffled from information desk to information desk to queue to security check. Jet lag must have garbled the gutterals of our South African accents to unintelligible levels, as ground staff dismissed our queries as the pipe dreams of the travel-weary.  We traversed over stock granite tiles in Arrivals to dark-grey wood laminate that updated the ambiance in Duty-Free, bowed over by our backpacks and the lament; Oh Istanbul, is this it? Eventually, one savvy desk clerk saved her city for us.

This is what you do to get onto a free tour of Istanbul (provided you are more than ten hours in transit and are flying Turkish Airlines for both nodes of your journey):

• South Africans proceed to Passport Control 2. A free visa will be entered into your passport and you’re good to go.
• Follow the exit signs and make your way towards the Hotel Desk (located across Starbucks). Show them your boarding pass and they’ll put you on a time-appropriate tour. There are baggage lockers right next to the Hotel Desk, it cost us 30 Turkish Lira to check two backpacks.

Click here for more pictures.

beating

against chest,

the bricks shifting

under rib cage.
Only it was the earth moving.
I was hoping

for Duende.

—

It is what happens when you fall asleep with a writing assignment on the brain. Dreams of duende manifest into the earth twitching and leaping in Jo’burg South early this morning. Did it wake you too?

I seek you out
in the cradles of hands
between the creased ditches
and the padded mounds.

My thumbs are search parties
covered in prophets’ ink
rubbing through piles
on prayer mats.

In a palmful of Joburg snow
children see you clearly.

Jalebi from Mansoor’s Sweetmeats, Fordsburg 011 838 5613

Growing Bones

First soft and unknit
to mould through mothers
to begin this work
of hardening frame
growing upwards
to fall free when six
from the top of the world, fracturing fear
and breaking in three places
casting a school-term in plaster
scribbled on in fruit-scented markers.

Bones, I drink to your strength.
The milk, always, in tall glasses
good for glugging in one go
and skillful lickings
of wet-white mustaches after.

Under stretched-out bras and holy panties,
I scribble bones into perfumed diaries
that close with a heart-shaped lock
pickable with a paper clip.
Bones, you make good backs
built to bend
under the weight of adolescence
and spring up
when
the world becomes
ready
for a woman.

I use their MiniCards to promote ShootCake, my food photography sideline. The MiniCards are really bitty and supercute in that way all diminutive things are. When they were going to be included in the goody-bags at an event I was photographing, I realised their lilliputian dimensions would also be their disadvantage in the mash of larger business cards, tissue paper, and samples.

A card-holder seemed like the best presentation solution and I came up with a concept that referenced my work and allowed for the card itself to be showcased.

They’re easy to knock together if you have a cutting machine and the design software that talks to it. I altered a camera-shaped dingbat to fit the dimensions of the card, mirrored it to create a flip-open mechanism and inserted a vertical cut for the card to slot through.

I’ve been fielding a few queries to go commercial with these but my minions are as lazy as I am. If you have access to a Silhouette Cameo, I’ve made the cutting file available for you to download here*. The file allows for six card holders to be cut out of one standard 12×12 scrapbook paper sheet.

*
Camera-shaped MiniCard Holder by Saaleha Bamjee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

While the spells did little to vanquish the spectres that loom around an unrequited adolescent, the poems I wrote were innocent incantations wrapped up in secrets; taweez to pacify and protect.

I soon outgrew traditional rhyme schemata and found more space in free verse and bastard lines. That’s still the kind of place I like stretching out in and I’ve decided to focus on poetry for my Creative Writing MA.

How terrifically self-indulgent it is to tell people that I’m going to spend an entire year writing poems and reading them!

Between poetry and prose, I can’t say which is the easier to write. Both demand something different from the writer. I’d like to be versatile enough to be slave to both, but for now, I feel (and that’s the key to it really, the feeling) that poetry will be transformative. I may just find my voice.

Her paranoia probes under our fingernails
with a splintered stick,
splitting the tissue-beds, prying us apart.
We give her pills for our pain.

Her cataracts cloud over
her unlettered  bewilderment.
but she can still see old blood on the ceiling
of the state hospital.

My mother is wrung, she can’t sleep.
Guilt stretches out on her bed,
nesting on sheets of the unsigned hospital plan.

We’ve had to put a price on my grandmother.
The doctor at the private clinic tells my uncle
hip operations costs hundreds of thousands
and old people don’t make it that far.

Love them when they make your mistakes,
When your wisdom gets too small.
Love them when they leave you.
When their choices are not yours.

If all you know is what your father gave,
take it with its lacking.
Love with imperfection
and love your sons beyond.

The Fare

The day wound up its mound of tangled rope.

Abdou pulled on the last of the threads, his palms raw on the worn leather steering wheel.

One more fare and he could pile this day up on his bed and lie on it as he usually did, fettered and grudging.

At the corner of Abbaas El-Akkad and Mustafa an-Nahas, he pushed down on the taxi’s window. Hot air sank in, coating Abdou in a fresh wash of wet.

He reached over the dashboard to retrieve a tired handkerchief that would offer him no real respite.

“Tahrir Square.”

It was not so much the directive that took him by surprise but the way he heard the voice; from right inside his head; strongly composing itself through the Cairene cacophony of horns and people

She was a tall woman dressed in white robes.

It was an odd garb to Abdou’s eyes and stranger than her dress, was the fact that no one else in the thronged street seemed to think anything of it.

“Yes, I can go to Tahrir Square.”

“Good.”

The voice rang between his ears.

It was close to dusk that Thursday night and Abdou was surprised at how the traffic parted itself for him. He kept looking at the rear view mirror, hoping to garner more clues about this woman, but she was a wall.

“Where in Tahrir Square Madame?”

“Here is fine.”

She pushed her money at him and folded out of the taxi. Abdou scanned the crowd but it was as if she had melted into the ground.

He wiped a finger over the blue ornament dangling from his mirror; a protection against Al-Ain*. He bought it because he liked the colour, but now he hoped that there really was something to it.

–

It was Thursday again and the heat sat in Abdou’s pores.

He stopped at a red traffic light and prayed the police officer wouldn’t look too closely at his cab and conclude that the car was indeed held together solely by the Will of God. July had not been a good month for fares, and the fine would undo him.

“Take me to Al-Hussein Square.”

The voice bounced against the walls of his mind.

Stupefied Abdou, if he did not hear the springs in his back seat compressing, he would have thought her an apparition.

She was dressed in the same white cloak as before.

This was truly something.

He wanted to ask her who she was and where she was from but the will stuck in his throat like a rag ball.

“You’ll soon know.”

She must be a witch.

“Don’t be stupid. That’s insulting and before you think to say it, I can read your mind. Well not so much read it, as listen to it. You think very loud!

“AllahuAkbar! What creature are you!” Abdou shouted, almost falling sideways through the taxi’s door.

“Be quiet you Himaar**, do you want all of Cairo to think you are mad? No one else but you can see me.”

Abdou started reading Ayatul Kursi. His mother had once said it was a powerful protection against evil.

“What good is that going to do Abdou? God’s own revelation and I am His own creation. Hardly evil, though some may think me so. Now stop your blabbering, I am going to tell you what I am. I am Death.”

Abdou could not determine the source of his fear; was it because of this apparition or the knowledge of a nascent insanity?

He managed to break open his frozen lips to ask, ‘But, but how can you be Death? You are a woman.”

“Why should Death not be a woman Ya Abdou? We are more than capable. But I am not here to fret with close-minded chauvinism. I am here to tell you how to live. For too long most of you pathetic creatures have gone on rather vapidly. It’s become such a bore to reap your kind off of this plain.”

“It’s hard to live when you have to work all day for very little money. If I was the president, I could really live,” Abdou said.

“I can make that happen, but you must promise to live, before I come and claim you.”

With that, she vanished.

Abdou sat in his taxi, riveted to the tar despite the insistent ushering of hooters and epithets.

She’d come once he’d lived.

President, ha! Abdou shook his head, re-started the taxi and searched for his next fare.

 –

*the evil eye

**Arabic word for donkey

Character – a thief
Situation/incident – separation/divorce
Place/setting – in a house, alone
Time – a time recalled
Theme – requited love

Home Invasion

For ten years, Malcolm pushed a button on a plastic remote, a convenience that challenged the seam of his trouser, to open his garage and enter his home.

Now, he crouched at the kitchen door, feeling ridiculous and irritated. He’d wrapped a garden rock in the the old gym towel kept in his car and it knocked against his knees as he peered into the unlit interior.

Malcolm knew no one would be at home to hear the glass give way in his inelegant burglary. Earlier that evening, while parked behind their neighbour’s van, Malcolm saw Susan dispatch their son and daughter for a sleepover at her mother’s house before that bastard Terence picked her up for the evening.

Malcolm had little doubt about Susan’s plans to bring Terence home later. Susan, the devoted mother that she was, knew better than to have her children around to interrupt her fuckery with this joke of a new-daddy.

Susan had always nagged him about improving their home security. Their community was newly-gated and he considered the additional expense an extravagance. If he’d got down to putting in the sophisticated alarm system outlined in the brochures she used to leave on his desk, he’d have had little hope of now retrieving the box that held the details of his offshore investments. He’d sooner let Terence diddle him than have Susan gut him financially in the divorce settlement.

The house looked little different from when he made his dramatic exit six months ago. Things were just marginally neater. Susan had replaced the study door with one that didn’t bear the splintered negative of his fist. His son’s schoolbooks were piled up on the kitchen table. One of his daughter’s Barbies had left its head gazing up at him on the tiles. Malcolm kicked it towards the shadows of the kitchen units as he made his way to his study.

He didn’t need the lights on to navigate through the space. Even though Susan would fight him on it, he still considered this his home.

He stopped outside the guest room. He remembered when he and Susan had first moved into the house. Before the kids, before middle-class pressures, before her fucking Terence and his fucking Stephanie. They were so young, soaked in pure foolish passion, going through the house, making love in each room, ignoring the doorbell, letting the phone ring on and on.

And then Malcolm spending hours and thousands on avocations that stuffed the garage with motorcycle parts, fishing rods, model airplanes while Susan’s eyes flooded with dripping taps, leaking geysers and gutters stuffed with leaves. And Susan wanting to know where the money was going and what investments he’d made and why he’d bought the car when he did, calling him at the office three times a day; you didn’t say I Love You when you left this morning, when are you sorting out the medical aid, why haven’t you called me back?

All that passion fizzed out to settle into a flat and grudging legal construction. Malcolm craved individuality, he needed to have his own secrets to keep him sane.

When their son came along, Susan focused all her attention onto the baby. Malcolm welcomed the strictures loosening and he often wondered if those golden days of glorious loving and fucking really happened.

He hoped Susan hadn’t discovered his papers in a fit of rage that could only be quelled by the destruction of his personal property. But Susan hadn’t touched a thing in the study. The place felt like a defective shrine. She was probably waiting for the last of the divorce proceedings before she expunged him completely from the house. He found the small box of papers where he’d left it; tucked behind bent dividers in his filing cabinet.

On his way out Malcolm felt drawn to their old bedroom; a semi-sanctuary where him and Susan found each other in rare moments of forgetfulness, before he found out about Susan and Terence and she found out about him and Stephanie.

Malcolm went about his affair with no real sense of originality. Stephanie was his moderately attractive secretary, and after he smelt a cologne that wasn’t his on Susan’s collarbone, she proved to be a convenient playing-piece in their games of recrimination and betrayal.

He only fucked Stephanie to hurt Susan, to make her feel as empty as he did.

Because in all of his rage and pain, he still loved her completely.

He knew the truth.

He was a shit of a man.

He pushed her away, never expressing the love she demanded even though he felt it acutely. He knew she didn’t understand that he kept his secrets only because he needed to have a part of himself just for himself, while she gave of herself so openly. Her turning to another man was inevitable.

Malcolm had been in the house for about an hour. He needed to leave before she got home with Terence. But before he did he needed to claim just one unsullied memory that would withstand the shit and stains from the divorce.

On the bedside table, he noticed that Susan had piled up a stack of letters next to a bottle of Aramis. Malcolm felt a cold hole forming in his belly. It was the cologne he’d worn since she’d gifted it to him on their first Valentines Day together. That scent was sacred to him and he couldn’t believe that she would debase that memory of a purer time by using it to build something new with that fucker Terence.

He rifled angrily through the bundle of letters. They were all in his handwriting.

My Dearest Susan.

Your Loving Malcolm.

These were the notes he used to send to her before they were married; verses copied out of love poem anthologies, his fantasies couched in crude erotica, anecdotes from varsity, confidences about his relationship with his father. Malcolm sat down on the bed to steady himself.

He imagined Susan lying in bed, wearing her baggy flannel pajamas, her long blonde hair piled on her head held in place with an elastic band, sniffing at the bottle of Aramis while she read his letters.

She still loved him.

She wanted him back.

She’d realised that Terence was just his understudy, that there could be no one for her but Malcolm. He would woo her again. He would show her that he loved her enough to change.

Damn the secrets, if she wanted all his money, she could have it.

Malcolm heard a weight placed on the laminate flooring.

And then the squeal of the door-hinge he never got down to oiling.

“Susan, I’m so sorry…”

His vision exploded into white as the bullet penetrated his chest. He fell backwards onto the duvet, clutching a letter where he wrote about taking Susan to Mauritius for their honeymoon. His chest seared with a heavy heat and his head rolled to face the door.

“Shit man. What the fuck did you do?”

“I panicked! Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

Malcolm gazed after the two armed men running down the passage. He tasted something metallic in his mouth and his breath felt like it was forcing itself through a mass of clots.

He wondered if Susan’s mother would mind having the kids stay with her for two weeks while him and Susan took a trip to Mauritius to start all over again.

the children of my bad-days,

the offspring of my ineffective living,

clustering like fruit

disallowing any real life

to root.

I have conceived

a syndrome

a malfunction

a sabotage,

a betrayal.

There are no side-kicks here.
We save this world together.

–

Without you,

it was another lifetime.

With you

is all of this life,

all of this time.

–

It was not the evisceration I expected but a valuable series of inputs and comments on the way we structured and conveyed meaning through our work.

I’ve been looking for this grade of sand-paper all my life.

Here are the last in my series of photos taken in and around the Rhodes University campus: