Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: boys

  • Make Africa Great Again

    We went out to the white people’s restaurant, as he calls it, which is a street stall on a dirt laneway behind the supermarket. There’s no street lighting, no cutlery. Collapsible plastic tables are set up between the parked cars. Vivid local tunes blast from the tiny bar across the road, which brings icy beers in brands no one drinks in Europe. We sit there for hours eating chicken and fish with our fingers. Last week a white girl got up and went over to the bar, carrying her phone. She persuaded the barkeep, who is a rapper, to link up her tunes to his speaker. Within seconds this wholly fresh and salty sound bathed the scene, and at their work and in their seats everyone was dancing.

    Tonight a man sitting against the wall behind us had on a MAGA hat. A black man. I looked closer. MAKE AFRICA GREAT AGAIN. I got up and went over. Close up his red baseball cap read MAKE AFRICA HOME AGAIN.

    I crouched beside his table to say hi as I do occasionally when a table of visitors have stiffed the boy dancers. “We can’t afford to give money every day,” they say, reasonably, demonstrating they can afford to eat out every day and I spread my hands, “I know, me too,” and persuade them that it’s ok not to give, it’s not ok to turn your stiffened faces away and keep eating while someone is standing there, sweating with performance, holding out an upturned cap. He is standing there. Treat him like a human. You are not greater nor less. Make whiteness great again.

    Since so much of our cruelty comes from diffidence, I offer scripts. “I say, I’m so sorry, I cannot help you this time.”

    “But then they don’t go away!”

    “Just be direct. It’s courteous. ‘I’ve said no three times, you have to leave now. Bye.’” I tell them the dancer who stuffed fire down his pants but was yet to bloom in puberty “came to our table after you, and he just looked so wounded.”

    Poverty is all around us like jackrabbits in the grass. Poverty, hard work, resourcefulness and struggle. We are like big birds of prayer gliding like clouds across the sun, idle on the air and wondering which one next we will swoop on to assist or exploit. Building our bullshit churches, insulting sufferers with thoughts & prayers in place of action, rendering free men into slaves, free woman into sex slaves. Calling the children they raise from rape ‘half caste’, as though only that portion of their humanity fell into any class we recognised.

    Next morning four boys came to the low wall around our house which keeps the goats out. Their upturned faces were lower than the wall and I had to go and peer over, to hear. “Please, we want you go buy us four bicycles.”

    Oho! I said. Well I would love to buy you four bicycles. I wish I could. I explained that I would love to have a bicycle, myself. But of course, I meant a second bicycle, here in my second home at which I arrive by jet plane.

    The spokesboy suggested, “Or maybe a ball.”

    My heart flooded with regret and shame, yearning and heat. Why shouldn’t these smiling, reasonable, kindly, and well spoken courteous boys have a ball? A ball to play with. A boy standing behind him said, “Bicycles!” and got cuffed for spoiling the deal. I asked, “Ee gon be how much?”

    They reasoned. “Well, ee cost 25 cedis.” Five dollars. The spokesboy explained, you can get them for 18 cedis, but… “They get spoilt?” I suggested, using a word that in the wealth world we use to describe unhappy children but which here means, I had a phone once, second hand from the markets, and now it doesn’t work.

    I tried to respond to this adventurous, eminently reasonable, and brave request the best way. I didn’t want them to feel that if this ball got spoilt they could just come ask the white lady for another, that a ball was nothing to me. I didn’t want them to feel I gave something which was nothing, it seemed insulting. I explained I had little money right now. All Africans know little money. It’s the most usual form of money. “But I will try. I’m going to try to find some money for you so we can buy a ball. I can’t promise you,” I said. “But I will do my best. Do you get me?”

    Of course I’m going to buy them a ball. I just want them to have a week of looking forward to it. I see school children carrying their homework under the awning of a shop which has a light. I see people eating yam for breakfast, just boiled yam. If you have a sauce on your rice, the sauce is a couple of spoonfuls of garnish; in Europe garnish is the main dish. The man in the MAKE AFRICA HOME AGAIN cap made me at home at his table and we spoke for some few minutes. Neither of us mentioned Trump. We exchanged our numbers, as Europe and Africa should do. We are so few and have so much. They are many, and have little. We, they. We spoke about the music. The rapper who brings beers played his own song again. Coming back to our table I was dancing, a little. In Ghana I always want to give everyone everything and as I build my tiny business I am finding out a way we might be able to do that, one transaction at a time. It’s not giving everything: it’s not giving at all. It’s giving up what we can afford of what we stole. It’s giving part of everything back.

  • by force

    In an Italian cafe I saw two eight-year-olds locked in a passionate embrace. I had to blink. What on earth? On closer examination he had her locked, her neck was rigid, he had hold of her head in both his hands.

    Their lips were pressed on each other, hard and still. It was a Holywood endeavour, something they had seen and now copied; not something felt. I felt frozen, as did she. After a long time, perhaps a minute, the girl brought both her hands up and tried to prise him off her face. He lifted his head. She clapped both palms over her mouth to protect herself. But it was no use. He came in again, swooping on her, an unpleasant grin of entitlement souring his face like a sneer. Boys aren’t born with this expression. He kissed her again, if we could really call it a kiss. It was an occupation, a tiny, private siege that shamed her in this sunny public place.

    This is the first hot day in five weeks in Berlin’s climate disordered summer. It has rained and rained and it’s as cloudy as winter, that long grey fleece. Everybody was out. In the garden of the cafe people sat plunging long-handled spoons into gouts of melting ice cream, large men stirred tiny espressos with tiny tin spoons. The girl endured her assault in full view of everyone. So far as I could tell, I was the only one who noticed.

    I sat in an agony of empathic shame. This was the beginning for her and things would get worse. They had for me. I felt my legs tauten into springs and wanted to rush over there, but – to my horror – the thought of this tiny boy’s scorn frightened me and I was unable to protect her and could not even approach them.

    He broke it off just as the mother, mother of one or maybe – horrifying – both came back from the bathroom visit he had opportunistically expanded. The boy got onto his bike and bent his head. He was shorter than her, when she stood up, and her long caramel strands of hair hid her face. I saw the mother say something cheerful and I saw the girl trying to smile. This is what we breed by rearing our boys on porn, our girls on romantic comedies where persistent stalking always pays off and no means please. I paid my bill to the sneering Italian waiter whose courtesy deteriorates the more I am friendly to him and I always forget. Cycling home I thought about the feminist truism that patriarchy wounds men, too, and thought how different these wounds sometimes seem.

  • of wheels & wings

    Today a day of wheels and wings. On the high street I set myself an errand, which failed, as the Turkish woman who repairs garments has locked her shop and flown south for the summer, into a tide of incoming birds. Her storefront was locked like a little dark cage. On the street out front two big bikes sputtered and racked, their owners shouting conversation back and forth as they waited for the light to change.

    Who among us is not waiting on a change in the light? A small boy, not too small, maybe eight or nine, was making his way down the pavement. He stopped and gazed at these beasts, two big throbbing machines, the riders almost supine in that cock-cocking slouch. Spine relaxed to a slump, pelvis tilt: this was manhood. These were Harleys, or whatever other bike there is that renders that cocooned helplessness. Hands up curved like a child riding papa’s back and peering over. The boy made a thumbs-up and grinned. They didn’t see him. I was walking behind and swept up my own arm to jab downwards. Look, I showed them, swooping the air above his head like a homie. This boy here, needing your manhood. The nearer one saw him and smiled, cracking a face almost paisleyed in swirling tattoos. The boy called out something. Made a fresh thumbs-up and offered it. “Was?” the biker yelled: whut? I left them talking – masculine, back and forth across a several arms-length’s distance, in roars, through the machinery of their own engine noise – I was grinning. They seemed to me all somehow boyish, and sweet.

    Very late alone I had lunch under the trees. The water beckoned with deceitful gleams, fish-whiffy at close-up. Every passing car was loud on the cobbles, which make tyres sound flabby as though hopelessly flat. On the pavement a woman passed wheeling a bicycle, sailing under steam, under her own steam. Her long brown hair tangling behind her. A small, queenly child perched on the bicycle seat. The child had clots of molasses-coloured dreads in a long ponytail; she rode her mother’s bicycle as though it were a steed, her beauty an admonition on us all. The sister came pedalling behind, dreaming atop her own bike as her little feet propelled it forward slowly. The slow, stately pace and their undisplaying femininity gave the family a processional quality.

    Overhead, the summer trees flickered. In three months all these trees will be bare, I suppose. Late at night I’ve been out walking and heard the trees start up the breezes as though it were old spirits of the place who pass. The breeze travels high off the ground, in the canopy. The branches rustle and are silent again, shifting the dark. In the old world, I have heard, people knew how to make news travel from tree to tree. We have forgotten our every enchantment. I think we seem to long for that. The flickering fireside of a computer or gather-round television. The mercury of incessant palm-warming phones, that promised to free us and have enslaved. As I was frowning across the road into this thought, a fellow rode past on his ridiculous bicycle, wearing a tiny porkpie hat. His bike had tiny wheels and a tiny frame. Pedalling like a clown, his knees under his chin, he too stared ferociously ahead. But he looked up and caught my eye and slowly, piercingly sweetly smiled, and I smiled back and thought: this changes everything.

    On the tabletop a glossy orange ladybird made its way trundlingly by. Ladybird, here: let me give you a lift, I thought, deceitfully, meaning here ladybird… give me a lift. I put out my finger flat to her, hoping she would launch herself off me and fly away so I could launch on her a wish. She climbed me and kept climbing, clear along my finger and up onto the back of the hand. Scaling the knobbly writer bones on my wrist she came up softly through the hairs on my speckled forearm. Softly, softly, all the way to the shoulder she came. I put up my hand, patting: Where have you gone. She fell out of my hair, locked in the jaws of a ferocious millipede. He was black, glossy, and writhing, he had her pegged by the petticoat of her wings. As I said aloud, Oh, no! and began to try and separate them I was aware of a prejudiced loyalty, stemming not just from the delicate, brief intimacy shared with the beetle but also her cute, round prettiness, from a human-projecting point of view. He was hungry too but I had no thought for him: even the pronouns I assigned seemed to me a kind of self-adoration disguised as compassion. It seemed like he was consuming her in front of my eyes. I put my thumbnail in between them. That’s how he died, because I accidentally separated his head from his body, a much larger brute, crude and intrusive. His body curled and stilled. The bird hobbled away, her skirts awry. The glossy orange wing case folded neatly and defensively whole but one sheer inner wing trailed long and ruffled behind her. I suppose this creature now will starve and will die a painful death, where she might have been eaten at once. I got up and walked home through the jolting stream of pedestrian-sized traffic, the bike trailers towing kids home from kindergarten, children loose and relaxed in their own inner worlds, gazing, musing, one little boy holding a flapping cut-out drawing in front of his face and singing sleepily as in a dream. I craved their size and their sense of safety. I envied their wheels and their wings.

  • hungry in Spain

    I saw three Spanish boys doing parkour in the gardens. I have run out of money and am hungry: it’s temporary. To a Spaniard gardens means a large, bare, gravelled expanse with formally clipped hedges and dark, clotting trees. The smell of the cyprus is familiar from home. I sat on a bench under the trees and watched these boys for half an hour. They were trying to climb a sheer twelve-foot wall using their speed and hands and concentration and willpower. To my right a couple in puffer jackets were smoking some excellent weed. I sat watching the three boys in their baggy grey pants intently concentrating, doing it for themselves, and was overcome with dark sexual longing. I adored them. They went at it over and over, always exactly the same, one of them actually scaled the wall and stood on top clutching the railing with both hands before he dropped lightly back to earth like an angel, I thought: were it not for tree-planting and feeding the hungry I think this would be the noblest pursuit a young man can throw himself into, in this messed-up, traffic-scarred, urbanised world.

    A child of four or five threw his teddy up in the air again and again for his mother to catch and hurl back to him. His teddy-loving days, I thought, are numbered, and not high. Another couple hid inside the boy’s parka hood and with intense delicacy grazed on each other’s faces. I saw a man cycle past guiding with one hand the back of his child’s tiny bicycle, he had a large paper butterfly she had hand-painted with sparkles attached to his backpack and flapping. Spanish girls with their luscious long hair. On every corner a hairdresser, a pharmacy. The underground train which is livid with voices laughing, chatting, like a big, relaxed club. The five elders sitting side by side, four men and one lady, formally attired and letting the last drops of sunlight fall on them along the lip of a large statue, in granite, of some soldier or some prince.