Rabbie Serumula, author, award-winning poet and former journalist. Picture: Nokuthula Mbatha
A brother of mine - he is actually a friend.
But a brother of mine gifted me with a blue Adonis acoustic guitar, a few years ago.
I had expressed my intrigue, which has dwindled, to play this instrument.
I have still not learned how to.
I keep it hanging on my wall in my office.
It reminds me of freedom. A freedom that sounds like power. A power to conjure melody.
A melody can bring forth change. Change can heal. A melody can heal.
Freedom looks like change.
It looks like 1994. Like level two lockdown.
It looks like no load shedding. Like taverns overflowing with inebriate patrons, with no masks.
Sorrows are going to drown here.
Maybe Covid-19 hasn’t come close enough to all of us.
With all the music and booze, the sound god, Aurras, will be worshiped here.
To my brother, I know now that freedom and change are a great power.
A power that is reliant on being, not attempting to become.
It is from the guitar that you gifted me with that I know who I am.
I am a descendant of breaths tickling knees. Folded lungs. I can’t breath.
A breed that doesn't only bite the hand that births us - we also swallow them whole.
We are a self loathing bunch of thieves, pick-pocketing souls.
Snakes that have outgrown coiling.
I am the middle child in a cacophony of miserable children birthed of corruption.
Descendants of greed. A people starved of comfort.
Disciples of change. We change for the worst.
Perhaps we have been bad to the bone since the first two polynucleotide chains coiled around each other to form a double helix. It is in our DNA.
Heads don’t roll here, they are found in septic tanks - synonymous with bodies of our young in pit toilets.
Our loved ones; we hold them in our arms, exposed to our heart chakra when we burn.
I am an ascendant of a breed who's blood stream harbours vultures and crows.
The omen that police are to black lives.
I am land, nothing grows on my skin.
I am the spawn that has sworn to leave skid marks beneath a noose.
Clip the wings off of black girl magic and leave her levitating from a harness on her trachea,
child in womb. My smiles are tombs. I am a walking eulogy.
But not willing to walk into a tavern packed to the brim amid a pandemic despite passing the peak.
Life is a grim business.
To my brother, thank you for the freedom. For offering me change.
Perhaps I was supposed to tell stories of how I was gifted with, instead of learning to play the guitar.
Perhaps the story here is about learning.
Learning to adapt to survive. To protect yourself for the sake of your loved ones because freedom looks like level two lockdown. Like no load shedding.
Like taverns overflowing with patrons, with no masks.
perhaps Covid-19 hasn’t come close enough to all of us.
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