Excerpts from In Search of Rain & Harvest (a novel, unpublished)
We really believed that we knew it all. Our anger and self- righteousness sat coiled like a beady- eyed serpent on the floor of our guts. We could not understand why the world failed to recognise our talent and brilliance.
“They’ve rejected my manuscript!”
An irate dragon could not have breathed worse flames.
“Why?” I asked.
She threw her hands out into the air.
“The same old crap!”
“No storyline?”
“You’ve got that right! They say, and I humbly quote, ‘Although the different chapters are supposed to be a series of reminiscences, they lack any cohesive tie, and there is no well developed character for the reader to identify with…’ blah, blah, blah!”
“Chapters? I thought it was a collection of short stories.”
“So did I!”
I burst out laughing. Her face battled with tears and laughter, until eventually reason triumphed and she burst out laughing, too.
“Yeah baby,” she said, “Got to laugh to keep from crying.”
“You got that right!”
“Oh, to hell with it! Let’s go and get bombed!”
Once, she found me feeling blue. My sheaf of poems had been rejected. She held my face between her hands and said,
“Cheer up, luv. You’re not the first or the last to go through this. It comes with the territory. Keep on writing, for they know not what they’re doing.”
“It’s so damn frustrating.”
“I know, honey, but take heart. You know, there’s this amazing Chinese writer, Zhang Xiangling, who says, ‘Politics can keep you from publishing but not creating.’ So you see, precious, you shouldn’t stop creating simply because a bunch of cretins masquerading as editors and publishers have rejected your work.”
And now here I was consoling her. The truth of the matter was no matter how much you anticipated the eventual rejection slip, it still hurt like hell. There just isn’t any cure for an editor’s sneer- except for getting completely sozzled, of course…
…. She was tall and dark- skinned and- in my fanciful moments- resembled and had the bearing of a Nubian queen. She had light- brown almond eyes over which arched deep black eyebrows. Her eyes, when she was happy, twinkled like star- lanterns burning bright in the fabric of the sky. I loved the sensuous curves of her full dark lips, the sharpness of her high cheek- bones, and the slenderness of her neck.
She had broad shoulders and a tapering waist. She was a natural born dancer. Her parents had sent her to ballet school. They made sure she had piano and voice lessons. She called her childhood gruesome, but it had helped lay the foundations for her passion for the arts. The pulse of story, song and dance coursed through her being. Her hair cascaded down her back in dreadlocks. She hardly put any make up, saying, simply,
“I’m, like most Africans, beautiful in my natural state.”
… She had a deep, husky, melodious voice that could wrap itself around the lyrics and make sensuous love to them. She had the earthy spirituality of Stella Chiweshe, the soul and depth of Aretha Franklin and Chiwoniso Maraire, the power and grace of Miriam Makeba and Bessie Smith. She had it all.
Her voice could capture ad paint the various layers and textures of emotions. She had an uncanny ability to take your soul and soar across open star- studded skies, and glide over undulating landscapes full of mountain- peaks, and valleys. Although she was trained in the European classical tradition she had been able to break free and expand her repertoire and sensibility to embrace the musical heritage of her ancestors both at home and abroad.
It was she, who introduced me to the intricacies of blues, jazz, soul- the whole gourmet of the idiom of expression of Black America. Ma Rainer. Ella Fitzgerald. Sarah Vuaghan. Mahalia Jackson. Marla Glenn. Nina Simone. Down home, she helped me discover the treasures of the South like Snowy Radebe, Emily Kwenane and many others who lived under the shadow of Miriam Makeba, Leta Mbulu and Dorothy Masuku…She helped me realise the divine power of our modern day goddesses and priestesses- divas all.
She always said that the best thing that had ever come out of her prolonged stay abroad was her access to unlimited music material that she would never been able to come across back home.
“As usual,” she would say wryly, “their vaults contain the best of our heritage.”
She said that it was a pity that many people in the homeland did not know or appreciate the fact that it was their brethren stolen from the homeland as slaves who had put the rock and the roll into modern music and not Elvis Presley.
“It was all born on the slave plantations, with echoes of the rhythms of Africa.”
“In the end it’s all about cross currents isn’t it? They went, and took something of the mother continent with them, and once there, it became something new, and it returned to the motherland, setting off change in the youth…
“It’s a process that never ends as long as there are people to exchange ideas.”
“And that’s what life is all about.”
“Ah, the beauty of life… It’s more than the Yes and the NO, but more about what lies before, in between, and after.”
“There are infinite possibilities in this world…”