Deep Throat
This poem is about how I learnt to swallow. How I forced my throat to break the confines of science. How I raised my tired middle finger to biology and morphed into a hybrid of myself. It is about the thick, murky liquid, about its alkaline burning a path through my body. It is about the sensation of thousands of years of oppression absorbing into my skin, marking my cells as their own. It is about the tribal drums beating their loud noise through my oesophagus and barraging through the barriers my mother’s body oh so lovingly gave to me.
It is about forgetting my worth, about considering only “peace”. This poem is about how I learnt to swallow. How I learnt to deep throat their racism, how I let them thrust their ignorance further into me and abandoned my gag reflex. This is about submission, about learning my place, about suspending my need for respect, my need for a home, for a sanctuary. It is the story of how I gained a new-found reverence for those that came before me. How I learnt that ‘yes sir’ can take many different forms, that my showy laugh, my silence in the midst of my persecution, my acceptance of their new names for my name. My refusal to inform them that when my mother called me by my name in thanks to God she did not mean for you to one day stand before me and spit on her sacrifice, she did not mean for you to see her laid half open before you, vulnerable, strong, god and think it okay to rob her of her offering. My name, a prayer to the most-high, a proclamation of greatness, of the goodness of a God so mighty he took me from and brought me into this world all at the same time. This is about the scar I carry every day, about my neck cut open, about my mother pouring herself into me as I took my first laboured breaths as if to say here, all I have I give to you even as you desert me, even as you leave me scared, open, in agony. This scar I wear upon my neck as a reminder that even as I came into this world beating my loud arrogant noise, it fought to drag me back down into the pits of extinction. This scar so quietly powerful it twitches as I bear my teeth and smile back at your degrading humour, this scar so telling it fights to disappear ashamed of the person I have come to be. This scar threatening to burst open once more and pull the life from me rather than feel every contraction as I mould myself anew to accommodate you; as I learn to swallow the words you ejaculate with such blatant disregard.
This poem is about the first time you said Nigger. About how I watched the word fall into the sink I was washing dishes in and my back grew weary from the weight of carrying my ancestors’ sacrifice, my back crackled as the progress you boast so proudly of trickled down the drain tangled in pieces of decomposing cheese. It is about the second time you said Nigger and my drunken stupor turned to cold focus, about how I straightened my back and cleared my throat of all that Nigger you thought you heard. How I positioned myself so that you would see me, not cotton picking, back door using, uniform-wearing Nigger but me, me who laughed when you called me by your names, me who chastised you for using the word Nigger like you would tell the sky to stop pouring down rain, powerless, inferior, awe-struck. It is about the third time you said Nigger and I pondered what they fought for, I pondered how Kenneth Kaunda bought a bike through a window, I pondered the jobs we never got, the huge corporations that waltz into our Zambia and dared not hire one of us to run their companies, I pondered the thousands of acres of our land they own, I pondered the 90% unemployment as compared to the number of trucks filled with copper driving merrily out of our borders, how they syphon the resources from our land, how they leave us their cancers, their sperm, their pollution, their shit and take our royalty, take our magic and sell it back to us. It is about the fourth time you said Nigger, and the fifth and the sixth time, you motherfucker. It’s about how my face became gradually less willing to construe itself into a pleasant expression. It is about the way my whole body contracts as I call on Jesus and ask him to stop me. It’s about a rage that comes from the pits of the millions of starving children.
This poem is about how I learnt to swallow, about how I filled myself with you, with your thick murky liquid, with your racism and your names for my name that steal the glory embedded in me, deeper that your condescending tone could touch. It is about how I allowed you to reshape my refuge, how I accommodated you so completely that there was no room for myself, there was no room for the sacrifice made for me, no room for my mother who tore herself open for me.
You say Nigger and I watch from the corner of a room I do not recognise as a fire so lit rises from the floor, closes in from within the walls, seeps in from the ceiling and envelops your rancid, misogynistic, racist existence and vanishes.