Station Zed Read Online Free

catching it and throwing it
    fluttering in the air, the silver wrapper
    turning the air between him and his mother
    into a medium, another otherworld
    nobody but them can share just as long
    as the calories, the sugars, the digestive
    juices feed that silver-never-ending-
    in-the-moment-momentary fluttering.

Eclipse
    for Tayeb Salih and Binyavanga Wainaina
    Heat lightning flicking between head and heart
    and throat makes me hesitate: I could see
    in the rearview one part of the story
    while up ahead the crowd breaking into riot
    were throwing rocks at one another as the soldiers
    retreated into a doorway. The whole thing
    comes back like a moment out of Eisenstein,
    the baby carriage bumping fast and faster
    down the city stairs, screaming mouths ajar—
    and that’s when I smelled an overripe lily smell,
    an eye-corroding battery-acid smell:
    tear gas in a green cloud came wafting
    from the mosque, all of us imploding
    into the eyes staring from next day’s newspaper.

    “Oh yahhh, we got plenty of carjackers here, Mr. Tom.
    Two fellows, I see them in the rearview mirror, one
    with a panga , the other with a gun,
    and so I put the car in reverse and drove right over them.
    But you journalists are crazy, you like all this—
    after the elections when we Kikuyus
    were being hunted down at all the checkpoints
    the fellows I was driving for, good guys sure, they want
    to find the worst thing and shoot it for TV.
    And so they stop the car near a stack of burning tires
    and inside the tires is a Kikuyu like me
    and they tell me I’m safe, we don’t have to worry
    because we’re the press: but that damned fine fellow in the fire,
    if he was me, would I just be part of the story?”

    Later, in a matatu blaring “Sexual Healing,” I sat
    staring at a poster of a punk rocker without
    her shirt on, two machine pistols
    held at just the right angles to hide her nipples.
    It made me weirdly happy to look at her—
    her, and the light coming through the windows,
    and the jerk of the matutu through giant potholes,
    and the lifting off of whatever fear
    into the logic of a dream where I was some new life form
    sent down for no larger purpose
    than to listen to the talk-show host ask questions
    about “the alpha female,” “foreign influences”
    that make riots happen,
    and if “the President is going to plant some trees.”

    When she wrote about Africa, note that “People”
    means Africans who aren’t black while “The People”
    means Africans who are. She never mentions AK-47s
    (which don’t yet exist), but prominent ribs, naked breasts. Lions
    she always treats as well-rounded characters
    with public school accents while hyenas
    come off vaguely Middle Eastern. Bad characters
    include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners,
    and future employees of the World Bank.
    She always takes the side of elephants, no matter who they trample.
    This is before “blood diamonds” or nightclubs called Tropicana
    where mercenaries, prostitutes, expats, and nouveau-riche Africans hang out.
    But there were genitals, mutilated genitals.
    And of course her sotto voice, her sad I-expected-so-much tone.

    A nail in the wall is what the world hangs on:
    a poster of the latest “big man” whose name
    in fifty years nobody will know; or Jesus looking
    put upon, head drooping on the cross, hands bleeding
    a hundred times over in the wooden gallery
    of tiny Jesuses for sale. Or else a mosquito net
    drapes down in a gauzy canopy
    over the narrow, self-denying cot
    where you sleep for a few hours, sweating out
    malaria between parsing words
    writing the fatal formula that cuts
    into the mind terms you can’t live with or without:
    “We are foreign men in a white world,
    or foreign-educated men in a black world.”

    The plate glass shattering rewound into the windows,
    cannisters of tear gas leapt back into the hands that threw them,
    even the horns hooting and the awful traffic jam
    reversed into dawn and malarial