Skip to main content

Shwri ya Mungu: It's all God's fault


The dhow tacks from side to side while its squatting boatmen take big unsuccessful swings at getting us to our destination. And the boatmen sit and chat as they miss the quay twice and chew quat. They manage to land us in the end, but unfortunately only while the tide is out. So we have to walk for another mile in shallow water and feel the shock and wriggle of rock pool life against our feet.

But on this small island, far from the Kenyan coast the people aren't black, but yellow. The people are sallow-skinned with intermarriage and poor and benighted and they stare at us from behind dusty stone arches. The children show us the only ruin the place has. It is an ancient well down which their whole history seems to have disappeared like a sump. No one can tell us anything about it at all. What language do they speak, anyway? It's not Swaheli.

But the history of Arabs and slaving and of boats lost and off course, perhaps on the way to the land of Punt, is here to read in their faces and in their bodies.

It's late, much too late. On the beach at dusk we see a thousand red, one-clawed crabs run, their eyes on stalks, up and down the gray, volcanic sand. The tide is in and we have to tiptoe through them and step into the waves and scatter them before we can haul ourselves, with help, on board.

It gets dark and now the dhow slowly enters a mangrove swamp where there is a cloud of mosquitoes waiting and they strike as we move through them and soon we are in their mist, dancing to the rhythm of their suck.

And then, something glorious happens. The sky clears and the first and last stars I will ever remember appear. And I am imprinted by them like a child looking at his mother's face and we float along with them in space.

We are out in the Indian Ocean again and the dhow is beginning to move, to rock and rock harder and tip the boat and in the growing blast of the storm the boatmen consign themselves to God saying: "Shwri ya Mungu. Shwri ya Mungu." They say. It's probably by way of an excuse for their incompetence and our adventure. But it doesn't wash with us. The three men, Antonello, Dad and I, throw ourselves from one side of the dhow to the other side to try and stop the boat from capsizing and lean overboard until we can feel the sea spray.

I cry and at 15 I say. "I don't want to die." And my twin brothers, 12 years old, and my mother curl up quietly in the flooded middle of the vessel providing extra ballast.

Suddenly, the storm, almost Galilean, just stops.The boatmen assure us. "The coast is very near." I don't believe them. But still, we dip ourselves overboard into invisibility and we swim a little until our feet touch the bottom. And now the sea is blowing softly, like a warm wind against our chests. It's 1 a.m., it's overcast and we wade forwards.

We reached Lamu beach intact and alive barely making out the shadows of the palms above. Face down in the sand I felt such a such a love of the Earth my family and friends. Such enormous gratitude to be alive.

We all got up and walked the last miles along the tarmac road to bed. That night I dreamed a dream of the world and it was very comforting.

. . . . .

* "Shwri ya Mungu" means we are in God's hands or alternatively: It's all God's fault. Take your pick.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Guardian: Kate Harding's reactionary censorious blog on CiF

It should go without saying... ....that we condemn the scummy prat who called Liskula Cohen : "a psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank" But I disagree with Kate Harding , (in my view a pseudo blogger), posting her blog in the Guardian attacking bloggers. It's a case of set a thief to catch a thief. The mainstream media is irritated by bloggers because they steal its thunder and so they comission people like Kate Harding , people with nothing to say for themselves, apparently, other than that they are feminists, to attack bloggers. I'm black. So I can legitimately attack "angry white old men". I'm a feminist, so I have carte blanche to call all anonymous bloggers "prats." Because yes, that is her erudite response to bloggers. No I don't say that the blogging medium can't be used to attack progressives in whatever context. Of course it can. But to applaud the censorship of a blogger by a billion dollar corporate like Google, and moreov...

The Guardian books bloggers' poetry anthology

There more to composing poetry online than this. ..isn't there? I don't really like conventional poetry of knowing. I love the poetry of words coming into being. The Guardian is going to publish a printable book online with our poems in it and the Irish poet, Billy Mills is getting it together with Sarah Crown, the literary editor. Good for them. Let's also remember that Carol Rumens got the ball rolling. Does Des feature in this anthology? Taboo-busting Steve Augustine decided not to join in. So what are we left with? In the anthology we will be left with a colourful swatch of well-meant, undeniably conventional, occasionally clever, verses - some of them. But there could be, there should be and there is a lot more to on-line poetry than this. Than agile monkeys, koalas and sad sloths climbing up word trees. Perhaps we should focus in on translation, because in translation there is a looseness of form and a dynamism such as, it seems, we can't easily encounter in our...

Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION :  The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-...