Norman Rush - Mating

I stayed sitting, afraid that if I got up and started walking around I might jar my headache back to its heights. A new hors d’oeuvre had come out, which somebody brought me. It was smoked bream cut into chunks, with thorns stuck into the pieces to facilitate neatness. It was decent. I’d heard that Herero herdsmen were detouring to Tsau and bringing sacks of smoked bream down from Lake Ngami. If we could get this with any regularity it was good news. Animal protein was a fixation for me in those days. I noted that people seemed less gingerly about the bream than I would have expected, the prejudice against fish-eating being what it is among the Tswana.

When things resumed, the new chair was Mma Keridile. After a vote we went into Setswana. Even chewing too hard seemed to set my head off, so I had to concentrate on masticating my bream ultratenderly. I drifted during a rather diffuse rally by the believers, consisting of set answers to the one question of why churches were in fact needed, answers like To prevent us from evildoing and To say where we shall be once we are dead. The constituency for this was sparse and, I thought, about out of gas, when Denoon felt called upon to add something that was being left out. His point, which he pursued prometheanly in Setswana, was that a better way to look at a religion than through the particular beliefs that compose it was to see how much repetition it expected of its most faithful adherents. By this he meant the sheer numbers of times per day or week a particular text would have to be repeated or service attended. Every church was there to see if you were doing enough repeating to be satisfactory. Built-up churches were engines to enforce repetition. Repetition is what we use to put a child to sleep. This was all too spun out, but on it went. Whenever there is a church edifice it is in fact there to give you a place to come and repeat something, and you will repeat as you are told because every church says it is your father’s house and we are used to obeying our fathers. The reason for repetition was to make our minds sleep. And it would be good to remember that the big competition between churches was not only over doctrines but also over seeing which one could be foremost in the number and kinds of repetition it could impose on its faithful. I felt for Denoon. All this was heartfelt but indigestible. I knew this theme. It went deep with him. I had heard priests described as superintendents of repetition before. Repetition was a problem everywhere. American television, or irrelevision, as he slightly annoyingly wouldn’t stop calling it, was based on it. Genre was a covert form of it and genre was overrunning literature. And so on.

I was clearly not alone in having missed the signaling that was supposed to precede Denoon’s being allowed to declaim for so long. There was a shouted protest from Leta, the worst batlodi.

She continued with This is lies! She herself was violating the rules by plunging straight into English without getting assent, which drew comment.

Why are you speaking so long with saying we must not have beliefs whilst you are thrusting beliefs upon these people from long before when we first came here? she asked.

People said Shame! but she went on. Always you are giving forth beliefs, yet you are a lakhoa and we say why is he not giving forth beliefs to makhoa rather than Batswana?

I was amazed. She was very junior to be putting herself forward so aggressively, and her status in Tsau was interim and dubious to say the least. And there was ingratitude. By accepting the batlodi Nelson had saved them from jail time.

All this came out in the partial chorus that rose against her: She is impudent, She is a new person who is soon gone, Where is her mother to see this?

She said You see because when whitemen come amongst the people it is always for lying, as we know from when they came with New Testament put down in Xhosa and Pedi that was saying it must be one man one wife as you can see written. And then in time they could no longer keep hidden Old Testament with proof of many kings with many wives at that time. And you must make that woman stop with writing, as I am not on for examinations, I am speaking my heart.

She was pointing at me. It was like a blow. I had taken my notebook out and was getting a few things down. I had done this publicly often enough, without anyone objecting, although I suppose that usually people assumed I was under the rubric of recording something about birds. Before anybody had to defend me I stopped, ostentatiously.

Leta stopped then. Denoon was silent, feeling chastened, no doubt. He looked worried.

I sensed a larger attack gathering. Dorcas Raboupi seemed to be creeping between several groups. When I perceived the attack forming, my headache vanished completely, occultly.

The rest is sketchier than it should be, because I was stopped from noting things down in situ and it was a fair while before I could get back to reconstructing the event. And then the event itself took such a swerve toward furor.

First there was an ineffectual flurry of dinging. In a way I experienced that as a tolling for something lost. I had never seen anything in Tsau as uncivil as what Leta had done. I was full of clear energy. I wanted to fight, not that I had any special right to and not that doing it would have been anything but counterproductive, granted my status, meaning my link with Nelson and my race too, I suppose. But still I wanted to fight. I was tremendously galvanized. And my head was perfect.

What had been in preparation was a potpourri of falsely spontaneous grievances ostensibly brought into being by Leta’s salvo. Nothing had anything to do with the subject of the parlamente. The attempt was to inflate the churchbuilding issue into an umbrella unrelated issues could shelter under. Say how he has interfered amongst our underclothing, was a facetious reference to Denoon and the brassiere imbroglio I overheard. I think this was humorous and probably not meant to be part of the developing potpourri, but one of the batlodi also overheard it and brazenly shouted it out, even though that issue long predated her arrival in Tsau and everyone knew it. There were four or five foci of objections spread throughout the crowd, the most active one being among the people around Hector and Dorcas. Everything critiqued Nelson in one way or another, but the protest was always directed to Dineo, with Nelson referred to in the third person, which was an insulting strategy in itself.

He has made us to eat from a wheel, someone said. This had been mentioned to me. At an early point Nelson had tried to introduce the lazy susan into household mealtime protocol as a delicate way of promoting a more equalized access to food, protein in particular. Nelson was well aware of the statistics on household males, senior males, getting the first pick and the lion’s share, then the women, then the male children, then the female children. He was perfectly right, because the statistics about men hogging the food in the third world, and I don’t mean only in Africa, are horrifying. I could understand Nelson’s feeling that here they were, engaged in wringing food and drink from bare rock, in a sense, and he was seeing it reticulated directly into a stratified consumption pattern which anyone seeing it from the outside would want to do something about. I don’t know how sensitively he’d promoted these lazy susans, but they had fallen out of general use, although we did encounter them on occasion when we went out for corso, where they might be in use for serving sweets. It was an elderly gentleman who had raised this complaint, so presumably he had personally undergone the wheel and it had clearly left a mark on his soul. I was pleased that there was at least a little negative trilling by the loyalist women after he spoke.