Petina Gappah - An Elegy for Easterly

Lisa calls that evening to explain that when she had told her mother that Peter would be on the morning flight, she had meant only that there was merely a possibility of him being on the flight. She did not actually tell her mother it was a certainty . The situation is more complicated than she thought, she says. In fact, Peter might not be home for some days . She has travelled up to Birmingham from London, she says, but she cannot stay. There will be a post-mortem, Lisa says. Peter died in an area with many junkies . It was a week after he died before he was identified. And it seemed there would be at least one week, possibly two, before he can come home. There may well be two post-mortems, if they charge anyone with his death.

In the meantime, his remains congeal in the drawer of a mortuary in a foreign land. And while his body is there, the family has gathered here to bury their child. Outside, the men of the family sit around the fire keeping a vigil while they argue over whether Motor Action or Caps United deserves to top the national soccer league. There is no hope for Dynamos under its present management, they agree. Inside the house, the women sing of the transient nature of our earthly presence. ‘ Hatina musha panyika ,’ they sing as they wait to see Peter in his coffin before they can undam the full outpouring of their grief. They cannot mourn him fully without seeing his body. He came from the dust and to dust he must return to be interred whole, intact. They are all here, my grandfather’s brother, my father’s nephews and nieces, the agnatic aunts and uncles as well as the aunts and uncles by marriage. They continue to arrive, preparing their faces to meet the faces that they will meet, composing their faces to masks of mourning as soon as they glimpse the gates to our house. They let go then, wailing at the top of their voices, falling into each other’s arms as they stagger in little dances of grief. Then the moment of emotion over, they ask after one another’s health and that of their families, and their thoughts turn to food.

And in this matter of food lies our anguish.

We cannot feed them all if they continue to pour out like this, and if we must host them for an unknown number of days. We cannot be sure how long it will take to bring Peter home. The small pile of chema funeral donations in a bowl on the kitchen table, grubby notes laced with the sweat of many hands, is barely enough to pay for three days’ supply of black market milk and bread and sugar. Already the relatives on the paternal side who have the authority to command the daughters-in-law march into the kitchen and demand to know when the feeding will begin. But how to tell people: please go away, we have not started officially to mourn? They have spent money to get here; the old aunts from Shurugwi have taken out their notes from the old pots in which they keep their money. And then to tell them, please, find more money, go away for now and come back later, wearing your most sorrowful faces.

We cannot issue an invitation to a funeral like it is a wedding.

And even as we cannot bury Peter without our relatives, the relatives bring complications beyond the pressing matter of food. They do not accept our decision to bury Peter here in Harare. They will not listen to Jonathan as he explains how fortunate we are to have a burial site, how we had to bribe a council official and still pay double the market price. They insist that our customs dictate that Peter be buried with my father and other ancestors hundreds of kilometres away in Shurugwi. Great-uncle Matyaya who arrived last night has been the most insistent. He trembled with passion as he grasped the rounded end of his walking stick and thumped it on the floor in emphasis. ‘Is it not bad enough that Peter died mhiri kwemakungwa , over the oceans where the baleful influence of alien spirits could not be discounted? Never before’, he said, ‘has a son of Chikwiro been buried away from the land of his ancestors.’ Jonathan has reached his limits and has to restrain himself from saying to the fathers of the clan that if they want to bury him in Shurugwi, they have to pay for the bus to ferry the mourners there.

‘The only good thing about Father’s death’, Peter had said in his careless way, ‘is that we will not have to put up with his tiresome relations.’ We learned soon enough that this prediction was premature. Death does not sever the ties; it binds them ever tighter, for it is in death and its attendant processes that kinship asserts its triumphant claims. He had been loaned to us as husband and father, but in death the clan reclaimed him. They buried him in Shurugwi, where we had to travel for hours on uncertain roads if we wanted to visit his grave. Kinship asserted itself through the funeral rites, in the ceremony to release his spirit, and in the accompanying ceremony of inheritance. His family had even attempted to speak on his behalf. They consulted a diviner who interceded between this world and the next: Father did not rest easy, was his uncompromising verdict. It appeared that the reasons for his discomfort were mainly financial.

‘He wants the money that he left behind to be divided between his children and the brothers and sisters of his blood,’ Mai Lisa pronounced.

But my father’s spirit, however restless, could not undo the will that he had written and signed in his own hand. And when the Master of the High Court pronounced this as the final word, the aunts and uncles could only curl their mouths into their noses.

They are here, now, the aunts and uncles. They are determined that we meet the costs of their expectations, but that we bear the burden alone just as we shared my father’s inheritance without them. Jonathan is particularly worried about the fuel. He drives at a moderate speed to conserve it. There are snaking queues at the garages, people sleep in their cars, unsure of the hour the fuel will arrive. The garage attendants are endlessly optimistic, the fuel will arrive if not just now, then some time this week. But the queues only grow longer as the attendants become more hopeful. Jonathan is afraid that we may not have enough to last the week. The garages give priority to funeral parties, but they have become wise to the tricks of conmen who pretend to be part of funeral processions and then sell on the fuel at inflated prices. One man even feigned death, almost suffocating in his coffin to get his precious fluid. The attendants insist on seeing the death certificates of the deceased. We have no death certificate, and we will have none unless Lisa comes through for us.

Lisa is the daughter of our father’s sister, she calls me mainini , little mother, and she calls Jonathan and Peter her uncles. Her mother takes every opportunity to tell us of her latest success.

‘Lisa has bought herself a car.’

‘Lisa has moved into a bigger flat.’

‘Lisa is flying to America, to Canada, to Italy, to France.’

‘She has sent money just today, two hundred and fifty billion dollars she sent, it is only two hundred pounds, just imagine. She insists that I go on a holiday, but I told her, no, my child, not on four teachers’ annual salary. I said a new stove is more important. Can you believe that she sent more money, five hundred billion dollars? Just imagine. I will buy a new fridge from Radio Limited.’