LIT-- unit 7

UNIT 7

Dividing Lines: The Ideology of Difference

Telephone Conversation

by Wole Soyinka  

  

  

The price seemed reasonable, location 

Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived 

Off premises. Nothing remained 

But self-confession. "Madam," I warned, 

"I hate a wasted journey--I am African." 

Silence. Silenced transmission of 

Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came, 

Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled 

Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was foully. 

"HOW DARK?" . . . I had not misheard . . . "ARE YOU LIGHT 

OR VERY DARK?" Button B, Button A.* Stench 

Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak. 

Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered 

Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed 

By ill-mannered silence, surrender 

Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification. 

Considerate she was, varying the emphasis-- 

"ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?" Revelation came. 

"You mean--like plain or milk chocolate?" 

Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light 

Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted, 

I chose. "West African sepia"--and as afterthought, 

"Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic 

Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent 

Hard on the mouthpiece. "WHAT'S THAT?" conceding 

"DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette." 

"THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?" "Not altogether. 

Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see 

The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet 

Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused-- 

Foolishly, madam--by sitting down, has turned 

My bottom raven black--One moment, madam!"--sensing 

Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap 

About my ears--"Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather 

See for yourself?" 

At the Portagee's

 Alex La Guma

 

"You can have the one in the green," Banjo said.

"She's got pimples."

"But she's got most knobs, too. Don't I say?"

"Well, all right, then."

"You better talk to them when we go over," Banjo reckoned.

"you talk to them."

"What's the matter with you?" I asked. "Haven't you picked up a goose yet?"

"You talk to them, man."

We were sitting at a table in this cafe. Banjo had just finished a plate of steak and chips, and I had an egg roll. Now we were finishing the coffee. There were other people in the cafe, too, and the tow girls sat opposite each other at a table in one of the booths down the side of the room. There were empty Coca Cola bottles on the table between them, and one of the girls was looking at herself in a small mirror. The one in green.

There was a smell of cooking in the room, you know, oil and fried bacon and boiled vegetables and coffee. The ceiling was hung with streamers of fly popper.

"What are you going to say to them?" Banjo asked.

"I don't know. What must I say?"

"Ask them if they'd like a cold drink," Banjo reckoned.

"They just had coke," I told him, looking across at the girls.

"You think we'll strike luck?"

"I don't know! You think every goose is going to give you that?"

"Don't you want?" he grinned.

While I was thinking of how to go about it, a man came into the cafe. He was thin and dirty and wore an old navy-blue suit that was shiny with wear and grease. His face was covered with a two-day beard. He hesitated for a moment, just aside the doorway, and then came over to us. Banjo was watching the girls.

When the man came up he was just like this: "Say, old pal, spare a sixpence for a bite, man" He looked tired and his eyes were bloodshot, the eyelids rimmed with red. The cuffs of his jacket were torn and the threads dangled over his wrists.

"Who you bumming from?" Banjo asked, looking up. "From whom do you bum?"

"Leave him alone," I said. "What's a sixpence?" I felt in my pockets and found a sixpence among my change and handed it to the man.

He said, "Thanks, old pal," not looking at Banjo. "God bless you, old pal," He nodded at me and then went to another table and sat down.

"You rich" Banjo reckoned to me. "Lord Bleary Muck."

"Ach, never mind, man."

We looked at the girls again. One of them looked our way and I smiled at her. She looked away and said something to her friend. The other girl looked across at us.

"There's our chance," Banjo muttered, trying to look as if he wasn't interested.

Some people brushed past our table on their way out of the cafe. Outside the sun was going down. The man in the navy-blue suit sat stiffly at his table waiting to be served.

"Come on," Banjo pleaded. "Let's go over man."

"Okay," I said. "Okay."

I got up and he did the same and went over to the girls. Banjo kept behind me, and I could hear my heart beating with embarrassment. The girl's didn't look at us.

"Hello," I said. "Can we sit here?"

They kept looking away, but smiled faintly. The one in the green was watching the other, and this one said, "Well, it's not our cafe, and there's no reserved seats."

"Thanks miss."

I winked at Banjo and slipped beside the girl in the green dress and sat down beside her friend.

"You like a cold drink?" Banjo asked.

They looked at each other again and the girl next to Banjo said, "well, we just had some cokes."

"You can have another," I said.

"Do you want?" she asked the one in the green.

"Alright"

"You get them," I told Banjo.

"Okay."

While Banjo was getting the drinks over at the counter I told the girls our names. The one in the green was Hilda, and her friend was Dolores.

"That's a nice name," I said to the other one called Dolores. "Spanish mos."

When Banjo came back with the bottles of mineral water I told him, "This is Hilda and Dolores."

"That's fine," he reckoned and smiled at them. "You can call me Banjo."

"His name is Edward Isaacs," I told them. "But we just call him Banjo."

"Does he play the banjo?" Hilda asked.

"I never heard him yet," I replied, laughing at them. "He can play the fool all right."

We sipped the drinks through the straws. While we were talking,

I heard somebody saying, "You can't get a sixpence food here, you fool," and it was the fat Portagee who owned the cafe talking at the tired-looking man in the navy-blue suit. The Portagee was standing by his table and looking across. He was very fat and wearing a greasy apron around his belly, and his face was red and sweaty. The waiter who worked their stood nearby.

The man in the tattered navy-blue suit looked at the Portagee and said clearly, "I only wanted a sixpence fish."

"No sixpence fish." the Portagee said. "You better get out."

He reached out to take the man by the shoulder, but the man moved back in his chair and said, "Don't touch me, I have done nothing wrong."

"Get out loafer."

"All right, man," the man said and got up. "There's no need to get angry. I'' go." He spoke with contempt, looking at the Portagee and he turned about and walked out of the cafe, holding himself straight. Some people in the place laughed.

"There goes your sixpence," Banjo said.

"The poor man," Hilda said. "That Greek could have but given him a sixpence fish."

Banjo began to narrate: "I heard of a juba that went to a posh cafe in town but he never bought anything. He was one of those cheap johns, see? He took his own sandwiches with him, and when the waiter come round he ask for a glass of water. Then when the waiter comes back with the water, this juba look around and says, "And why isn’t the band playing?"

They didn't smile or say anything and Banjo grinned at me. Then he asked, "You want to hear the juke-box?"

"Yes," Dolores said. "Play beyond the reef. They got the record in the machine."

"Okay"

Banjo got up again and went over the big juke-box and shoved a sixpence into the slot. The record dropped and the arm swung onto it, and we were listening to Bing.

"He sings real awake," Hilda said, giggling a little.

"I like Tony Martin," Banjo reckoned.

We didn't say anything for awhile, listening to the voice from the juke-box.....where the sea is dark and cold...... shoving past the other sounds in the cafe. Banjo was singing, too, softly, trying to sound like Crosby, with the bub-bub-bub-boos thrown in. I put a hand under the table on Hilda's thigh. She didn't move or say anything and i kept my hand there, feeling the long, smooth, curve flesh under the dress.

"You girls doing anything tonight?" I asked.

"I don't think so," Hilda reckoned, looking at Dolores for confirmation.

"No," the girl called Dolores said. She had a dark, smooth skin and her lipstick was smeared a little. There were small plastic flowers attached to the lobes of her ears and her hair was black and shiny with oil.

"Let's go to the Emperor," Banjo said.

"What's playing?" Dolores asked.

“An Alan Ladd piece," Banjo said. "Real awake. You want to go?"

"Okay. But we don't want you spend your money on us."

Banjo laughed and said, "Don’t worry about us. Were in the chips. Don't I say pal?"

"You telling me," I said.

"Where are you working?" Hilda asked.

"He works in a factory." I told her. "I'm a messenger."

"My father is also a messenger," Hilda said. "He worked forty years for the firm. Now he's head messenger. Last year they gave him a silver tray with his name out on it, and 'For service-some-thing."

"For services rendered." I said.

"You clever," Hilda said smiling at me.

"He went to high school," Banjo told her.

"My ma put the tray on the sideboard," Hilda said.

"Well," Dolores announced, "We got to go home and get ourselves right for the bio."

"Where are we going to get you?" Banjo asked.

"Get us outside the Emperor. Half past-seven."

"I think that's okay."

"We better go now," Hilda said.

I gave her thigh a squeeze to take the place of a kiss and we all got up. Dolores said thanks for the cold drinks and we went to the door of the cafe with them. Hilda was tall and not too bad, and the pimples didn't matter much. The fat Portagee was behind the counter doing something, and he did not look up as we went out.

Swaddling Clothes

Yukio Mishima 

   He was always busy, Toshiko’s husband. Even tonight he had to dash off to an appointment, leaving her to go home alone by taxi. But what else could a woman expect when she married an actor – an attractive one? No doubt she has been foolish to hope that he would spend the evening with her. And yet she must have known how she dreaded going back to their house, unhomely with his Western-style furniture and with the bloodstains still showing on the floor.

   Toshiko had been oversensitive since girlhood: that was her nature. As the result of constant worrying, she never put on weight, and now, an adult woman, she looked more then a transparent picture than a creature of flesh and blood. Her delicacy of spirit was evident to her most casual acquaintance.

   Earlier that evening, when she joined her husband at a night club, she had been shocked to find him entertaining with an account of “the incident.” Sitting there in his American-style suit, puffing at a cigarette he had seemed to her almost a stranger.

   “It’s a fantastic story,” he was saying, gesturing flamboyantly as if in an attempt to outweigh the attractions of the dance band.

   “Here this new nurse for our baby arrives from the employment agency, and the very first thing I noticed about her was her stomach. It’s enormous – as if she had a pillow stuck under her kimono! No wonder, I thought, for I soon saw that she could eat more than the rest of us put together. She polished off the content of our rice bin like that…” He snapped his fingers. “Gastric dilation – that’s how she explained her – and her appetite. Well, the day before yesterday we heard groans and moans coming from the nursery. We rushed in and found her squatting on the floor, holding her stomach in her two hands, and moaning like a cow. Next to her baby lies his cot, scared out of his wits and crying at the top of his lings. A pretty scene, I can tell you!”

   “So the cat was out of the bag?” suggested one of her friends, a film actor like Toshiko’s husband.

   “Indeed it was! And it gave me the shock of my life. You see, I’d completely swallow that whole story about ‘gastric dilation.’ Well, I didn’t waste any time. I rescued our good rug from the floor and spread a blanket for her to lie on. The whole time the girl was yelling like a stuck pig. By the time the doctor from the maternity clinic arrived, the baby had already been born. But our sitting room was a pretty shambles!”

   “Oh, that I’m sure of!” said another of their friends, and the whole company burst into laughter.

   Toshiko was dumbfounded to hear her husband discussing the horrifying happening as though it were no more than an amusing incident which they chanced to have witnessed. She shut her eyes for a moment and all at once she saw the new born baby lying before her: on the parquet floor the infant lay, and his frail body was wrapped in bloodstained newspapers.

   Toshiko was sure that the doctor had done the whole thing out of spite. As if to emphasize his scorn for his mother who had given birth to a bastard under such sordid conditions, he had told his assistants to wrap her baby in some loose newspapers, rather that proper swaddling. This callous treatment of the new born baby had offended Toshiko. Overcoming her disgust at the entire scene, she had fetched a brand-new flannel from her cupboard and, having swaddled the baby in it, had laid him carefully in an armchair.

   This had all taken place in the evening after her husband had left the house. Toshiko had told him nothing of it, fearing that he would think her over soft, over sentimental; yet the scene had engraved itself deeply in her mind. Tonight she eats quietly thinking back on it, while the jazz orchestra brayed and her husband chatted cheerfully with his friends. She knew that she would never forget the sight of the baby, wrapped in stained newspaper and lying on the floor – it was a scene fit for a butcher shop. Toshiko, whose own life has been spent in a solid comfort, poignantly felt the wretchedness of the illegitimate baby.

   I am the only person to have witnessed its shame, the though occurred to her. The mother never saw her child lying there in its newspaper wrappings, and the baby of course didn’t know. I alone should preserve that terrible scene in my memory. When the baby grows up and wants to find out about his birth, there will be no one to tell him, so long as I preserve silence. How strange that I should have this feeling of guilt! After all, it was I who took him up from the floor, swathed him properly in flannel, and laid him down to sleep in the armchair.

   They left the night club and Toshiko stepped into the taxi that her husband has called for her. “Take this lady to Ushigome,” he told the driver and shut the door from the outside. Toshiko gazed through the window at her husband’s smiling face and noticed his strong, white teeth. Then she leaned back on her seat, oppressed by the knowledge that their life together was in some way too easy, too painless. It would have been difficult for her to put her thoughts into words. Through the rear window of the mirror of the taxi she took a last look at her husband. He was striding along the street toward his Nash car, and soon the back of his rather garish tweed coat had blended with the figures of the passers-by.

   The taxi drove off, passed down the street dotted with bars and then by a theatre, in front of which the throngs of the people jostled each other on the pavement. Although the performance had only just ended, the lights had already been turned out and in the half-dark outside it was depressingly obvious that the cherry blossoms decorating the front of the theatre were merely scraps of white paper.

   Even if that baby should grow old of ignorance of the secret of his birth, he can never become a respectable citizen, reflected Toshiko, pursuing the same trail of thoughts. Those soiled newspapers swaddling clothes will be the symbol of his entire life. But why should I keep worrying about him so much? Is it because I feel uneasy about the future of my own child? Sat twenty years from now, when our boy will have grown to a fine, carefully educated young man, one day by a quirk of fate he meets that other boy, who then will also turn twenty. And say that the other boy, who has been sin against, savagely stabs him with a knife. 

   It was a warm, overcast April night, but thoughts of the future made Toshiko feel cold and miserable. She shivered on the back seat of the car.

   No, when the time comes I shall take my son’s pace, she told herself suddenly Twenty years from now I shall be forty-three. I shall go to that young man and tell him straight out about everything – about his newspaper swaddling clothes, and about I went and wrapped him in flannel.

   The taxi ran along the dark wide road that was boarded by the park and the Imperial palace moat. In the distance Toshiko noticed the pinprick of light which cam from the blocks of tall office buildings.

   Twenty years from now, that child will be in utter misery – he will be living a desolate, hopeless, poverty-stricken existence – a lonely rat. What else could happen to a baby who had such a birth? He’ll be wondering through the streets by himself, loathing his mother.

   No doubt Toshiko drive a certain satisfaction from her somber thoughts: she tortured herself with them without cease. The taxi approached Hanzomon and drove past the compound of the British Embassy. At that point the famous rows of cherry trees were spread out before Toshiko in all their purity. On the spur of the moment, she decided to go and smell view the blossoms by herself in the dark night. It was a strange decision for a timid and unadventurous woman, but then she was in a strange state of mind and she dreaded the return home. That evening all sorts of unsettling fancies had burst open in her mind.

   She crossed the wide street – a slim, solitary figure in the darkness. As a rule when she walked in the traffic, Toshiko used to cling fearfully to her companion, but tonight she darted alone in the cars and a moment later had reached the long narrow park that borders the palace moat. Chidorigafuchi, it is called – the Abyss of the Thousand Birds.

   Tonight, the whole park had become a grove of blossoming cherry trees. Under the calm cloudy sky, the blossoms formed a mass of solid whiteness. The paper lanterns that hung from the wires between the trees had been put out; in their place electric light bulbs, red, yellow, and green, shone dully beneath the blossoms. It was well past ten o’clock and most of the flower-viewers had gone home. As the occasional passers-by strolled through the park, they would automatically kick aside the empty bottles and crush the waste paper beneath their feet.

   Newspapers, thought Toshiko, her mind going back again to those happenings. Bloodstained newspapers. If a man was ever to hear of that piteous birth and know that it was he who had lain there, it would ruin his entire life. To think that I, a perfect stranger, should from now on had to keep such a secret – the secret of a man’s whole existence. 

   Lost in these thoughts, Toshiko walked on through the park. Most of the people staying there were quiet couple; no one paid her any attention. She noticed two people sitting on a stone bench beside the moat, not looking at the blossoms, but gazing silently at the water. Pitch black it was, and swathed in heavy shadows. Beyond the moat, the somber forest of the Imperial palace blocked her view. The trees reached to form a dark mass against the sky. Toshiko walked slowly along the path beneath the blossoms hanging heavily overhead.

   On a stone bench, slightly apart from the others, she noticed a pale object – not, as she had first imagined, a pile of cherry blossoms, nor a garment forgotten by one of the visitors to the park. Only when she came closer did she see that it was a human form lying on the bench. Was it, she wondered, one of those miserable drunks often to be seen sleeping in public places? Obviously not, for the body had been systematically covered with newspapers, and it was the whiteness of those papers that had attracted Toshiko’s attention. Standing by the bench, she gazed at the sleeping figure.

   It was a man in a brown jersey, who lay there curled up on layers of newspapers, other newspapers covering him. No doubt this has become her normal night now that spring had arrived. Toshiko gazed down at the man’s dirty, unkempt hair, which in places had become hopelessly matted. As she observes the sleeping figure in its newspapers, she was inevitably reminded of the baby who had lain on the floor in its wretched, swaddling clothes. The shoulder of the man’s jersey rose and fell in the darkness in time with his breathing.

   It seemed to Toshiko that all her fears and premonitions had suddenly taken concrete form. In the darkness, the man’s pale forehead stood out, and it was a young forehead, though carved with the wrinkles of long poverty and hardship. His khaki trousers had been slightly pulled up; on his sock less feet he wore a pair of battered gym shoes. She could not see her face and suddenly had an overmastering desire to get one glimpse of it.

   She went to the head of the head and looked down. The man’s head was half-buried in his arms, but Toshiko could see that he was surprisingly young. She noticed the thick eyebrows and the fine bridge of her nose. His slightly open mouth was alive with youth.

   But Toshiko had approached too close. In the silent night, the newspaper bedding rustled, and abruptly the man opened his eyes. Seeing the young woman standing directly beside him, he raised himself with a jerk, and his eyes lit up. A second later, a powerful hand reached out and seized Toshiko by her slender wrist.

   She did not feel in the least afraid and made no effort to free herself. In a flash, the thought had struck her, ah, so the twenty years have already gone by! The forest of the Imperial Palace was pitch dark and utterly silent. 

Nightsong: City

Dennis Brutus 

Sleep well, my love, sleep well:

The harbor lights glaze over restless docks,

Police cars cockroach through the tunnel streets

From the shanties creaking iron-sheets

Violence like a bug-infested is tossed

And fear is immanent as sound in the wind-swung bell 

The long day’s anger pants from sand and rocks;

But for this breathing night at least,

My land, my love, sleep well. 

The sound begin again;

The siren in the night

The thunder at the door

The shriek of nerves in pain. 

Then the keening crescendo

Of faces split by pain

The wordless, endless wail

Only the unfree know.