Nigwatilo Mawiyoo
TRAVELOGUE TRIPTYCH

(Two Photographs: Innocence)

I’m crushing finger millet
on a grindstone. Later,
eyes stinging
from the wood fire,
I’ll stir powder-water
into porridge.

Here, I’m helping
fishermen pull their catch
out from the water.
The woman behind me says
lean back, use your body
not your muscles, like everyone
at the rope. Hours later,
tilapia suffocating on the beach,
a fisherman hands me one, my cut.

Adopted families drinking that sweet
porridge, eating the fried and salted proof
of my labor. A joy, romance: work
as literal sustenance.

(Three Acts)

Named, “This big thing has an answer,”
Aunt Niramutu
is sitting on the verandah when
the neighbor brings home
a white woman
from the beach hotels.
He takes her wherever she likes
on his motorbike,
she will pay
eventually.

The white woman’s gaze
against these coral homes:
children playing mutely,
Aunt Amina napping in the shade
of the old mango tree, the wind.

Late afternoon
the white woman and I
chat long enough to become
Facebook friends,
pair of watchers that we are.

(Home)

In the kitchen with the woman who watches
my father, her mind on her children: two girls
approaching a certain age.

Hearing something unsaid, I ask
if they’ve been circumcised: “initiated”
in the Kiswahili. They are to be cut
in December, she says,

if I decide. While heating up a plate of rice
and mung beans, I ask about their father;
I want to know if the cut worked for her. We agree
the theory, at least, failed, since two girls
in the village approach a certain age, fatherless.
This big thing has an answer.

Mermaid's Lament

Daddy drove through the neighborhood
always after a drill of safety procedures
to secure me within the car. At twelve

I never thought to doubt my lungs,
never knew how easily one could suffocate

until I tried swimming home alone.
I felt so grown that day, maneuvering
skillfully past old coral’s sharp edges.
I looked right and left and right

and everywhere, my body strong and limber.
When I could see the gate, I fixed upon its
light blue mesh, the squares
widening as I neared. Then an urchin

drifted in front of me
trod on my new breast with his spines.
Hypoxia first,

then the sharp pains. My mind
hasn’t been the same since, and years have passed.
Everyone says it could have been worse,
but I’ve never felt lucky.

Shell
                       after Lashon Daley

The last time I saw my father
I watched him hold my mother, the palm
of his hand covering her nape, four fingers lost
in her afro, thumb in the hollow behind her ear.

And then he let her go,
slid his fingers out the way he came—
I didn’t see his face. I carry the moment
of a hand on a nape, the arc of my mother’s back,
how tall she stood then, limbs curved the angle of glee.

All I know is, while she lay dying,
my own hand covered her nape; my hand,
raw like the inside of a coconut
after the soft meat is scraped.

Found: Portrait of Umau’s Early Days

                       with Tom Mboya’s Freedom And After

My father knew in his own mind that we were Africans, eyesores to the Europeans. My mother late, he decided I was born to go to school. With complete power over us the missionaries insisted we must be Christians to learn to read and write. What my father wanted for his children: payment for the way they punished us. So I was sent to a local mission school to be converted, fully accepted as one of them. I still remember how dry it was in the reserve where farmers could own land: it was scrub and thorn trees, soldiers. Evenings we merely ate and slept. There was no education. The missionaries lived very simply and very tribally. I came to know their language and tribal customs, to behave very much like them. By the age of twenty-eight I was known to be good, enlightened. When I became a teacher at a mission school, with a wife and family, I determined to have a better standard of life, not a mud-and-wattle hut with no sanitary facilities and no piped water. Only traveling helped me remember how we were bought, made into investments against Europe’s old age. The passionate hopes of my father hunted me in those early years, those sacraments between parents and children.

_ _

A Callaloo Fellow from Nairobi, Kenya, Ngwatilo Mawiyoo’s recent poems have been published or are forthcoming in Kwani?, Obsidian, and One Throne. Ngwatilo is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and was shortlisted for the 2015 and 2016 Brunel University African Poetry Prize. She is the author of two chapbooks, Blue Mothertongue and the forthcoming Dagoretti Corner. She received her MFA from the University of British Columbia.

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