A letter from exile

ica, sluggish, slow, I know my blood’s arterial pulse. Serene, beneath the sun, once. Now comes this roaring tide, the Tube, or the traffic of Marleybone Road, a language shouting against my centre, displacing the settled stone I am who sits at the river bottom, so hard to stay still when everything pushes me like a pebble in the flood.
It erodes, and with it, the cost of Freedom’s survival, so hard to find the spaces in between where I can dream the languor, the poet and the peace. I have dances of Babylon instead, the thousand heads about me of faces and places, signs and times that are not home. People listen to football every night or shout in places where coins and beer are exchanged without measure! Liverpool, you will be glad to hear, are doing well. Did you get the T-shirt I sent you?
You remember, Baba Mukuru, how the children could never get any paper to play with or write on. Paper was for the rich and we used to save the cigarette boxes for schoolwork. Well, here, they push forests through your door, each day, all talking about money. Brightly coloured as the shops in Camden market, or the fruit stalls at Mbare Msika before the government bulldozed them.
It is the god of money who is king in England. True, they have a queen, but the King is the pound sterling. You should know from the Western Union transfers that keeps the family alive back home.
Unlike in Harare, you have the right to remain silent. In fact, people never ask you anything. You even have the right to say Mugabe is an idiot. But you can never go home.
So this is how it is, my friends; from fear of the one kind of stasi, the Central Intelligence Organisation, to fear of the debt collectors and the fact that no longer is there a family to support you or talk with, you barter yourself.
Pray to the unknown gods of the Lotto who never answer. Put your head in at the betting shops and find what the German government calls the “Arbeitlos”, or here those on benefits, as long as you are legitimate or English, the acceptable unemployed and dispossessed. So, you want a loan. OK – fine, you want to start a new life. Your credit rating? What is that? How many cows do you own? – No. It means, brother, your bank balance, your mortgages, your property and your higher income in the reaches of the upper echelons you will never know. Ever heard of Whitehall. Being black, it is not the place for you, I guess.
A bit like a white boy from Africa in Zanu (PF) Headquarters. It doesn’t exist unless for interrogation. – Continued next week.