A Hundred Silences
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Gabeba Baderoon
Gabeba Baderoon is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University.
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A Hundred Silences - Gabeba Baderoon
Title Page
GABEBA BADEROON
A hundred silences
KWELA BOOKS/SNAILPRESS
Dedication
To Rafi
1. Give
Give
Before dawn, low voices briefly loud,
my father and his friend the ambulance driver,
his days off always in the middle of the week,
drive away from the house
with thick sandwiches and a flask of tea
and my father’s green and white fishing rod
whipping the wind behind the ’76 Corolla.
Camping by the sea,
we’d see him take his rod further down the beach,
walk waist-deep into the water, plant
himself with legs apart in the breakers,
reach back, cast the line
baited with chokka, and pull,
giving then tightening the line, nudging
its weighted stream of gut to the fish.
But in this place on the West Coast
they never disclosed,
they stand unwatched, out of reach
of each other’s lines, at their backs
a fire on the beach not stemming
the dark but deepening it.
Often it would come to nothing,
their planting and pulling,
but sometimes the leather cups holding
the ends of their fishing rods strained
as they bent back against the high howl
of the reels being run to the limit
and holding.
Bowing forward and giving
and leaning back and pulling,
their bodies make a slow dance nobody sees.
And at home the scraping of scales
from galjoen and yellowtail
and slitting the silver slick of skin
to make thick steaks for supper,
setting aside the keite for breakfast,
the head for soup and the gills and fat for the cats
while they tell us how they landed them.
I wonder about the empty days, more frequent,
the solitary standing in the dark at the edge
of something vast, sea and sky,
throwing a thin line into the give of it
and waiting, silent and waiting,
until something pulls
against your weight.
2. Learning to play frisbee
Learning to play frisbee
In any case I was a child
who did not look up from books
and frisbee required
the full inhabiting of the body.