Blood on the Banana Leaves

Frrrrrr, frrr, frrr, say the banana trees ghosting the age-tired moon of Africa, sifting the wind. Ghosts. Ghosts of time and of my pain. Black wings of nightjars, white wings of night-moths, cut, sift, the moon. Frrrr, frrr, say the banana trees, and the moon slips pale with pain on the wind-tilting leaves. John, John, sings my girl, brown, cross-legged in the dark of the eaves of the hut, the moon mysterious on her eyeballs. Eyes that I have kissed in the night, victim-eyes of impersonal tragedy, to be impersonal no longer, oh, Africa! for soon the banana leaves will be senile with dark red, the red dust will be redder yet, redder than the new-lipsticked lips of my dark love, store-betrayed to the commerce-lust of the white trader.

‘Be still and sleep now Noni, the moon is four-horned with menace and I am making my fate and yours, the fate of our people.’

‘John, John,’ says my girl, and her voice is sighing with longing like the sigh of the incandescent leaves, wooing the moon.

‘Sleep now my Noni.’

‘But my heart is ebony with uneasiness and the guiltiness of my fate.’

‘Sleep, sleep, I do not hate you my Noni, I have often been seeing the white man pointing his eyes like arrows at the swing and the sway of your hips my Noni. I have seen it. I have seen it as I see the banana leaves answering the moon and the white spears of the rain murdering the cannibal-raped soil of our land. Sleep.’

‘But John, my John, I am sickening with the knowing of my betraying you, my man, my lover, and yet was I being taken by force, not in having of my true self, by the white man from the store.’

Frrrrr, frrrr, say the banana leaves and the nightjars cry black murder to the sick-grey moon.

‘But John, my John, it was only one little lipstick, one little red lipstick that I bought, for the making of my thirsty lips more beautiful for you, my love, and when I was buying of it I saw his cold blue eyes hot on my maiden thighs, and I ran, I was running, my love, back from the store to you, to my love, my lips red for you, for you my John my man.’

‘Sleep now, Noni. Sit no longer cross-legged in the grinning moon-shadows. Sit no longer, crying from your pain which is my pain and the pain of our people crying for my pity, which you are having now and for always my Noni my girl.’

‘But your love, my John, where is your love for me?’

Ah, dark coils of the red snake of hate, sliding at the roots of the banana tree, swelling in the latticed windows of my soul.