A Letter from the Death Bed

Austin Kaluba’s Sequel to “Dambudzo Writes to Samantha”

Dear Samantha,

Death bed epistle. Which of you two bastards is death? You, who delayed your reply until longing curdled into resentment, or the thin shadow perched at the foot of this hospital bed counting my breaths like unpaid debts?

By the time you read this, I may be under the red soil, still arguing.

The ward smells of disinfectant and surrender. Nurses move softly, as if loud footsteps might tip me into the grave. I write propped against pillows that feel like reluctant witnesses.

It is strange how death both terrifies and clarifies. I think of Dylan Thomas raging against the dying of the light. They called him drunken and doomed. They call me the same. It is convenient to reduce a man to his bottle. It saves society from examining the fire.

You once asked me why I behave as if I am permanently on trial. Because I was born in a room that leaked history. Not water. History. It dripped from the ceiling in brown stains shaped like continents. My mother placed pots under the worst of it. You cannot mop up empire. You can only rearrange the furniture.

My father died and poverty entered like a permanent relative. My mother did what she had to do. Men came with bread, butter, eggs and bottles of Mazoe.

They knocked softly, like polite invaders. I lay in the next room listening to her sob. The sound rearranged my brain.

One of them worked for Smith’s government. He once asked if she was home. Murder rose in me so suddenly I tasted iron. I lied. She emerged, rebuked me for lying, and led him into the bedroom. I considered the butcher’s knife. Instead, I went outside and cried. That was my first revolution and my first surrender.

Later, when I touched women, the past returned like a curse. If a black woman made the same sound my mother had made, I recoiled. 

I once shouted her name in the middle of an embrace and withdrew as if burned. The woman pulled me back, puzzled. She did not know she had become a ghost.

So they say I prefer white women. They invent a mythology of appetite. They do not understand that desire, for me, is political and pathological. Whiteness became an escape hatch from that bedroom.

When I kissed a white girl at Oxford, I tasted confiscated land and borrowed prestige. When she whispered that I was different, I heard anthropology in her throat.

I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and saw how Malcolm chose Sophia over Laura. Status masquerading as love. I told myself I was different. I was not.

At school I learned that civilization wore a tie. At home it wore ancestral beads and carried hunger like a family heirloom. I belonged to neither camp.

I was the interpreter who mistranslated both sides deliberately. The cane whistled across my back for insolence. I decided that if adulthood required obedience, I would counterfeit maturity.

You remember the tarot reader at the Oxford fair. She ordered us out, claiming my spirit would disrupt her energies. You laughed. I did not.

Family legend says my grandmother was accused of witchcraft and abandoned in the bush to die. A violent death breeds a restless spirit. My mother later lost her mind. A n’anga told her the madness could leave her only by entering one of her children.

The bitch chose me.

Since then I have walked with more than one voice. The loud one the world saw. The timid one that writes to you now. Doctors at the Warneford examined me. They said I was not mentally ill. They offered counselling. They wanted to domesticate the storm. But my condition was historical, not chemical. How do you medicate a boy who heard empire through a bedroom wall?

At Oxford I played The Doors obsessively. Especially Light My Fire. Later I read about Jim Morrison claiming a spirit entered him on a highway. I recognized the grammar of possession. Some men inherit land. Others inherit ghosts.

People think the scandalous Dambudzo was authentic. The drunken provocateur. The one who insulted authority and seduced daughters of empire. They do not see that he was armour. A soldier singing before battle to drown out fear.

My cousin who fought in the second Chimurenga told me about a commander who barked orders and punished weakness. One day he found him alone, weeping over a photograph of his daughter, clutching a Bible. Courage is theatre. Cowardice is often hidden inside performance. If you put a brave man next to a coward, the coward borrows spine.

I borrowed mine from outrage.

I performed rebellion for audiences. For colonial authorities. For critics. For white liberals whose approval I craved while pretending to despise them. Inside I was divided.

I condemned racism while secretly despising my own blackness. I feared being labelled an Uncle Tom, so I overacted the revolutionary.

Once, at a township book function, I humiliated a Shona writer. I shouted that he was not a writer but a munyori. I pretended I was attacking colonial manipulation of language.

In truth I was attacking the ghetto inside me. English became my passport. Shona felt like the smell of that bedroom.

Yet I wrote in Shona. I attacked the corruption of the new elite. I criticized the colonial Southern Rhodesian Literature Bureau for sanitizing African stories into obedient fables.

I said harsh things about indigenous languages because I believed imperial fingers had rearranged their spines.

But anger is rarely pure. Mine was contaminated with shame.

Independence came dressed like a redecorated prison guard. Same boots. Different anthem. We cheered because the whip had changed hands.

Now I watch Zimbabwe stagger under the long shadow of Robert Mugabe and I wonder whether I have been too severe or not severe enough.

I demanded excellence from a wounded people. I barked at Africa for failing to become Europe overnight.

Perhaps I have been a strict father shouting at a child still learning to stand.

Do not mistake me. I do not romanticize failure. I do not excuse tyranny. But I see now that my rage was sometimes misdirected. I was fighting ghosts. My mother’s room. My grandmother’s bush. The white gaze that demanded I prove I was human by speaking impeccable English.

With you, Samantha, I sometimes removed the armour. With you I could confess that beneath the legend is a frightened boy who once stood outside his house and wept. You were the only witness before whom I did not perform.

Nights in this ward are unbearable. I feel presences pressing against my ribs. I wish to die in daylight. At night everything I have outrun catches up.

The brave man and the coward argue inside me. The English writer and the Shona boy. The possessed and the ordinary.

Which of you two bastards is death? The shadow in this room, or the division that has lived inside me since childhood?

If I do not rise from this bed, let them not package me neatly. Not troubled genius. Not cautionary tale. I was a battlefield. History marched through me. Spirits quarrelled in my skull. Desire and disgust shared a pillow.

I was not interested in dying politely.

If history performs an autopsy, it will find no stable organs. Only contradictions. Only a heart that beat against every available wall.

And somewhere in the wreckage, a stubborn question still burning:

Who taught the sun to rise over a country that has not yet woken up?

Yours faithfully,
Charles