Afrika, My Music by Es'kia Mphahlele

Author:Es'kia Mphahlele
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780795706202
Publisher: Kwela
Published: 2014-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

I look at the Rockies, thirty miles to the west of me. I don’t like mountains. The mountains of my youth still haunt my dreams and I remember the dark nights when I often had to sleep in them. Whenever I draw near the foot of the Rockies, they loom before me, unfriendly, like giant apes marooned on a patch of Time. And I cannot join the crowds that seem to experience an orgasm in their contact with the mountains. I cannot be ecstatic about snow either.

The tyranny of place … When I arrived in Denver, Colorado, in 1970, I bought a house whose owner decided to leave a piano in the basement because it would cost sixty dollars to have it carried out. He flatly refused to acknowledge the responsibility to have it removed. I started to hack it down with an axe. I threw the iron frame down on the concrete floor and the damn thing shattered. Some friends and others who heard of it were horrified, because the instrument was still in good working condition. That was a moment of glory for me. I did not see why I should inherit someone else’s junk. You love your own junk because it has a smell that expresses you. I needed more room for my four children: if they want to learn to play the piano, they can work and buy their own when the time is ripe. I resented being drawn into a piano-ornamented culture.

This mood of rejection, of revolt against the brittle elegance of suburbia, its rectangular, well-ordered, antiseptic manners carried over to another object – the crabapple tree. This highly fertile thing grew in front of my yard. We spent the first summer sweeping away fruit that had fallen and was decaying in the water on the sidewalk. By the next summer I had got someone to dig out the damn thing. Again some of my tree-stricken friends expressed horror. Kill such a lovely tree, ecology and all! You could have made jam with all that fruit; you should see the blossoms in the spring … So they said. But my next-door and opposite neighbours were happy, annoyed as most suburbia is by highly fertile things and beings. Having been raised in the country where you have all the wild nature you want, and more, and in an urban slum where we swept the yard every day, I can’t get excited over the tending of a lawn. I’m still working on an idea: that of digging out the confounded stuff in front and terracing that part of the yard with stones. Then I can hose it and sweep it in the good old style.

I seem to be doing everything to court and diminish alternately the tyranny of place. A tyranny that gives me the base to write, the very reason to write. And yet only seldom does an exile get to live on his own terms. I don’t know. You look at the Rockies. They seem to say to you, you’ve been moving fifteen years.

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