I formed this habit of sneaking to go where his grave was. Thinking about it, there was nothing much happening within me because I was little. I would just feel nice being there. I would play with the dust and even have conversations with “him”. I would gather the dust in mounds and scatter some in the air. It became a regular routine when I was at my grandparents’.
My father passed on within weeks of me being born. I did not get to see him nor do I know if he got to see me. I learnt that he was late by going through the family album and seeing the funeral photos. We had a tradition of going to see our grandparents every school holiday. My father was buried there. Someone I cannot remember may have shown me his grave as we walked through my grandparents’ farm in pursuit of fruits from the many fruit trees there.
I would pay attention to the earth on that grave a lot. What weeds grew there when it was long before the grave was weeded in. And how during the dry season,when it was windy, the earth on it would be swept clean. And how I would go there and make the grave my canvas, and draw childish shapes on the bare earth, like shapes I was learning to draw in school.
Thinking about it as I grew, I realized that this mindless ritual I had formed was a way of grieving my father who I never knew. I wrote the poem, “I have a tribute that stretches from my navel” to relay to the reader these mindless activities I engaged in to mourn my father. I think of the lines “I have peeves from trying to pick dust from the wrong parts of your grave” as a line I further explored by saying – how I would play with the dust gave me peeves of some sort. And the lines, “No one tells me how to mourn yet no one mourns for you these days like I do” as me trying to say, look how I was clueless on how else to mourn dad but show up at his grave and play with the dust and draw stuff and hold conversations.
I probably developed the poem more to encompass other things, to make it wholesome, but this experience gave that poem trajectory. I explored the poem in one of my interviews with Writers Space Africa as one that relays the mindless activities I engaged in to mourn my dad.
I think of this reader, who after interacting with the poem, wrote and said, “You wrote of difficulty and made it beautiful.” And I think that is what I wanted to achieve in writing the poem; expressing the difficulty in a beautiful language.
An excerpt of Noami's “I have a tribute that stretches from my navel”.
…I have a tribute that stretches from my
navel to the place where my mother
hangs her rosary and this is where you kneel because,
this is not the only part of the poem that may need a little worship…
