The University/4

I am on my way back to the medical hostel. I left while Philip and the fighters were still sleeping as I didn't see any point in staying on any longer; with morning people should get up and get on with whatever remains of their wretched lives.

I am thinking of Philip now and wondering how come he is such a quiet person when he is sober; a totally different person from his inebriated self. And I am wondering what really goes on behind those sad dark brown eyes of his that always looks down when you try to meet his gaze. The only thing I know about his past is that he is of mixed race and that he never knew or liked his white father. He also usually felt uncomfortable around white males but until a few days ago-when he had decided to recite a poem, which he'd recently written-I didn’t really think that he had any serious identity issues.

I was sitting with him and two other guys in his room and we were drinking as usual, trying to get slowly drunk while we waited for his fighters to arrive. And then he suddenly announced that he is working on a poem and that he wants to entertain us with it because he heard the rumour that was going around about him having a big penis.
"I have written a poem about my penis!” he announced.

I am not suprised at his choice of topic. I thought as i quaffed my Vodka ,waiting for him to hit us with the expected punch line of what i assumed would have been a crude joke.

But he suprised all of us; he came out instead with something very profound and very sad. I am now trying to remember the exact words,which he had used but most of his words are gone. And I know that I must get hold of the rest of the words of the poem because as long as I don't have them, their silence will continue to haunt me.

I have met up with him twice since then but he has always been too drunk to care and would laugh at me calling me "Oga...", the Nigerian way of refering to someone in authority "...why you like this penis matter sef?" he would say in his broken pidgin English.

I remember that he started off by saying something along the lines of him being just an appendage to his penis! And then he continued in a beautiful recitation, which his East African accent lent a certain cadence that could only have come out of Africa. And which keeps on reverberating in my innermost being like the piercing scream of a friend lost in a dark and lonely tunnel.

I watch the trees running past the windows of the bus and around them I see the white snow-capped landscape of southern Russia; but in my heart I hear his voice...
“It is my penis that defines me
It gives me a sense of belonging
not my colour...

I feel lost
in the eternity
which separates these two colours that have birthed me…

I don’t dare to call myself a man
for i am dispossessed of the pride of manhood
when I ponder the humiliation
that my mother felt at the point when she was raped;
the point when I was conceived

I am not coloured;
i will not let colour to define me….

Now you spit on my humiliated face
and tell me
that i am not a man;
You then remind me of my impotence
on the bed of history
where you ravaged my innocent black mother

No; I am not a man-men do not sit back
and watch their mothers defiled
I am just a creature
that is attached to one shrivelling colourless penis…”

There was a lot of sadness in his voice and I remember that we had all remained silent after he read his poem; not even the sound of clapping was heard. Instead there was the sniffling of restrained tears as we all sat looking into our glasses of Vodka not wanting to look at each other; African men are not supposed to cry.

Perhaps this is the silence that Philip carries with him in his moments of sobriety; perhaps this is the silence that he is always seeking distraction from when he reaches for his Vodka and for the embrace of his many fighters.