ODE TO AUSHI WOMEN
(An expression of the physical beauty of the Aushi women of Mansa District in Luapula Province of Zambia. This poem is written in plain Aushi translation and is a song of the rite of passage for the Aushi young women)
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An ode to the Aushi women:
In the Luapula area
The land of brownish groundnuts
Our drums beat faintly daily
And we praise the waist,
The breasts and the buttocks.
She is just a small girl
The first time you see her.
The pubic hairs can be counted
And her nipples are tender and red
Her waist is flat like
Bangueulu plateau
With sour, pale virginal lips.
When she has been charmed
By the wisdom of her betters
She wears white and red beads
Abashes all shyness and bashfulness
And gyrates within her buttock lines.
We praise the Aushi women
When the moon has passed
And blood has been purified.
Her mother of ancient reason
Has taught her how to dance
From the beats of Imfunkutu-
The arrangement of three drums,
To the two small ones they lift hands
And to the big drum they throw legs.
She will teach them Akalela, too.
To enhance the libido of sex-
To the whistle the men thrust
And to another whistle women bashful.
In the coldest of our Winter season
They are taken to the Munwa River,
To wash away every abominations.
The sweet juice of our soundless rivers
Elongates her clitoral shaft
To hold any male that wins.
We shall all see her firm frame
When she comes back decked
With the diadems of Mansa
On which mice lay their young.
She is cold and shivering outside
But strong and enlarged within.
And her womb has simmered.
We shall now praise her bottle shape
With elongated black nipples,
A small rounded waist
With her facial and pubic hairs full and dark.
The moon has now accepted her
And introduced her to the Eastern Solar
To be beautified in beads of white and red.
Then we shall test her fruit
To know if streams have become rivers.
These are the Luapula women
Who cause charcoal to burn brightly
And turn strongmen into novices.
To make that wrestler Mandingo
That killer of vicious lions
That hunter in the Luela plateau
To cry irresistibly like a child.
We prefer the Luapula women
With their widened pelvis
And big, soft, protruding buttocks.
For these confuse sanity in men
Kill their masculinity and pride
But resurrect virility and humanity.
Oh, we abhor flattened buttocks
And big breasts and slimy bodies.
We are not moved with press nudity
To us it is sport and trivial.
We will watch the Miss World Pageant
And examine all her features.
We still breathe normally and drink
For their legs are lifeless and skinny.
But we die in the nudity of the Aushis;
Where will we get strength to watch them?
One step of a black legged Aushi
sweeps ninety strongmen breathless,
And drives their genius mad
Leaving them with dry throats.
Our Luapula women will not parade
On the open stage to be viewed.
They bath in the shadow of the moon
In the shallows of Luapula River.
Where they to appear on world stage?
The peoples would freeze in awe
And panel of adjudicators
Might not have sense to balance
And might be arrested half naked.
A love son of the Luapula soil
Has never known to marry two Aushis.
Custom and legend strongly forbid:
He could unwillingly live shorter,
For one Aushi woman is enough
To paralyze the life-force in him,
And reduce him to crumbs of bread.
Once a curious man took two Aushi wives;
He slept the entire harvest season
And his in-laws chased him away
For the lack of food in the homestead.
Oh, we do not envy the Namwanga or
Lozi women,
Who could be married two or more
By an impotent farmer,
For they lack a trekking experience
To the primal land of the moon
Where girls become women and blossom.
Bring back our Luapula women
Any Lobola we can dare to pay,
For she dances faster and steadily
Moving only the pelvic muscles
While relaxing the stomach sinews.
Oh, these Luapula Aushi women –
Long hernias
They will not tremble to
For their outer vulva is capable
Erect, ready and succulent
And whosoever dares to go hence
Will die temporarily for
She squeezes all strength out of him.
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Song 1| The Preamble
The song of an alien, which he sung
In a foreign country, where he did
Not belong
To the people unfamiliar and
Unappealing, from another world.
“Do not gaze at me”,
began the alien,
“With those blue and brown eyes of yours.
I also have my own people, with a culture.
We were ten when we were born,
With seven strong boys and three girls.
We leaped through the jungle of life
With fried opinions and hammered lips
And found the world a strata of classes.
Now I have lost all who were mine,
And that not through bullets or jaw-bones,
But through the roundness of the globe.
Yet I have this to my credit,
I love the smell of ink, and the
Bluntness of the pen, and my hands,
Are strings on a well-tuned violin.”
Thus began and ended the
Curriculum vitae of the alien,
Whose brief account of his own
Qualification and previous occupation,
Do not exceed the thoughts
Of those around him,
And the job that he seeks
Is never in places where the qualified delve.
Song 2| Feeble Rights
It is obvious and I can see it in your mind
As you walk, aimlessly and eyes down.
You are always thinking as you walk
And this you do day and night.
You never straighten up your head
And your steps are always disoriented.
Even in the flurry of spring,
Your eyes are still small and squeezed.
You walk as if you are hiding something
And your own greetings betray you.
You are an alien, better you admit it
Or those who have lent you feeble rights
Come and confiscate the little you have.
The streets on which you trot
Are hard and cold, very cold.
They were manufactured from bitumen
Products acquired from the sweat of
Slave labor, the labor of vindictiveness.
The peace of the world you do not have
And neither do you possess enough joy.
You claim you stay in a paneled house,
Which is but a refreshing station
Or a changing room
To which you only return at mid night
To munch hard crusts of bread
Since you have no quality time to cook,
And early in the morning,
You report to run the monstrous machines
Which never retire nor rest.
Song 3| Weird Thinking
The plight of an alien is his platitude.
You left your own country with a quest
Hoping to find gold scattered in the
Polished boulevards of trekkers land.
You had thought your own peoples
Were ruined and uncivilized at most,
And you had called them freaks and
Had opposed all local efforts
To broaden etiquette at home.
You have used the term “backwards”
Time and again, as if your people
Aren’t even trying to make progress.
Such thoughts, and where you got them,
are alien, too.
Prisoner of your own weird thinking,
Is almost suitable to you,
And your own languid motives cheat you.
You are never content, not satisfied,
People like you, where do you come from?
Some people have better manners,
And better manners are bedrocks of
Candid civilizations.
Some people display mature ways of life
And do not ignorantly provoke others
In the lands in which they are aliens.
Some are aliens on grants,
The benefits of which will never
Develop their deserted nations.
There were opportunities you never saw
In the land in which you claim
Nothing developmental goes on.
But now you say,
How I will be rich
When I return to my own country;
Such hypocrisy is huge,
Since kings are born, and not made.
Song 4 | Industrial Towns
I see the rains pouring steadily outside.
The land is being watered for cultivation
And you are wondering why the waste
Since no clear land clearly exists,
Only silhouetted towers and skyscrapers.
No pigsties exist,
Only idyll havens
Full of electronically operated platforms.
There is no hoe for cheap agriculture,
Not here and
Not one.
We have combine harvesters,
And long honked tracks and tractors
Which bring in corn, wheat and rice
In bulk supplies for sale and export.
There are transit carriers and long buses
Carrying busy and disheveled men
And blond and brunette women
Always in colorful attires and thick coats.
And industrial power is auto-run
While human labor works them in shifts
And their din never fades.
Such is the state of affairs in these
Industrial towns where gold is unheard of.
Cecil Rhodes and his clan
Hold gold rights
While Rothschild and Rockefeller
Control the Manhattan Reserve
With mega metals.
Alien, you only see automobiles
Which are nicknamed of a “She”
Since their owners treasure them more
Than they care for their wives.
These cars outnumber the traveling public
Though the outnumbered,
Control traffic rights.
Alien, you see all the beautiful surroundings
And none owns them serve for mortgages.
Song 5| Free Existence
An alien, is he only so because of birth?
If we should allow him to obey laws
Just as natives do,
Can’t we also allow him to exist free?
An alien is a dreamer,
always dreaming of threats of relocation.
What if he does not have anywhere to go?
If his native land is infested by plagues
Or is invaded by other foreigners,
Or worse still, canopied by battle planes?
Is it only lack or poverty,
That pushes an alien to voyage?
He sees innocent policemen in dreams
Coming towards him and asking for papers,
Demanding that he shows them evidence
That he came in through right means.
By right means, they do not mean
Coming by chartered flights
Or in luxurious greyhounds,
But with authorization by the
Consulate of these nations
Which, too, exist in the alien’s country.
Does it make sense, therefore,
to be hard, too hard,
When native nations also have
Foreign embassies in far lands?
They talk about law and order and cops.
They count the alien’s steps and
Ensure that he does not exceed the limit.
Yet you seem to understand law and order
And you are more law-abiding than
The citizens of the lake in which you fish.
If you are law-abiding,
Why are you still a foreigner?
Song 6| Dreams of an Alien
Horrendous and lethal.
His night visions are invisible
And well-plotted.
In his dreams, an alien can be free,
Free from fear of relocation and trespass.
In his night visions he can buy a house,
Find great jobs and even
Be an executive.
In his dreams all plants are green,
And all roads lead to bliss.
In these fancy exotics
All scenes are in summer,
No winter inconveniences,
And all settings are in late spring
With beautiful surroundings and flowers;
And all flowers are either daisies or roses,
And all roses are red and white.
When he wakes up, all about him
Is either blurred or suffocated;
How he longs for the night
When he can fall again and fantasize
And reach places
Too difficult for commoners,
And wear clothes
Too expensive for the jobless.
An alien’s dreams are sweet, too.
In the best of deep dreaming,
Ideas are laid and hatched in full,
Bearing green leaves and yellow fruits.
Here he is not imprisoned by his reason
But liberated by it.
The blissful seasons in which he thrives,
Are far from surrealism,
A concept only learned,
And is never applied,
With controversy as the only real premise
On which unusable theories are filed.
Song 7| Schizophrenic
An alien is accused of being schizophrenic,
A mental disorder of ambivalence.
He is made to behave like one
Because he does not have enough sleep.
A man with rights is a small god,
Able to recreate and reproduce.
But a foreigner is like an impotent rich ruler.
“Once there lived an impotent emperor,
Who, due to sheer vanity,
Added one concubine to the numbers yearly.
The thing in between was but a haunch.
The young charmed maidens were wasting
Inside the marble palace.
They peeped through narrow lintels
For the courtiers who wear no silky apparel
And feed on no dignified a table.
Yet they have living hernias ever ready
In the presence of exalted nudes.
He was a king with a populous kingdom,
Extending from coast to coast,
And his queens lay flat-bellied
As flat as the king’s own dining table!
So is an alien, in the land in which
His abilities are despised and ignored.
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