I don’t do singing. I can’t sing. This I know for a fact. And yet there are times when I am so moved by a song that I begin to hum along and maybe, just maybe say the words to the chorus when I am taken by a song I like. Every time this has happened, and it does not happen to me very often, someone close to me happens to be nearby to say in a calm flat tone “Jumani, please don’t sing”.
One such person is my little sister, Kupela. Somehow, at my most embarrassing moments she is there waiting to point out to me how foolish I look. The first time I kissed a girl in the cinema is a case in point. She was sat in the row behind me when my silhouette hunched over the nervous girl next to me and obscured the view of something like Edwin Cameron’s The Titanic when she said “Jumani please don’t do that in public”. Kupela, on the other hand is nonchalant when it comes to daring and bold. She sings in the shower to her hearts desire on a Sunday morning. She sings under that tap loud enough to get dad out of the bath to put up the volume on the BBC radio and not suffer any recriminations at the family breakfast table soon after.
However, it doesn’t bother me so much though that I don’t often express any sounds when under the sensation of rhythm or passion. But it can bother other people. This is why when I have sex I have a standard collection of things I say, progressively louder and in sync as the heaving and pushing quicken, to convince my partner that I am enjoying the sex of my life. Nothing sincere of course. No roar that rips out of my chest at the sheer explosive joy of it nor a whimper at the end to signal that I am ready to submit to whatever bureaucratic punishment life has to offer after such a joy. No such sounds out of my throat, however much I enjoy the excursion. In its place is only a consistent grunt to keep things going.
I am not much different when it comes to dancing either. But at least there I can hide behind my English genes. I can say that my father is an Englishman and so my bum is considerably rigid. This contrasts quite strongly with my sisters (I have four in all) who seem to take after our African ancestors when it comes to gyrating their bums to rhythm of lurid Congolese songs or something of equivalent sentiment from the US of A. Countless times I have been to parties with and had some of my best friends point at me, so that everyone can see, and make fun of my hapless attempts wiggle my bum and then laugh. And so when Tobre, the woman who under writes my dilettante existence, gets gripped by a song and is fashioned into a lurid and pornographic dance she is often disappointed to see me take refuge from her at the bar and try to compensate by nodding my head to the music with a sheepish smile. (When I do let go of the bar table and allow my self to drown in a crowd of writhing bodies I know I have drank too much and should go home).
What I can do though is walk. I do walking with such confidence and flare that between my home and office I have done a march, a cantor, a skip and a waltz every morning. I leap onto and off curbs. I boldly step in front of on coming traffic with graceful large strides. I do pirouettes on the landings between successive flights of steps and I explode through door ways as if in a Michael Jackson music video. This is a wonderful skill my Englishman father taught me, this walking. With him in his Northampton leather shoes he put me through gruesome training when we raced up and down escalators and public steps in his home town while shopping for nearly-new clothes to take back to our socialist country. Later I returned to England and worked in London for 18 months. During this time I used public transport everyday which made for a thorough internship in aggressive endurance walking when I raced between trains and buses. I now wear a pair of feet that cut pavements they way otters slice through the tepid waters of a river bank.
Of course it helps the walking to have music in my ears with my new iPod when I am on a march between the station and home. I am a late comer to this audio-internet universe and since I have entered it I found to a wonderful way to get just the right walking music while I tear through my sleepy suburb in my leather Lacoste shoes. When I do this, I slip on my favorite walking music(usually Phoenix’s Listomania) and leap from step to step with rhythm and to a beat. There isn’t a sister or childhood friend to point at snicker on my way home, and even if there was, I am so busy snapping my fingers and turning on my heals that I wouldn’t notice them. With my best feet forward, step by step, it occurs to me that I am dancing. I am dancing past trimmed hedges, galvanized steel gates and barking dogs. Perhaps I am free like this because I think only the domestic animals can see me. The man reading the paper in his car in the shade can’t see me. The woman in the burkha can’t see me. The grandmothers behind the lace curtains are not looking at me. The mosque’s minaret calling the pious to prayer doesn’t notice me. But they know I am dancing. I am dancing all the way home.
