On the day I die, my husband ties a red cloth on our gate. His hands are shaking. The cloth is from my favorite doek, the one that always looked like a rose when I tied it around my head on special occasions. He keeps the gates open for mourners to trickle in. The women wear black doeks, the strands of their hair tucked behind the thick cloth.
“Beauty has no place at a funeral!” Tete Saru screams at any woman who arrives uncovered. She never explains why the dead consider a woman’s hair disrespectful.
Wails and glum hymns ricochet through the house in the twilight. The red cloth marks the commencement of the all-night vigils that happen every night until I am to be buried.
There are too many people to fit into the house, so they remove the sofas from the living room and some people sit on the hardwood flooring. The sofas are carried outside, where other family members crowd around a fire, the flames casting dancing shadows. The fire burns every night before the burial. The higher the smoke rises into the air, the higher my prospects of securing a good spot amongst the ancestors.
At the first vigil, my relatives and friends argue about how the red cloth tradition started. Disputing the fabric’s origins provides a welcome distraction from the boiled cabbage swimming lifelessly on their plates. As my tete likes to remind us, eating meat at a funeral is akin to spitting in the deceased’s face.
“If you cannot forgo the luxury of meat, oil, and spice, how could you say you loved the deceased?” Tete Saru says.
Tete is in charge of inspecting the food. She urges the varoora who’d been assigned cooking duties to pour bowls and bowls of salt into the big black pots of boiling cabbage for an extra measure of misery. Funerals taste like tears and seawater.
“The red cloth has always been our culture,” a cousin says. He is an eager-eyed university student studying African History. “It signals to the community that a passing has occurred and a family is in mourning. It invites anyone, regardless of whether they knew the deceased or not, to come to pay their respects. It’s ubuntu. Even in death, I am since we are, and since we are, therefore I am.”
I wish I could smack him for sounding like a PhD dissertation and remind him of the times he ate sand, played nqobe, and did armpit farts.
“Fool!” says Sekuru Givemore, an aged uncle who’d fought in the war. “The freedom fighters during the liberation struggle started it. The white Africans, those bloody Rhodesians”—he spat on the ground after saying “Rhodesians,” as if to rid himself of the colonists along with the phlegm that had built up in his throat—“were so afraid of a revolution that they made it illegal for more than five black people who weren’t from the same household to meet under one roof. This made it complicated to bury our dead. An African must have a funeral as big as a wedding, or no funeral at all.”
“But—”
“The Rhodesians allowed funerals to happen if households would put a marker on their gates that a funeral was occurring, so that the Rhodesian Police wouldn’t disturb them as they patrolled,” my sekuru says. “That marker was the red cloth.”
“But—”
“Listen to your elders. The freedom fighters started meeting and plotting at funerals, and the Rhodesians were none the wiser. They never inspected a house with a red cloth on the gate. Thought they were clever, those bloody shits. That’s how we beat them.”
Sekuru laughs and throws a fist in the air. He starts coughing. My cousin has to slap him on the back to stop him from choking.
“It was her favorite headscarf,” my husband murmurs, but he is drowned out by another origin story.
Only Tete hears him. Her usually tough demeanor softens, and she whispers the words, “Don’t worry. We will find a way to bury her.”
The first day of being dead is a lot like sleep paralysis. I can see and hear everything around me but somehow I can’t tell my legs to move, can’t will my chest to rise or fight the pull of gravity. At first my spirit doesn’t register that its home is gone and that I must leave. I try to breathe life into the cells and jolt the heart to beat one last time. No matter how much I slap my limbs and try to pry open my eyelids, nothing moves at my command.
I remember Tete explaining death to me many years ago over a pot of cabbage. I was twelve, and it was my first funeral. My mother’s funeral.
“Westerners will tell you that funerals are for the living, not the dead, but that’s not how it works for us,” Tete Saru had said.
“What do you mean, Auntie?” I asked.
“Death is not the end. It is the beginning of another long journey,” she said.
She gestured for the varoora sweating over large black pots to drown the cabbage in more boiling water. The cabbage slowly turned from green to white.
“Soon you will graduate from primary school and go to high school. You will get a certificate from your school that tells the high school that you are ready for secondary education. You cannot go to high school without a certificate from your primary school. Think of death as part of a graduation ceremony at the end of mastering a long life. It is the certificate God gives you to open the gates to be with the ancestors. A spirit cannot proceed without this certificate.”
When the cabbage was sufficiently devoid of color, Tete Saru nodded her head in approval. It was ready to be served.
“One cannot skip that process,” Tete said, helping the cooks dump the soaked cabbage into plates and bowls. “You must crawl before you walk, and so the dead must be buried before they can advance to the after. The only problem with this process is that your family is in charge of securing your passage.”
My auntie’s words flood back to me as I lie in the mortuary unclaimed. Everything encasing me breaks down on a slab of steel. I yearn for a casket and fresh earth to cover me; but the dead, like newborns, are subject to the goodwill of others. My family will not bury me. The longer I stay in the mortuary, the more the gates recede.
When you’re dead, all you’re left with is your own thoughts. There is no body to distract you from yourself and no drink to fill the belly to quiet the musing. I lie in the cold that I cannot feel and think of how the end of flesh comes with an impatience, a call to journey to another world. At nine months a fetus yearns to break the barrier between the womb and a new world. I wonder if I will announce my arrival on the other side crying, too.
The third day of being dead, the sleep paralysis loosens.
The incandescent lightbulbs flicker on and off as the mortician stands over a table, working on a new body. He has the excitement and pride of a painter at a gallery showing. He likes to play with the pretty girls, girls who would never have breathed in his direction when they lived. At least other girls’ families collected them quickly.
When his fingers linger too long on the new arrival, I fight against the last hold my body has on my spirit. Something unlocks. My spirit yawns and stretches as it leaves its cage. Before I can register this new feeling, this new way of being, I hurtle towards the mortician. He yelps in surprise as his needles, scalpels, and pointy scissors fly at him. He bellows as he bleeds on the floor. I do not look back.
Newborns suck on their toes and thumbs. They don’t know what else to do in this new realm and body. I test out my new being by whipping through doors and walls. I escape from the building’s sterile walls and fly to a school playground. The children marvel at the empty swing rocking back and forth. I soon grow bored and float above the city, searching for a place to go. I see a gate with a red ribbon and race towards it.
Everyone is curious to know if they will get to attend their own funeral, but I want to know what it’s like to attend the funeral of another, as a spirit. It’s the last day of a vigil. Whoever has died will be buried tomorrow. The body rests in a coffin in the living room, sleeping one last time in its home before burial. The spirit stands over the open coffin, staring at what she once was.
“You’re . . . dead . . . too.” I try to get used to my new voice. It sounds like when the wind moans on a stormy night. “What’s your name?”
The spirit doesn’t look up. She continues to stare at her body, longing for the warmth of being alive.
“Maya.”
“Why are you upset?” I say, irritated. “At least your family is burying you!”
Her casket is completely gold. The inside has a soft white velvet lining.
“I won’t be able to cross the gates to the after,” Maya says. She points at herself in the coffin. She is wearing a pretty floral dress. That’s when I notice that she has one leg.
“I lost my leg in the car accident. I will never become an ancestor.” She weeps bitterly.
“A woman cannot proceed to the after without being whole,” I say. “That’s what Tete Saru told me.”
When I still had breath, I thought life was unfair, but death is a different kind of unfair. Spirits, especially female spirits, can be barred from the after for anything. Even women who donate their organs are not considered “whole” and cannot pass through the gates.
I fly away from the damned spirit towards home. Death is supposed to provide rest. But for Maya and me, it is just another system whose boot we live under. I throw birds at car windshields and laugh. I enter traffic lights and play with the pretty colors. I can’t tell if I like amber or green more. I avoid red. Car horns bellow as drivers swerve to avoid each other’s bumpers.
I remember the day before I died, my husband drove me to the hospital. We drove down the street lined with purple-flowered jacaranda trees as we always did. Suddenly my husband braked, nearly veering off the road. Out of nowhere a giraffe ran across the crosswalk and onto the street opposite Edgar’s department store. The shoppers inside pointed at the marvel outside. The Chipangali Wildlife Orphanage is only ten kilometers out of town, so it was nothing new for an animal to escape and make its way into rush hour traffic, blinded and scared by headlights. This giraffe in particular wasn’t spotted. It was completely white, as if it had been thrown into my auntie’s cabbage pot. A red tuft of fur clung to the base of its long neck. I don’t know why, but my hands went to the red doek tied over my hair.
“I don’t think I should go to the hospital,” I said.
“You are starting to sound like Tete Saru,” my husband said, shaking his head. “It’s rare, so what?”
“If something unexpected crosses a path you take every day,” I insisted, “you must turn back.”
“If everyone did that, no one would leave their homes,” my husband said, driving on.
Hours later the giraffe was shot, tranquilized, and airlifted back to Chipangali.
My death, like my life, was not exciting; just an incident beyond my control. Born with stubborn kidneys, I endured three weekly hospital visits for four hours. I would greet the nurse in her starched white uniform and white stockings. She would make a joke about seeing me more often than her own husband. She would weigh me, take my temperature and blood pressure, poke a needle or two and a colony of tubes into my arms. I would sit by the dialysis machine as the blood flowed into and out of my body until it was time to go home.
Kidney failure.
What a weird expression. As if my organs were students in a class competing for gold stars. My kidneys were the student that never applied himself, the student that cut class and never dreamed beyond an F.
The stats show that with dialysis treatment, patients can live a long, healthy life. These stats didn’t account for the fact that I lived in Zimbabwe. The machines are old, and the doctors and nurses were on a four-month strike before I passed. The friendly nurse left for Britain or America. I was the number, the variable the smart people didn’t account for in their studies, and so I died.
“Gone too soon” is what they call spirits like mine. Spirits that are most likely to get hung up on the injustices of their lives and become ngozi in death. “The dead must move on as the living do” is what I was taught when I was young. I don’t know if I believe in that anymore.
When I rush through my home’s gates, I find my husband pleading, begging my family to see reason.
“The mortuary fees are piling up,” he says. “How long will you keep her away from joining the ancestors?”
The men from my family do not soften.
“If you want to bury her,” they say, “finish paying for her lobola.”
“I do not have the money,” my husband says.
“She will not be buried until you do,” my family says, unwavering.
A woman has two weddings. The lobola and the white. On the morning of my lobola ceremony, a delegation from my future husband’s family made up of his brothers, uncles, and father came knocking on our gate. My father did not let them in.
“We don’t want to seem too eager,” he said, his face buried behind a newspaper. He turned the page with a flourish.
My husband’s family stayed outside the gates all morning waiting for an invitation to come inside. I paced back and forth in my room, anxious that they would get tired, give up, and go. I remembered reading an article in the Chronicle about a groom who had been kept waiting outside his bride’s home for two hours and was hit by a drunk driver who drove onto the curb. The bride price money was still in his pocket. It was either blood money or the bride was cursed, everyone in the city mused. I didn’t want to be called a cursed bride.
I repeatedly texted my husband, who was then my boyfriend, that I loved him. He sent back hearts and said I was worth the wait. I bit my nails and waited. I tried to push away the nagging question in my mind. Why must my lover pay the men in my family for their blessing? Loving me came with an invoice, a big invoice.
A little after one o’clock my father finally let them in. I was to stay in my room; women weren’t allowed at the negotiation table. I pressed my ear to the door.
“Our daughter is educated, she got her degree abroad,” an uncle was saying. “This means your children will be smart and she can help them with the homework.”
“She is beautiful, not too dark,” another uncle chimed in.
“She also knows how to cook,” my father said. “This meal you are eating. She prepared it all by herself!”
I heard murmurs of approval from the other side.
“We cannot let such a good daughter go away for nothing.”
The men in my family continued to list all the metrics that calculated my value. The men from my boyfriend’s family repeatedly tried to lower the price, but my family would not allow for a discount. Then came a moment of silence. I knew my father was scribbling down a figure on the paper and would slide the paper over to the other side. This ensured that no eavesdropping women heard the figure.
Halfway through the negotiations, my cousin came to fetch me. My heart pounded in my chest as I entered the dining room. I kept my expression demure, head bowed, not meeting anyone’s eyes.
“Is this the woman you have come to collect?” my father asked my boyfriend.
I considered this mandatory part of the ritual silly. Who else would he have come for? I didn’t have sisters.
“Yes,” my boyfriend said, keenly.
“Do you know this man?” my father asked me.
I lifted my gaze to my boyfriend and smiled.
His uncles admired me. “A good catch,” they all whispered and nodded to each other.
“Yes, I know him,” I answered. Tete Saru had told me before not to answer the question too fast. I wasn’t supposed to be too eager.
“Then the bride price is settled,” my father said. Everyone let out a sigh of relief. My father poured whiskey and beer to celebrate.
I wonder how much my husband paid for me. I wasn’t allowed to know the figure. Knowing brought bad luck upon the marriage.
In the old days lobola was simple. A groom brought a bag of maize, a piece of jewelry, or a gardening hoe as a token of appreciation to the bride’s family. Now most grooms beg to pay in installments. My husband has been paying for me for years and is nowhere near done clearing the bill. I died before he finished paying for my lobola. Now my family put the debt collector’s cap on and demanded he pay up, or my body would rot in the mortuary. They withheld their blessing for a funeral until every cent of my bride price was paid.
My husband tosses and turns at night until he finds a restless sleep. I stand over the bed and climb to my side. I peer at him, my face so close to his that he shivers. Earlier, I entered a stray cat and made it go mad. That’s when I discovered that spirits could enter anything alive, inhabit its flesh momentarily. I wonder what lurks inside.
I slip into him through the nose and land in his dreams. Here, I am still alive. This is our first date, brought together by the magic of algorithms and a swipe right. We are the only two Zimbabwean students abroad in our year, both homesick to hear our own language and taste home in a faraway place. Outside the African restaurant he greets me and we hug. Instead of saying hello, I whisper,
Suddenly his spirit ejects me from his body. Human bodies are harder to inhabit. You cannot just go into someone else’s house and claim it as your own.
When my husband wakes up, he polishes his shoes and visits the loan sharks. When he returns, he tosses a briefcase full of cash at my father and uncles.
“Here is the rest of her bride price,” my husband says.
“We can bury her tomorrow,” my father announces.
Throughout our marriage, my husband refused to tell me how much he owed, refused to tell me how much my family had bartered me for. I finally know the figure. The money is divided between my father and my uncles. I watch them smell the fresh notes and stuff them hungrily in their pockets.
It doesn’t take much to piss off a spirit. I watch my uncles plan out how they will spend the money. Some will splurge on a trip to Cape Town, and others will use it to spoil their Brazilian-weave-loving “small houses” with new handbags and phones. Men who’ve never contributed anything to my life are now thousands of dollars richer. It was Tete Saru who took care of me when my mom died. In all the memories of significant moments in my life, it is my auntie’s presence that I can recall. Yet she does not get a cent of the bride price. If anyone deserves payment, it’s her.
Maya appears on the day of my burial. We both watch as they lower the coffin into the ground. The arched gates to the after appear above the open grave, aglow in sunlight. Maya shades her face with a hand, cowering before the luminous gates. I can see the longing in her eyes. I should feel that longing too. All I feel in this moment is rage.
An uncle in a shiny new suit stands over my grave with a shovelful of dirt. The dirt spills across the casket. My husband shakes with anger as another shovelful hits my casket.
“You should go now,” Maya says. “The gates will shut when the last bit of earth covers your coffin.”
Tete Saru rocks herself back and forth as my grave begins to fill. A single tear rolls down her cheek. I’ve never seen her cry at funerals. Her eyes fix on the spot where the gates hover, as if she can see them.
I know what I must do, but I cannot move, cannot bring myself to enter through the gates as if I am at peace.
“I cannot,” I whisper.
“You need to go or you will be stuck here,” Maya says.
“I will not!” I shout.
The ground shakes, the headstones around us rattle. The money in my uncles’ pockets becomes a leash that pulls them towards the hole in the ground. They try to fight against the force as the earth beneath them gives way. One by one, they fall into the grave.
“If you touch grave soil before you die,” I say, “you become next.”
I curse all my greedy uncles. Back home, the red cloth by the gate burns. The gates recede beyond my reach.
I become an avenging spirit.
I become a ngozi.
My anger leads me to Chipangali. Ngozi haunt particular places. I don’t know why the Wildlife Orphanage is where I end up. Maya follows me here. As someone who died on a road, she has nowhere else to go. We wander down the winding dust roads the tour guides use for safari tours. A tour van drives through me as foreign tourists point at the zebras and wildebeest walking by. They ooh and aah at the water hole where a herd of elephants are rolling around in the mud. I know all the animals see us. A baby elephant lifts its trunk and waves at me. Its mother leads it away.
That’s when I see it again. The white giraffe. It emerges from behind the bushes. It is no longer completely white. A huge gash is on its neck, red blood oozing out. I know, like me, the white giraffe is dead. Killed by trophy hunters. Such a beautiful creature can never last long in the world. I approach and stroke it. The white giraffe bends down to rub its head against mine.
“It’s okay,” I say to the giraffe. “You’ve got me now. Let’s go find those who hurt you.”
I climb on its back. When it rises again, I am so high off the ground I can see everything.