R.S.V.P. V, Senga Nengudi, 1976. Nylon, mesh and sand, 48 x 36 x 2 in. Image courtesy of studiomuseum.org
We are six. No, you are six and I am eight, and our feet, they are moving in clumsy circles on the tiles of our kitchen floor, and we are hugging so tightly that I can feel your breath on my ear, hot in a way that makes me want to say Yuck but I want to win this game so I do not pull away. It is like we are playing thumb wars but with our feet; mine are on yours, then yours on mine and the grit from the bottom of your feet rubs off onto the tops of mine and I make a face and tell you: You are disgusting, to which you reply: But nothing like you, and round and round we go and now both of us are laughing so hard we can’t even hear the sound of Mom watching the 9 pm news in the sitting room. The curtain is pulled to one side so we can see the sky and we will call our game, this cross between a lover’s dance and thumb wars, “A Dance in the Moonlight”. You start to sing, repeating the phrase over and over again, and I start to sing too, and our voices sound not too different from the way the stray cats do when they fight one another for leftovers when someone has left the trash uncovered, but I will remember this tune, still, when I am twenty-one.
The Nairobi version of moonshine we call Chang’aa, a cheap brew that is made from fermented sorghum or millet and sold for as little as 20 US cents a cup. It is also known as “Kill me Quick,” because that twenty cent cup could contain, in addition to fermented grain, anything from jet fuel to methanol to crushed antiretroviral medication, “just enough to give it a little kick,” which sometimes translates to, “just enough to strike you blind, or dead.” A man in a YouTube video compares his addiction to Chang’aa to the Devil; he does not understand how or why it is so hard for him to get away. I have never tasted Chang’aa, but I feel like I can identify with Abedi Pele in a way: I have experienced some harmful intoxications of this life. If I could delete seven-thousand miles and two years of our long-distance relationship, I would tell my little sister, the girl with whom I danced in the moonlight, that she should not trust so easily in this world, that people’s cups come with hidden agendas and there are many inebriations in this life to avoid like the plague: you must, for example, run away from untrustworthy men who ask to take you on harmless walks by the river, and block them on Gchat when they try to send instant messages reminding you how special you are. You must flee from the Devil and demand that he get behind you before you cannot get him our of your mind, and now I — I who should be the fun and carefree sister — am at the verge of panic as I compile a list in my head of all of the horrible addictions of this adult life — in alphabetical order for easy reference — in a “How to Have a Heartbreak-Free Life” cheat sheet.
I am ashamed of how little shame I have over the sheer amount of time that I spent on her boyfriend’s Facebook, all the while crossing my fingers that there should be no accidental “likes,” as I trace out hundreds of connections from his life for a storyline to fill the freezes in the Skype calls between my sister and me. And now I am on my sister’s profile, wondering where she learned how to do her makeup like that in the past two years, and who is the boy with his arm around her and is that a Tusker® bottle behind her shoulder when I’m not even of legal drinking age in this country and does she grind when she goes out to clubs? and — I would laugh if it were not me, at how ancient I feel when she reminds me that I was her less than two years ago. It is true, I know this, but my shoulders stiffen with the weight of unspoken denial, and I change the topic.
2025