Juju

Juju often wondered what his mother must have been like.  He was sure he knew her, somewhere inside of him, because he had been out of the womb for at least a month before she died.  That month, was often a mystical source of strength for him; he could feel her quickening inside him when he thought about it.  Somehow she was there, a part of him, and he felt her guidance as a real force, from wherever she was. 

The villagers said she had given up her life so he could live, and that there was no other explanation to it.  Often, he thought that the forces of nature were indivisible, even though later, in school, he would have to accept the principle of divisibility in order to comprehend the education he was receiving. What was sure, however, is that he could not be divided from her; her presence was a shadow within him, both present and absent at the same time.

The other thing that occupied him was his nickname.  “Juju,” he thought, it didn’t seem African in the slightest.  It had been given to him by the heavy smoking head-matron of the Hillside Convent in Beira, who had taken one look at the streaked flesh running across his head from the middle of the forehead to the point where the spine met the neck.  It seemed almost like some of the hairstyles she’d seen in her now enormous collection of Juju dolls, collected from all over the continent in her travels as a care-worker in remote third world African villages. 

He’d arrived at the convent within two hours of his mother’s death, a month old infant with a wound that had healed and sealed itself, seemingly, in an instant.  The matron had been nonplussed by the affair of the wound, but had failed to realise the significance of the nickname that had almost mindlessly rolled from her lips.  His mother had given him a Xhosa name, Tulani, and he still wondered what had inspired this choice of name, her being far removed, it seemed, from anything remotely Xhosa in her native land of Mozambique.  “Tulani,” he often repeated to himself, as if in secret, so nobody else could hear.  He didn’t want anyone to know the magic it made him feel.

Even now, as a young twenty three year old journalist, he was divided in how he envisaged the moment of his separation from his mother.  A stroke of lightning, he thought, had many routes through the sky; why it landed on her head as it did still escaped any logical explanation. It might as well have been a spiritually divined event.  As the villagers had witnessed it, had streaked from a hole in the sky straight into her crown and she had reared up, seemingly to consume the whole current and preserve the child on her back.  The streak had passed across her back - on which he was perched, wrapped tightly within the folds of a blanket - over his head, and down his spine and hers; killing her almost instantly. 

She had seemed, to the villagers, to have a moment of awareness at the outset of her death, which had led her to protect her child using all her spirit.  The irony and cruelty of what the villagers considered a metaphysical intervention was emphasized by the fact (that was claimed by many present) that she had been wearing rubber sandals at the time she had been struck. 

Something that random, Juju thought, was bound to be full of purpose if one opened up to the idea that it might in fact be a spiritual event. Or perhaps, a bit of her heel or toe was in contact with the ground at that time, maybe she was touching a plant, or something else that was earthed.  One thing that he took for fact from the villagers though, because they had buried her body, was that she was untouched and had died with a smile on her face.

So if he believed all that was rational and classifiable and divisible, why on earth would he believe that there was something special about that moment other than what he wanted to believe?  Perhaps most of his inclination was due to a blend of wishful thinking and intuition. But there was also something else that motivated his imagination to seek out what lay beneath the surface of events. His secret.

Whenever he was behind the camera, a whole universe seemed to liberate in the moment his flash opened its illuminating beam upon a subject.  Until recently, he had not fully appreciated the value and curse of this gift.  It allowed him to penetrate the very depths of time and space itself to arrive at a full understanding of whatever he photographed.  The experience, it seemed to him, was narcotic, but he didn’t understand it fully. It was only last night that he had glimpsed the potential of his birthright and a new understanding of his abilities had become apparent. 

He threw on an overcoat and some boots and stepped out for a walk towards the docks, determined to shake off this fantasy, inhale some sea air and be surrounded by real large-scale rusting human constructions. They gave him a strange comfort and grounded him, perhaps because it was an inescapably real environment. 

But something nagged at him deeply enough for him to veer off course.  He just had to see.  He glanced at his watch.  It was three-fifteen in the afternoon.  “It wouldn’t be long now, I’d better get going,” he thought.  He would still have to get there and choose out a spot from where he couldn’t be seen. He didn’t want to be questioned by any cops should they pitch up asking questions. That is, if what he thought was going to happen, actually happened. 

He turned into a tarred street with cobblestone pavements called Hout Street, and made his way over to the far end of the parking lot outside Heritage square.  He hurried along, it would be soon now, if it happened.  He knew that he could have taken a walk down the docks and cleared his mind at the edge of one of the piers and read about the whole incident tomorrow in the papers if it did happen, but what he wanted to see was if it happened the way he had envisioned it.  Besides, he thought, he would know if he was crazy or not.  He pondered on this for a bit; perhaps all it would achieve would be to prove conclusively that he was indeed crazy.  If it happened, what would it mean?  Nevertheless, he had to see for himself, madness or not. 

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