Luckless and Unconsidered
Smoke from the burning embassy
district hangs low in the sky. The
presidential palace rises out of the mud, a gaudy display of staircases and
columns and coats of arms, with its pair of bookend armoured personnel carriers
parked back-to-back at the gate facing angry, stone-throwing crowds.
In front of their hovels,
luckless and unconsidered, women cook rice and beans or fry bananas on
smouldering twigs or dung cakes, while their babies mew and crawl and weep,
their tears streaking their dusty faces.
The men rest, fat paunches over waistbands, machine guns propped to one
side, stoned eyes focused on the infinity of despondence, the inherent dignity
of the human person lost in a social landscape that is nothing but a heap of
combustible material, littered with the usual debris; venereal disease,
neglected bastards, piles of un-biodegradable trash, people reduced to despair,
a few people’s privileges paid for by many other people’s work.
One, little more than a girl but
old, seeks and finds her naked scrap of an offspring from the ragged children
with matted hair who are sitting in the dust.
She squats and attaches the child to her nipple. After, she wipes his backside and his snotty
face with the hem of her wrapped skirt and places him back in the dust.
Down the hill, wading and
splashing in the delta streams, older children squeal and shout and grab at the
teats of slovenly, slothful water buffalo, amid a detritus of rusted hulks and
engine blocks and broken bicycles and dirty plastic bags, where only twisted
flowers grow in the morning sunshine filtered through a haze of diesel exhaust.
The teats are covered with a film of the black crankcase oil that slicks the
surface of the river from shore to shore.
They squirt warm milk and burnt fossil hydrocarbons down their eager
throats.
To be continued…
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