Comings of age & Learning to pray

Saaleha Idrees Bamjee

Poems from Zikr (uHlanga Press, 2018)

Comings of age 

The first time I ate an ant, it tasted sharp against my tongue. The first time I bled from the head was when it connected with the back of a swing at Zoo Lake. I looked white enough to get into the hospital ward but my name turned them against me. There was another hospital, and my first X-ray. I looked up at a light, my neck cradled by a pillow filled with beans. The second time I bled from the head, I fell off the back of a truck. The first boy who liked me first drove a purple Beetle, called me every night and it was so boring. The first boy I liked looked like Michael J Fox. We had a high school English teacher who was perpetually pregnant. I ate fish cakes after attending my first Christian funeral. At my uncle’s funeral, I remember thinking how odd must God think us, Muslims at a service for a Catholic man at a Hindu crematorium. The first time I ate oysters, I didn’t know it was cruel to chew them. They pull back in their shells when you poke them. Tip back and swallow, better stomach acid than the gnash of teeth. My father tried to teach me chess. I learnt the names of the pieces and their positions on the board. He died before I learnt their moves. I played draughts with my grandfather. When my grandfather started using machines for breath, I would lay out his clothes every evening for the next day until there wasn’t one. He had three tiered hangers for organising his trousers by colour. His room smelt like rosewater and leg wounds. My grandmother smoked cigarettes only when it rained. I once asked my mother what sex was all about and she said it’s when a man and a woman get close. I used to skim through copies of Mills & Boons at the public library just to get to the scenes.

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Learning to pray 

Alif, the first letter, pronounce it a leaf.

This is how we wrote to memory.

Muslims who didn’t speak Arabic or understand it,

but who could say it and read it,

we learnt ways around it, praying by ear.

Meaning would come later, if ever.

Qul Huw-Allahu Ahad.

Say He God Is One.

Cool who will law who a had.

Say He God is One.

Allah-us-Samad.

God is All-Embracing.

All law who sam add.

God is all-embracing.