Eugh...

If men have ceased to be men, do we blame the state of society as a whole, or do we blame modern parenting skills (or evidently, the lack thereof).



About three Saturday’s ago, we had a house warming party to break in my new flat. We invited 30 people and ended up with just over 60. The poor little flat was packed tight. I can’t complain though. It turned out to be a damn good party; our party ROCKED! Of course we asked people to arrive for 8pm, so they would turn up sometime before midnight. We had the small chops laid out nicely, a clear punch and a dark punch, and neat little cubes of Tanqueray jelly.



How does my house-warming relate to parenting, gallantry and men? It goes like this: a friend of mine, proving to be a weak man of the worst kind, removed himself from the party and sat on the staircase shaking his head. He said he was exhausted and reeling slightly and that he just needed to breathe a while. He refused my offers of coffee, tea, ginger ale, water, anything that would re-hydrate him and flush out the alcohol. He didn’t look very bad, and we were even chatting/catching up on old times. I asked if he felt better, and he said slightly, so I said OK, come inside and rest for a sec, then wake up and join the party.



He lay himself down on my nice, new white linen, which I splashed out on just that week as a present to myself, and went to sleep. About half an hour later, I went in to check on him and he sat up and said, ‘Emz, I puked.’



Just like that. Emz I puked. As though he were a baby, reporting himself with glee: Mummy, I poo-pooed in my nappy!



Then I lost it. He didn’t even try to get to the toilet and puke there. Nooooo. What did he do? He lay there, wallowing in his own bile, like a freak. Needless to say, it soaked through the bedclothes to the mattress, dripped onto the carpet, splattered on my chest of drawers, and studded my sister and her flatmates' pull-along cases. Can you imagine? When I went to the window to get some air and calm down, his friends tried to get dramatic, like “ooh, don’t jump out of the window because you’re angry, calm down”. I was thinking, jump ke? Why would I dream of jumping, when all I can think of is pushing you out of it right here and right now?



I was like, oh boy, can’t you hold yourself? Haba! All the rice he ate that day, was spread out on my beige carpet and the room smelled putrid. With all the cleaning we did, we still need professional cleaners to come in and get rid of the stain. The quote: £50. Not the end of the world...



Can you imagine, I didn’t get an apology until the Wednesday, and even that was a text. You desecrate my room, and all you can do is text? Then on Friday I got an apologetic phone call, in which he presumed to tell me that he knew I had already found space in my heart to forgive him, and that he was too embarrassed to phone on Weds, which is why he texted. Whatever.



Now, here’s a question for you. Do I blame his upbringing for not teaching him that when you ruin something in someone’s house, you fix it? Or do I blame him, for allowing the laissez-faire approach to modern manners to emasculate his sense of duty?



If I puked all over your carpet a) I’d clean it up myself, out of sheer shame and b) I’d handle the cleaning and new linen linen bill so fast, you wouldn't know what happened. If you break a worthless, I dunno, side plate you say sorry and let it fly. If you break crystal or special china, you get on the phone and order up a replacement, even after you've apologised profusely! If you borrow a friend's top and burn cigarette holes in it, you buy her a new one, if you puke on the carpet, you get it cleaned. Basically if you wreak havoc on someone's house/belongings, you go ahead and get it fixed, unless you're specifically asked not to sweat it. But really, it wouldn't bug me if he broke something. I really wouldn't care. The reason I'm so upset is that this is vomit we're talking about. Gut juice. Vomit. Eugh. Of all the yucky fluids capable of leaving the human body, vomit is the one that grosses me out the most, and it's hard to accept that my space has been tainted with it.



The puke-maester said he’d come round on Sunday to sort things out. Have I heard from him since? No.



Without wanting to seem like a mean person, he's taking the piss. What bugs me, on principle, is his lack of remorse, his lack of awareness, that he has a social obligation to make things right. If he offered to handle it, he would have given me the opportunity to say you know what, it’s alright, don’t worry about it, but don’t you EVER do that again. But his brazen “I know you’ve already forgiven me” line…Brother, which oracle are you consulting? I haven’t forgiven nuttin’!



What annoys me the most I think, is there I am, being Little Miss Nurturing and Benevolent again, and what do I get for it? I get puked on. Insult of the highest order! And I haven’t been able to sleep in my room since…

Another Gem of a Book

First of all, huge apologies for not updating! This is me grovelling, rubbing my palms together…

E jo
Emabinu
Iweliwe o!

And now that we’re cool…






I’ve just finished reading Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. What a book! Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m behind. It’s been around since 1988 and I’m only just getting to it. Well, to use a cliché…actually, I won’t use a cliché! I find it weird though, the pattern that my reading seems to have taken on in the last couple of months, since I started working in Publishing. I’m either going way back to read the all-important, groundbreaking books I’ve always wanted to read, and have never quite got round to, or I’m reading way, way, way ahead, to titles that won’t be out until March/April next year. Kinda cool, huh.

On my retro book menu, still waiting to be devoured, are Perfume by Patrick Suskind and The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. The old skool greats I’ve just read and come to love are The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah and Nervous Conditions.

Back to Nervous Conditions…what a book! For something that was written over 18 years ago, I’m amazed at how aptly it captures things, how advanced and perceptive its treatment of the cultural miscellany of the individuals in a colonised country are. Those are issues that are still being faced now. Whether that means nothing has changed since 1988 (which is very worrying indeed) or that Dangarembga saw so well to the heart of the matter all those years ago (which is a sure sign that it’s the truth) I feel I’ve discovered a gem of a book. Rather than being polemic, it’s an exploration of the cultural identity and displacement in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

The characters were all so alive, and the language was just…mmm…I don’t know…juicy. You could tell it was in direct translation from a native dialect, and that gave it a weighty, sincere, beautiful dynamic. I loved Tambudzai’s lightening sharp mind, and the hunger, deep down in her belly, to better herself and overcome her disadvantaged beginnings so she could take care of her little siblings. I loved Nyasha’s intellectual enquiry, and how her being slightly avant-garde made her question many of the native traditions of her parents’ people, and how at the same time, quite unpredictably, she championed the causes of local practises, when it seemed the western ones (brought in by missionaries) were just thinly veiled ways of manipulating her people. Babamukuru, the benevolent but grumpy, patriarch, who said “Er” before everything, and his wife Maiguru, who worshipped her husband, called him her "daddy-sweet" and pretended to be stupid even though she had a Masters in Philosophy just so he wouldn’t think she was undermining his authority; the four of them, placed side by side, created a robust framework in which the theme of the book could operate.

Nyasha’s character posed the most thought provoking questions of all. Will the day ever come when the worldwide model of civilisation is not built solely on Western paradigms? Will the levels of personal development to which we aspire ever be independent of a desire to, for instance, a)sound more and more anglicised b)own a foreign passport c) know the intricacies of the Battle of Waterloo but nothing about the Benin Empire?

Or has the standard been set? Is it damage control from here on in? There’s a song called Beautiful Struggle by Talib Kweli. This is what Nyasha encapsulates in the pastoral setting of 1960s Rhodesia. The only problem is, as beautiful as the struggle was, as noble as her intentions were, the oxymoron of being a Westernised Local was at the very core of her existence. The book ended with Nyasha going mad….

Is there an answer to cultural miscellany?


Many times, I felt like getting a pencil and underlining whole chapters, because the observations were so clear eyed and so damn right, but my mind overruled. Besides, Auntie Jackie says it’s wrong to scribble in books! The humour was there, but controlled. The kind that made you do a knowing smile and shake your head. The kind that made me stop reading for a while on the train to work, think about what I had just read, agree with what I had just read, identify with what I had just read. It was expertly rendered humour, because it wasn’t far out or fantastic – it was uncluttered, simple, the wryness of everyday life.

On a lighter note, I’m really fascinated by sadza, which is what the characters ate a lot of in the book. I really want to try it so if anyone knows a good place in London to try Zimbabwean food, please let me know.

If you don’t already own a copy of Nervous Conditions, please I beg you, sort yourself out!

And Tsitsi Dangarembga you’re a star.