Author: saaleha
I am a writer and photographer (look up my work on www.shootcake.com) based in Johannesburg, South Africa. I have an MA in Creative Writing from the university currently known as Rhodes. My writing accolades include winning the 2014 Writivism Short Story Prize and the 2020 Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize for my debut collection, Zikr.
Writivism 2014 Flash Fiction: No Juju That Strong
I was selected as a participant at the 2014 Writivism workshop in Cape Town early this year. Further to the workshop, participants were paired with other writers who mentored us as we developed a piece of flash fiction for publication across a range of African media.
After feedback from my mentor Julius C Sseremba, this was the story that appeared in The Observer newspaper in Uganda:
No Juju That Strong
by Saaleha Idrees Bamjee
She sways and spins, her position held by hips as broad as a baobab. The feather-duster in her hand sheds ostrich plumes.
They rain down hope on the woman kneeling before her. Mama Eve raises feet clad in green plastic mock-crocs. She stamps on a heap of cowrie shells, filling the room with brittle crackling. The woman rocks her bowed head reading, chanting softly from the scrap of paper in trembling hands.
Mama Eve lowers her hips and torso and comes face-to-face with the woman. “Come out!” Mama Eve shouts in a voice deeper than the one she was born with. “Come out! And leave this one! Come out and let her bear! Come out!” Her eyes are open to their whites. She places her hands on the woman’s stomach and pushes.
“By all that is good, and all that is not good, come out I command you!”
Mama Eve presses her palms against the unyielding belly once more. The woman falls to the side. Mama Eve strikes up, cobra-like and circles the woman. She picks up the feather-duster again waving it around the supine figure. “It is done,” she proclaims.
The woman stumbles to her feet. Mama Eve leads her out to the cash register. “I won’t charge you for the consultancy but cleansing is R350 and the medicine is R400.”
The woman hands over the money. A mystified gaze floats in her blood-shot eyes.
“You must follow the calendar I gave you. Lie with your man on the days I’ve crossed out. If you still don’t have a baby in three months, come see me again. I do not charge for follow-up visits.”
The woman’s cheeks melt into meek gratitude as she leaves, her hand lightly rubbing her navel. Mama Eve locks the door behind her. She proceeds to a desk stacked high with leaflets. She picks through the names of some competitors.
Those who go by the title Dr. – Simbwa, Hanifah, Kirumba, Khan and Nyere; there are those who, like her, go by Mama – Obote, Zainab, Tina and Belinda. There is only one professor, a certain Gibson. Mama Eve glances at the clock. Oliver has still not called after leaving the night before.
If this is like the other times he’s left, he probably found his way to his brother’s house to sober up before work. She should expect his knock within the hour, his trembling hands clutching a bouquet he bought from the man at the robot.
Eve picks up a cork from the table, a reminder that there have been few celebrations in their home since the baby’s funeral. It was not her child but Oliver’s first born from the woman who’d forgotten she had a baby in the car, as she chased tinkling barrels of cherries for cupfuls of coins at the Gold Reef City Casino. Oliver must have run out of his usual poison and started on the wine she kept for love spells and Christmas.
Mama Eve dips the cork in a stain left behind from Oliver’s late night binge and draws a symbol on the table where it evaporates as fast as she sketches. In the same way that psychics aren’t supposed to see lottery numbers or winning horses, Mama cannot heal herself or her man. There is no juju that strong.
She pages through her collection of leaflets again. Dr Kirumba will bring back a lost lover. He can also administer a treatment to double the length and girth of a penis. Eve knows his supplier – the same Chinese herbalist at Dragon City she gets her stock from.
Mama Zainab now has an advert printed in full colour; business must be booming. Zainab promises to fix an immoral spouse but does not offer the cure for a broken one. Eve sweeps her hand across the table sending the heap of leaflets to the floor where they nestle among beer cans and cigarette ash she will sweep up later.
She reaches for a pen and the stack of phone books of which she keeps a ready pile since the pages are just the right thickness to wrap charms in. She flips through to a section she hasn’t yet ripped out. Her fingers, as a braille reader’s, move down the yellow page. She pauses at M and the number next to — marriage counsellor.
Camera Collectanea: LEGO, Lippie, Snow Ice & Pasta Sauce
My fortnight in pictures:
—
—
—
Found Poetry: A Google Search Poem
This is a poem made up entirely of Google autocomplete suggestions to search queries.
I took the idea from Google Poetics, a blog that collates examples of poetry created through the medium of the Google search bar.
NaPoWrimo 2014 Catch-up
I’ve been away for a few days, out in the tempered bush of a game reserve in the Eastern Cape, taking pictures of animals at cautious distance and ignoring my emails. I also attended the ceremony where I graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Rhodes University. It was the culmination of a two-year part-time programme where I made the enduring acquaintance of a group of accomplished writers who will all soon be landmarks on the SA literary scene. As for myself, I am nursing the bereavement that comes from being delivered from the womb of thesis supervision. Despite the officially embossed paperwork, I am still grappling with my place as a writer, but more on that in another post.
While I saw and smelt much poetry out in the green, gold and blue of bushveld and seascape, I wrote none of it down. And this is why I have nine poems to write before I clear up my NaPoWriMo backlog.
Here are five of them as a start.
The Poet’s Dilemma
Saaleha Idrees Bamjee
I never know where to break a line
or when or if in fact it should be
broken at all to create a pause a breath for the reader
a kind of rest for the eyes or if this is being read aloud
a space to sip at water without flushing the rhythm
so carefully composed.
When a poem comes its through an open tap puddling till all I can do is float in it.
This breaking of lines sounds savage sometimes the cracking of eggs the splintering of timber
bone china in pieces on the floor.
The Old Lion
Saaleha Idrees Bamjee
I watch the old lion watching the herd.
The zebras smell him,
they’ve turned their heads to look.
There’ll be no clanging of the food chain today
and he shuffles off through the veld.
I’ve seen him before in a supermarket aisle,
staring for fifteen minutes at tins of baked beans,
the trolley empty, longing for his wife
who did the grocery shopping.
Elephants
Saaleha Idrees Bamjee
Yes, giraffes are elegant, obviously.
It’s that neck, and their legs, all slim lines and graceful
silhouettes photographed against saturated skies.
But have you watched an elephant walk? Have you really
considered their grand compacting of the ground beneath them?
Their balletic paces, unplodding gentle treads
hinged on judiciously oiled knees,
they barely seem to emboss the grass.
We always think big things unwieldy,
giants must be clumsy, skinny is everything.
During a Reading
Saaleha Idrees Bamjee
The pause is most pressing
when a poet loses their place.
The poem hangs over the room
its bladder fully pinched
the listeners shifting in seats
holding in the expectancy
clenching their attention
for when the poet finds himself on the page
any moment now.
Pick-up Lines
Saaleha Idrees Bamjee
Hey beautiful,
I want to build a life
on that bone structure.
Have your zygomatic arches
hold up the roof to a home,
the walls papered with lyrics
from our song.
Your hair could weave
a winter warm.
Curtains fall
when you close your eyes
dark enough to dream unfettered
and the room fills up
with all of you.
My gifs to you: Looping Giraffe and PE Piers At Night
Ah, the gratifying amusement and magic of .gif animation.
I really should make these more often.
Jo’burg Photowalk: CBD and surrounds
Jo’burg city is like an aging movie star who dropped out of the public eye decades ago and has now emerged from her reclusion, reinvented. Her waist may have thickened and the skin around the eyes more deeply etched, but her magic still shimmers in the right light, charm at-ready, her presence grand.
Camera Collectanea 06.02.14 – 03.04.14
In this collation, the overarching theme is, unsurprisingly, things one would input via the mouth.
These fairly regular photo grouping exercises are so useful for identifying overworked themes and angles in my work. I really must get out of this habit of isolating all my subjects.
Personal Identity: A Monogram
Monograms feel like classy relics from an offline age where people still left behind their calling cards.
For now, I will resist embroidering this simple consolidated SIB onto bathrobes and towels, incorporating it instead into the design of my personal stationery suite and business cards.
