Member-only story
Snakes in the Night
[NB: This piece was originally published in September 2018 in Arts and Africa, a now-defunct literary magazine.]
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“Mommy — what’s chitsulo?”
My mother and I were sitting in the playroom together after dinner, on the sofa adjacent to the room’s bay window. We didn’t normally do this, converse after dinner I mean, as I usually had homework to do. But school had ended for the year that day, with early closure and a year-end party for the Standard Sixes — the highest class in the primary division of my school, who the following year would be advancing up to secondary — and so I had come home that afternoon free of obligation, for six weeks until the start of school in September. My mother looked at me, curious, vaguely suspicious, but still open.
“It’s an iron, Mimi.” She seemed a little amused, as I would have had no reason to need to know what an iron was in Chichewa — my siblings and I attended an international school, and the household staff understood us in simple English well enough — and she had probably figured that it was another one of my many Lost-In-Translation moments in that first year since we’d moved back to Malawi. “Why?”
“Well,” I began haltingly, “it was below my name on the back of Chifundo’s party invitation.”
At that explanation, my mother’s face froze. I’d had a sense, when I’d first seen it, that it couldn’t mean something good, that it was some kind of name-calling, probably, because they’d written it in Chichewa, which I was only just beginning to learn, and so whoever wrote it would have known I wouldn’t be able to understand it. But as much as I’d wanted to brush it off at first I found myself becoming more and more uneasy with the notion of something going on behind my back, going over my head but known by everyone else around me, and by evening I’d resolved to ask my mother about it as soon as the chance presented itself, in as unalarming terms as possible, as I didn’t want her too concerned with the everyday dramas of eleven year-olds. I just wanted the literal translation of it so I could decide what I needed to do next, if anything.
My mother’s face, however, told me that whatever barrier I had had the intention of keeping between this event and herself would remain in imagination only.
