“Exorcist” by Busamoya Phodiso Modirwa


The man with the black suit comes over
mama told him I act like a boy
She says she will not mother abomination
The man says this can be fixed
The man plays exorcist and pours
oil over my head
The man touches the oil flowing down my neck
The man does not stop
Inside my too small bedroom
It is just me and him
His hands do not stop
He speaks in a language nobody uses at home
After this mama tells me I’m free
I want to tell my father what the man did
How his hands made my body something to be explored
A map in braille
But my heart beats the courage out of my mouth
My tongue unfolds and I stutter
Mama tells me to stop playing with words
All the language in my mouth finds a place to hide
The man with the black suit is coming for dinner today
The man with the black book is saying grace in my house
My eyes are wide open
My shame has finished eating my voice
He sees me over the deception he has cast
like a cobweb over my parents’ eyes
Sees me through the eye he has for little girls like me
This eye is a wandering thing hungry and ugly
It watches me lose my voice
To gain it back seven years after his ‘Amen’
The man says ‘Amen’ and all the glasses in the house shatter
All the bibles swallow their God and I have nothing to pray to
I want to tell my father the man is deceitful
I want to tell him I do not want to go to church
But I’m afraid mama will call the man
Her voice a succession of blaring sirens
And then he will come again, the man with the black book
And then he will come again, the man with the black suit
Hands hungry for the darkness he has made my body
Like he has many times before
Busamoya Phodiso Modirwa is a Motswana writer and poet. She is a recipient of the Botswana President’s Award for Contemporary Poetry 2016. Her short story, ‘The Healing Balm’ was short listed for the Botswana Tourism Fiction Award 2019 and her poems, ‘Family Time’, ‘Surviving Suicide’ and ‘Coat Of Many Colours’ are published on the Writers Space Africa magazine on the December 2018, January and May 2019 issues respectively. She also has an essay published on The Kalahari Review and poems coming up on The Ake Review 2019.
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