Beaton Galafa is a Malawian writer. His works have appeared in Stuck in the Library, Transcending the Flame, 300K Anthology, Home/Casa, Betrayal, The Seasons, Empowerment, BNAP 2017 Anthology, Better Than Starbucks, Love Like Salt Anthology, Literary Shanghai, Mistake House, Fourth & Sycamore, The Wagon Magazine, Every Writer’s Resource, Eunoia Review, The Bombay Review, Nthanda Review, Kalahari Review, The Maynard, Birds Piled Loosely, Atlas and Alice, South 85 Journal and elsewhere.
Songxi Village. Or, How to Write about Songxi If I Were That Good
After I read Binyavanga Wainaina’s How to Write About Africa, I’ve always wanted to do a piece like his. But there is no work that one can do, in the same style as Binyavanga’s, that can rival his greatness. Yet, as an admirer, I sometimes have to borrow his heart and hand to express how I feel about certain places. And, it will not always be satire. If you have read Binya – as those who love him sometimes shorten his name to, do not raise your expectations. This piece doesn’t resonate with the magical literary expertise in his. Neither do I possess the same ingenuity as Binya. And, while Binya talks about Africa – my motherland, I talk about a distant place. Far from the colonial tropes of a dark continent Binya attacks. Far from the complexities of modernization. Yet maintaining a scintillating but low presence in a thousand years of China’s history. Or the world’s.
The village. You wind along the snaky road that connects it to the rest of Pujiang County, swerving through mountains and the lotus flower gardens at its entrance. Until its residents welcome you at the plaza outside Xu Family’s Ancestral Hall. It can be any other tiny place insignificant to the outside world, its people trapped in their own ruins for millennia. Unless something peculiar happens. Like shelling of the village in 1942 during the Japanese vengeful attacks after the Doolittle Raid. A history that confines itself in tiny bullet scratches on a grey wall a few feet from the village’s dispensary. This is a narrative of the village’s only living World Wall II witness. A nonagenarian who makes you imagine his livid experience when the village woke up to sounds of tanks and ammunition one morning over half a century ago. You relieve it through interpretations of a celebrated local poet. Your American friend can’t decipher anything from the old man’s Pujiangese – a dialect he never encountered in his one year of Mandarin.
Should you happen to be called, to live through the history and culture of this village, you might find yourself in need of writing. It might be in a diary, hopping that after you die, it will be discovered by the world. Like the diaries of Captain Lawrence Oates, Robert Falcon Scott and their friends. When death came travelling through blizzards and frostbites of the South Pole as they camped the last days of their lives out in 1912. Or you might simply be on a writing mission. Here, you will find writing about the village relevant, and wish you were me – sometimes doing it for nothing but the desire to emulate and consequently taint Binya’s art of writing about places.
On your way to Songxi, the green fields lying on both sides of the road will tempt you into getting your laptop out – or anything you’ve brought for the mission. Suppress the feeling. You’ll need the energy.
First, talk about the people. You will not find it easy skipping the landscape. The streams. The ancient stone walls that resemble ruins of Mwenemutapa. You’ve already drawn parallels between ancient Zimbabwe and the Chinese of ancient Songxi in your mind. But once you remember the faces of old men and women sitting around the square in front of Shao Family’s Ancestral Hall, sharing cigars and stories, you will want to narrate the glows on their faces. Your fingertips must follow them from the light of lanterns hanging in the village’s streets to moonlight bouncing off their foreheads as their laughs sink into the hushed night. Include their imitation of the ni hao and buyong xie you attempt the first morning you walk past them basking in the glory of a bright morning sky. Do not forget the old man whose house you walk past every day afterwards. Narrate to your readers how he’s always seated in his sitting room, front door open, watching television, sometimes eating, sometimes smoking – and how your Indian friend observes that at times he’s both eating and smoking. You and your friend conclude there is no other way of defining life.
You’ll not manage to describe the people in one paragraph. You will need a second, where you will narrate how the people welcome you on your first night. The dragons and lions dancing and disappearing in the darkness. Kids surrounding you to hear if you can speak Pujiangese – or at least any other dialect. Ignore the phone cameras and drones hovering above you. They are local tourists capturing the very moments that you will be experiencing. Focus on the one small boy who follows you everywhere, in a vest with BRYANT printed at the back and a pair of yellow shots going beyond the knees. In him, you will learn of Songxi’s love for basketball. But that will probably be on vacation, because out of the village’s three thousand people, you will learn it is mostly the grandfathers and grandmothers you meet in your evening and morning strolls who have stayed behind. The rest have been swallowed by the metropolises of China. The boy, and another one from your host family, will be disappointed when they learn you can only play football.
Next, you will want to talk about the Cockscomb Mountain standing tall on all sides of the village. Imperfect timing. You cannot wander from nature to nature. People always need a new story. Do not talk about the murkiness of the walls on some old houses and walls standing on the banks of the Ming Stream. Your readers will not understand how that fits for description of a village you profess profound love for. Instead, narrow your focus to the grey paint on the new houses lining the village’s streets and the stone walls. And how light from the sun bounces off into the streets and backs of yellow and orange fish swimming in their shoals at the conflux of the Ming and Hidden Stream.
You can extend the narrative to a part of the stream because you’ve been coerced into an encounter with nature this soon again by the gods. You can’t resist the call. Describe how hiding under bridges, reappearing and disappearing beneath the village’s stone houses, the Dongwuyuan Stream earned itself the charming name of Hidden Stream. Don’t explain how you find the name charming. You’re not obliged to. And, you never know how far your work will travel. So, do not forget to liken the bridges to catacombs. Or something bigger. Those familiar with the ancient Roman Empire might find a home in your heart. In Songxi. In the stream. And your name might forever be hailed.
You must also not forget the moon, and that one night you see it traversing through a cotton cloud. You will have to follow it. To the moment it gets swallowed in dark clouds, leaving the night to stars momentarily, before reappearing above the mountain to the north of the village. To conquer darkness again. The night’s silence can be ignored. It’s too abstract. Unless you include crickets that chirp through it, accompanying nocturnal readers and writers, and those who obsess about darkness and go out to admire its hollowness from a balcony. With this, you must take them through sights of lanterns around the village, as you stand high at the balcony staring at the shadows of the Cockscomb Mountain which you must describe next – lurking around the village – from a drone’s angle.
You must present the Cockscomb Mountain with extra care. Your readers have probably been to the Himalayas, the Andes, Everest, Kilimajalo and Mulanje. They will not sit there all day reading your gibberish. Not until you tell them how the mountain towers over the village from all sides, strategically keeping off enemies of ancient Songxi in times of war (probably). Successfully hiding from the perilousness of foreign contact. You must explain how the mountain’s tears form the Songxi Stream that flows through the village, dividing itself into the two streams that rejoin to form one big stream again near Xu Family’s Ancestral Hall and together head for Puyang River. As you let the streams slip away, scare them (your readers) with the four dragons (could be lions) guarding a plaza where ancestral veneration occurs in front of the hall.
You must finish your writing with one traditional ceremony. Describe to them a night filled with joy from locals as they watch performances of young people celebrating Chinese Valentine’s Day. You must explain to them how if they are lucky they might have a chance to float a lantern on the Ming Stream, mumbling a wish. At times a prayer for a possible return once they run out of time in the village. At times a wish to stay forever young – like Songxi. Make them feel like they are the lanterns in your love story, floating on waters under a dark night – away from the staring cameras of curious people on the stream’s banks. Away from the tumult of the night. Away from your story.
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