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The Grim Reaper’s Work

A long-awaited episode of Hlala Kwabafileyo aired on TV 1, which at the time of writing this is SABC 1. The series title means, ‘Remain among the dead’. It featured talented cast members like Don Mlangeni Nawa and the late Daphney Hlomuka. A character who’d supposedly been murdered was in a casket. Now and then, we’d have glimpses into his coffin where his fingers trembled in what looked like blood. The music was petrifying. I tried to cover my eyes. The cop’s daughter-cousin said, ‘Don’t be scared. It’s just tomato sauce.’

After around-the-TV supper dishes had been cleared away, we got involved in a lively conversation about funerals, death and murder. Grandma then made the gloomiest of predictions. ‘Death is coming to this house. We’re due for a funeral or two.’

That’s how our version of ‘The Purge’ began. Not a month passed before the first of those two funerals happened. A male cousin, the youngest of Mom’s seven siblings, was accidentally shot in the head. Now years after his death when I walk past mirrors, I catch glimpses of his face where mine is supposed to be as though he’s stealing bits of the life that was stolen from him. His service was attended by crowds that spread three blocks down the road. Somebody hired a sound system to match. Thankfully, black neighbours don’t complain about noise to police; they endure.

In hindsight, it surprises me that my siblings and I got to view the body; we were very young. We were lifted to see into the casket sticking out of the back of the hearse. What was there was so strange, so incomprehensible, the memory is possibly a product of my imagination. He was covered from the collar down in all sorts of coffin drapery and funeral things — you know them; they have that garish finality you get when eternity meets consumerism. There was a giant stitch running down the side of his face. His lips and eyelids were swollen; his skin was dark and grey. He didn’t look like himself. Nowadays, citing ‘respect’, we hardly ever view the actual body. He was nineteen.

Next, the cop uncle passed. His daughter of the tomato sauce comment clocked out after him, also at nineteen. She predicted her death two weeks before it happened while we were watching the movie Red Scorpion. The movie had an appearance by actress and game show hostess, Nomsa Nene. Two other people had a dream in which her cop father said he’d be coming to fetch her because where he was, he had no junior to send on errands. ‘Anginangane engizoyithuma’. Black readers will understand that not even death is an excuse not to convey messages or do chores for your parents.

I was crushed by her passing. Being my most attentive child-minder, she had given me room to experiment with who I was. I could wear anything, play with any doll or toy truck I wanted, and she would accept that I was just different. She never suppressed or ‘corrected’ me.

A born storyteller, she’d made another formative contribution to my life: she was the first person to read and explain John 3:16 to me. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.’ She also re-preached sermons from the church services and Pentecostal revivals we went to, scaring more hell out of us than the pastors had. I would stare at pictures of this white man, Jesus, and would wonder to myself.

My parents, siblings and I moved to a house in a development on an old golf course. There was no shortage of building debris to play with in the neighbourhood. I visited Grandma’s house almost every weekend. It was late spring when we started living there, the strange landscape often overshadowed by otherworldly storm clouds.

After Thembi (‘tomato sauce’) passed, so did her infant son. Then Grandpa died and Grandma followed. She’d loved Thembi’s baby something fierce. I was told his name was the last thing she said before she passed, her face reacting like he appeared in front of her a moment before she clocked out.

We reached a point where not all the funeral things would be put away. Eulogies and funeral programs were recycled and spliced into one another, the process being simplified each time. We started out catering on porcelain plates; these days, we serve food on Styrofoam take-away containers to save people the trouble of washing their Tupperware after taking extras home.

In those lighter moments when they joked about death and about how dramatic some people (many of whom were in the room!) had been with their crying, the grown-ups also spoke about the hymns they wanted sung at their own funerals. ‘Alehliki ibhokisi,’; That casket isn’t going down, they’d threaten. It would only descend to the very orderly sound of everyone singing the hymn they’d chosen.

Did we remember the song, once the person died? Ha! We were so shocked and busy I’m sure we got it wrong half the time. Writing it down somewhere wouldn’t have helped because we’d simply have forgotten where it had been written or, if we could find it, how to read. We learned to prescribe left-out details for people’s funerals. ‘So-and-so really loved this song,’ an adult would say, ‘We’re singing it at their service.’ I’d nearly fall off my seat, having never heard so-and-so so much as talk about that song let alone lip-sync it.

If Grandma’s house was the dwarves’ home from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, then dinner would have begun with someone calling out, ‘Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy, and Dopey! Supper’s ready!’

With each death, our household’s list of names shortened. Sometimes the person serving would stop just before calling out the name of someone who’d passed. You could hear the pause without listening for it; you’d look around discreetly for hearts that would have been crushed by hope that at the mention of that person’s name, he or she would come bounding in from around the corner. I remember asking who’ll bury the last person on earth to die. The question landed more dispiritingly than I had intended. Some of our deaths were AIDS-related.

An uncle’s hearing-impaired wife passed away when I was in my teens. I’d always felt intimidated by her. My mother told me, without knowing about my anxiety, that I’d always held a special place in her heart from among the hordes of children all the adults were raising together. She and I didn’t talk, but we did communicate. At her funeral, her son was expected to share a few words. It was barely noon and he was tipsy. So, he sang (remarkably well) a famous song about the Father’s love. In his rendition, he substituted the word ‘Mother’ for Father. There wasn’t a dry eye in the audience. He didn’t say anything else.

When he was dying, the girls he’d been dating took turns nursing him to a dignified end. The last I heard, one of those girlfriends had lung cancer, and a third one was fighting HIV/AIDS. His dad, my uncle, also passed away after one of his sisters nicknamed Queen, and after Queen passed, that uncle’s older sister, who was my strictest aunt, departed after him. Growing up, I’d been intimidated by her disciplinarian ways, her waddling gait and permed hair. She chewed pink gum and wore red lipstick. Her shirts were irredeemably ugly, awful things, and I’m sure they were buried with her as it’s sometimes done.

When we went to the rare funeral at other people’s houses, we probably thought, These amateurs to ourselves. Likewise, when they came to our funerals they probably whispered, ‘These okes die every other weekend; haven’t they run out of people yet?’ under their breaths. But the Grim Reaper was firmly resolved on making our house Death’s neighbourhood refreshment station, eating scones and drinking lukewarm tea from metal cups among mourning candles and the living. The accusation of witchcraft dangled in the air, which is an all-too-common and dangerous story in black communities.

Kangaroo courts were convened. Sangomas were consulted. Ancestral grudges were dredged up for explanations. Church groups were called in to pray (or they invited themselves). Some family members were born-again Christians and subscribed to an expression of faith that didn’t mix with anything not in the Bible (or what the church in Acts did in the New Testament). Even then, Christianity boasts 40 000 denominations because of interpretative differences. I once asked an ex-boss what denomination she was in. She replied, ‘I’m Presbytebaptistlutherancatholievangelical’ and that pretty much covered her bases.

Other family members were traditionalists and performed Zulu rituals. Some of these traditional ceremonies call for everyone under the affected roof to participate, which adds to tensions and despair. Some people agree to the spiritual group effort; others sit it out. The ritual conductors tacitly accuse those who don’t do the work of being ritualistic freeloaders, while the pastors of those who don’t do the work tacitly accuse those who do it of spiritually tainting the terrain (by showing a lack of faith in the biblical God). With us, these sides clashed with each other in what the family began sensing were religious and spiritual entrepreneurs playing sides off against each other.

Many churches pick what’s socially accepted from the Bible and syncretise that with what culture dictates, the resultant variations making for enmities across the religious landscape. The danger is bits and pieces of religious law are invoked and inveigled in people’s personal morality crusades, which are then seen as a prerequisite for being healed and stopping your family members from dropping dead. One of the women who prayed for our family told us of her dislike of women who wore heels in church (‘Are they stomping Satan further into the ground?’) and mini-skirts (‘Are they blinding him with glory from their holy of holies?’). She and one of the gentlemen she’d brought along spoke of the good old days in which women walking past taxi ranks in mini-skirts would have them ripped from the slit up by bystanders in protest of how they were dressed (or rather, not dressed). The gentleman also suggested that the only ‘person’ God created was man. Woman was the derivative helpmeet, but not a person. Now, this man wasn’t some buffoon. He was a varsity student.

‘But this female non-person brings male persons into the world?’ I enquired.

He laughed, seeing my logic. ‘A cell phone carrier bag,’ he pointed out, ‘is not of the same status as the cell phone it carries.’

‘I know God lives in the heart,’ the praying woman would explain, ‘but surely women are disrespecting him in the way they carry themselves nowadays?’

‘What about the way men carry themselves?’

Ah, ‘but the nature of a man can’t be helped’ while that of woman can. The logical conclusion of her argument was that if a woman reported a rape, we’d have to ask what she’d been wearing and demand she wear the same outfit to court to be judged in it. ‘If I were the judge and her clothes appeared immodest, I’d sentence her and the rapist to jail!’ the praying woman declared.

Then why did God create Adam and Eve naked?

At any rate, when a woman goes to court to seek justice for being raped, it’s historically likelier for her to be punished instead of her rapist. So if they’re incarcerated in gender-separate prisons, as per the praying woman’s logic, the rape survivor would at least be kept from the perpetrator. Deuteronomy 22:28 and 29 prescribe this instead:

‘If a man finds a young woman who is a virgin, who is not betrothed, and he seizes her and lies with her, and they are found out, then the man who lay with her shall give to the young woman’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife because he has humbled her; he shall not be permitted to divorce her all his days.’ She’s stuck with the guy who called first dibs on what many cultures view as her family’s honour — if they’re discovered.

Cherry-picked and amalgamated into a cultural context that checks women for virginity, such scriptures may lend religious credence to the oft-repeated suggestion that such issues should be dealt with using ‘African solutions’ that call for the family to be compensated for ‘damages’. I can’t think of any Bible verse that explicitly condemns rape. Genesis 19, which has the story of Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction and is usually thought of as the Bible’s first reference to homosexuality, tells us the patriarch Lot offered his two virgin daughters to be raped by the neighbourhood’s mobs instead of his male guests. And Lot is frequently referred to as ‘righteous’. This train of thought often causes me to ask people my next question:

‘Do you hold to everything the Old Testament prescribes?’

‘No,’ they often say. ‘We’re no longer under the Old Covenant, so we don’t have to subscribe to the literal letter of the Law.’

Then who gets to decide which parts of the Bible apply, and how is anyone who wants to opt out (but is trapped by economic or familial circumstances) to stay shielded from the consequences of unpredictable Bible-verse cherry-picking?

I scoured the Bible for answers. But was I allowed to? The Johannine verses’ masculine focal point confounded me. God’s Son was gendered, every son having been at some point a boy and every boy a son.

Indeed, the lithe Jesus on the Catholic crucifix was not depicted as a sexless cherub. He was a man; the first pin-up I ever knelt before. I kissed the Saviour’s chiselled knees and thighs under a suspicious priest’s glare at Veneration the year before I had my first Communion, where I gulped Jesus’s wafer-thin body down my gullet. Look, I might go to hell for writing this but the poor excuse for a loin-cloth draped about Jesus’s pale waist messed with my head. If his plan for saving me from the perversions of my flesh was himself being made into a perversion of the flesh, then I was a spiritual disaster because I kept seeing the sacred in the sexual and the sexual in the sacred.

Some light did transplant itself from the buttery oil-painting clouds of cheap Renaissance imitations into the skies of my imagination. The half-naked Jesus of those paintings appeared to be the only person, dead or alive, who could understand this conflict of spiritual and sexual awareness. But, he was both God and God’s Son; judge and judged, executioner and executed: a grim warning about what God would have done to boys who think shameful thoughts. He was a type of the boy on the bike — a son with a capital-letter S, like on Superman’s vest.

I threw myself into the pursuit of holiness, sublimating my growing sexual awareness into religious zeal. I was on my way to becoming a self and body-hating Saul, the anally-retentive Pharisee.

A girl who supposedly had a message from the Lord of Darkness stood at the front of the Pentecostal church I was at. ‘Satan said to say all the believers’ homes are going down,’ she announced matter-of-factly. A shudder went through the congregation. Another night, a young man confessed his sin in a regretful tone: he’d dreamt he was sleeping with a woman. The congregation gasped. I envied him — marriage could be prescribed for that, unless he was one of the fated Christians Pastor Gumede had seen burning in hell in one of his visions. ‘Abanye benu basesihogweni njegamanje,’ he warned us. Some of you are in hell already. This was said to ‘encourage’ all of us to turn away from hidden sin.

Even as I muttered pious shock like the adults and teenagers around me, my hypocrisy gnawed at me from below my diaphragm. My desire’s acute demand for release singed nerve endings I didn’t know existed in places on my body I wouldn’t have pointed out on a doctor’s chart. Each internal gyration echoed my pulse down my groin, to my toes — right there in church. I learned to tuck my feet under my seat while squirming as the attractive pastor preached about that sin, that most hidden, alluring sin dragging you off to hell from the inside because you like how it caresses you while it ensnares you. And you’re not confessing it, you filthy sinner. You’ve got the Pharaoh’s army of enjoyment behind you and the Red Sea of shame before you — Amen!

He’s not talking about me, I would tell myself in a panic, especially when he preached against the sins of Sodom. The dreadful, terrible deeds of that place; deeds some of you are secretly practising. Or considering. And we church-goers worshipped frenziedly, like each of us was putting his or her religiosity out there to deflect suspicions that we were that sinner in the sermon; passionately, as though we knew it was as close to getting off as we’d ever, er, come.

Years later, Pastor Gumede made news headlines for statutorily raping male students at the school he taught at, and half the ‘holy ones’ he preached and worshipped with. ‘Had you continued going to that church,’ said a cousin from Dad’s side, ‘you’d have grown up to become one of his fuck boys.’

And not to say the thought had crossed my mind (the guy was married with children) but I’d probably have overcome my shyness to ask that he call me a filthy sinner while we were doing it.

I spent hours as a teenager at a beachside pool that was too cold for anyone else in my family to swim in. I’d leave everyone and float on my back in the deep end for hours, gazing at skies purpled by the chemicals in the water and in my eyes. ‘You were once the happiest child any of us had ever seen,’ Mom complained. I wanted to reply, ‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but that child may have died.’

So, before I even came out to her, she turned every hostile tradition I had been exposed to on its head. Were gays a hoax or riddle from the ancestors? No: they were spiritual guides from beyond. Abominations? No: God is love; he creates different kinds of people to love. Were gay people from Satan? No! Satan’s hold on us is never that direct — his influence, like God’s, works more in the realm of relationships than innate traits like sexual orientation, though those can be leveraged by Satan for blackmailing and shaming people. In the end, religious legalism would do more to turn folks away from God’s light than towards it. The spiritual fight could not be rushed into superficially, the way most churches preached it. We’d only shipwreck our faith if we took everything religion said literally.

‘But how do you pick which parts of the Bible to follow?’ I asked.

‘You take what you can, and leave what you can’t take. Anyone who thinks they can take all of it is lying to himself,’ she replied. Oddly, this also echoed Jesus’s preaching about eunuchs — a teaching he said would be another one of those things not everyone could take on board.

Matthew’s Gospel tells of2 Pharisees who asked Jesus whether it was lawful to divorce one’s wife for any and every reason. Jesus replied that Moses allowed divorce, but it was only to be resorted to in the case of sexual immorality.

Jesus’s disciples remarked that if the Law of Moses was to be lived that strictly, it would be better not to marry (which makes them a lot more honest than most legalists). That’s when Jesus replied, ‘Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.’

What’s worried me is that our churches don’t have support groups, systems or ministries for these eunuchs. It would be very strange for the number of eunuchs born as such to also drop.

If Jesus’s ‘born eunuch’ is today’s intersexed person, that opens the door to the whole sexual spectrum because if nature can make one kind of exception to gender binary, which Jesus recognised as prolific enough to qualify religious expectations, it would be difficult to argue against a full-blooded spectrum much like we see in today’s LGBTI3 community.