2
I should feel afraid. I should wake in the night, soaked in sweat from fearful dreams. I should have palpitations, no appetite and endless runs.
I have felt afraid. In those early days, as I awaited the trial and bail was denied, I shared a cell with Mavis Munongwa, the only other woman who is here for murder. That was before I got my own cell.
I covered my ears as Mavis screamed out the names of the children that she had killed. I was sometimes afraid to close my eyes and go to sleep. But even then, fear did not hold me completely to itself. I was insulated by my sense that none of this was real. That none of this was true. That it was too preposterous to be real.
I still feel afraid now, sometimes, but it is mostly in my dreams that fear comes to me and I find myself drowning before I startle myself awake. Outside of those dreams, I sleep well, or as well as I can on a prison-issue bed in a cell whose dimensions fall short of those prescribed by international treaties on the sagacious and humane treatment of the prisoner. I eat well, or as well as one can eat when the food is as bad as it is here.
Mostly, I just feel bored. You do something often enough, even something like waiting for your own death, and it too becomes routine.
I am writing this in my cell because Loveness has allowed me to take the notebooks and pens back with me. It has been three weeks since you gave me the notebooks and I started writing. You were my first visitor from the outside. And you were certainly the first visitor that any of us have ever had from overseas. Even here in Chikurubi, as in the rest of Zimbabwe, we value above all else the things that come from outside ourselves. Well, maybe not Synodia, the head guard.
They talked about you after I left, Loveness and Synodia. They were perplexed as to why a white journalism woman, as Loveness called you, would come all the way from America just to talk to a murderer like me. Synodia snatched from me the card that you left behind, and read your name and address as though they were lies that I had made up just to annoy her. ‘Linda Carter,’ she said as she read your card with her thumb over it. ‘Who is this Linda Carter?’
‘It’s Melinda Carter,’ I said. ‘She is a journalist who lives in Washington, in America.’
Synodia twisted her face into a moue of disbelief. ‘Pwelinda, Pwelinda,’ she said, and flung the card back at me. ‘Pwashington, Pwashington. Can you eat America? I said, can you eat America? If you can, you shall eat America until you are full of America. Pwamerica, Pwamerica.’
I call these statements Synodic Utterances. I am sure they make perfect sense in her mind as she is formulating them. They just somehow lose all meaning when they are uttered.
You were the first visitor that I have had, outside my lawyer, Vernah Sithole. My first outside visitor in the two years, three months, seven days and thirteen hours that I have been here. Until Vernah became interested in my case, the only outsider I saw was the woman from the Goodwill Fellowship.
It was Vernah’s idea that I should tell my story to you. Before she sent you to interview me, she told me that I should write down every detail that I could remember, that I should record everything that could make a sympathetic case. ‘It is important for the appeal,’ she said. ‘It is important because the death penalty is mandatory in cases of murder, and we have to find extenuating circumstances. It is the only way to commute the sentence.’
The appeals here are not looped in the endless cycle that goes on in America. And there is no governor to grant clemency at the last dramatic minute. I have just one appeal, to the Supreme Court. Vernah has appealed both the sentence and the conviction. The judges can do any of three things: they can confirm the conviction and uphold the sentence; confirm the conviction but quash the sentence; and, best of all, they could quash both the conviction and the sentence.
Look at me, with my legalese. I have become an expert in my own case. Perhaps I would not be here at all if Vernah had been my lawyer when I was arrested, or if she had represented me at my trial. I had no lawyer at all. When I confessed to killing Lloyd, I had not slept or eaten for days. That is another reason Vernah is convinced my appeal will succeed.
As I have said, writing to you was another of Vernah’s suggestions. ‘Write it to Melinda Carter,’ she said. ‘Tell her everything, even the things you think she already knows.’
You cannot imagine how strange it is to be addressing this to you. Like every person who has read the magazine you write for, I am familiar with your work. Every time I bought your magazine, I skipped the big celebrity interviews, the Iraq War and financial-scandal exposés, and made your column the first feature I read every month.
So I know that you have made a career out of exposing miscarriages of justice. Vernah has told me that you are here for a year to research a series of essays on our benighted justice system.
Verity Gutu, that veritable fount of endless and often irrelevant information, told me that I was in good hands with Vernah Sithole. She said, and these were her exact words, ‘You are in good hands with that Advocate Sithole woman.’
Loveness told me about her defence of a woman in Gweru who had thrown her baby down a pit latrine. The baby had not survived; she had drowned in the faeces and urine and rank sweat. Loveness said Vernah got her off with a one-year suspended sentence. ‘A pity,’ the magistrate said, ‘that the lawyer showed more remorse than her client.’
Until the reprieve that Vernah is fighting for comes, if it comes at all, I write this in the shadow of the gallows. If the Department of Public Prosecution and the Department of Prisons have their way, I will swing from a rope and hang until my neck lengthens to breaking point or it snaps and my bowels open and my life is extinct and I am given a pauper’s funeral and an unmarked grave.
I was thinking today about the question you asked me on our second meeting: why none of the journalists here have been interested in my story. On my less cynical days, I would answer that other things matter more: who will win the election; who will govern next; which man has killed his wife with what instrument; who will win Big Brother Africa; football scores and cricket results; mysterious happenings involving sorcery and grave robberies, goblins and curses.
In many ways I am glad that no one has chosen to tell my story. When the papers first reported Lloyd’s death, they focused on my condition, just as had always been done in the township where I lived before Lloyd bought me. There was a brutal honesty in how the children regarded anyone different. If they saw a person with no legs, they did not point out a person living with no legs, or a person living with no sight; they shouted, hona chirema, hona bofu, come and see the cripple, come and see the blind man, calling attention to each deficiency.
Their attitude was implicitly rooted in the language itself. Bofu is in noun class five, denoting things, just like benzi, the word for a mad person. Chirema, like a chimumumu, is in noun class seven, also denoting things, objects, lifeless objects or incomplete, deficient persons. As murungudunhu or musope, I find myself with normal people in noun class one. But murungudunhu is heavy with meaning. As a murungudunhu, I am a black woman who is imbued not with the whiteness of murungu, of privilege, but of dunhu, of ridicule and fakery, a ghastly whiteness.