sahwira and ubuntu

Old grief, new words, and a challenge

Photo by Vadim Sadovski on Unsplash

And now we are home again. No more waking to the roar and rush of the surf. No more throwing myself into the waves and rising up again with a sputtering whoop of exhilaration. No more long walks in the sand, my toes kissed by the foaming sea. No more fresh, salty breeze. I am once again landlocked for the foreseeable future. I am home, and I have no choice but to remember that it is June. There is grieving to do.

June we can neither
face nor forget 

My early grief after the death of my sister, Rose, came as an outpouring of (admittedly, not very good) poetry. I wrote and wrote, my sorrow and anguish and rage bleeding onto the pages in a torrent. I filled a notebook, and then another, desperate to preserve some part of the vibrant life so abruptly ended.

I failed. I might as well have been writing with smoke.

The memories fade, too often replaced by photographs and videos. I hoped, at our sister’s wedding this spring, to catch some sense of her, some feeling that she was there with us. The completeness of her erasure from our lives was a shock as great as watching her rapid decline. She was there, then she faded, and then she was gone.

I think this is why a particular passage in Dr. Tererai Trent’s The Awakened Woman impacted me so deeply. In it, Dr. Trent described her mother’s funeral, and a particular ritual sacred to her people.

The driver of the hearse carrying my mother’s body smiles nervously as she gets out of the car. Wiping raindrops from her forehead, she shakes thick strands of dreadlocked hair. Striding deliberately toward the back of the hearse, she unlatches the tailgate, which opens with a soft, hydraulic sigh. Inside, a dark brown mahogany coffin decorated with a patch of black leather blends into the darkness.

Moonlight reflects off the coffin’s steel handles as the woman carefully opens the car’s side window curtains. With perfect synchronicity, six middle-aged men emerge from the circle of silence to lift my mother’s coffin. As the coffin is slowly raised, the sound of an eerie, shrill ululation fills the dark rainy night.

The driver of the hearse closes the door, my mother’s dearest friend, Mai Chigowo, asks, “What took you so long?” but she continues speaking before there is an answer. “Has anyone brought lamps or candles?” By now it is completely dark but for the light of the moon and a nearby fire.

My mother has just died and the hearse has brought her body from the hospital to her final resting place—our rural home. In my culture, no dead person is buried without her sahwira (pronounced sah-wee-ra), a Shona word that translates to “friend for life,” to make sure burial protocols and rituals are observed before the dead’s final departure on earth. The sahwira also presides over burial activities, overseeing food preparation and entertainment. But the sahwira’s role transcends beyond burial and is cultivated early in life.

As mourners gather around my mother’s coffin, a voice imitating my mother’s brings my daydreams to an end. The sahwira imitates her friend in order to represent her values. It is common practice in our community to use role-playing and “stand-ins” in a variety of different circumstances. Likewise, the sahwira becomes my mother to elevate our mourning. Our identities are fluid and transferable.

Mai Chigowo makes people laugh and cry at the same time. She emerges from my mother’s bedroom, wearing her favorite dress, eyeglasses, headdress, and hat. Walking with a limp, she holds my mother’s walking stick just as my mother did. Because Mai Chigowo and my mother were approximately the same height and weight, the sahwira—with her face partially covered by the hat—seems to bring my mother back to life.

Mai Chigowo approaches the mourners and pretends to talk to a young man with a cell phone. She dictates this message for the invisible young man: “Wanyora here zvandataura, umuudze Tererai kuti kana ouya, atiigire mabrofeni.” — “I want you to send a text to Tererai! Tell her that on her next visit from America, she must remember to bring back ibuprofen pills for our headaches!”

In response, some in the room begin to laugh while others wipe away tears. Even I laugh—for the first time since my mother died. Mai Chigowo smiles at me. I smile in return for she has fulfilled one of her fundamental roles—to lighten our grief and to remind us of my mother’s special qualities and extraordinary capacity to care for others.¹

This passage contains the most immediate scene in Dr. Trent’s beautiful book. I was instantly transported into the moment, and by the time I had finished I was full-on sobbing, tears coming so fast I had to stop reading. We don’t have anything like this in America. The hole in our lives left by my sister has been kept safely barricaded behind our collective silence. We almost never mention her anymore. If someone breaks the unwritten taboo, the response is usually more silence. It is as if we have decided to pretend to have forgotten her. I wonder what it would be like to try to fill that hole with memories? I wonder if any of us could still replicate the way she walked (with a kind of bounce), talked (all sharp wit and precise wording and timing for maximum hilarity), dressed (messy bun and perfect outfit no matter what she had on), smiled (she had a lot of different ones), laughed? I wonder if that’s what I tried to do with my poetry, bringing her back long enough for us to finish saying goodbye? I wonder if everyone fails in that role because there can never be a substitute for the people we have lost. I guess I’m glad I tried.