memoir

I was sixteen years old, flat chested, and very sorry to be there. My dad had just resigned from the Harare Polytechnic, where he’d taught a number of courses, but it was mostly photography I’d heard about, which he loved. Now someone else would be getting that entire load, which he had worked hard to build up, in some cases by starting courses from scratch.

I had to go to the farewell party, at which he would receive the tokens of two metal dishes. I actually cannot remember it too well – he received two items small and silver-plated, and inscribed. I never saw these objects again after that night.

We were not part of his professional life, but we had to be there, Glenda and his whole family. And there was something poisonous in the air; some sense of dark, deeply ingrained hostility between my father and several of the attendees of this party to farewell him. Was one of the younger male lecturers contending to take up my father’s place, to be the new head honcho, dominating much of the field of commercial arts? I sensed that this was so, but it was not for me to concern myself with. My task, to the contrary, was to be very, very still, to the point where I could perhaps disappear from this embarrassing adult party, at which I had no place. If I propped myself up against a pillar, and stood there, very, very still, it would perhaps seem as if I hadn’t existed, and then, like the only child left alone in the playground, without anyone else to keep her company, I would curtail my embarrassment until the bell that marked the end of break began to ring.

It was getting later, about 8 pm, when the presentation was about to happen. My father was getting increasingly agitated. It seemed the young man in question was making wise cracks at him. This had to do with my father’s professional life, which I didn’t know anything about, as I have said. It was also to do with men, and how they were, having exchanges of thoughts and ideas that women just ignored.

My father received his silver-plated items, and now he was fit for exploding. His fate had been sealed as no longer belonging. Perhaps this is how he felt? As if he had made his pact with death, as with being an outsider, as if ashes from Vesuvius had started to tumble out around the place.

He picked up his silvery, shiny baubles, and directed us straight towards the car.
“Where you looking at that guy?” he said.

“Which one?” I asked.

Since I had decided to adopt a mode of denial, my father was even more furious at me.

“You were looking at him,” he accused me. “He said you were looking at him.”

His anger was about to burst his ear drums. The rest of the drive home was in silence.