BEYOND THAT BROKEN BRIDGE

By MK KUOL, Juba, South Sudan

Dear Dora

Tuesday, July 14, 2020 (PW) — It has been a while, perhaps four decades, since I last wrote you a letter. And I hope you had been fine all along. As for me, I’m more alive than ever though I’m now at the threshold of old age. My family, that’s now well acquainted with you, rather your name, since I barely talk about my youth without mentioning it, greets you. They were delighted, especially my wife, when I told them I would write to you. In fact, she is the one who will post this piece as I’m too occupied. I guess youheard about my winning the Nobel Peace prize in Literature early this year and that, as a result,the government will be touring me around all the major towns around the country. At last, they have understood the role of media in nation building. Surely I’ll taketime off my busy schedule, when I come to your town, to meet you personally. We will soon leave this world and you well know that there’s nothing we take on that journey, just as there’s nothing we gain in this life except the warmfeeling of our hearts when we are close to people we love and carefor. That, I want to feel again.

However, that isn’t the reason my pen bleeds, today. No. I want to tell you something. Perhaps it is a question so I’ll ask. Now that you have grown old and money with all the good it offers doesn’t make sense, would you still have left me for that man, I mean your firsthusband, who by the time, with the yardstick of material things, had more than me? Now that you’ve gone through decades and the foolishness of youth is stripped off, would you say he had more than me? Really? I always tell my children that the love of a heart is an indestructible treasure. And like many valuable treasures, rare, that if one gets it, should be cherished and clutched with both hands. I want them to make decisions they’ll be proud of at the end of their lives. Decisions, uninfluenced by circumstances, for they are like passing clouds. They come and go. But the effects, good or bad, of our decisions, however trivial, last a lifetime. 

When you left me, My heart was heavy that I thought it wouldnever ever be light. It was evening when a friend broke to me the news that you have tied knots with a man. ‘Are you sure it is her?’. But my friend’s voice was too sympathetic to be lying. He knew, like others in my orbit, that you meant to me, life. I was sitting under the neem tree, revising a manuscript of an article I was writing for the JUBA MONITOR when the phone rang. I should’ve ignored it but Ngor is someone who knew how I spent my evenings, writing and reading, that I had no time for any distractions, phone calls included. So I picked it knowing that it was something serious. His voice was heavy and sympathetic as he told the chapters and verses of the story I thought I would never hear. I sank my head into the manuscript on my laps and drenched it with tears that I had nothing to present that week to the Editor. My legs, as well as my whole body, were weak and I laid on my single bed like forever. I couldn’t make it on my own either it was day or night. Everythingturned grey! Sadness has the ability to drain vitality out of man!

A year after our break up, I was up on my feet again. But I was never the same man. I started seeing the world with different lens. Lens tainted with bitternessand hatred. Hatred for who I was and for the humanity that didn’t take me as I was. But luckily, my love for pen wasn’t affected. I still loved and cherished it. It was my only weapon. The only I would use to make my way out of the fog that life had turned to be. I started penning down my bitter stories for newspapers in the capital, Juba as a freelancer under the pseudonym ‘SIMON TD’ for the fear that people might judgeme if they found out that my writing stemmed from my ugly past. The city readership related to my ‘fictions’ and I made a name as well some fortune. Well, It might have been little but for a man whogrew up with absolutely nothing, I appreciated it. But what was more important was the fact that my voice, through the pen on the platform of Newspapers, was being heard. ‘Pipe dream’ You once said in the dim past when I said I wanted to be like Ngugi waThiong’o, Taban Lo Liyong, Chinua Achebe, Ken Wiwa-Siroand Buchi Emecheta. Little did you know that, with hard work and determination, your idols canbecome ‘rivals’

Dora, You shouldn’t have left me.Beyond that broken bridge of despair and hopelessness it was entrenched in was a life I curved out of nothing with sweat and prayers. Look where I am now. A fulfilled and successful man with a great family! Then, You would never imagine that I would crawl out of the valley to the Hill-top.I’m not trying to blame you but the fact that what you did broke not only our bond, but also us is a pain that will live with me, perhaps us, for all of our days under the sun. In my heart, as a longing, a thirst that nothing can quench. And in your heart as an undoable regret. I know I was in the pit of life with no hope of ever coming out, without the Lord’s intervention. But was that enougha reason for turning your back on me. You should’ve been patient for I was working and praying harder day in, day out. You know very well that life is no one’s friend. And no one’s enemy. It doesn’t fight for, or against, anyone. And that the good and bad times trail each other like the seasons of the year. All you need is Abraham’s faith and Job’spatience. You should’ve known that though the night was dark and long, the day was sure to break. And sure it broke. Unfortunately, you had slipped away while it was still dark.

Money has its place. It is the only single man’s invention that had enslaved him, defining each and all that he does from the first breath to the last. We may not know but it is the thread, with which, humanity is interwoven. Plainly put, Money defines our relationship with others. I know that you’d known the ugliness of poverty by experience to choose it again. But was our love not more important than the ‘good times’ that only the rich are privileged with? Would you have traded our beautiful moments for money?Standing under the summer moon until the wee small hours, laughing heartily and whispering love-inspired words from ourhearts to each other’s ears, kissing and cuddling until the whole world folded into us, two. Dora, my time with you was the only anesthesia to my hard times, the only moments I felt the joy of this mystery called life. True love is as rare as chicken’s teeth and shouldnot be lost for anything, whatsoever. The truth is the rich of today could be the poor of tomorrow and vice versa. 

I wallowed in pain, always looking up the path hoping your familiar figure would form in the distance, but it never. Whenever my phone rang, I thought it wouldbe you. Alas! you never called. In every girl, I always saw you. Maybe because it was you I waslooking for. I developed an acrimony for day times for they gave me a chance to think of you. My only anesthesia, the only antidote was sleep. It made me forgot all the pains momentarilyand sometimes transported me to new worlds, through dreams, where pains, worries and anxietieswere strangers. A couple times, we met. And talked. Laughed. Kissed. Made love until it felt like the good old times, perhaps, like a retreat holiday from the ugly reality. And then I would wake up!

I was dispirited when I heard that you have left one Richard, the man you left your first husband for. Though I am not well acquainted with him, our paths crossed a couple times especially when he was the managing director of a certain publishing company. And he proved to be honest, hardworking and benevolent. He held his family dear. In fact, I could not have known he was your husband, for we never really talked, if I did not see an embroidered image of you smiling flawlessly on his pitch-black T-shirt with the words “Heaven gave me you so I’ll give you the world” beneath it in italics. “The man is obsessed with his wife” Someone in his orbit told me. A few months later, I heard he was sacked and was now doing time in a state penitentiary for misappropriating the company’s funds. “Why?” I inquired to confirm my deep-seated suspicions. “His wife needed more than a god can meet” I shook my head and cursed money. The same ‘devil’ that made you leave me! 

I barely know anything about your last man except the fact that hewas a socialite and a croesus who garnered his wealth dubiously, emptying national wealth into his pockets. Your friend Ajok said he was a millionaire by the time you exchanged vows. A year into marriage, you drained all of his resources. Selling assets and taking loans would not help the man from sinking. You also left him when he would not foot your bills. Will you not have stayed for the sake of the three children youprocreated together? How many kids did you leave with the second man, if I may ask? Do you still have contact with your primogenial child, the first fruit of your womb? Dora, what gives women that divine endurance isn’t will power but a mother’s love for her own. Chasing money is like chasing the wind. You end up exhausted with nothing to show for your efforts. How does it feel to never brood children that came out of you?

We will soon wear out. Our dust will go back to dust, and our spirit to the Life-source. And all our fears, that influenced most of our decisions, will be no more. That’s good to know. Yeah, it is worthy mentioning in this epistle for it will make sense to you, now that you are in your old age staring death in the face and everything is losing meaning. However, You are not entirely to blame. No. I would blame the molder, the man who formed us out of clay, first. Why would he give us something that takes from us more than it gives to house a spirit he would, at last,take to himself? Something we had to maintain with food, water, clothes, and other necessities only to lose it at the end of the day? Yetthis things are what give money, a mere paper, power and value. But you let greed clouded your mind that you gave up our love, as if, having enough of them have ever immortalised a soul. Love breeds respect. And respect is the only pillow a dying person can cushion his/her head on. It is the only thing we take to our afterlife. Isn’t it sad that you’ll die without a proper family? Now that the fruits of your wombs, live miles away from you, and themselves, with their fathers? Imagine the bitterness in their hearts as they grow under the heavy hands of their stepmothers just because you chased ‘good life’ all your days.

I accumulated money, builtmansions,ate the good our land could provide, drove the lastest wheels, wore Italian designs and drank Russian wines. I’ve also traveled, going as far as Ibiza in Spain and Miami in the USA to bask in the sun, not to talk of Mombasa and Jinja where the source of the great Nile is. I’ve seen the great Wall of China, the pryamids of Egypt and Sudan, and almost all the major cities in and out of Africa. I’ve been to the biggest museums of the world and seen the fossils of the ancientworld, most of which I’m sure you read about, if, at all, your love for literature outlived our time together. I’ve stood before the tombs of great men, both of our time and of the near past. Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Julius Nyerere, Robert Mugabe, Lucky Dube, Jomo Kenyatta, John Padmore, Du Bois, KwameNkrumah, Haile Selaise, Dr. JohnGarang, Chinua Achebe and Patrice Lumumba to mention a few. But none of the abovecompares to the Joy of having raised and built a family that doesn’t only respect, but love and support me. Love and respect gives you an extra foot, in all your endeavors, that money can’t. It is a pillar you can lean on when everything else fails. 

Our true legacy will never be an achievement. No. It will always be the kind of children we’ve left behind when we repose. The truth is our children are ourselves with the disguise and mask off! Most chide out of their ordinary selves, extraordinariness, through hard work. Others amass riches from the back of ‘slaves’ and other underprivileged lots of the society. Some go as far as taking credit for something they didn’t do, say military generals. And at the end of the day, that’s their legacy. I’ve won the prestigious Nobel prize, and though manywill consider it my legacy come my time, I honestly don’t think so. Not really. In my opinion, the children–my four sons and three daughters–are! Having kept together a family until I breath my last will be! Yes, maybe I won the anecdote for being the most industrious and passionate writer of my time. Not for being gentlemanly. Or at least human. But for doing what I love. Raising a family takes more than that. It needs you to love the woman, who is the mother, as much as the children. You’ve to be accountable for your failure and mistakes to avoid blame game, which is the cancer of most families. And of course, You need to be a man who gives more than he takes. It sounds too fictitious right but woman, that isn’t all it. You have to keep a smile, or at least, a grin on your face even if you are hurting on the inside. That’s the paycheck for raising a family that would be your legacy. I’m deeply convicted that is all the gods willask for, at the gates of eternity. And Dora, what will you show? What does it profit one to live in the earthly palaces only to be tossed on the ash-heap of eternity upon death? 

You lived life as if it was all was. But it is just a state. In fact a stage that, with time, transits depending on how you’ve lived. All who lived for themselves, satisfying their appetites, are trampled on by gods and tossed into the abyss. And those who go far and wide, for the good of humanity, are ushered into the glorious kingdom of gods and made gods. The be-all and end-all of your life was expensive clothes, fancy cars, being the life and soul of the parties, drinking exotic wines, and having a good sex. And all those, instead of other noble things, drained your money. And your need for them made you make money an Idol that you did everything possible to get it. You even left your men after menwhen they could no longer afford your wild lifestyle, not to mention my case. Money is a tool that can destroy or build you. And sure, It destroyed you for it was it that, at all times, influenced the major decisions of your life. Tell me honestly, have you ever visited soldiers at the warfront? Or an orphanage? Or the children that brave the harsh streets of Juba, sleeping on cartons, their stomachs empty? Or the victims of the deadly AIDS that are cramped together and forgotten at the corners of public hospitals? Yet you once called yourself the Queen of Juba, posing with Shisha and bottles, giving newspapers what to sell, everyweekend. Did it ever occur to you that old age will tame us all? And the only insurance against it is a well raised family?

I’ve written quite verbosely today. Maybe it is that I haven’t written to you for over four decades. I wish I could just forget you. But there’s a part of me that’s made of you. And I am not one that easily forgets a favour, though I might have returned it, one way or the other. Dora, I haven’t forgotten the fact that you stood by me during my darkest times. I’d just lost my mother, had no money for University, or even an odd job. I looked thin and old for my age. My hair knew no comb. Andbarely had I anything to wear. I smelt bad and no one loved me. I always walked around my neighborhood with a bowed head. People I crossed paths with,laughed at me. But your love for me was unquestionable. You were always there, a bright smile, that always illuminated my life, on your face. However, it is onemoment I’ll never forget. I was in my friend’s room, reading when your name appeared on my broken phone’s screen. ‘I am coming’ You said after I picked up. You were in a jean skirt that cuts just above your knees, exposing the road that leads to heaven clearly and a white long sleeved T-shirt when you appeared on the doorway. Your eyes twinkling like the summer stars. Your face tender and unspotted. I got up and you sank into my arms. A kiss and we were already on bed naked, sinning. As we were dressing, you looked into eyes and said ‘TD, If I was to choose between poverty and richness, I would choose poverty?’ I was faltered. A moment of Truth it was. I was poor but chosen, nevertheless. So much happened thereafter, but the lesson is what has lived with me over the years. And whenever I feel like closing the chapter on you, I remember it. ‘You’ve hurt me but I still love you, nonetheless’ Just like you were with me on my darkest day shall I always be with you

This letter would be meaningless without me talking about this.Infact it is one of the reasons I’ve spread the blank paper before me.The mango tree that we always stood under when we’re young, you remember? The one behind your old home where we had our first kiss? I bought it. That’s the cradle of love in my life and so I broke the bank to secure a long cherished memory. Haha…I still remember how you tightened your lips as if I was going to suck life out of you with a kiss. As I write now, It is noon and men are at work in the simmering heat of Juba that you know. I can see through the window of my study room a man, about thirty, putting a brick on brick. Others are soaked in sweat doing whatever the supervisor have assigned them. And soon, the retirement home I’ve decided to build will come to life! I’ve talked to each and all in my family and it is now agreed that, there under that mango tree,would be my burial groundinstead of a national cemetery, as the the government woulddemand come my time, considering my contributions to the country. The icing on the cake is that my family have agreed,too, to bury you next to me, on my life side. Chrissy, My beautiful wife, who made a god out of an ordinary man that I was, would rest on my right! It was my only wish! And sure my family granted it. My dream was to live my life next to you and now thatyou made it impossible, I’ll be buried next to you. In the meantime, You can come and live with us. My youngest daughterhas just brought me a Cup of coffee. Let me take it. Could’ve written even more. You know old men wag their tongues a lot as I wrote in one of my books ‘The strength of an old men departs hisarms and legs and goes straight to his tongue’ But since I’m coming to your town soon, we shall talk more. KISSES AND HUGS!

Your lost love

SIMON TD 

Write South Sudan©2020

The poet is reachable at his email: maydemas14@gmail.com

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