Home

I want to take you home.
No, not to my apartment —
that would be weird since
this is just our first date.
I mean, where I'm from.
Problem is,
it doesn't exist yet.

The first place I'd take you
after we wake up in my homeland
is for a picnic in a cemetery
to stroll among the tombstones
of capital and colony,
of apartheid and empire.
Gardens glisten upon their graves.
Orchards have blossomed there for centuries.
Their fruit is freely grown and freely given,
and it tastes as sweet as goodness.

The second place I'd take you
is a proper restaurant, but
without prices, things work a little differently.
We work for passion and joy.
We can do what we love,
so we love what we do,
and so many people love to make food.
After all, it is one of the most ancient forms
of social reproduction,
and what sorts of work could be more valuable
to a social species?
Before we eat, you'll hear me say
takthauma bilachte --
"everything delicious is sacred."
At home, one says it like a reflex, habitually,
as meaningless a mouthful as itadakimasu.
Its significance only comes home
when I'm homesick.
If I said Yucateca-Punjabi,
would you think it sounded tasty?
Would you be willing to try?
I'd treat, but
no prices.

The third place I'd take you
is my parents' place,
or rather, the place I was raised.
None of the eight folks I call pa'ti
are my genetic progenitors,
but nobody cares about that
except here in the past.
In my native tongue, parent is a verb.
It's something you do.
You live up to the work,
and that makes you a parent.
For me and a dozen siblings,
they tried their best.
No matter how advanced we have become,
it still takes a village.

I want to take you home because
we keep getting looks around here,
looks I don't like.
Whether it's because
my skin reflects light while
yours absorbs it,
or because
my estrogen is exogenous while
yours is endogenous,
these gawking onlookers seem helpless
to quiet the opinions their stares shout.
I find it hard to ignore that in your time
apartheid isn't dead.
He's at the bar, leering.
He's in the exec suite, laughing.
He's in the room with us,
even when we're alone.

So I wish I could take you home, but
I couldn't drive us there if I wanted to.
The road to it is a temporal one.
Getting there takes a vehicle called
struggle.
Apartheid lives and breathes
through momentum and inertia,
through a great deal of intentional work.
I couldn't kill him alone in a hundred lifetimes;
that's not how one murders a god.
The path to my home is being paved
by more hands of more generations
than could ever be counted.
In any case, I didn't get here by time machine.
I drove from my apartment.
Maybe someday I can invite you there
and serve you something homemade:
a curry, with love, from the future.