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Mubanga Kalimamukwento

4.

before abandoning my fatherland/ i must first dignify this
departure with marble and granite/

bribe someone to chip Here lies a beloved beneath the carving of an
angel etched above April 14th

1958—July 28th 1999. but of course/ Lusaka City Council has lost
his plot/ on the old Leopards’ Hill / i have to bribe somebody and
then another somebody to retrieve

the tattered death registry/ leaf pages/ walk backwards/

Of course, I remember the date i tell the third somebody

 

3.

i must first eulogize 20 years too late

locate K & scroll/ should i use his English name

before his Bemba one/ Fuck you to his mantra/bitter laugh dance 
in my gut/

an African must not bear a white man’s name. I can’t find him/
Damnit Dad/

 

2.

KA/KAB/KAC/KAL/

a fourth somebody is pacing/ How far madam? squeezing Lusaka
humidity with are you sure about the date?

fyola, but not loud enough for this somebody to hear my teeth kiss.
i’m sure/ about all the exhausted wailing when i walked into the
funeral house/ of

Maama’s breath hitching/God. You look just like your father—just
yesterday was her baby. i’m sure about the cortége of deaths smirk
inside the hearse/ i’m sure of the fresh wounds in the

earth & flame trees bowing around winding dirt paths/

still/ I can’t find him.

 

1.

not without a mirror to say/

There is our nose daughter

the birthmark we share on our philtrum.

There, lips lined black from his smoking, racing through my mother
to darken mine too.

There is the dark behind our eyes, which splinters every time we laugh.

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Headshot of Mubanga K

Mubanga is the author of The Mourning Bird (Jacana), “unmarked graves” (Tusculum University Press), Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press), The Shipikisha Club (Dzanc Books) and “children of small places” (forthcoming from Holy Cow! Press). Her other writing appears in The Hopkins Review, adda, Aster(ix), Contemporary Verse 2, Kweli, Overland, The Ex-Puritan, Menelique, on Netflix, and elsewhere. Her editorial work appears in Shenandoah, the Water~Stone Review, Doek! Literary Magazine, and Safundi. She is the founding editor of Ubwali Literary Magazine. 

Mubanga’s work has been awarded a Minnesota Book Award, Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction, and Dinaane Debut Fiction Award. Mubanga was also the first African winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. She has also received support from the Hubert H. Humphrey (Fulbright) Fellowship, Young African Leadership Initiative, the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies, the Africa Institute, the Hawkinson Scholarship for Peace and Justice, the Miles Morland Scholarship for African writers, and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.  Her research appears in Safundi and the Journal of African Cultural Studies.

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Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies
Wayfarer Books

San Juan Mountains, Colorado

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Mubanga Kalimamukwento’s multi-lingual, hybrid collection of essays and poems, Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies, is a kaleidoscope of emotions: at once self-excavation and epitaph, exhumation and burial song. These words are a conversation between the present and the past.

Kalimamukwento deftly navigates the aftermath of devastating personal losses, particularly that of her mother. Through them, she invites readers to reflect on their own experiences of loss and the enduring impact of familial bonds. 

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