EAVESDROPPING

EAVESDROPPING

EAVESDROPPING

I have a penchant for eavesdropping.
Each time I cross a border I find
myself sidling up closer to strangers
than seems decent – at train stations, on buses,
in bank queues – listening out for ‘foreign’ words,
even ways of sighing I might recognize: traces
of languages that may emplace me.
 
A hand-slapping Zimbabwean masikati,
lilting Norwegian ha det bra, emphatic
Swedish absolut, flat Danish mange tak.
Reluctantly, even a guttural Hebrew betach.
Fragments of familiarity, like shrapnel
embedded in the skin of my memories
of too many places I’ve been, left, lost.
 
And then English, unapologetic coloniser
of countless tongues, spreading like wildfire
through savannah schools and missionary rules.
The BBC and the British Council, the World Bank
and the world at large assailing the airwaves
with proper nouns and deliciously poetic sounds
that conjure and confuse, that disguise the ruse
 
yet translated now through the hip-hop tropes
of tropical cities, and the literary spin of whole
new generations of diasporised dealers
in words, signs, songs. My language alive
in a million strangers’ mouths, made less strange
through these shared rumblings that hint
at things commonly lost and found and felt.
 
And so when I find them, these beloved strangers,
I listen unashamedly close, wondering
which accents, which phrases to discern
as partially mine. And mine is the point
in this ritual mapping of migrations, this
claiming of fragments of belonging,
this softening of dislocation.