FILLING AN APPLICATION FORM FOR MY NATIONAL ID
i) NAME: Mother, is this the part where I tell our story packed tight into the one word your tired eyes told the nurse will be my name?
ii) SURNAME: This is the space my father could have sat in. Could have dug himself a sure foundation to ground me but he was away when they named me. This man is always away, anyway, my mother gave me her grandmother's, said that will do between now and the time a man tethers me to himself like a branch. ‘Till I want kids with him to add to this shrubbery of a family tree.
iii) GENDER: Female, but this one time a family member said I should have been a boy because, ‘What's with the funny music and pants, hairstyle and legs as far apart from each other as men's ways from God’s.’ I didn't think it made any difference when all I ever saw was women being asked to sit down while men stand, run, dance, do whatever it is they want with their legs. Should I sit down though? Will that tell you?
iv) NATIONALITY: I don't know, you mean within which boarders do I belong? As in like where I will always be from even if I leave for years and years? I belong to a country whose descendants came here running from battles, Nfexane.... . Sometimes something blasts loud and bright and even in the face of danger, we wear our curiosity like running shoes to go see what would be so brave to try to end us, what in the hell would want to kill us. I belong within this fearless borders.
v) DATE OF BIRTH: There are twenty reasons inside the five that made nineteen ninety-two a song. The five, poetry, solitude, questions, questions, questions. It was in the dusk of autumn.
vi) PLACE OF BIRTH: The story goes my mother was so deep into the desert when her water broke it was the only thing that saved her- her water. I came tumbling down from between her legs and fell in between her relief and joy. I think I was born in her survival.
I swear that the information I have provided is true to the best of my knowledge.
Please sign on the dotted line
This space is small and I was asked questions that dug too shallow. So let me say, My name is of one who carries healing in the shape of other people's ache and not mine. I was born and raised fast running away from a war inside myself to my mother's people. Sometimes when I'm sleeping I can feel the violent gallop of a small animal running fast and fast past me. I am the small animal. I am a girl who grew up wanting to be a boy if that's what it took to do what I want. Play all day and come back to cooked meals and praise about body odor because that would mean I am becoming a man. I would have become a man but I'm still a girl. Also, I'm still learning the curve of letters inside my name to make it a signature.
Busamoya Phodiso Modirwa is a Motswana writer and poet with works published on Jalada Africa, Praxis Online Magazine, Ake Review, Kalahari Review and elsewhere. She writes poetry and creative non-fiction between her day job and evening accounting studies.