Sawijika
-Liza ([1]lizaausten@tri-countynet.net or [2]malenka@malenkaya.com)
Disclaimers/Spoilers/Ratings/other nonsense: I don't own the characters that show up on the show, so whatever. I also don't own the song. Any spoilers that are referenced here are not actually... you know, out-and-out referenced, except the existence of Kerry, her parents, Africa, Sandy, and Frank (and his quote). Most of it's just speculation based on a line here and a line there. The rating is probably something akin to PG13 (but the series overall is an R), because of references to disease, abandonment, death, horrible living conditions, and mature themes. Consider yourself informed, warned, and et cetera.
Important Note: This is part of a series that crosses several fandoms (currently, CSI, the West Wing, and ER are being planned, possibly the Division, - but NONE of these are crossovers. I am not a crossover fan, myself, so I don't write crossovers). The third being this one, Sawijika, based upon the mood (mostly) and a few words (only referenced in the last few lines) from the third stanza of the song "Picture" by Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow. If you'd like to read the others, please contact me at [3]lizaausten@tri-countynet.net and I'll gladly provide you with a copy or a link to the other(s). The understanding of each story depends only on that one, meaning you don't have to read any of the others if you're so inclined. They're all stand alone, but have the song in common - a different stanza per story.
My thanks go to Claudie for the reading, editing, idea-bouncing, and helping, and a good friend for making me listen to the song (I think she prefers to remain nameless).
I love hearing opinions, good or bad, and feedback is this girl's best friend. Eh, who needs jewelry anyway?
Dictionary/Translator (meaning, read this, or you're gonna be saying 'huh?') from Swahili to English:
*lango - gate
*muungu -god/goddess
*simba - lion
*sawijika - ugly
-I caught you last night at the hotel
Everyone knows but they won't tell
But their half-hearted smiles tell me something
Just ain't right...
I've been waiting on you for a long time
Fueling up on heartaches and cheap wine
I haven't heard from you in three damn nights.-
She worried about it, this thing and this woman, how it and she had taken precedence over her life and changed her, changed the way people looked at her, reacted to her. It wasn't as if she wasn't used to their stares - she was, she had been for a long time - it was just their way. She was the daughter of evangelistic missionaries - adopted but beloved - and in honor of their names, their memory, she'd followed her clear cut path, but always with one eye on the road less traveled. Always doing what was expected, right - times had changed.
She had made her choices, things were to be different now.
She had been a good child, never forgetting birthdays or anniversaries, Mother or Father's Day, each was marked by cards and sometimes gifts, and she strived to make them proud with her words and accomplishments. But they never told her.
When she was a child she was laughed at because of her metal "third leg", but she was feared and respected for the damage it could inflict, the intelligence she possessed, and the gift of the shaman that she'd been given. The gift of strength and of healing, and it was when that gift failed that she failed, and she had been young when she learned to forget.
She was born an African citizen - a redheaded pale-skinned creature amidst a sea of dark faces and ebony hair - but they never cared, never told her how different or ugly she looked until her mother had given one of the tribal children a mirror, and then they called her Sawijika, ugly.
She was never called by name.
Her father had taken her in the 4x4 to one of the nearby villages when she had first been adopted, when they guessed she was seven years old but small. They didn't keep very good records in Kenyan hospices in those days, little less the villages themselves, and no certified papers proved her existence, then, so she was created, not born - sort of like the Phoenix - as Kerry Weaver in 1967, and her new Mama and Papa told her she was lucky because she got to pick her own birthday. They'd ridden from Nairobi to the Kamba region where people cried for opiates as their children died of AIDS and malnutrition. Their souls were not what needed to be saved then, and her father knew he was useless but he never stopped trying, never gave into the denials, and morphine could not take their pain away. She would become a doctor not because of her leg or the parents she did not remember, or even the shaman gift that had been bestowed upon her before her creation, but because of them.
Six years later she'd left Kenya freckled and strong, lean legs from running the prairie behind the other children -even with her crutch - and she'd never found it hard to catch whatever or whoever she chased. She had two cavities and needed braces when she went to her first dental appointment, and she'd struggled with English over Swahili for over a year, even though she'd been taught both and all her mother had spoken was `American'. Her mother'd never understood Africa, never loved Kenya, breathed steppe dust, marveled at the lions dance for their prey, spoken with the shaman, understood its peace.
America was different - harder, stricter, bigger, dirtier - very different. It was not free like Kenya - you could not lift moist dirt in your fingers and let it scatter in the wind - for all she knew of America was pavement and steel.
She had been born in Kenya and accepted in Kenya - like she'd never be in America, in a land they said was `so full of promise' - and when she returned years later, paler and older, less sure of herself and reasonably more afraid of what she was returning to, she knew that it was in Kenya that she would live and in Kenya that she would die.
---
When she was a child, she practiced witchcraft.
When she was a woman, she shunned it.
She had once danced with the shamans, prayed with the witch doctor, laughed with their children, and sang to their `goddess' a lioness the village had captured.
That was before the polio had struck and she and the lioness were the only ones left because the HIV and the new disease had taken the rest. She was four years old with a painted face and she slept outside her cage until the missionaries came.
She could not dance and she would not speak, and it was several weeks later before she would take the food they offered, for she was so used to living off the crops of the Kamba and the contaminated water from the streams she had bathed in, that a cup and a plate felt wrong.
She'd hated them for taking her away from the muungu simba, and she had cursed them in the language of the men that had perished when she'd finally spoken. But they did not understand her, did not speak the dialect, and before they had turned to America, she had forgotten the language of her birth for the language of her creation, and suddenly the memories she'd forgotten seemed even farther away.
And, when the Sawijika child had returned to Kenya and the Kamba region after an eight year absence at age twenty-six, it was not alone, and she had found the dirt less moist and the wind more harsh, and the carcass of a once svelte lioness lay rotting in the bottom of the lango cage.
---
When she returned to the land of her native citizenship, she was not alone. When she left it for the last time, it was not through the heavens as she had planned, but on a plane she never thought she'd board. When she abandoned her homeland, she was alone, for the husband she'd arrived with died of the polio that could not kill her.
In the land of her birth but not her creation, there was no indoor plumbing, no showers, no soap softer than lye that was stronger than rice. In the land of the ancient culture of the Kamba, they bathed in the streams that they cooked from, and when the second polio resurgence struck it was contained to seven people, and she was the only doctor, the only one immune. And with her primitive medicines and the cries of the shaman, she lived and they lived - except him.
And when she buried her husband in the land of her blood, the flies had long abandoned the carcass of the muungu simba, but had they not, the village fire would have driven them away as it did the polio.
Molded huts and no-longer-moist earth fed the flames and she boarded the plane while smoke still rose above green treetops, the color unlike any she'd see again.
She would not die in Kenya.
---
She was the daughter of Christian missionaries, and Frank told her she was going to hell.
She had made her choices and she had chosen well, for Sandy made her believe she wasn't Sawijika anymore.
Things were to be different, now.
References
1. mailto:lizaausten@tri-countynet.net
2. mailto:malenka@malenkaya.com
3. mailto:lizaausten@tri-countynet.net
-Liza ([1]lizaausten@tri-countynet.net or [2]malenka@malenkaya.com)
Disclaimers/Spoilers/Ratings/other nonsense: I don't own the characters that show up on the show, so whatever. I also don't own the song. Any spoilers that are referenced here are not actually... you know, out-and-out referenced, except the existence of Kerry, her parents, Africa, Sandy, and Frank (and his quote). Most of it's just speculation based on a line here and a line there. The rating is probably something akin to PG13 (but the series overall is an R), because of references to disease, abandonment, death, horrible living conditions, and mature themes. Consider yourself informed, warned, and et cetera.
Important Note: This is part of a series that crosses several fandoms (currently, CSI, the West Wing, and ER are being planned, possibly the Division, - but NONE of these are crossovers. I am not a crossover fan, myself, so I don't write crossovers). The third being this one, Sawijika, based upon the mood (mostly) and a few words (only referenced in the last few lines) from the third stanza of the song "Picture" by Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow. If you'd like to read the others, please contact me at [3]lizaausten@tri-countynet.net and I'll gladly provide you with a copy or a link to the other(s). The understanding of each story depends only on that one, meaning you don't have to read any of the others if you're so inclined. They're all stand alone, but have the song in common - a different stanza per story.
My thanks go to Claudie for the reading, editing, idea-bouncing, and helping, and a good friend for making me listen to the song (I think she prefers to remain nameless).
I love hearing opinions, good or bad, and feedback is this girl's best friend. Eh, who needs jewelry anyway?
Dictionary/Translator (meaning, read this, or you're gonna be saying 'huh?') from Swahili to English:
*lango - gate
*muungu -god/goddess
*simba - lion
*sawijika - ugly
-I caught you last night at the hotel
Everyone knows but they won't tell
But their half-hearted smiles tell me something
Just ain't right...
I've been waiting on you for a long time
Fueling up on heartaches and cheap wine
I haven't heard from you in three damn nights.-
She worried about it, this thing and this woman, how it and she had taken precedence over her life and changed her, changed the way people looked at her, reacted to her. It wasn't as if she wasn't used to their stares - she was, she had been for a long time - it was just their way. She was the daughter of evangelistic missionaries - adopted but beloved - and in honor of their names, their memory, she'd followed her clear cut path, but always with one eye on the road less traveled. Always doing what was expected, right - times had changed.
She had made her choices, things were to be different now.
She had been a good child, never forgetting birthdays or anniversaries, Mother or Father's Day, each was marked by cards and sometimes gifts, and she strived to make them proud with her words and accomplishments. But they never told her.
When she was a child she was laughed at because of her metal "third leg", but she was feared and respected for the damage it could inflict, the intelligence she possessed, and the gift of the shaman that she'd been given. The gift of strength and of healing, and it was when that gift failed that she failed, and she had been young when she learned to forget.
She was born an African citizen - a redheaded pale-skinned creature amidst a sea of dark faces and ebony hair - but they never cared, never told her how different or ugly she looked until her mother had given one of the tribal children a mirror, and then they called her Sawijika, ugly.
She was never called by name.
Her father had taken her in the 4x4 to one of the nearby villages when she had first been adopted, when they guessed she was seven years old but small. They didn't keep very good records in Kenyan hospices in those days, little less the villages themselves, and no certified papers proved her existence, then, so she was created, not born - sort of like the Phoenix - as Kerry Weaver in 1967, and her new Mama and Papa told her she was lucky because she got to pick her own birthday. They'd ridden from Nairobi to the Kamba region where people cried for opiates as their children died of AIDS and malnutrition. Their souls were not what needed to be saved then, and her father knew he was useless but he never stopped trying, never gave into the denials, and morphine could not take their pain away. She would become a doctor not because of her leg or the parents she did not remember, or even the shaman gift that had been bestowed upon her before her creation, but because of them.
Six years later she'd left Kenya freckled and strong, lean legs from running the prairie behind the other children -even with her crutch - and she'd never found it hard to catch whatever or whoever she chased. She had two cavities and needed braces when she went to her first dental appointment, and she'd struggled with English over Swahili for over a year, even though she'd been taught both and all her mother had spoken was `American'. Her mother'd never understood Africa, never loved Kenya, breathed steppe dust, marveled at the lions dance for their prey, spoken with the shaman, understood its peace.
America was different - harder, stricter, bigger, dirtier - very different. It was not free like Kenya - you could not lift moist dirt in your fingers and let it scatter in the wind - for all she knew of America was pavement and steel.
She had been born in Kenya and accepted in Kenya - like she'd never be in America, in a land they said was `so full of promise' - and when she returned years later, paler and older, less sure of herself and reasonably more afraid of what she was returning to, she knew that it was in Kenya that she would live and in Kenya that she would die.
---
When she was a child, she practiced witchcraft.
When she was a woman, she shunned it.
She had once danced with the shamans, prayed with the witch doctor, laughed with their children, and sang to their `goddess' a lioness the village had captured.
That was before the polio had struck and she and the lioness were the only ones left because the HIV and the new disease had taken the rest. She was four years old with a painted face and she slept outside her cage until the missionaries came.
She could not dance and she would not speak, and it was several weeks later before she would take the food they offered, for she was so used to living off the crops of the Kamba and the contaminated water from the streams she had bathed in, that a cup and a plate felt wrong.
She'd hated them for taking her away from the muungu simba, and she had cursed them in the language of the men that had perished when she'd finally spoken. But they did not understand her, did not speak the dialect, and before they had turned to America, she had forgotten the language of her birth for the language of her creation, and suddenly the memories she'd forgotten seemed even farther away.
And, when the Sawijika child had returned to Kenya and the Kamba region after an eight year absence at age twenty-six, it was not alone, and she had found the dirt less moist and the wind more harsh, and the carcass of a once svelte lioness lay rotting in the bottom of the lango cage.
---
When she returned to the land of her native citizenship, she was not alone. When she left it for the last time, it was not through the heavens as she had planned, but on a plane she never thought she'd board. When she abandoned her homeland, she was alone, for the husband she'd arrived with died of the polio that could not kill her.
In the land of her birth but not her creation, there was no indoor plumbing, no showers, no soap softer than lye that was stronger than rice. In the land of the ancient culture of the Kamba, they bathed in the streams that they cooked from, and when the second polio resurgence struck it was contained to seven people, and she was the only doctor, the only one immune. And with her primitive medicines and the cries of the shaman, she lived and they lived - except him.
And when she buried her husband in the land of her blood, the flies had long abandoned the carcass of the muungu simba, but had they not, the village fire would have driven them away as it did the polio.
Molded huts and no-longer-moist earth fed the flames and she boarded the plane while smoke still rose above green treetops, the color unlike any she'd see again.
She would not die in Kenya.
---
She was the daughter of Christian missionaries, and Frank told her she was going to hell.
She had made her choices and she had chosen well, for Sandy made her believe she wasn't Sawijika anymore.
Things were to be different, now.
References
1. mailto:lizaausten@tri-countynet.net
2. mailto:malenka@malenkaya.com
3. mailto:lizaausten@tri-countynet.net