Chris Abani: "Hanging in Egypt with Breyten Breytenbach"
Image from Dancing The Dog by painter, writer, and activist Breyten Breytenbach Dancing The Dog: paintings and other pornographies Breyten Breytenbach Bio "Hanging in Egypt with Breyten Breytenbach" By Chris Abani There are stones even here worn into a malevolence by time gritting the teeth and tearing the eyes with the memory. Out in the desert, the wind is a sculptor working the ephemera of sand. Desperately editing steles to write the names of thousands of slaves who died to make Pharaoh great. It is a fool’s game. And we are like the blind musician at the hotel who tells us with a smile: I’ll see you later. The guard at the pyramid eyes me. Are you Egyptian? he demands, then searches my bag for a bomb. At the hotel they speak Arabic to me, don’t treat me like the white guests, and I guess, even here, with all the hindsight of history we haven’t learned to love ourselves. I cannot crawl into the tombs, and cannot explain why. How do you say: In my country they buried me...