by NoViolet Bulawayo
Come December the year folds its wings like a great, tired bird, and they return home for Christmas.
One minute it’s quiet and the next they are swarming, spewing, spilling – just eating up the place and squeezing breath out of the air. When the air gags and chokes, they just keep squeezing and squeezing and squeezing. Diaspora; they are famished for their land and are savage in their love, and they don’t care if they draw blood. The ones from South Africa always get here first like somebody set their feet on fire and pointed them to the road.
Read the rest at The Africa Report Magazine
NoViolet Bulawayo won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Boston Review, Newsweek, The Warwick Review, as well as in anthologies in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, she now lives in New York, where she is a Truman Capote Fellow and lecturer in English at Cornell. She blogs at NoViolet Blogs
