The Village That Wrote Me Poem by Mpho Leteng

THE VILLAGE THAT WROTE ME

For years,
I thought becoming a poet meant learning how poets speak.
So I learned the language.
I learned to write about love with a broken heart
I learned about darkness and searched for the right light.
I learned about storms that were never weather,
flames that were never fire,
And journeys that never needed roads.
I learned the rules.

And because other poets had written these things before me,
I believed I was becoming one of them.
I mistook familiarity for truth.
So I wrote. And wrote. And wrote

But somewhere between one borrowed metaphor and another,
I began to wonder why my poems sounded like everyone else's.
Then I returned to Kachikau.
Not as a tourist.
But as a man finally looking at the place that had been looking at him all his life.
And suddenly the ordinary became impossible to ignore.
The dust.
The cattle posts standing beyond the reach of electricity.
The smoke curling from an evening fire.
The Mosikiri tree.
The names of places that mean nothing until you have lived inside them.

I had seen all of this before I knew it could become literature.
That was the revelation.
I had spent years looking for stories when I had been living inside one.
I had been searching for metaphors while Kachikau was handing me facts.
The kind that survive without a metaphor.

And then I understood:
Perhaps the poet the world needs is not the poet who knows every rule.
But the one who knows something that cannot be borrowed because it has been lived.
Something only he can tell.

I cannot write Kachikau like a stranger.
I know where the road bends.
I know the difference between a silence that means respect and one that means pain.
I know what children invent when they have little to play with.
I know the stories behind the faces that outsiders pass without noticing.
I know the names.

And that knowledge is not research.
It is inheritance.
That is when I stopped trying to become a poet like other poets.
I began becoming the poet my place had already made.

This village did not give me a subject.
It gave me a language I had been speaking before I knew I was fluent.
It did not ask me to invent stories.
It asked me to remember them correctly.
To listen.
To be accurate with the things that made me.
Because there are stories I can tell that no book can teach me.
And perhaps, this is what I had misunderstood about being a writer.

A writer does not always create the story.
Sometimes he becomes the place where a story finally finds the language to leave home.
So I write.
But now I know that I am not writing alone.
The old road writes.
Mpeteke, barangwe and Babalelampa cattle posts write.
The elders write in stories repeated until memory becomes tradition.
The Mosikiri and Motsentsela trees write.
The seasons write.
The village writes.