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Jason Bruner (US),
All things are possible I–IV
I.
It’s January, before the rains come. A film of dust casts the world in a dull sepia. The city responds with a unified determination: parking attendants ceaselessly splash grey water over the cars under their supervision; women, torsos perpetually perpendicular, scrape their handmade brooms along the sidewalks and storefronts. Still, the dust smooths the city’s creases. It piles in soft ridges beside streets. It covers unpaved roads with a rusty snow that never melts. I complain to Stella that I can’t keep my black dress shoes clean. «You don’t know how to walk,» she tells me. The scraping and sweeping and splashing keep the dust swirling down the sloping streets. It’s easy to move downhill in Kampala because in Kampala, everything rushes into a thousand whirlpools—always coming, always leaving, always pushing, always going nowhere. To survive here means not being carried along to someone else’s eddy. The dust settles, finally, at the bottom of the city, where it’s held in place by the minibus taxis’ thick diesel cloud. You can’t linger here, of course; just passing through twice a day turns my sneezes black at night. But if you cut your way out of the old taxi park and head east towards the city centre, you might climb a steep, uncertain sidewalk with loose cinderblock steps. And along those steps you might notice that while the advertisement is squared with the tile, something of the image is askew. You invent history to remove the dissonance: a tailor asked for a banner displaying Italian shoes, and these looked smart. I have not yet learned how to be smart—in the local sense—when I walk: graceful, deliberate. I wake up the next morning to find that Stella polished my shoes after dinner. I have not yet realized that my shoes will be no cleaner after the rains.
II.
«‹I am making all things new.› Also he said, ‹Write these things down.›»—Revelation 21:5 When missionaries came to the court of the Kabaka—first the Anglicans in 1877, the Catholics in 1879—they used the same word for read and pray. The new Christians learned that writing makes ideas into things: words, books, newspapers, laws. New subjects, new subjectivities, new subjugations. Is it a thing’s novelty that makes it worth writing down, as if there was something new under the equatorial sun? For most people here, style is the work of making things new—or, if not new, at least repurposed. Like the badass teenaged motorcycle taxi driver who wears slender, flamingo pink gloves that cover his forearms up to his elbows. Like the long-distance male runner who trained in a women’s swimsuit. Like the Pentecostal preachers filled with the dazzle of divine power. I once crossed the equator for a long weekend with a bus full of clergy. On the way back, I sat next to a young woman as we waited for the elderly bishops to say their goodbyes in the cathedral’s parking lot. The air was oppressively still, and sweat soaked through my khaki pants. The woman noticed my discomfort as I wiped my face. I pointed to the men coolly wearing their clerical collars. «I don’t know how they do it in this heat,» I chuckled. Her lips pressed into a wry smile, «Smartness knows no season.»
III.
On the nights I eat dinner at the Indian-owned hotel where I’m staying, I order the naan. The waiter always checks with someone in the kitchen and then returns saying, «Wouldn’t you rather prefer the chapati?» And I tell him that would be fine, thank you. There is also chapati at the buffet breakfast. One morning, a stout man in a slick pinstripe suit—a Big Man, a Pentecostal—comes into the hotel to have breakfast with his wife. A younger man rushes towards him. «How are you, brother?» he asks. «I am pushing! Pushing!» the preacher grins as he thrusts his fist slowly through something thick and invisible in the air between them. A new mall has opened on top of a hill to the northeast of the city centre. I’ve spent too much on dinner there on nights when I wanted to eat something that felt familiar. On one of those nights, I sat on a bench near the escalators, just outside the French bakery, and was asked by a Ugandan teenager if I believed in God. He said he needed to ask because things were changing and you couldn’t be sure what white people believed anymore. The white people who came here used to be missionaries, he said, but not anymore. I’m learning that originality is being the first to comb through what others have left behind. Cities make scavengers out of all of us; crammed in, we have to pick our own way through. At 17, the teenager was running his own business because he knew where to find the slim-cut jeans and cool leather jackets that motorcycle taxi drivers wanted. He seemed surprised when I told him that I appreciated that style. «Why?» «Because you can see that there is intention. Look at me, I didn’t think much about what I would wear today, but they did.» That was only partially true, because I’ve learned to wear only my brown shoes. No one here would describe them as smart, but they are the same color as the dust. His is a familiar hustle, fueled by a contagious but desperate optimism. There is a rooftop café across the street from the library where I’m working. A young man—maybe 20, 21—is directing people behind a counter with an easy confidence. I order chips, and he sits next to me. He tells me he owns the café, and that the café is simply a start for owning ever bigger things. I observe that there are a lot of young people like him here, running 2 or 3 or 4 small business ventures. He leaned back into his overstuffed chair and smiled, «This is Uganda, where anything is possible!»
IV.
A city’s past establishes a frame: what someone else imagined would work here, the residue of earlier futures. That’s why the spiritual life of a city is always new wine in old wineskins. And that means cities are risky, for Jesus warned that new wine will burst old skins. I think that’s why one must be smart when walking here. There is a building to the west of the Kampala taxi park—a quaint administrative shell left from the British Protectorate days—where a woman now presides over multiple Pentecostal deliverance services each week. Yearning to be made new, they stretch their bodies to the sky, pushing towards another story. Their voices join with the single sound of survival and renewal, of promise and request: the brash young taxi conductors drumming up business on the hollow sides of their vans; the poor Sudanese women, whispering foreign pleas, twisting their empty palms into open car windows; the street preachers demanding a megaphoned repentance, soft leather Bibles bending just so in their hands; the gentler evangelists weaving through traffic, begging the nearest stuck passenger to be born again before it’s too late—these roads are dangerous, after all. I learn from example to keep my gaze fixed ahead, to not become distracted by the cacophony of others’ hopes, to keep pushing. One morning, as I hesitantly crossed the jammed-up maze of the Wandegeya intersection, I marveled as a colorful blur twirled through its chaos in a tank top and jean shorts cut off at the upper thigh. He preened, like a crested crane on roller skates, then gracefully grabbed the hitch of an unwitting truck to tow him up Makerere Hill, where the road was newly smoothed with the dried red mud that filled in the cracks after the rain.
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1 Jason Bruner, All things are possible I–IV, 2011–2016.
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