Today, like all days that have come before, there are so many questions.
Did the land weep when our grandparents died? We wonder because all around us are the living signs of dispossession. And when the sky cracks does the ground taste its grief? We ask because our weather is ever more unpredictable and extreme. How do we tell the world we are sorry after pushing it in the path of dangerous animals time and time again? We need to know because we cannot keep subjecting it to degradation, death, and decay. Would you agree that the evening sky is misleading? It seems as though even sunsets cannot be trusted.
This week, like all weeks that have preceded it, there are numerous iterations of fear and doubt.
Lean forward. Stop breathing. Smile less. Speak less. Feel less. Our minds are preyed upon by our upbringing, the anxious moments of our time, and our personal regrets. Our skins have patinas that hide so many of our scars—deemed eternally unclean, abominations—that mark us as passers-by, shadows in motion. There are dark forces at work—here, there, and everywhere, and larger than any one of us—with talons that rake through the tissues of our brains and ventricles, telling us that we will be the many names no one remembers. That our struggles and efforts to do right by each other are meaningless. In the face of all this, there is the temptation to tender apologies, that we are sorry for the unwrought clay of this flesh.
This month, like all the other hitherto months, there will be longings.
Like our elegies at 2 A.M, when we dream that it is a weeknight and you are alive again. Or that in a quiet moment of reflection, at the Aphrodite hour, our paths will converge in a whispered moment of skin and secrets—soft breaths before the world stirs, between light and shadow.
This year, like all the years that shall come hereafter, we will remind ourselves that we are something, we are people, we are more.
We have to sneak up on ourselves and learn to enjoy some of the simple things this beautiful and complicated world has to offer—like the power of praising bees or stopping and breathing amid the sonic overloads of life.
We will recall that our ancestral connections turn pictures into prayer, that we are flesh of the sun and flesh of the sky: our stories—from us, by us, and for us—are our thrones, and every reader—both met and unmet—is a crown.
This is Doek!—a literary magazine from Namibia.
Rémy Ngamije is an award-winning Rwandan-born Namibian author, editor, publisher, photographer, literary educator, and entrepreneur.
His books include The Eternal Audience Of One—which was honoured with a Special Mention at the inaugural Grand Prix Panafricain De Litterature and won the inaugural African Literary Award from the Museum of the African Diaspora—and Only Stars Know The Meaning Of Space, his collection of award-winning fiction.
In 2021 he won the Africa Regional Prize of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and was shortlisted for the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing in 2021 and 2020. He was longlisted and shortlisted for the 2020 and 2021 Afritondo Short Story Prizes respectively. In 2019 he was shortlisted for Best Original Fiction by Stack Magazines.
Rémy is the founder and chairperson of Doek, an independent arts organisation in Namibia supporting the literary arts and the editor-in-chief of Doek! Literary Magazine, the country’s first and only literary magazine. He is also the founder and director of several literary initiatives such as the Bank Windhoek Doek Literary Awards, the Doek Literary Festival, and the Doek Anthology.
His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in The Johannesburg Review of Books, Lolwe, American Chordata, LitHub, Granta, One Story, and Best American Essays 2024 among many others.