concepts

Concept I

Concept II

Concept III

Concept IV

How can I express myself to you... One day I went up to my room late and drunk. There was a strange cat on my bed. It had fixed its eyes on my own. It was only half-grown; with white fur gilded here and there and long thin white whiskers. Its eyes were green, and the transparent green was brilliantly shot through by a terrible apprehension of its position. I locked the door behind me. It was not a very big room and there was nowhere for the cat to hide. I could easily turn the bed onto its side. The single chair offered it no protection. And my many books would not at all help it. Rather I could use the books as missiles. What had brought that cat into my room? And why my room out of all the other rooms in the world? Why me? In an instant I had lifted the bed and smashed it onto its side, the cat leaping clear just in time. It really was just a kitten, and it was crying, not at all spitting, crying, and that - it was so weirdly human - only made me kick out viciously at its head. I missed and instead kicked the wall behind it. I howled with pain and rage. I picked up an armful of heavy hardbacks - a complete Shakespeare, a complete Oscar Wilde, the Variorum edition of Yeats' plays, a Concise Oxford Dictionary, and Thomas Hardy's Collected Poems - and stood in the centre of the room, my eyes glued on the cat's. Bloody cats used to vicious white racist cunts! Shakespeare dazed it. Wilde was wide off the mark. Yeats stunned it. Hardy made it scream like an innocent being tortured. And the Concise Oxford drugged it enough for me to raise my foot and crash it once, twice, three times. But it was still alive; blood spurted out of its mouth; and the dirty thing had defecated a rash of blood and guts too. I couldn't decide to which author or poet to give the privilege of finishing the little shit. But as I ticked them off one by one the blood-stained twit actually began to drag itself towards the door. I watched it in amazement. I wondered who it thought would open the door for it. These feline shits are used to being treated better than we blacks are treated it probably thought... Why should I care what it thought? I picked up a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica and bashed the shit to death and then flung it out through the window, flung it to the far side of the street.

- from The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera