Our enemy marches at the head of the column;And yet we march!The voice we obey is the voice of the enemy,Yet we obey!And he who is forever talking about enemiesIs himself the enemy!

[Book Review]

USEFUL ZULUPHRASES

By Lynn Freed. Freed included "Useful ZuluPhrases" in a recent reading of her work at BlackOak Books, in Berkeley. She is the author of HomeGround, a novel published by Summit Books.Freed, who grew up in South Africa, lives in SanFrancisco.

Wite South Africans are convinced thathaving servants is no easy matter. They like tosay that servants are like children. What theymean is that servants need watching. That theylack responsibility. And that their understand-ing is on a level with their English.

For an English-speaking employer, the ser-vant who speaks English is indeed the best sortto have. But the tiresome fact is that servantsgrow up speaking their own languages. If theyspeak English at all, it is of a rather primitivevariety. This clearly hampers the process of ser-vanting. And there is the additional problem ofknowing just how much English a servant un-derstands. On the one hand, employers main-rain that servants understand far more than theypretend to. And, on the other, that they havethe infuriating habit of pretending to under-stand when they don't.

Just to make sure, an employer will usuallyfollow an order with, "Do you understand?" Tothis question all servants nod. But then theHoover turns up broken or the white saucecomes out like glue, and where is Master orMadam to tum next?

One might think that a solution lies in learn-ing Zulu. But this is to ignore the difficulty Eng-lish speakers have with foreign languages. Andparticularly with languages like Zulu, whosecomplexity seems to them to be in inverse pro-portion to that of its native speakers. Zulu is alanguage of strange sounds and clicks andwhooshes far beyond the skills and dignity ofmost English speakers.

For the frustrated householder, there is help.An Easy Zulu Vocabulary and Phrase Book:SimpleSentences for Use in the Home and Garden andon Other Everyday Occasions is a small paper-

26 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MAY

bound volume, first published in 1938 by Shuterand Shooter, an old and respected South Afri-can publisher of schoolbooks and other texts.Now in its fourth edition (1982, with new or-thography), the "primary object" of the book,according to its preface, "is to help newcomersin their common contact with Zulus." Phrasesof common contact are grouped under the head-ings Gardening, Health, Housework, Motor-ing, Store work, Stabling, and Miscellaneous.

The beauty of this little book lies in the factthat most of the phrases of common contact arevoiced either in the interrogative or in the im-perative. If, for instance, one wants to knowwhat to wear, there is the phrase for "Is it hottoday?" If one has trouble hearing, there's "Al-wayscall me when the telephone rings." Offen-sive habits can also be done away with. "Do nottouch anything," "Do not spit like that," and"Do not smear your clothes with blood" are afew of the phrases that are provided for thispurpose.

For the talkative servant, one finds a trio ofinjunctions: "Be silent," "Be silent while I amspeaking," and, "You must not speak while an-other is still speaking." To deal with the trickyproblem of encouraging one's servants' intellec-tual skills while still maintaining householdstandards, there is the following sketch in theMiscellaneous section:

Can you read?It is good to read.You may go to school in the evening.You must finish all your work first.You must not neglect work for the sake of

reading.That is bad.It is very bad to make learning an excuse for

laziness.

Free time on Sundays-always a sticky pointwhen hiring a servant who claims to be de-vout-can be solved with, "If you go to churchon Sunday you must return in time to do what isnecessary."

The hiring of servants itself is, in fact, a com-plicated matter. There are things an employermust know. If a cook is to be hired, what kind ofcooking has been done before? "Plain cooking"(anchovy toast, Welsh rarebit, rock cakes)might suit one madam, but another may de-mand "Jewish cooking" (chopped herring, friedfish, and knowing which rag is meant to cleanwhich dish). Standards differ too. So do duties,wages, hours.

An Easy Zulu Vocabulary provides some wel-come relief. An employer can start off with afew standard phrases like, "You will have to doany work that I tell you," "Do not make a noise

[Sculptures]

GUATEMALA'S UPDATED ICONS

From the FalVWinter 1986 Massachusetts Review, a special issue on Latin America. Mujeres en Armes (Women in Arms, /eft) and ElCocodrilo (The Crocodile, right) are part of a series of statues created by Margarita Azurdia, a Guatemalan painter. Azurdia commissionedlocal artisans to carve the u.ooden statues, which she then painted.

in the evening," and "Come at once when thebell rings." And follow these up with such spe-cifics as, "You must get up at six," "Catch twoyoung roosters," and "Cut their heads off"

Using this book, one can lend one's servantsto friends-"Go with the White man," "Gowith the lady." Or make sure that errands arecarried out properly. "Take the master's food tothe store" is followed by, "Hold it carefully, thatthe gravy be not spilled."

"That the gravy be not spilled" demonstratesnicely one of the subtler points of master-ser-vant dialogue. The quaint formality of the wordorder, the injunction against spilling (gravyhere, rather than seed}-the whole tone of themessage, in fact-is intended to communicateto the servant that God is speaking. A Godsomewhere between the fierce Old Testament

Jehovah and the rather more benign New Tes-tament Pater Noster.

It is this role toward which the employer ac-tively works, and which, in the end, tests themaster-servant bond. If the white man is God,the reasoning goes, then the servant, like Abra-ham, can be tried. To effect.

A small picnic vignette, hidden in the Mo-toring section, demonstrates the point nicely.

We will stop here.Sizokuma lapha.

We will have some lunch.Sizodla ukudla kwasemini.

Make a fire.Phemba umlilo.

Put the kettle on.Basela iketela.

READINGS 27

Spread the rug in the shade'.Endlala ingubo emthunzini.

Get out the lunch basket.Khipha ubhasikidi wokudla.

See how deep the river is.Hlola ukushona komfula.

[Poem]

GIVE MEANICKNAME, PRISON

Fr~ B.eyo~d the L~mit, a collection of poemswntten In pnson by lnna Ratushinskaya, publishedby.Northwestern University Press. Ratushinskaya,thlTty-three, spent two and a half years in a Sovietlabor camp because of her writings. She was releasedlast October, two days before the Reykjavik sum-mit. Beyond the Limit was translated by FrancesPadorr Brent and Carol]. Avins. Kolyma is a re-gion in northeastern Siberia where many laborcamps are located.

Give me a nickname, prison,this first Aprilevening of sadnessshared with you.This hour for your songsof evil and goodness,confessions of love,salty jokes.They've taken my friends,ripped the cross from its chain,tom clothes,and then with bootsstruck at my breastbonetorturing the remainsof hope.My name is filedin profile, full-face-a numbered dossier.In custody-nothing is mine!Just as you haveno one, nothing!On the window's gratinghere's all of me-christen me,give me a name, prison,send off to the transportnot a boy, but a zek,so I'll be welcomedwith endearments by Kolyma,place of outcasts, executionsin this twentieth century.

28 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I MAY

[Monologue]

I KNOW WHATI'M DOINGeel Know What I'm Doing About All the AttentionI'tie Been Getting," by Frank Gannon. From Yo,Poe, a collection of Gannon's writing, to be pub-lished next month by Viking. Gannon lives in Dem-orest, Georgia.

Iwas really worried about what to wear. Itwas like an anvil on my brain, just beating andbeating and never stopping. Earlier that after-noon I saw someone walk into a clothes storeand come out with a package. I knew what wasin that package.

NEW CLOTHES.It was like, Somebody bought some clothes

why can't I have some clothes too? 'I went into my closet and got down on all

fours and started to breathe really heavy. I wastrying not to get nervous. I nudged a pair of bro-gans with my nose. Why not wear everythingthat's fallen off the hangers? It was a desperate,Hans Arp type of gesture, but what was left me?Yesterday I went to buy dog food in absolutelythe worst thing: green shorts, gray socks, whitesneakers. A brown shirt with the numeral "16"on the back. As soon as I walked into the gro-cery store I knew right away: wrong, wrong,WRONG!

But what could I do? It was too late then. Iwas trapped. I went through with it, but when Igot to my car my heart was pounding and myface was flushed. My throat was dry and my hairwas wet. My feet were bent and my back wastwitchin'.

I'll never do that again.I'm a quirky dresser. I'm absolutely fearless

about what it is that I believe in. My shirts areincognizant and my socks-you must be com-pletely unaware of my socks, that's, like, my ap-proach to socks. My pants can be wily or evendishonest on some days if I just get up and feelthat. But I have to feel it. When I wear a tie-and, believe me, sometimes I really wear a tie-it can be porcine, strait-laced, odious. I have acertain little-boy quality, but there's also thatbig-fat-sweaty-guy thing in there too.

I've stopped taking myself so seriously. I cantake a step back and laugh at myself. SometimesI can get a really big charge out of what an abso-lute idiot I am. I'll have this big intellectualstumbling block right in my way, and suddenlyI'll realize, Hey, who put the damn stumblingblock there in the first place? That's right: Mr.Serious Artist Person!

Whoa, I just crack up when that happens.