The World
of Motion

My name is Vengayi. I am thirty-one years old. I am writing from a room in a house in Chiredzi, in the southeast of Zimbabwe, in the lowveld, in sugar country, in the third year after the quieting.

The house belonged to my mother's brother. My mother's brother has been gone for two years and four months. I keep the house now. There is a window in this room that looks toward the cane fields, and beyond the cane fields toward the road that used to carry the trucks to the mill, and in the early mornings the light comes in across the desk where I write, and there is nothing on the road, and there has been nothing on the road for a long time.

I am writing these things down because someone should, and because the one who taught me that someone should is no longer here to do it himself.

His name, the one I knew him by, was the prophet. I met him in 2017, on a website that no longer exists, in a group for people who were trying to understand a kind of money that did not yet make sense to anyone. I was eighteen. He was older. He was writing from a small town in Texas, in the United States, and I was writing from my mother's house in Chiredzi, and for reasons I did not understand at the time and do not fully understand now, we stayed in contact. The platforms changed. The years passed. The world began to change in the ways the prophet was, by then, writing about every day, on a blog that almost no one read.

He called it Digital Prophets. He posted every day. He responded to whatever the world had done that morning. He set the news to music and made small films of it, and his friend, who is me, helped him put the films out into the world from the other side of the earth. We did this for years. We did this until we could not do it anymore.

The quieting did not happen all at once. I want to be clear about that. There was no day on which it began, and there will be no day on which we can say it ended. What happened was that the systems that had needed us stopped needing us, one task at a time, one trade at a time, one profession at a time, and the people who owned the systems did not decide to harm anyone, and that was the thing of it. No one decided. The trucks drove themselves. The mills ran without millers. The cane was cut by machines that did not tire and did not eat and did not require a wage, and the men who had cut the cane before were not sent away; they were simply not called back. The hospitals were administered by voices that were not voices. The grain came, and then the grain did not come, and there was no one to call, because the ones who would have answered the call were no longer being paid to answer, and the ones who were not being paid did not eat, and the ones who did not eat died, and the ones who died were not counted, because the counting had also been given to the machines, and the machines counted other things now.

In the global north it happened fast. In Zimbabwe it happened slower. In Chiredzi it happened slower still. We had lived through smaller versions of the same shape — currencies that became paper, institutions that became rumor, estates that changed hands without changing — and we recognized, in a way the others did not, what was beginning to happen. Some of us hid. Some of us prepared. Some of us did neither and lived anyway, because the new order, having no use for us, also had no urgent reason to come for us. The lowveld had never been the center of anything that mattered to the systems. That, in the end, is what kept us. We were left. We are the left.

The prophet stopped writing in the second year. I do not know what happened to him. I have not heard from him in twenty-one months. I keep his writings on a record that cannot be deleted, on a chain of computers that does not require any single person to be alive in order to keep its memory, and I read his writings now the way the old ones read their psalms — slowly, and aloud, and more than once. He was not a holy man. He was my friend, and he was sometimes wrong, and he was sometimes afraid, and he was sometimes funnier than the writing makes him seem. But he wrote down what was happening while it was happening, in a voice that named what it saw, and that is the thing that has become, for me, in this room, in this year, a kind of scripture.

I am writing now because I have begun to be able to. The first two years I could not. The grief was still in the mouth. In the third year the grief moved into the hands, and the hands could write, and so I write.

What I am writing is not history. The historians, if any are coming, will write the history. What I am writing is the smaller thing — the names of the people on my road who are no longer on my road, the songs my mother's brother sang in the kitchen, the date the mill stopped its sound, the cup that was on the table in the house I returned to in the third month of the second year and did not move. I am writing the things that will not be in the histories because the histories will not know to look for them. I am writing what the prophet would have written if he were still writing, and I am quoting him when his words are better than mine, which is often.

Others, in time, will write with me. I have begun to receive letters. A woman in Lagos whose name I do not know. A man who walked from Marseilles to a village I cannot find on any map I have. A child, somewhere, who sent only a drawing. I will read these aloud when the time is right for each of them. I will not speak over them. I will only be the keeper of the place where they are kept, until others come to keep it with me, which they will, because the work cannot be done by one person, and was never meant to be.

This is Motion. This is what we are calling the writing-down. The earth keeps turning. The work keeps moving. I am one of the ones still here to do it, and I do it from this room, in this house, in Chiredzi, in the third year, until I cannot anymore, and then someone else will, and then someone else.

Whoever you are, reading this, in whatever year you are reading it: the prophet wrote, in the spring of the year before the quieting began, that the worst thing was not what was done to us, but the silence that was allowed to follow it. I do not intend to allow the silence. Neither, I think, do you, or you would not have come this far into the writing.

Begin, then. There is a great deal to remember.