totem

"Do you know what my totem is?" Fadzie asks.

She and my son are climbing in my pantry, legs splayed out to balance on the shelves that line the walls. It's not entirely permitted behaviour but my mind was -- until now -- elsewhere.

"Mum, what's a totem?"

I look at Fadzie. "It's an animal, isn't it, that represents your family?" I'm not sure that that is everything there is to a totem, but Fadzie nods.

"It's a porcupine." She must have just seen the porcupine quills, collected when we were last in the Lowveld. They're on a shelf next to the lightbulbs and a grubby lump of plasticine. She has already corrected me on my housekeeping skills, taking the broom to sweep the floor as I wash up hurriedly in cold water: "If Gogo could see this floor, she'd say: 'Do humans live here?'"

"Porcupine is nungu in Shona," she says importantly.

"Mum, what's our totem?"

She laughs, but it's a good-natured laugh. "White people don't have totems," she says.