Hallo, my name is Maruwaan…

I am one of seven children from different fathers, but we have the same mother. We are actually six now after my brother was shot on Christmas day last year. It was a bad day, and everything was all mixed up. My baby brother is very cute, and my mother says he is her blessing.

My biggest dream is to be a member of the 28’s and to get my tattoos. I am already practicing to run on roofs and jump off them. One must be able to do that if you want to be a good gangster.

I cannot understand why people are always whispering about me behind their hands. But I have picked up that they use words like split personality, possessed by the devil, gruesome and that a demon was living inside me. All those words sound very serious, but I am only Maruwaan.

Sometimes I am naughty, while other times I want to be a baby, and then I suck my thumb.  I can change very quickly from being naughty to being a baby. I really don’t  know how that happens. Maybe I have super powers, like the heroes we see on the dvd’s. I don’t  always know which one I am, and I also  don’t know what I am up to. My father says I know very well what I’m doing. I don’t know. Maybe I am two different persons, and that’s it.

In the afternoons I must go to madrassa, but sometimes I hide from my father when he comes to fetch me, because I would rather go to the Kid’s Club. I can see that I really work on the nerves of the aunties who teach us from the Bible, but it’s nice to be there. Sometimes I manage to keep them from chasing me out of the class room. It is then that I suck my thumb. If I don’t do that, things start going wrong.

I am nine years old and have been smoking since I was seven. The strangest thing to me is that I can’t stop. It seems to me that if I start something, I have to keep it going. But it’s all the wrong stuff. There are some things that I do with the girls and my friends that I also can’t stop. And when I start watching blue movies, I also cannot stop. I don’t like to be on my own, so I always invite everybody to come and visit and then I teach them about what I see in the movies and in books. Sometimes we watch together, and then start fiddling with each other.  It seems to me that the others can stop somewhere, but I just cannot.  I can’t even stop swearing, and everybody says that my swearing is very ugly.

I once told auntie Abigail that she was a k****. She started crying and stormed out of the classroom.  What a drama about nothing!  She just had to stop crying, and those tears did nothing to me.

I like guns and shooting.  And knives. Just the other day they stabbed a laaitie in the arm.  It was bleeding and just hanging from his body. I think it was about drugs. My grandpa came running out of the house one day and he was waving his gun in the air. There were a lot of children, because it was time for Kid’s Club. Everybody was screaming and then ran into auntie Lewena’s house. I liked seeing how scared everybody was. I was not scared at all. The police came and threw a man into a van. I started swearing at him through the little window at the back of the van.

My grandma and grandpa died some time ago.  My grandpa trained the Coons and my grandma was a shoplifter. She always brought us brand name shoes and clothing, and then I laughed a lot at the other children who had torn clothing and broken shoes.

Everybody says grandma became religious before she died. I didn’t know what it meant, but everybody seemed to be happy about it.

The other night the Junky Funky Kids fired shots at my father at the station. Fortunately, he was not killed. He swears a lot at me, but he is still my father and at least he cares for us. He sees to it that things run smoothly at the taxi rank and he sells luxury goods. He also has a car.

I don’t know if my dreams are going to come true, but the gangsters like me and they don’t mind if I listen to them talking when they meet in the cage.

More and more I think that I’m two persons and that I am no longer sucking my thumb that much.  Maybe I will become only one.  An Eight….