DREADLOCK IN WEDLOCK
When I had been in Liverpool, a young woman had introduced herself to me while I was doing a performance in a community centre. She’d been working for a radio show on a community radio station, and with a youth theatre group, and they were interested in putting on one of my plays. Her name was Amina. I’d actually met her a few years before, when I’d done a performance in Liverpool before I lived there. Then it was her sister, Ruckhsana, who I’d met, and as I spoke to Ruckhsana she introduced me to her little sister, Amina. I patted her on her head and said hello. Next time I met Amina, she had grown up and was keen to get into the world of theatre. I told her she should go right ahead, and that I would love to see their interpretation of my play. She had a genuine enthusiasm, which impressed me. As time ticked on we struck up a rapport, and agreed to meet again so I could listen to her ideas.
The next time we met the atmosphere was very businesslike. We discussed the theatre group and our conversation turned to the arts. We started talking about a film that was showing in the city. Amina said she and her sister, Hamida, were going to see it. I sort of invited myself along to watch it with them. Amina was about seventeen and we started to date. Our relationship blossomed and she moved in with me. She came from a poor family who were Pathans with roots on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border. Many people had expected that the family wouldn’t accept me because of my race, but I got on so well with her mother that by the time we got serious she wasn’t seeing my colour.
When my residency in Liverpool ended, I returned to London, but I kept the flat on in Liverpool so Amina could live there. My personal life had been complicated at the time because I’d also been seeing a girl I’d met at a university a couple of years before. This wasn’t like it was in the old days; I wasn’t collecting girlfriends or partaking in good old-fashioned two-timing. I was trying to decide if I should be leaving this girl or not. I liked her a lot, so much that I even took her over to Jamaica to meet my grandmother and the rest of my family, but in the end I couldn’t forgive her for cheating on me. So I told her it was over.
I was thirty-something, Amina was eighteen, and her family wanted us to be a bit more serious about our relationship. I was at an age where I thought I ought to be growing up. I hated the idea of marriage, though. I had read, and was influenced by, Simone de Beauvoir, Andrea Dworkin and bell hooks, and after watching what my mother had gone through, I believed marriage was about ownership and control. But then it got personal, and there was a part of me that thought it would reassure Amina’s mother if I married her.
But when I told my mother I was marrying Amina and not the other girl she was not just a little disappointed, she went mad. Her actual words were, ‘What! You’re marrying a Pakistani?’ She didn’t even know Amina. She didn’t have anything against people from Pakistan per se, it was that she was so fond of the other girl, who she thought was lovely and innocent and would make a good wife. I knew better, of course, but she had always wanted us to get married and settle down. My mother thought she was perfect, and refused to hear anything that wasn’t praise for her, which meant she knew very little about her.
Amina and I were together for a year before we got married. If two years before you had asked me about marriage, I would have said something like, ‘Me is a roots natty dreadlock, and natty dread nah check fi wedlock.’ Although deep down I still felt marriage was a trap, I thought it would be great for Amina and both families to see I was serious, and it was a way of bringing both families together. I had to tell myself to forget all the stuff that church and state tell us about marriage, and that we should be able to marry for our own reasons and live in our own way. We had to know for ourselves why we were getting married and forget about what the priest or imam thought of the idea.
We married on Amina’s birthday, which was also St Patrick’s Day, in 1990. I drove myself to the register office in my Peugeot 205 (good car!), and I parked illegally outside the office. The reception party afterwards was a very multicultural affair, with lots of drumming and people wearing their national costumes, but there wasn’t a honeymoon. We talked about the idea of one but decided against it. I had some gigs to do, and neither of us were romantic types. We preferred to be practical. In fact, a couple of days after the wedding I went to the States on tour and had to leave Amina behind. Many of our friends thought this was a little cruel, but we just thought this was what life was going to be like. I’m a poet, I tour, and sometimes the show must go on.
Amina moved down to my house in east London and I gave up the flat in Liverpool. It was sad leaving the city, but I consoled myself with the fact that I’d taken a bit of Liverpool with me. At first, life was pretty much the same as it had been before we’d got married. We didn’t have kids, so there weren’t little ones for us to look after. We did start to think about them, and some family members, especially on Amina’s side, began to ask when the first baby would arrive, but I’d always suspected I was infertile, so I didn’t hold out much hope.
Amina was a little more organised than me and she started to take care of some of my business affairs. After a while she actually worked for me and collected a wage. She loved theatre and wanted to be an actor but unfortunately she couldn’t act. In fact, I thought she was a terrible actor. I told her as much, which was harsh but true. But because she loved the theatre so much she began to look for other roles available to her in the theatrical world. I spoke to my old colleagues at the Hackney Empire, and Amina found a job there for a while as an administrator.
Personally and professionally we got on extremely well and we made a great team. Although she was naive and inexperienced, her heart was in the right place politically. What was also great for me was that she loved literature and martial arts. She had done karate for a few years, and as I was still practising Chinese kung fu we were always sparring. Sometimes we would be sitting at our desks working and we would suddenly jump up and start play-fighting. Sometimes, as we passed each other in the living room, I would fire off a kick to test her reflexes. Her Japanese karate meant she was really strong, but stiff and straight, whereas my Chinese style was about being light-footed, flowing, with lots of circular movements. I would kick her very lightly on one shoulder and then move around to the other, whereas she would kick and punch me as if she were breaking bricks.
We also had our differences in working styles. She was an organiser, and very efficient around the office. I had always been very tidy, my office was orderly and I knew where everything was, but she knew how to file and she was good with figures. That was helpful, but her urge to make the figures add up sometimes proved embarrassing. I have always kept an extensive collection of books and DVDs, and when friends came to the house they would often ask to borrow some. Amina would write down the time and date of the loan in her own little book and, if the item wasn’t returned on time, she would tell me or phone the person who’d borrowed it, quoting the time they borrowed it and demanding the items be returned – even the local library didn’t do that! Sometimes I would tell her not to worry and to calm down, but usually I’d leave her to it. Sometimes it was useful, because if I’d lost something she’d know where it was, but on other occasions it would annoy people and I would find myself having to apologise to them.
Generally I was adjusting to married life quite well, though. I now had to think about someone else when I travelled, and I consulted Amina when important decisions had to be made, but that was good – I needed that. I liked having someone else to think about, and having someone else to think about me.