‘Guinea Woman’

My great grandmother was a Guinea woman.

Wide eyes turning the corners of her face

could see behind her.

Her cheeks dusted with a fine rash of jet-bead warts

that itched when the rain set up.

Great grandmother’s waistline the span of a headman’s

hand. Slender and tall like a cane stalk

with a Guinea woman’s antelope-quick walk.

And when she paused, her gaze would look to see

her profile fine like some obverse impression

on a Guinea coin from Royal memory.

It seems her fate was anchored in that unfathomable sea,

for great grandmother caught the eye of a sailor

whose ship sailed without him from Lucea Harbour.

Great grandmother’s royal scent of cinnamon and scallions

drew the sailor up the straits of Africa; the evidence

is my blue-eyed grandmother, the first mulatta

taken into backra’s household and covered with his name.

They forbade great grandmother’s Guinea woman presence,

they washed away her scent of cinnamon and scallions.

They controlled the child’s antelope walk, and they called her uprisings, rebellions.

But great grandmother, I see your features, blood dark appearing

in the children of each new breeding. And the high yellow-brown

is darkening down: Listen children, it’s your great grandmother’s turn.

IT MAY HAVE begun some time in 1965, with hearing Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte singing ‘The Train Song’. Or it could have begun with hearing Hugh Masekela’s rendition of ‘Coal Train’, and then finding out what the words meant. How these trains were taking migrant workers away from their homes and families in Southern Africa to those wicked and dreadful minefields, to excavate the great wealth from which they themselves could not profit, their humanity regarded then as less-than.

And something in you felt you had to keep track of that train and always follow the fortunes of those men and their women and children.

It may even have begun as far back as 1959 when you heard your parents saying how proud they were that our then premier Norman Manley had made Jamaica one of the first countries to join the embargo against trading with South Africa. You are not sure exactly when.

But one day you became convinced that your people, including your writers and scholars, artists and singers and players of instruments, had a burden placed upon them to speak and write and sing without cease of the fate of our Southern African brethren and sistren – yea, until Apartheid’s end.

Her name was Daphne Abrahams; and she was white; she was one of my first art teachers and she was the first South African I’d ever seen in real life. But most evenings I’d hear her husband’s voice over the radio. His name was Peter and he was Black and he was dearly loved and respected by the people of Jamaica. Peter and Daphne Abrahams were guilty of a love deemed criminal under Apartheid, but they found a place to thrive in Jamaica where they lived up in the hills and he wrote his great novels following Mine Boy and talked to us through the radio about things particular and universal, local and foreign, spiritual and secular, and always ended his broadcasts with life-giving words of encouragement.

And please know that the people of Jamaica truly loved Peter Abrahams and that we too are heartbroken and mortified by how his life ended. Peter Abrahams was the first writer from South Africa I really knew, but I’d read about the consequences of a marriage like his and Daphne’s in the novels of Alan Paton, in Cry, the Beloved Country and Too Late the Phalarope.

Then in the summer of 1968 on my first trip to the USA, I caught Hugh Masekela at the Village Gate, ‘Grazing in the Grass’. The manager was Jamaican, and he allowed me and my two friends, Lorna Bennett and Joy Rogers, to stay over and watch the second show for free because we were so obviously young-girl delighted by Mr Masekela himself in his striped bell-bottom pants, and by his trumpet stylings, his exquisite artistry: exuberance and joy as fellow travellers accompanying profound sorrow songs of unfreedom.

That condition of being at home with great contradiction – joy and sorrow, humour in the midst of grim realities, and stubborn, sometimes slenderest of hope in the midst of massive despair – is one of the great gifts that the artists, writers and thinkers of the continent of Africa and of the African diaspora have given to the world.

Something else they have given the world is a way of being entirely at home with the unempirical gifts of prophecy. That Nelson Mandela would say time and again, ‘South Africa Will Be Free – pause – In My Lifetime’ was always a source of wonder to many, myself included. How could he have said these words repeatedly, given what he was up against?

But he spoke them, and he wrote them, and he said them again and again, and Alleluia they came to pass, and everyone who trades in words should meditate a while upon that. Now more than ever we must believe that, as Rastafarians say, ‘word sounds have power’.

In 1983 I had the great good fortune to take part in the Iowa International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where writers from all over the world are brought together for a semester and given time and resources to write, give readings and lectures, and to be part of a community of writers and scholars learning from one another. I shared living space in the big adult dormitory of the Mayflower Hotel with a writer from South Africa by the name of Gladys Thomas. Here is my poem for her:

‘The Woman in Gladys’s Story’

Struck a match and smelled sulphur scorch the yellow

wallpaper rose. Like Dido she torches her own bed.

Introduced as my South African flatmate we are

meant to share a kitchen. I see her light skin,

she reads my face and says ‘I’m coloured’.

Her story is set in district six, Cape Town where she

and her husband Albert made life, making art. Black

and White Indian Chinese and Coloured mixed

till the state roared in with tear gas

and attack dogs.

Gladys shows snapshots of her husband then doing ninety days

for staging Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage. He is standing

outside their good brick house; around his feet

a riot of yellow flowers. Uprooted

into hardscrabble township.

She considered setting fire to the house; but chose instead

to hand the woman in her story kerosene and matches.

We cook a chicken dinner; break the wishbone:

Free South Africa! Talk till we can see through

the windows of the Mayflower

the Chinese writer executing a kata along the Iowa’s jade green

banks. He spends waking hours outdoors after being ten

years locked down in a cell because of a story he wrote.

In our shared kitchen we brew strong black tea

We applaud his morning dance.

When I said goodbye to Gladys in 1983, we never thought that we would see each other again. Ours was one tearful parting. Unlike Nelson Mandela – the Prophet, Warrior-king, Peacemaker, Repairer of the Breach, Father of the Nation and new-human-being-cultured-over-twenty-seven-years-for-the-benefit-of-all-humanity – I was not at all sure that South Africa would be free in this lifetime.

And all someone like me could do was to participate in countless anti-Apartheid rallies and grieve about the conditions under which someone like Winnie Mandela lived and suffered as a banned person.

And one day I was walking along the street in the city of Kingston and a clipping from a newspaper, right there on the sidewalk, caught my eye. The news story stated that Winnie Mandela’s home had been raided by the police, and that they had seized a number of her personal items in this raid, including a bedspread. The bedspread had been taken into custody because it was in the colours of the flag of the African National Congress. That had to be a poem.

I had the honour of reading that poem to Winnie when the Mandelas visited Jamaica right after his release from prison.

For many of us writers and artists and musicians in the African diaspora, Africa is never far from our minds. And South Africa never, ever left our minds during the time of Apartheid.

Under the British colonial school system in Jamaica, we were never taught that there was such a thing as an African writer; but for me the living presence of Peter Abrahams in Jamaica was proof that Africans did write books, and this led to my discovery of other African writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Wole Soyinka. But the women – I needed to find the women writers of Africa. The women who were the scribes who had set down those stories that used to be scripted by tongues and stored in books of memory. Women writers who would look and sound more like me, whose stories would perhaps help to connect me to a place and a time and a history and to traditions lost in the great watery graveyard of the Atlantic.

So I went in search of the work of African women writers, and as time went on I actually had the privilege of meeting and even on occasion sharing a stage with some of them, including the venerable Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga and our own dear Miriam Tlali, who once told me that during the time of Apartheid she would sometimes write her stories then wrap them in plastic bags and bury them in her backyard in case her home was raided by the police. Miriam Tlali, Bessie Head, Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing, Noni Jabavu, Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan and Ingrid Jonker are no longer with us, but we owe them a great debt for the ways in which their lives and works have nourished and sustained humanity.

And then of course there is the great iconic figure: Nadine Gordimer.

I had the enormous privilege of meeting Mrs Gordimer – I always call her Mrs Gordimer – at a Commonwealth writers conference in Manchester, England, organised by the brilliant Michael Schmidt of Carcanet Press. I confess that I was starstruck. Completely starstruck. For one thing, I expected her to be much bigger in stature. And I concluded that this was because her stories are written on such a monumental scale, written with a kind of courage and power that is not usual. In real life, she was a petite and quite pretty lady who wore the most gorgeous diamond earrings I have ever seen, and who was quite comfortable wearing my husband’s leather jacket one day when it rained. I believe she grew fond of Ted after she found out that he was a Professor of Comparative Literature and an expert witness in Aboriginal land claims issues and that he was instrumental in putting together a land claim for a group of Bushmen or San people in the Kalahari Desert. He wrote about all this in If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?

When he told Mrs Gordimer that three of the people involved in the land claim were the sisters Una, Kais and Abakas, she was visibly moved as she explained how, in 1936, she had been taken to the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg where she saw, on display, a family of Bushmen of the Kalahari with three young girls around her age. Those girls were the same Una, Kais and Abakas whose singing, storytelling and personal witness played a big part in the success of the land claim.

And Nadine Gordimer never forgot them. It is safe to say that something transcendent must have passed between those small girls – one very privileged, staring at the three others set there in a dehumanising, objectifying display as the last of the Bushmen – a look passed between them that said, ‘We see you. I see you. We see you. I see you for who you really are.’

Because something of that clear seeing shines through all of Mrs Gordimer’s work; that unflinching refusal to look away from the toughest things, a determination to name them, describe them, shame them if necessary, and to fashion bold new forms to contain them as you go along. Cutting your cloth to fit your coat, as my dressmaker mother would say, in the shape of our ever-evolving, not-usual, who-knows-how-it-will-all-end story.

I want to reference here the ending to Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People. Cinematic, apocalyptic, prophetic – these days I keep reading and re-reading that ending. These days I also find myself reading and re-reading her novel The Pickup. I read too, her short stories that defy categorising. She is a writer that other writers learn from.

And I learned quite a few things about what women writers can bring to the writing enterprise from watching Mrs Gordimer for those few days in Manchester. For one, she had no problems with being placed on a programme with other writers who were nowhere near as accomplished and acclaimed as she was. She had the same fifteen minutes as the other three writers, the line-up went in alphabetical order, so she read second, and she had cut and pasted and timed her presentation so that it ran to exactly fifteen minutes, not a millisecond over. Done and dusted. During the question and answer period she was agreeable and amiable enough, but she also made it clear that she did not consider herself to be an acknowledged or unacknowledged legislator of the world, that she saw herself first and foremost as a writer, and that she would rather talk about matters that pertained to writing.

Coming from a writer who had been as actively politically engaged as Nadine Gordimer that was a stunning thing to hear; but it was also a freeing thing to hear for those of us who sometimes feel that there are occasions when we can best represent ourselves in the world by writing our poems and stories in such a way that they function like the look that passed between Nadine and Una, Kais and Abakas.

A look that says: I see you and I see that these are not the last days for your or for my people. In fact, we are part of a brave new future in a country that will be a shining example to the rest of the world. I see you, we see you, and we will work and suffer and struggle and rejoice together as we write this future into being.

This poem is an elegy for my mother, Doris, and I dedicate it to all the African women writers who shape and inspire us.

‘After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down’

August, her large heart slows down then stops.

Fall now, and trees flame, catch a fire and riot

last leaves in scarlet and gold fever burning.

Remember when you heard Bob Marley hymn

‘Redemption Song,’ and from his tone and timbre

you sensed him traveling? He had sent the band home

and was just keeping himself company, cooling star,

sad rudeboy fretting on cowboy box guitar

in a studio with stray echo and wailing sound

lost singing scatting through the door of no return.

When the green goes, beloved, the secret is opened.

The breath falls still, the life covenant is broken.

Dress my mother’s cold body in a deep green gown.

Catch a fire and let fall and flame time come,

after the green gown of my mother gone down.

We laid her down, full of days,

chant griot from the book of life,

summon her kin from the long-

lived line of David and Margaret.

Come Cleodine, Albertha,

Flavius, Edmund, Howard and Rose,

Marcus her husband gone before

come and walk Dear Doris home.

And the Blue Mountains will open to her

to seal her corporeal self in.

From the ancient vault that is their lapis lazuli heart

the headwaters of all our rivers spring.

Headwaters, wash away the embalmer’s myrrh resin,

the dredging of white powder caking her cold limbs.

Return her ripe body clean

to fallow the earth.

Her eyes to become brown agate stones.

From her forehead let there dawn

bright mornings.

May her white hair contribute to the massing of clouds,

cause the blood settled in her palms

to sink into fish-filled lagoons.

Earth, she was a mother like you

who birthed and nursed her children.

Look, cherubim and angels, see her name

written down in the index of the faithful

in the mother-of-pearl book of saints.

‘My Mother’s Sea Chanty’

I dream that I am washing

my mother’s body in the night sea

and that she sings slow

and that she still breathes.

I see my sweet mother

a plump mermaid in my dreams

and I wash her white hair

with ambergris and foaming seaweed.

I watch my mother under water

gather the loose pearls she finds,

scrub them free from nacre

and string them on a lost fishing line.

I hear my dark mother

speaking sea-speak with pilot fish,

showing them how to direct barks

that bear away our grief.

I pray my mother breaks free

from the fish pots and marine chores

of her residence beneath the sea,

and that she rides a wild white horse.