AS I GROW OLDER, the list of people I’d like to meet before I leave this earth gets shorter and shorter. Some of the people I most love and admire have gone ahead so there is now no chance I’ll meet them here below. All things considered, I’ve done pretty well in the meeting-of-important-people department. I will refrain from providing a full list here, but I will mention that I met Fidel Castro twice, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu once personally thanked me for reading some of my poems, as did Ahmed Kathrada, for whom I read at a function hosted for him by Professor Nesha Haniff in the Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Michigan. I once went to a small dinner where Harry Belafonte was the guest of honour, and Toni Morrison once chatted amiably with me at a gathering at the University of Toronto. I have spent time, on more than one occasion, in the company of Wole Soyinka, and Bob Marley used to nod to me like a mandarin whenever we passed each other on the streets of Kingston.
When Nelson Mandela died, I cried as much as I did on the day he was released from prison. That is to say, I bawled. Although my husband Ted and I once had the good fortune to sit one table away from him at a dinner at the Vergelegen Estate in South Africa, I never did actually meet him.
I did, however, meet Winnie Mandela, and I read her my poem ‘Bedspread’ (p.35) which I wrote for her. She cried openly and said that she’d been hearing about my poem for years, but she’d had no way of getting hold of it because she was a banned person. Then she hugged me very tightly for what seemed like a long time. After that hug I somehow felt much stronger, as if she had managed to transmit some of her enormous courage and fearlessness to me. That was one of the highlights of my life.
I always wanted to meet Muhammad Ali, I never did, and I know that a light went out in the world when he died. I felt the same when Seamus Heaney went home, after telling us not to be afraid. ‘Noli timere,’ he told his wife, and I believe he meant it for all of us. I was beyond sad. But I did meet him just once in person, and I can honestly say that as people go he was one of the sweetest souls that I have ever encountered. I only mention him because I had always hoped to meet him again.
I once shared a stage with Maya Angelou. Hers was an extraordinary presence. I am glad I met her because I think she was perhaps one of the wisest people who ever lived. Something she said once in an interview has helped me to make sense of my own life, with its hard and sometimes frantic questing to find the ‘one’ with whom I could build a life. To paraphrase: Maya Angelou said that she no longer answered questions about her romantic relationships and marriages; that she went into every one of them with all the right appetites for what makes such unions work, they did not, and she chose to keep on moving. But, said she, there are people who elect to remain in dead relationships who somehow think that their decision to stay entombed in this way, gives them the right to look down on others who do not. I learned from her that I am not under any obligation to explain anything to anybody about my somewhat ramshackle romantic track record.
I wish I’d met Zora Neale Hurston in person. My dear, dear old friend Ivy Coverley who spent time in Zora’s company told me that the great writer had a ball when she visited Jamaica in 1939, and that her stay had been greatly enhanced by the ministrations of a particularly good-looking Jamaican man and a fair measure of fine Jamaican rum. I also heard from Edna Manley that, during that same visit, she’d taken Zora to a Pocomania meeting in Jones Town. Mrs Manley said that things had been going really well up until a fight broke out at a political meeting that was taking place near the Poco yard. When the stone throwing between rival political factions started they had no choice but to run. So, Zora Neale Hurston and Edna Manley ran. They raced through the streets whooping and laughing like two wild young girls, laughing in the face of danger, loving all the excitement as they sprinted through the dark streets of West Kingston back up to the Manleys’ palatial residence at Drumblair.
And it was only after they were safely home and had settled in to have a few drinks, that Edna remembered that she had driven them to the meeting, and that her car was still back there parked outside the Poco shepherd’s yard.
And then there is the other woman writer whose work I admire greatly and whom I’d always hoped to meet. I remember feeling really pleased when I received an invitation to a luncheon in her honour, but once our eyes made four, as Jamaicans say, I could tell she was not happy to see me, and during the course of that lunch she sent out enough signals for me to know that she really did not want me around.
Now this could, in some weird way, have been regarded as a compliment, because the fact that one of the world’s most successful writers was actually sufficiently aware of my work, to the extent that she could be all but be cutting her eye after me and saying things like ‘All flowers are NOT roses,’ which could only mean that she had read, or read about, my poem ‘To Us, All Flowers are Roses’. I guess if ever I am interviewed by someone who asks, ‘When did you realise that your work was well-known?’ I could say, ‘When x took issue with the title of one of my poems.’
But after that meeting, I decided that I no longer want to keep a list of people I’d like to meet. I’ll just see who comes along and stay open to being surprised by joy.