You will be a whore just like your mother
Granny told me all the time,
like saying good morning.
I tried to make her love me,
but her mouth was brutal,
like hard-wire brush, it scraped me,
took skin off my bones, made me bleed
where no one could see,
so I’d shrink, a tiny rocking foetus.
You will end up on your back, scunt spread out,
feet sprawl out, whoring. Who tells a child that?
Yet I loved her. She was my granny,
and I wanted her to love me back,
but every day her words
put this hard thing deep inside me.
I wanted her to give me juicy mangoes and kisses,
I wanted pepperpot and tennis rolls;
she gave me rocks and hard stone,
pelted me each day, and I loved her still.
I told my doll that too much coconut oil
in Granny’s hair rancid her mouth.
I am grown and the smell of mothballs
curdles my stomach. I wanted mangoes and kisses:
You will be a whore just like your mother.
My father was her everything,
my brother her world.
Her daughters reaped zigar.
Her mouth spat, You black ugly scunt.
I was her black thick molasses, dunce and sour,
her burnt cassava. I was pone charred in the oven,
I was strong bitters, a brew better off unborn.
And I still wished her eyes could swallow me whole
the way they did my brother Philip. He would hug me
to transfer Granny’s glow to my world and I love him still.
Even when baby Kwesi came along, she never let go
of her apple-eye, but he never let go of us.
Yes! You red-skin, mixed-blood, nigger woman,
young, you were gold in Guyana’s sun,
your face a dark cream to my bitter chocolate,
eyes hazel like mine. We are kin, you and I.
Your blood pumps through me. How could you
scratch me so deep, leaving lacerations?
Yes, Jesse, tell me what hardened your heart
to your son’s first-born girl-child? Tell me,
Granny, now you dead, buried
in that Buxton graveyard, do you cuss me still?
you came to stay at our house:
how I was your shadow; how I followed you,
wanting to fix the wrong you saw in me.
Your cruel tongue banished me to slide down
my wall in the corner crying, Oh meh Goy, why?
Granny, what I do to you, eh?
It was the house over by the Buxton train line,
the house with the wooden front steps
and the old white rocking chair, those stairs
where you followed Mum, heaping curses
like red ants’ bites, spewing Rasshole, scunt, whore.
Your son had outside women? So what!
Mum ran ashamed; necks craned from windows
as you peppered her skin with cuss,
till she flogged a taxi on the highway.
Years later Mum tells me the story
after I ask her to go back to Guyana with me.
The entire plane journey Mum mutters, Wicked woman.
We walk up those same wooden stairs,
the divorced wife, the scarred granddaughter.
At ninety-six you could claim fifty years,
that day I saw you sit in the rocking chair,
saw my mother part your hair, pour coconut oil,
massage, then plait, her fingers caressing strands.
It’s water under the bridge, she tells me later.
I can’t talk past the words buried deep,
can’t talk past the men I froze beneath,
your words branded under the skin
inside my thighs, legs spread like a whore.
Oh mother, humbled I watch you
plait the hair of an old woman
I wanted to love me years ago.
Jesus look where you brought me from,
I was down in the world doing what I please
But look where you bought me from …
He had me one and let me go,
I don’t know why Satan let me go …
Caribbean Gospel – Jump for Jesus.
I lived till me turn one hundred and one,
live through back-break in backra sun.
I was a slave baby mixed with plantation white.
This creamy skin draw buckman, blackman,
coolieman, like prize. And if you did hear sweet talk,
if you did see how much fine fuck I get.
Is hard life, hard, hard life and only one son I bear.
My mother tell me to kill di girl child dem –
they only bring hard ears. Jessie, harden you heart
to them girl. But I tell you, Miss, I never kill no child,
and is one boychild I breed, only one, then pure girls.
I didn’t right to vex?
I was the lone woman every man want to advantage,
I had was to sharpen meh mouth like razor blade,
turn red in seconds till bad word spill blood.
Scunt-hole child, you want sorry?
Jessie Spenser never tell a soul sorry when she live,
you sure not getting one now me dead.
Wait for that and you go turn dust.
And what I ever do you, Missy?
I ever fire licks like rain scatter on ground
in rainy season pon you skin? No.
I tell you nuff ole higue story on back stairs.
I toughen you soffie-ness, mek man can’t fuck you
easy so. So fuck off, leave the dead some peace.