New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

Bosluiskloof and Brandrivier,

  Porterville and Pietersburg,

  the rivulets chuckle in secret song—

  “The woman in slippers seems quite insane”,

  “Look not at my feet but in my eyes”,

  but her diary lines are splashed against

  the overgrown hills of Wiegenaarspoort—

  “It’s not what she says, but what she does.”

  In Swanepoelspoort where the sun means hurt,

  the heavy oak trees have stories to tell.

  They beg her onwards to Steytlerville,

  but her voice sounds hollow in defeated response—

  “Please guide my feet to Sewe Weekspoort,

  for my heart feels dead and my eyes are cold”

  and her traces shout in the Rosebergpass—

  “It’s not what she says but what she does.”

  Through Dysselsdorp, De Rust and De Aar,

  the lush green fields of the Sederberg,

  water from the heavens sucks in the earth

  and a woman without slippers and hospital gown

  dances victorious to the dying sun—

  “What matters the content of a doctor’s report”,

  the echoes of her voice reaching the stars—

  “For it is what I say and what I do!”

  At the feet of the mountains in the Hex Vallei

  and in the unspoilt walks of the Houwhoekpass,

  (so goes the story of the indigenous ones),

  roams the spirit of a woman brave in her heart

  and when the earth goes dark with thunder and fear,

  her voice lights up in the heavens,

  “Hear not the call of the treacherous ones,

  who sneak around and swindle your soul.

  Listen to the beat of your heart,

  hear the music, follow the sound—

  know, where your journey’s bound.”

  Saartjie’s cry

  Oh mother, I am not me,

  my soul has been lost in this journey.

  Here where the clouds hardly leave the sky

  the sun never appears to kill the lie.

  Oh mother, it is not just my soul they’ve torn apart—

  It is oh mother my very heart!

  They call me savage, they call me whore,

  they call me names I have not heard before!

  It’s only in the dark of the night

  that the drink in the bottle makes my body all right.

  In my dreams I see our mountain with its foot in the bay,

  I see our springbok, our eland, our wildebeest at play,

  how we run up the hills so steep,

  go dive for fish in the ocean so deep—

  and I cringe oh mother, I die

  to think we are all caught up in this lie.

  When next you do the dance to our sun,

  please remember your forgotten one.

  Hold your hands up high to the sky,

  send me the wings so that I may fly.

  Nikky Finney

  Born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea, she is a child of activists, and came of age during the turmoil of the civil rights and the creative renaissance of the Black Arts movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff’s Amistad murals, she began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history. She is the author of five poetry collections—Head Off & Split, which was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry; On Wings Made of Gauze (1985); Rice (1995); Heartwood (1997); The World Is Round (2003)—and also edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South in 2007. She co-founded the Affrilachian Poets, a group of black Appalachian poets. The many awards she has received for her work include a PEN America Open Book Award and the Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry. She holds the John H. Bennett, Jr, Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina.

  Auction Block of Negro Weather

  The eye wall was human. Black skin could not take off running from this surge & convergence. Legal tender built & brewed this storm into a quick moving cell of half-goodbyes and twisting outstretched arms. A father’s wailing mouth turned up to the night sky was forever. A mother’s eyes sunk below the county’s water line world without end. One three x three vortex of epic ongoing drowning. Forests of human oak razed by the zephyr-force winds of banknotes. Family trees broken leaf by leaf then scattered by the winds of profit. Ten million fingers and toes divided up for chicken change. No hats or scarves or wings issued for the highly skilled wearing black skin. Beloveds, the elements, out in the elements. Low tide. Lightning strikes touching the ground where they stood waiting to be sold. Screams pushing the air unmeasured. Six million eyes and arms in whirling disbelief unravelling from each other. High tide. Goodbye Lovey. A deluge of wind is made by the mouths of children being sucked away. Women are opened like bank vaults, their gold coins snatched. Jerome is made to bare his teeth. Boy & girl twins are pulled north and south like sweet fruit on a stem. Hope is ground into a powder that will later be worn around the neck for good luck. Fathers sew their own eyes shut for what comes next. Salt streams each face under the fat and cumulous Negro clouds gathered. Holding her tiny wet hand his long-drawn monsoon begins. Her feet are caught running off the wooden stump straight into the air. Don’t forget me, Benna. His voice, her barometer, drops in the dew as he disappears in the back of a wagon. Told not to turn & wave. He waves & turns until she is only a black dot in a torn white dress. Amina grows wings that stretch and bear up against the sight of daughters chained around the same feet she rubbed with rabbit oil the night before. You will never be out of my sight, Rose promises the dust in the shape of a son trailing the back of a horse. Jocko and Juju go colorblind when they finally arrive in South Carolina, the rows of cotton there are long squalls of blue and green. A handsome woman stands in the middle of hurricane force winds, her ten-year-old daughter is being led away by a man with a whip whose zipper keeps flying open. The weather vanes of their sweet tobacco breath still hover in every public square of every city of the Republic. I was here they remind us if we dare lift our eyes to dare look their way. The promise of their stolen lives crumbled in between the joists and the starlight of the jet stream. A handsome people who arrived with broken hearts, punctured lungs, liver spots. A lovesome people, who arrived with belly buttons and blackberry moles, who came slew footed, left-handed, cried easily, or not at all. A red-blooded tribe who tried to run away, endured, and molded a nation out of infested swamps, impassable timberland, and eye wall after eye wall of hate. It was cataclysmic. There was water everywhere. Their easy-on-the-eyes hearts pushed back against the sheets of water that kept coming.

  Ifeona Fulani

  Caribbean-born, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Comparative Literature, both from New York University. Her published work includes an edited volume of essays titled Archipelagos of Sound: Transnational Caribbeanities, Women and Music, a collection of short stories titled Ten Days in Jamaica (2012), a novel, Seasons of Dust (1997), and scholarly articles and reviews, most recently in Atlantic Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Small Axe and The Caribbean Review of Books. She is currently working on a novel provisionally titled Verna’s Dream. Her research interests are Caribbean literary and cultural studies, literatures of Africa and its diasporas, transnational feminisms, urban cultures and writing. She is a Clinical Professor in the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York University.

  Three Islands, Two Cities: The Making of a Black/Caribbean/Woman Writer/Scholar

  I am one of those Caribbean people whose journeys have criss-crossed the ocean, my travels on two continents shaped by the dynamic flows of the black Atlantic—that triangular zone theorized by Paul Gilroy, constituted by cultural currents as well as literal movements by black people. I migrated to London, UK, from Jamaica when I was three. My parents went ahead, leaving behind me, aged eighteen months, and my six-month-old sister, intendin
g to send for us both once they were settled. They left us with my Aunt Cindy, Mother’s older sister, who had no children of her own. I had a serious accident when I was three and my aunt no longer wanted to keep me. My parents sent money for my fare and I flew to London on a BOAC plane in the care of Miss Ida, a cousin of my father.

  Because my parents were a few steps ahead of the great wave of Caribbean migrants to England in the late 1960s, in primary school I was the only black pupil. In grammar school I was one of three. At Nottingham University I was the only black undergraduate in the Faculty of Arts. I was accustomed to being the single grain of allspice floating in the milk jug, so that didn’t phase me. What was difficult was having to read English literature from Beowulf to Eliot and no further. I was alienated from the texts I studied and from my instructors, who were mainly white, upper-class and very self-regarding. In my undergraduate courses and seminars I read nothing that related to my personal experience.

  At that point in my life my black identity was defined in relation—and sometimes opposition—to the white/English people and culture around me. My home environment—people, décor, food, values—was unadulterated in its Jamaicanness. But Jamaica itself was an abstraction; my parents had nothing good to say about the place, though, paradoxically, they clung fiercely to Jamaican ways.

  An avid reader, I joined the public library on my own initiative when I was seven, by faking my mother’s signature on the membership application. I spent hours immersed in books thereafter. As a teenager I liked to write and won a prize at grammar school for a short story, but I did not think of becoming a writer. I studied English at university, but did not dream of teaching at university level. The marginality of black cultures in Britain, the absence of black writers, histories and subjects from British curricula, left black Britons of my generation without literary reference points or models. When I was growing up there were a few well known black writers, such as Chinua Achebe, but they were men. I did not read a novel by a black woman till I was in my twenties—Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall. As for black academics, decades later there are still only seventeen women professors in the UK. I left university, took a job at the British Council, married and moved to India, where I lived for two years—but that’s another story.

  Coming to Writing

  By the 1980s the wave of writing by African-American women that gathered momentum in the 1970s began to have an impact in the UK. The books, their stories and their authors were a source of inspiration for young black women like myself. Sula, The Salt Eaters, The Women of Brewster Place, I devoured those novels. They were about people to whom I could relate, their authors role models for young black British women who dreamed of becoming writers: Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara and, of course, Paule Marshall. But they were in America; in the UK we did not have access to any space that encouraged or nurtured black writing and literary talent.

  That changed somewhat in the 1980s, following uprisings by black youth in Brixton, Tottenham and Birmingham. The 1981 Scarman Report on those uprisings recommended (among other things) that provision be made for the cultural development of black youth, as well as for more leisure and recreation facilities, and skills training. Progressive metropolitan councils such as the Greater London Council invested in the development of arts centres for ethnic minority communities. Literary presses, such as Virago and the Feminist Press, that published women writers now included a handful of Afro-Caribbean and Black British writers on their list—Joan Riley and Andrea Levy, for example.

  In my thirties I had a novel “cooking” in my brain but no idea how to go about writing it and, if I’m honest, deep doubt that anyone would be interested in reading anything I wrote. The novel in my head was about two generations of a Jamaican family settled in London. My family, my relatives and our experiences as black people in London were the original inspiration, but I observed that other people I knew and their families experienced similar challenges and pressures, had similar stories to tell. The desire to write combined with a sense of being marginal, even invisible in London and in England, influenced my decision to take leave from my job in London and return to Jamaica. I wanted to live on the island where I was born, even if only for a while, and I wanted to write that novel, which meant I also needed to know the place my characters came from.

  Moving to Kingston, Jamaica

  I had been back to Jamaica only once since I was three and that was the year before I made the move. My parents never went back and never encouraged me to do so; they had nothing good to say about Jamaica, or their parish, St Elizabeth. To them, Jamaica meant hard life, hard work and poverty. My mother’s sister, and my favourite aunt, Veena, who had arrived in London shortly after me—returned to Jamaica and had settled in St Catherine, in a housing development near Spanish Town. My plan was to stay with her until I found a place of my own—I wasn’t sure where or how. I was travelling on a current of faith. A Jamaican friend from London had also returned and was living in Kingston and my first weekend on the island I took the bus to visit her. She had been invited to a party on the Saturday night at the house of a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, in College Common, Mona, and she was eager to attend, to meet new people and to network. The party was at the home of Carolyn Cooper, who, it turned out, had a room to rent, the former helper’s room at the side of the house that was quite private and had its own shower. A few days later I moved to College Common, where I stayed until I found a studio apartment in Kingston.

  In Carolyn’s house I was in my ackee; I was surrounded by an expert selection of books by and about Caribbean, African-American and African people, books from the postcolonial canon, books in the black intellectual tradition: the Black Atlantic in book form. I was drawn into a vibrant literary culture centred on UWI; I made new friends who were lecturers, writer, poets, artists. I was lucky; at the time I thought I could feel ancestral hands on my shoulder guiding me towards the people who soon became my friends. Many of them are still my friends.

  After one year in Jamaica I returned to London, resigned from my job and sold my house. My father thought I’d spent the year smoking marijuana and had lost my mind. (I had done neither.) I returned to Jamaica and I wrote the novel that had been cooking in my head, titled Seasons of Dust, over a period of two years. That novel draft helped me secure a place in the 1995 Summer Workshop for Caribbean Writers at Miami University. Many of the people in my Caribbean creative community I met at that workshop; I was there with Kezia Page, Donna Aza Weir Soley, Danielle Legros Georges, Dahlma Llanos Figueroa. On the faculty were Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison, Eddie Baugh, Gordon Rohlehr, Antonio Benitez-Rojo—a stellar faculty. I still tell people that Olive Senior was my first Creative Writing Teacher. A fellow participant who was a student in the Creative Writing Program at NYU encouraged me to apply to join the MFA program, which I did and I was successful. I went to NYU with a New York Times Creative Writing Fellowship. Even now it seemed miraculous that my first writing workshop at NYU was taught by Paule Marshall.

  Coming to New York

  Looking back, that entire period seems golden, magical. In Jamaica—in Carolyn’s house—I had met a writer from New York who was doing research at UWI, and who had worked in an agent’s office in NY. That was how I found an agent and, shortly after, a publisher for Seasons of Dust, before arriving at NYU for the creative writing program. I was grateful for the funding and for the time and space to write, as well as for the feedback on my work that the workshop structure promoted. Also positive—exceptional, actually—was the experience of working with stellar instructors: Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Chuck Wachtel. But my experience could illustrate Junot Diaz’s critique of creative writing programs quite well—#SoWhite—except for two other students from the Caribbean—Angie Cruz from DR and Ana Menéndez from Cuba. But, to be fair, white students did not overtly “other” my work; that was left for the world-famous Irish author, who commented on the dialogue of characters in on
e of my stories saying: “People don’t talk like that!”

  Resistance or a negative reaction to my writing soon became the response I anticipated from white folks in the US literary world who had difficulty seeing beyond stereotypes of Caribbean people. I did not fit an obvious niche. When my agent shopped my novel around editors and publishers, the responses she received ran the spectrum from: “These characters aren’t believable” to: “What would the audience be for this book?” “Is she Caribbean? Her characters don’t seem Caribbean.”

  Eventually, Seasons of Dust was picked up by an independent black publisher, Glenn Thompson. His press, Harlem River Press, no longer exists; it folded in the early 2000s, along with many other small presses, leaving black writers and others who are perceived as marginal by the publishing mainstream facing decreasing possibilities of seeing our work in print. And in the US, Caribbean writers are even more marginal; we are exotica, even to many African-American readers.

  I had planned to return to Jamaica after completing the MFA, to build a house on a piece of land I’d bought in Highgate, St Mary, just before leaving for New York. However, one of my literature professors persuaded me to apply to NYU’s PhD program in Comparative Literature; Kamau Brathwaite was teaching there, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Sylvie Kandé were there also, but I was hesitant. But it was lucky for me that I did submit an application, because the financial crisis in Jamaica in 1997 and the ensuing devaluation of the Jamaican dollar drove the cost of building a house way up and out of my reach. News of the crisis and the offer of a fully funded place in NYU’s Comparative Literature Department arrived at around the same time, making the decision easy. I was advised against the PhD and warned that doctoral studies would encroach on my writing. I published two short stories while a graduate student, and a volume of short stories, Ten Days in Jamaica, twelve years after completing my MFA. Teaching full time left very little time for creative writing.