But I have no regrets. My studies have enabled me to do work that I love: teaching, researching and writing about Caribbean and African literature. And in the breaks between semesters, I write fiction.
Patricia Glinton-Meicholas
A Bahamian poet, cultural critic and author, she was the first winner of the Bahamas Cacique Award for Writing (1995) and recipient of a Silver Jubilee of Independence Medal for Literature (1998). Her many books include short story collections such as An Evening in Guanima (2013) and Lusca and Other Fantastic Tales (2017), the novel A Shift in the Light (2001), three volumes of poetry and several works of satire. Her poetry appears in Across Borders, Poui, Womanspeak and Yinna. Her monograph on Bahamian folktales appears in the Encuentros series of the IDB Cultural Centre, Washington, DC. Her extensive writing on art includes Bahamian Art 1492–1992, the first comprehensive work on the subject (with Smith and Huggins). She is Vice President of Creative Nassau, and co-host of the Creative Nassau weekly radio show on Island 102.9 FM.
Remembering, Re-membering
My name was scraped from the register
of the griot’s tongue
and fed to sharks, whose memory is short
except for blood
and long ago, my captive member
was wrenched from the sweetness of yours.
Remember me
I’m the pricking of memory in your loins.
Press your ear against my breast
hear your drums pulsing still in my blood
let their throbbing send your heart racing
past coffle and castle
beyond forced couplings in foreign lands.
Strip away the long cloak of separation
rend my bodice of bondage
shred the rough girdle of shame.
Grip me once again
in your baobab arms
bind me with the lianas of your heart
bathe me in your potent Congo
cradle my head again
in the thick savannas
of your seething breast . . .
Call me yours again
re-member me
grow me a griot’s tongue to tell ancestral tales
give me warrior’s legs to leap the rough Atlantic chasm
and arms to embrace the freedom that is mine by right.
Let me, with heart and hands wide open
grasp your immensity
let my roots plunge into your soul’s soil
knitting an indissoluble re-union.
Slavery Redux
We who cut teeth on promises of paradise
frolic to the flute of a star-striped piper
gyrating on the sword’s edge
of geopolitics.
We eat, drink, sing and dance
lulled by the illusion
of benevolence on call
to drive us home from heedless revels
drunk on the over-proof rum
of self-delusion.
Revels grow cold
and soporific melodies
pledging endless summer, sky juice
and year-round junkanoo
will forge us new chains and manacles
with small hope of emancipation.
Woman Unconquerable
I am woman
reputed rib from Adam’s side
assigned voiceless subordination
relegated to the role of sidekick
servant to penile supremacy
daily peeling the mazorca
jaw frozen in rictus
knees locked in genuflection
of unnegotiated servitude.
Yet, here I am
refusing reduction
head unbowed, tongue unchained
resisting devaluation
of self-forged new coinage.
I’m “Third World” woman
mistress of the alchemy of hunger
daily spinning life from straw of scarcity.
Is ancient Japanese kaprang1 I ride
we two daily mounting insurrection
braving pothole, detour and downpour
fighting fickleness of two-faced economy
all on shame-brand, threadbare tires
her joints creaking a duet with mine
in ready-to-retire sisterhood.
I am a witch of Gambaga
by the twin spells
of custom and spite
transmuted
from wife, wise woman, mother
into poisoner of mates, minds and wombs
Satan’s doxy, covert holder
of his proxy for evil
my fate steered by the compass
of a dying fowl’s wings.
Yet, scrawny yard bird that I’ve become
I scratch up sustenance from the dust
conjure up purpose and cling
rotten tooth and bony claw
to life.
I am every woman
I pay passage but never reach
the market called “freedom”
my fruit spoiling in fetid cage
and claustrophobic crate
shut in and shut out
by tariff, quota
disease and domination
ignorance and interdiction
my flight to higher heights
often hijacked, shot down.
But still, I am, I live
a woman, mistress
of unconquerable convictions.
Now, meet this sister
steel forged in magma-spilling mountains
tempered in chill Tongue of Ocean depth
bold Atlantic/Caribbean woman
hands akimbo
liberal and bent on liberation
broad of beam, deep of voice
brave and feisty for days
raucously refusing
to travel bound again
below deck again.
Go ahead, Lords of Fraud
and tainted tenure
repossess the kaprang
foreclose the shack
cancel my right to community
refuse note and certification
cancel permit and visa
invoke self-interested sanction
trample on my aspirations
slam your door in my face.
Like loa-duppy-jumbie-sperrit
I’ll haunt your dreams.
Dis me nah! Caribbean Buttercup
colonizer of roadside ditch
conqueror of desolate ground
queen gilding a glorious kingdom
from a stinking, ancient rubbish heap.
I ain’t goin’ nowhere
this land and me is one.
Deny me rain and I run wild
prune me and I’ll coppice
rip off my blooms and I’ll reseed
root me up and I’ll spring back
to flourish in your face.
Carmen Harris
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she migrated to the UK at the age of five. After graduating from London University (BA Hons, Sociology), she worked variously as a writer in fringe theatre, as a sub-editor for Chic Magazine, as a corporate scribe, and a children’s author before becoming a professional TV scriptwriter. She used the pen-name Lisselle Kayla, during which time she wrote two series of her own original primetime BBC1 sitcom, Us Girls (the first such in the UK for a black female writer). She went on to work in many professional writing genres including radio, children’s and drama, with 10 years as a core writer for the popular BBC1 soap EastEnders. She is the author of several books, among them the 2015 self-help/autobiography Sh*t Happens, Magic Follows (Allow It!).
Hello . . . Goodbye
It was the year 1962. I was a skinny, dreamy, thumb-sucking five-year-old, about to leave my homeland with my mother, two brothers and sister. Unusually, we were to travel by plane, the height of privilege in those days. At least, compared to the thousands of other Jamaicans making the same journey by sea, taking up to twenty-tw
o days to reach the shores of the Mother Country. Six months previous, in preparation for our migration, we had moved from our home in Kingston to live with my Aunty Hilda and her family in Annotto Bay. Now, the long-awaited day had finally arrived. Amid the tears, the farewell hugs and kisses, as we embarked on our sleepy night-time journey back towards Kingston, the capital, a whole banana was tucked into each child’s hand. I immediately decided that I would not eat mine. I would save it as a gift for my father, that mysterious figure who had gone ahead of us to that mythical land called England to materialise his dream of social and economic self-improvement for the family. His absence had amounted to a lifetime in my young universe. Being just three years old when he’d left our tropical island, I’d virtually forgotten who my father was. I announced my noble intentions to my brothers and sister and to my annoyance they decided that they, too, would save their banana. Possessing the instincts of an only child, I was always caught short by the careless intrusions of my siblings into my inner life. My grumpiness didn’t last long, for I needn’t have worried. One by one, both brothers and my sister eventually succumbed to hunger and temptation and, by the time we reached Palisades Airport, all they had to show were three empty skins. I, however, clutched my yellow fruit to my chest with an intense loyalty. During my sleep on the plane, several times I felt my mother gently prising open my grasp and, each time, I awoke with a start to tighten my hold.
After an eternity of sleepless and sleep-filled hours, our BOAC flight finally landed at Gatwick Airport. As my siblings and I, dressed optimistically in flimsy sunny frocks and khaki shorts, stepped onto the tarmac and shivered in the chilly May winds, I was still clutching my banana. Inside the terminal building, a tall, caramel-skinned man wearing a brown suit and a felt hat, broke through the crowds and strode confidently towards us. I’d spent many hours dreaming of the exact moment, and now that it had arrived, I froze, unsure of my next move. But as soon as I felt myself swooped into the air, nestling in my father’s embrace, I remembered to wave the triumph of my gift. My father chuckled. A mixture of pride and joy, it seemed. It didn’t for one moment occur to me that it would be at the blackened, oozing mess, sticking to my palm . . .
I was often frustrated, felt somewhat cheated, by my father’s existence in the UK. This was the man who decided from early on that I was bright enough to become a lawyer. Yet, when single-parenthood forced me to take a dreary clerical officer post in the GPO’s Yellow Pages, he was appalled two years later by my proud announcement. My daughter was now five and I had been accepted by London University to study Sociology. I’ll always remember that look, not of admiration, but of terror that I might have taken leave of my senses. “What? You going to leave you good-good job in de Post Office?” he gasped. Where the father of my dreams was bold and gregarious, mine was not only socially coy, but cautious, meticulous, suspicious. Perhaps he had always been like this, for I have heard stories of my mother being the real force behind my father’s earlier entrepreneurial endeavours in Jamaica as a tailor, radio technician, Panamanian labourer and freight distributer at the Kingston wharf. Or, perhaps, due to frustrating early migrant experiences in the UK, he felt compelled to adapt to a new reality, one that required dampening passions and abandoning dreams of the future. Watching him consume a meal probably summed up everything there was to know about my father’s approach to living. No matter how welcome the offering, each meal was a ritual that began with a sigh, as though the arrangement of food before him was yet another one of life’s testing trials. Next, he would give a little sniff, as if strengthening his resolve, before proceeding to dissect the portions on his plate into neat surgical morsels. Once these were in the mouth, he would close his eyes to the sound of his masticating dentures, most probably counting each mouthful to a precise number of chews. Sometimes, like a cow ruminating on grassland, he would literally fall asleep over the task, till a clean plate was eventually accomplished. That’s not to say he didn’t enjoy food, he was an interested grocery shopper and, for a man of his generation, a surprisingly competent cook; but an ingrained apparent joylessness forbade him from fully indulging in life’s pleasures.
I hear my assessment of him and a part of me cannot help but wince, for when we find fault with a parent, our irritation may have more to do with seeing a reflection of our own selves in their image. It was much later in life when I learned that I could expand the boundaries of my “personal space” without feeling exposed or threatened; when I decided it might be more affirming to roll with others’ “playful” punches than coil inside and take umbrage; when I discovered that my authentic self could be found in laughing long and hard. This is in direct contrast to my younger years when I was accustomed to being hailed as the “serious” one, the humourless one, the one who lived more naturally in the head than in the world. Not a bad description of my father, as it happens.
Though it was difficult to admit, my father and I had our similarities. When he died, some twenty years ago, one of the more useful traits I inherited from him came to the fore. Faced with the double wardrobe and chest of drawers full of dead-man’s clothes and the stack of old documents and paperwork that my father had left behind, my siblings blanched. I, however, immediately rolled up both sleeves, relishing the opportunity to process my grief through the fastidiousness of creating order. My father would have been proud.
But I was being driven by a second, more urgent motive. Here was my chance to examine forensically the man behind the buttoned-up colonial mask; retrospectively to meet my father on equal terms. Halfway through the clear-out, I came across a battered old suitcase that I remembered from my childhood as first belonging to my mother. It was covered with a thin film of dust, suggesting it had lain unopened for quite some time. With excitement, I raised the lid, inhaling the decades-old nostalgia of the island years. Putting aside a few musty items of clothing, my eyes fell upon a rubber-banded collection of miniature diaries that had been stowed in the bottom, dating back to the late ’50s. My heart beat in anticipation. If I had failed to understand my father in life, I reasoned, surely now in death, his inner being would be revealed to me.
I sat down and didn’t draw breath till I had examined every single page of all twenty diaries. Disappointment was like a heavy door casting its dark shadow, before slowly closing on me forever. Each one of the diaries, written in my father’s deliberate cursive style, was an unreflective account of the minutiae of his everyday life: work rotas for the night shift, various doctor’s appointments, dates the insurance man called, when the gas meter was due to be emptied, etc. Whatever heartfelt longings and unrequited desires my father had nursed during his lifetime, he had carried them to the grave as efficiently as he had once cleared a plateful of food.
Sandra Jackson-Opoku
Born and raised in Chicago, she is the author of the American Library Association Black Caucus award-winning novel The River Where Blood is Born (1997), and Hot Johnny (and the Women Who Loved Him) (2001), which was an Essence magazine Hardcover Fiction Bestseller. Her fiction, poetry, essays, reviews and travel articles appear in the Los Angeles Times, Ms. Magazine, the Literary Traveller, Transitions Abroad, Rolling Out, Soul of America, and many other outlets. With poet Quraysh Ali Lansana she coedited the anthology, Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks (2017), a Chicago Review of Books Nonfiction Finalist. Her work has earned such honours as the National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines/General Electric Fiction Award for Younger Writers, a Ragdale Foundation US/Africa Fellowship, a William Randolph Hearst Research Visiting Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, a Roots Fellowship at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, and several awards from the Illinois Arts Council and Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.
Boahema Laughed
From Gods Gift to the Natives
Bags were packed, belongings sold, tickets bought and planes boarded before it occurred to me that it might be a mistake.
That in leaving Africa we were repeating the ancient rite of dispossession our ancestors had made. A modern Middle Passage, Diaspora’s children having returned to the Motherland, only to forsake her once again—this time voluntarily.
The aircraft taxied leisurely, as if to taunt us with reminders.
Kwesi, foolish man. See what you go leave behind-o?
Palm trees waved and whitecaps boiled off the Atlantic as drops of rain began to pelt the window. The plane seemed to rear on its hind wheels and sniff out the sudden storm before heaving itself into take-off. The airport, the city of Accra, the long beige ribbon of Labadi Beach, all retreated into the distance as we moved across the blue-gray Atlantic. I thought of all that would be lost at the end of this journey. Our spacious, mud-splattered bungalow. Our web of friends and adopted family. Our daughter’s African accent.
I found myself absentmindedly fondling the worn, pitted surfaces of my father’s old pocket watch. I clicked the lid open and shut in a familiar rhythm until I glanced guiltily in Alma’s direction. She called it my obsessive-compulsion. Whenever she caught me at it, she’d say: “Your OCD is showing.” I couldn’t imagine how she kept up with the latest American psycho-babble. It must be her subscriptions to all those women’s magazines.
I was relieved to find her snoring lightly, and feasted on the sight of her. Though my wife hated me to watch her sleeping, I always found her enticing in repose—full lips slightly parted, bosom rising and falling, her features relaxed and languid.
My gaze strayed to a woman moving gracefully down the aisle, a smile on her face and a basket of hard candy in her outstretched hands. An Alma wide awake might read lewd ogling into my glances, rather than fleeting admiration of a lovely young creature with cornrowed hair and gold earrings. The kind of woman Boahema might grow into, were not this journey interrupting her African childhood.
The flight attendant caught me watching and stopped at our row. “A sweet for the little one, sir?”
A “been-to”, no doubt. She looked African but spoke with a decided British accent. Her pear-shaped breasts lifted as she leaned across Alma’s sleeping form to offer a handful of wrapped mints.
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