Next time she smiles her smile that covers the grudge she holds against me, I might tell her that the husband she is now clinging to spends time on top of me, so she has nothing to be happy about. I stopped believing in miracles a while ago and the truth is I am tired and I am beyond damaged. In a village where gossip livens the daily chores, I know I can never go back and be normal again. They still talk about Mr Mohammed who killed his first wife because she refused to accept his second wife into their home. Something that happened before I was born, and fourteen years later it is still a topic of conversation. So I can imagine the loud whispers, I can imagine the stares of family, friends and everyone else. My future is gone, stolen.
I am no longer bitter or angry, what I am is just tired. I have gone from cursing them, their children and their grandchildren, to accepting that this is my fate. The great things my father planned will only ever exist in my head. I can no longer dwell on what could have been. I wanted my life to matter, I wanted to make a mark in the world, to do good, to be great, to be somebody beyond the confines of our village. I have now made my peace and it will be all over in the morning. The sun will no longer rise on my pain.
I write this, because maybe one day this letter will be found and it can be read to my father, mother and sister. I want them to know that I fought for as long as I could, but I was not strong enough. My wish is that one day they can forgive my weakness. I really wanted to go to university and learn. There were things I wanted to do, places I wanted to see. I wanted to build a house for my parents that had an indoor kitchen, so my mother didn’t have to carry firewood on her head when we ran out of kerosene for the stove. I wanted to have a job that did not include having babies, cleaning or cooking.
As I look around camp at girls like Hafsat who have accepted their fate, I question my own sanity. My life for the last two years could have been better, if only I had accepted life in the bush as my reality. But I rejected it, it was not my portion, it was not my blessing. When I was twelve my mother told me it was every woman’s dream to marry, have children and look after her husband. It was not what I wanted and Father did not want that for me either. So he sent me to school because he understood that I wanted more, and he wanted more for me. My mother never finished primary school and never left the village, so she did not understand the importance of education, but she gave in and let me go. Despite what has become of me, I am grateful for the things I have learned.
Father is well travelled; he’s been abroad, he’s been to Lagos and Abuja and has seen many things. When we were little, he would come back from his travels with pictures of people and places. As you enter our room, there is the picture he took of the burial place of Jesus, he took it when he went to Jerusalem for a conference or something. For hours I would stare at it and imagine what it would be like to fly in an aeroplane and visit another country.
It pains me that I am giving up, that I will never again see their faces. I will never again fight with my sister, argue with my mother or disobey my father who had a thousand rules about what we could and could not do and a cane to set us on the right path when we did not listen. I will use my last prayer, hoping that this message finds them, that they know I did try to get home, but after they kept me tied up for several days, I stopped trying. Am I a coward? I do not know how to fix the emptiness, the brokenness. I do not know how to lose the pain that is wound so tightly around my body like a wrapper.
There are times I look around camp and things seem so normal. At first we were constantly on the move. They did not want to risk capture, but as the months passed we moved less and less, until we finally settled here. During the day, the men go off with their guns as if they are going to their farm to harvest corn. Sometimes they come back on the same day, sometimes days later, with provisions, but never anything that makes our lives comfortable.
I have to forgive them, because it is the only way I can be at peace. I accept what is and what has been, not because I want to, but because I have to. Please do not judge me too harshly. You do not know who I am.
Patience Agbabi
Born in London to Nigerian parents and fostered in a white English family in North Wales, she is a poet whose work links high art with popular culture. She read English at Oxford University and completed an MA in Creative Writing at Sussex University. She became prominent on the London spoken word circuit in the early 1990s. Her work has been featured on TV and radio and she has toured extensively in the UK and abroad with the British Council. Her poem “The Doll’s House” was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2014. Her fourth collection of poems, the critically acclaimed Telling Tales (2014), is a contemporary, multicultural remix of The Canterbury Tales.
The Doll’s House
The source of the wealth that built Harewood is historical fact. There is nothing anyone can do to change the past, however appalling or regrettable that past might be. What we can do, however, what we must do, is engage with that legacy and in so doing stand a chance of having a positive effect on the future.
—David Lascelles
Art is a lie that makes us realise truth.
—Pablo Picasso
Welcome to my house, this stately home
where, below stairs, my father rules as chef:
confecting, out of sugar-flesh and -bone,
décor so fine, your tongue will treble clef
singing its name. Near-sighted and tone-deaf,
I smell-taste-touch; create each replica
in my mind’s tongue. My name? Angelica.
This is my world, the world of haute cuisine:
high frosted ceilings, modelled on high art,
reflected in each carpet’s rich design;
each bed, each armchair listed à la carte.
Come, fellow connoisseur of taste, let’s start
below stairs, where you’ll blacken your sweet tooth,
sucking a beauty whittled from harsh truth . . .
Mind your step! The stairway’s worn and steep,
Let your sixth senses merge in the half-light . . .
This muted corridor leads to the deep
recesses of the house. Here, to your right,
my father’s realm of uncurbed appetite—
private! The whiff of strangers breaks his spell.
Now left, to the dead end. Stop! Can you smell
cinnamon, brown heat in the afternoon
of someone else’s summer? This rust key
unlocks the passage to my tiny room,
stick-cabin, sound-proofed with a symphony
of cinnamon; shrine to olfactory
where I withdraw to paint in cordon bleu,
shape, recreate this house; in miniature
All art is imitation: I’m a sculptor
of past-imperfect; hungry, I extract
molasses; de- and reconstruct high culture
from base material; blend art and fact
in every glazed and glistening artefact
housed in this doll’s house. Stately home of sugar.
Of Demerara cubes secured with nougat.
Look at its hall bedecked with royal icing—
the ceiling’s crossbones mirrored in the frieze,
the chimneypiece. The floor is sugar glazing
clear as a frozen lake. My centrepiece
statue of Eve, what a creative feast!
A crisp Pink Lady, sculpted with my teeth,
its toffee glaze filming the flesh beneath.
The music room’s my favourite. I make music
by echoing design: the violet-rose
piped ceiling is the carpet’s fine mosaic
of granulated violet and rose,
aimed to delight the eye, the tongue, the nose.
Even the tiny chairs are steeped in flavour
delicate as a demisemiquaver.
Taste, if you like, sweet as a mothertongue . . .
See how this bedroom echoes my refrain:
the chairs,
the secretaire, commode, chaise longue,
four-poster bed, all carved from sugarcane;
even the curtains that adorn its frame,
chiselled from the bark, each lavish fold
drizzled with tiny threads of spun “white gold”.
The library was hardest. How to forge
each candied volume wafer-thin, each word
burnt sugar. In the midnight hours, I’d gorge
on bubbling syrup, mouth its language; learned
the temperature at which burnt sugar burned,
turned sweet to bitter; inked a tiny passage
that overflowed into a secret passage,
the Middle Passage; made definitive
that muted walkway paved with sugar plate,
its sugar-paper walls hand-painted with
hieroglyphs invisible as sweat
but speaking volumes; leading to the sweet
peardrop of a stairwell down and down
to this same room of aromatic brown
in miniature. Here, connoisseur, I’ve set
the doll, rough hewn from sugarcane’s sweet wood:
her choker, hardboiled sweets as black as jet;
her dress, molasses-rich; her features, hard.
This handcarved doll, with sugar in her blood—
Europe, the Caribbean, Africa;
baptised in sugar, named Angelica,
has built a tiny house in Demerara
sugar grains secured with sugarpaste,
each sculpted room a microscopic mirror
of its old self; and below stairs, she’s placed
a blind doll with kaleidoscopic taste,
who boils, bakes, moulds, pipes, chisels, spins and blows
sugar, her art, the only tongue she knows.
Agnès Agboton
Translated by Lawrence Schimel
Born in Benin, she is a multilingual author and storyteller now living in Catalonia, Spain. She has published two bilingual books of poetry in Gun (her mother tongue) and Spanish: Voz de las dos orillas (“Voice of the Two Shores”, 2010) and Canciones del poblado y del exilio (“Songs of Village and of Exile”, 2009) Her other titles include Más allá del mar de arena (“Beyond the Sea of Sand”, 2005) and Na Miton. La mujer en los cuentos y leyendas africanos (“Na Miton. Women in African stories and Legends”, 2004), plus books on African food and collections of African legends. She represented Benin at the Poetry Parnassus at the London 2012 Olympics. Her poems in English translation have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation and Wasafiri.
1.
Here, where time
seems to have stopped.
Here, where the land
is abandoned,
sacrificed daily
to useless memories
and heroic songs.
Here, where blood
seems fruitless.
Here, in the stillness
of the cemetery,
I’ve still found
the steady gaze
of crushed eyes,
I’ve listened to the words
of a stiffened tongue.
30.
Through their veins flows
night and morning
and in all their gestures
the dance is born.
I counted, one by one, their fingers
now far away,
I approach its skin of foam
and I saw that look
ignite in their eyes.
The dance is born, yes,
the dance is born.
I then saw how, in them,
two continents sprouted.
Their steps were white,
all their complaints were black,
those words.
The dance is born, yes,
the dance is born.
I now take refuge in their arms,
the new shoots,
with the sun at one extreme
and dark scent in these leaves
I curl around.
The dance is born, yes,
the dance is born.
Who will stop those rivers?
Who will channel that wind?
It is already an enormous flow
that lifts those bodies,
through all their veins flow
the nights and the mornings.
And they are a dance, yes,
they are a dance.
Omega
I am afraid that one day we might sink
into the sadness of a rainy afternoon
and our lives, now forever damp
from defeated and daily tears,
might never find
the strength with which we lift them today,
sadly,
steadfast in the search for a new dawn,
recreated from a word,
perhaps a sparkle.
(Always a small thing, never nothing.)
The sadness of a rainy afternoon
that sometimes invades your eyes;
and sometimes spills from your mouth
and from my own.
The sadness of a rainy afternoon
that binds our hearts
with sad (lulling)
ties of hopelessness and sleepiness.
The sadness of a rainy afternoon
on which we masturbated our minds
and our hearts.
NO.
Let us rise up again . . .,
there are other eyes in search of the hidden sun.
Other hands try to tear away
the clouds that cover it.
In other hearts
the weariness has been defeated.
NO.
I am tired, my love . . ., and I am afraid.
Ellah Wakatama Allfrey
Born in Zimbabwe and raised there and in the US, she has lived in England for more than 30 years. The founding Publishing Director of The Indigo Press, London, she has judged numerous international literary prizes including the Man Booker Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the David Cohen Prize. In 2016 she was Visiting Professor and Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and served as a Guest Master for the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation fellowship in Colombia. She is a former Deputy Editor of Granta (2009–13) and former Senior Editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House. She was series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of Africa39 and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction. She sits on the Advisory Council of Art for Amnesty, and the boards of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Jalada Collective (Kenya) and the Royal Literary Fund and is a patron of the 9Mobile Literature Prize. In 2011 she was awarded an OBE for services to the publishing industry.
Longchase
When I look online, I do not find my great-uncle Michael Kanerusine’s name on any of the websites my research brings up—not even those that claim “ninety-seven per cent accuracy”. I know he fought in the Second World War. That’s one fact. It could be a matter of confusion over his surname, I tell myself. As a people, we identify primarily by clan, totem and then father’s name. Perhaps the surname that has eventually become the “official” family name isn’t the one he enlisted under. It’s an imprecise thing, this English naming of Africans—seeking to determine equivalences in kinship patterns, to define what constitutes “family” and inheritance. It can never survive the translation from one culture to the other.
I am keen to find some verification of my great-uncle’s war record because my memories of his presence remain vivid from childhood and I realise, now that I want to pin down his story, there is no one from his generation that I can ask. Lucia, my grandmother and Michael’s older sister, died seven years ago and though we spent much time together during my visits to Zimbabwe, we always had so much else to talk about. So much to laugh about. And now, every time I speak with my mother about him, the story changes.
Here’s what I do know. Over a
million black African soldiers from the British Commonwealth served and fought in the Second World War and after. My great-uncle’s regiment, the Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR), was formed in 1940 with many of its troops recruited from the rural areas—leaving their homesteads and farms for battlefields in Europe, North Africa and East Asia. Some volunteered, some were conscripted, some went at the behest of their local chiefs. I know that in 1944–45 soldiers from the RAR were in Burma. Later, after the war, in 1951, I read, they fought in Egypt during the Suez Crisis. In 1956 they were deployed to Malaya.
One final fact: in April 1981, following Zimbabwe’s independence from colonial rule, the RAR was disbanded along with the other regiments of the Rhodesian armed services, replaced by the formation of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces.
I have always been fascinated by these soldiers. When I first lived in London thirty years ago, my boyfriend’s grandmother gifted us her flat in Sloane Square—a temporary home for our gap year after she had moved to a nursing home and was waiting for the flat to be sold. As I wandered this incredibly posh neighbourhood I kept seeing old men dressed in smart scarlet red coats with brass buttons and black trousers with a single red stripe piped along each outside seam. I asked about them. They were Chelsea Pensioners, retired soldiers who lived at the Royal Hospital Chelsea—a Christopher Wren building commissioned by Charles II and completed in 1629. The Royal Hospital offers a home for British Army veterans who are without family in their final years. Although I never quite drummed up the courage to speak to any of these old men, I would stare and then smile my most welcoming smile if they looked up and noticed me. I know now that some pensioners are women but the ones I remember seeing were all men. And they were all white. Where, I wondered then—as I still wonder now—were the black and brown veterans? What happened to them and were they as cared for, as recognised, as honoured?
New Daughters of Africa Page 35