Eighty claims its toll, she pays with her black hair
Her change is grey—I stroke it—feather-soft between my fingers
Her earth-red scalp yields tender to my touch
I scratch it to her purring
Strand by strand I will her to stay with us from grey to silver-white
Leave us not yet
For still I clutch the strings of your apron
Electric-blue—embroidered with flowers, veiled in white lace
Bought in Mexico, or was it Holland?
I hold in memory to its ribbon
Follow your ample hips swaying in the kitchen
Fleshy and alive as your scones on the rise baking in the oven
Concocted from milk gone sour
You have made something edible of me
I sing you your favourite: “Ave Maria”
“Beautiful,” you coo
From the dungeons of political exile you bring forth only goodness
You are Ghana sunshine in a frigid world
The unfamiliar cold made you sniff
But that did not stop you
Frosty foreign winters freezing soil rigid did not stop you
Bunions aching in feet of ice
Did not stop you planting a garden from day to dark
Seeded in pitch-blackness in a once rubble-d yard
In a Cotswold village in Oxfordshire, England
You made vibrant flowers scream full bloom
Evergreen trees, we as children challenged with our height
Now reach tall as houses
Fruit-trees spread branches so deliciously laden
Strangers trespass your garden to witness how you sprinkled nature
And commanded it to grow
Never too exhausted to water those you love, I am cultivated by your sweat
Drop by drop you formed my core
I drank holy secrets from the umbilical cord from which you fed me.
In Heaven I will remember all mysteries and find you
You will be my first knock-knocking on a door
I will know your house by the exhilarating scent of clean washing hanging on the line
For like fragrance of frankincense and myrrh clinging beneath your skin
Freshness has followed you from country to country, house to house
I will know you, Mama
From the sweet sound of your ever-singing praise songs
To the tufts of mud falling from your Dutch clogs in which you gardened
To the click-click of your black-lacquered walking-stick
I will know you
Your health restored—your cane no longer necessary for balance
You will use it to beat-beat rhythm on the streets “paved with gold”
When you march to witness Jesus pull me home
I will know you
Even if your two wedding rings have fallen off
The one Papa took you with
And the one you took off his dead finger to wear until death no longer parts you
Even without those worn bands of gold looping loose below your shrunken knuckle
I will know you
For I cherish you too much not to know you
I am branded by every firm press of your iron
Your body bearing down to make straight the untidy creases of my life
Papa’s clean fresh-pressed pyjamas warming nightly in the airing-cupboard
Bore testimony of your diligence
He will have waited thirty-forty years and more for your arrival
But I am persuaded that seeing the need of us his children
And your children’s children
He will be glad you stayed to steady us
He always rested assured
You would look after us
With all your mind
With all your heart
With all your soul
With all your flesh
Even your bones bent on our behalf
Lips, to lips, continent to continent,
They speak of you the same
“Dignified” “Elegant” “Wise” “Gracious”
Grace be unto you, Mama
You are loved
I know you
From the beginning of time
You are love
Everlasting
I will know you
Forever . . .
Juanita Cox
Born in Nigeria to a Ghanaian mother and English father, she moved to the UK in 1980 and worked for many years as a personal assistant before attaining a BA in Caribbean Studies with Mass Communications from the London Metropolitan University. Her interest in the Caribbean culminated in a PhD on the novels of Guyanese author Edgar Mittelholzer. She is editor of Creole Chips and Other Writings (2018) and has contributed poems to a collection on black womanhood called Songs of Yemaya (2015). The poems here were mostly written during 2014–15 while she was living between a coconut estate in the Pomeroon and a residency in Georgetown, Guyana. She currently lives in London and is co-founder/producer of Guyana SPEAKS (UK), a monthly forum that offers invited speakers to share their passion for all things Guyanese.
Guyana Poems
Revolution Lovers
Female frigates ride rising warm currents.
Soar in an arrow of Ms against
Dour dulled-skies. Heads, beaks, bellies and
Breasts powdered white, turn eyes; give accent
To black plumed frocks, and long forked-tails that trail
Magnificent wings like kites in Guyana come
Easter-time.
And a kiskadee freshens up for her partner:
Bathing only in the best pool, she swoops low,
Quick splash-tousle of feathers, she swoops out,
Perches on the greyish-brown back of a poolside
Chair, polishes her beak against the hardened
Plastic until it gleams; sends out a high-pitched
Screech like a straight-tubed saxophone fine-
Tuning itself for practice at the Sea Wall bandstand.
Her pretty feet, hint of waffle-brown, pad along
Terracotta brick-edge. Two glasses of coconut
Water, two straws, two dainty hands and I know
She’s dreaming bottles. High walls of painted glass,
Vivid red, maybe. Like her toenails.
And swirls of gold, maybe. Like her hair.
She’s a beacon of life, she’s his Haitian muse,
His revolution lover.
Stabroek Spring Tide
The view from the Sea Wall,
Yesterday,
Barren endless flat expanse
Of cracked mud plates, deflated
Lavender-pink sails:
Dying men-of-war, purple tentacles
Unsprung by noon.
Tonight silted brown,
The pullulating sea slashes
Against Georgetown’s defences,
Lashes over. Passersby
And the days full of bravado,
Drenched.
Wombs of turbulent bracing
Air are strong with scent of salt,
Siphonophores, fish and crustacea.
Mosquitoes are held at bay.
In the blank of night, a plastic bag
Flaps in frantic frip-fret, frip-piti-he,
Frip-fret-frip-piti-he. Rapt crapaud
Sing in high-pitched chirrup
’longside the slap-slash of now
Emboldened sea
The new moon, in occult syzygy, smiles sparingly,
A fishing man ties nylon string and hook ’round chicken’s head.
Milk white egrets huddle like blossom in nearby trees,
Filigree plumes blowing like delicate clouds on the move.
Hungry rice-eaters rest their back against pebble-dashed wall,
And find warmth.
All are braced in buoyant expectation.
All know what dem boys say:
“Moon ah run till daylight ketch am”.
Akawini Nights
On those nights when the moon reveals
nothing but a thin crocked smile and my eyes
(open or closed) see nothing but a sea of
blackness, the cool sheets of my bed
tip me gently into the cooling black waters
of the Akawini creek and as I float downward
little friendly fish nip at my skin.
And wata getting cold like crab dog’s nose.
“Wata wata, yuh guh yuh wata here.”
“Berbice?” “West Coas’, West Coas’!”
“Come buy yuh no scale fish, here.
One fuh hundred dolla.”
The ungodly darkness delights.
Wata running over my naked skin
an’ I sinkin’ deeper. Legs
entangle with slippery
reeds and lotus flower.
Wata Mamma asks:
“Is wha’ yuh doin’? Come
Le’ me comb yuh hair.”
A black beetle crashes into the side of my face.
Jolts me awake.
My body
drenched by the (s)welter of the night,
an’ I itchin’ bad.
Mr Loverman tightens his grasp,
his long arms protective. Nothing disturbs his sleep.
I sigh. He snores.
Gently.
Along the Sea Wall
The sun shafts the shore
Parched tongues of cracked-clay
Plead in sibilant whisper:
“Lil’ moisture nah . . . Lil’ moisture nah . . .”
In cruel tease the ocean tosses a wave
And a shoal of silver fish that flail in the heat of living
As the sea with sleight of magician’s hand
Leaves them stranded.
While the Fire in Kitty Rages
Early morning grey
A parakeet calls its tropical song,
A London bus thunders over cracked
Asphalt and sends shivers down the spine of a house
While the fire in Kitty rages.
A tired road separates Fat Boy in boxers
From the licks of yellow that laugh at
Black night and set five wooden homes howling.
He holds his hose flaccid:
Its mouth facing hard ground,
Dribbles.
Devastated,
A young woman hugs harried
Belongings, her wet tears dry
Stains on burnt wooden bones
Collapsing. In the warm, under velvet red blanket
Sipping hot coffee from a mug
Tight curls twist into helpless plaits,
Nausea seeps through my body.
How to comprehend the incongruent
Comfort of a cat curled by waking feet,
The folded lip of a long list of shopping
When a parakeet calls its tropical song
While the fire in Kitty rages.
Nana-Ama Danquah
A native of Ghana, she is the author of the acclaimed 1998 memoir Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman’s Journey Through Depression, and the editor of the anthologies Becoming American (2000), Shaking the Tree: A Collection of New Fiction and Memoir by Black Women (2003), and The Black Body (2009). She has taught and lectured at many notable institutions, among them the University of Ghana and Antioch College, and has written for publications including the Washington Post, the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, Allure, Essence, the Africa Report, the Daily Graphic and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She divides her time between Accra, Ghana and the Coachella Valley in Southern California.
Saying Goodbye to Mary Danquah
It is not a balanced equation if all languages must come to English to mean something.
— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
“Nana-Ama!” my mother called out. “Come meet one of your cousins.”
We were in Accra, at a family gathering—a wedding or funeral or naming ceremony, I can’t say which; they all blur into what, essentially, seems like the same memory of delicious platters of food and an endless array of new kinfolk whose names and exact relationship to me I no longer even try to keep track of. Except this time. This time would be different. This introduction would leave me speechless.
I went and stood beside my mother. She placed a hand on my back, just below my right shoulder. “Nana-Ama,” she said, almost giddily, “this is Mary Danquah. And Mary, this is Nana-Ama.”
I was instantly confused, thrust into what felt like an alternate reality. I blinked slowly, allowing my lids to stay down for a moment or two longer than usual, then I looked at my “new” cousin. For a moment, I half-expected to see my own face staring back.
“I’m sorry . . . um . . . did you . . . what . . . um . . . Mary Danquah?” I mumbled, unable to decide which of my many questions to ask first.
She nodded, said hello.
“That’s my name, too,” I blurted, drowning in the awkwardness of the moment. Not once in my forty-something years had I ever met another Mary Danquah.
* * *
In 1973, at the age of six, I emigrated to the United States of America to be with my mother, who had been living there for three years, and my father, who had only recently arrived. One of the many changes that came with living in a new country was the acquisition of a new name. Even though in private, and in the company of other Africans, my parents continued to call me Nana-Ama—my traditional, cultural name—when introducing me to anyone else, they used my Christian name, Mildred. I was not used to being called Mildred.
The practice of conferring Christian, or English, names on African children was introduced by missionaries from the Western world who came to what they considered the Dark Continent for the purpose of religious indoctrination. In many cases, children were required to have Christian names in order to register and attend classes in the missionary-run schools. Usually that meant balancing an existence of duality—using one name when operating within the colonial system and using another when operating within one’s native culture.
Mildred was as far removed from my reality as anything could be. I was being called a foreign name in a foreign country by foreign people. It was ill-fitting, and I wore it uncomfortably, resentfully, woefully. It was like sharing a body with a complete stranger. Mildred was an old white woman in Hampstead who enjoyed a proper fry-up—baked beans, tomatoes, blood pudding, triangles of heavily buttered toast—not a Ghanaian girl transplanted to Takoma Park, Maryland, who craved aponkyenkrakra with fufu.
Americans tend to be lazy-tongued, preferring brevity over all else, including beauty. They tend toward names that are familiar and monosyllabic: Sam instead of Samantha, Beth not Elizabeth, Hank for Henry, and Tim not Timothy. Many immigrants to America adopt English names or Anglicize their own. Itzak is transformed to Isaac, Ekaterina to Kate. Chang Kong-Sang becomes Jackie Chan. I didn’t want Nana-Ama to become anything else. I wanted to remain who I was, who I’d always been. That, unfortunately, wasn’t a viable option.
The children I went to school with weren’t just mean, they were hateful. They felt as certain of their superiority as Americans as they did of my supposed inferiority as an African. And they never let me forget it. I was teased mercilessly, called a monkey, an “African booty-scratcher,” asked if I had slept in trees back home, and told on a regular basis to “go back to Africa.” Imagine if in the midst of all that, I’d asked my terrorizers to call me Nana-Ama!
* * *
It never occurred to me that I could change my name until one of my classmates mentioned something about looking forward to marriage in adulthood in order to drop a surname she disliked. That’s when the idea of finding a name to replace Mildred took hold and I began exploring possibilities for reinvention.
The lists I made were ordered alphabetically. Beginning with “A”, I jotted down names I thought acceptable, thought I could tolerate, perhaps even learn to like. I liste
ned to their rhythms, the particular cadence people used when saying them. I turned each letter over and around in my mouth, letting my tongue glide over the smooth edges of its vowels. I tried to avoid names with sharp, hard consonants, and names that were an obvious magnet for bullies.
The first name I fell in love with was Amanda. I heard it one day while watching television. A father, square-jawed and towering, had been teased by his daughter, a raven-haired girl with Shirley Temple-style curls. Afterwards, he said, “Oh, Amanda,” through an exaggerated smile, then used his fingers to softly brush the girl’s bangs from her forehead. There was such tenderness in that scene. We had an Amanda in our school whom everyone liked. She wasn’t in my class, but during recess, when we were all outside, I watched the other kids speak to her, their voices carrying the sound of each syllable until it started turning into song.
I’d often pretend that those were scenes from my life, that the father in the program was talking to me, gently patting my afro-puffs; that my imaginary circle of friends was singing my name in perfect harmony, as though we were in a musical. There were so many things about that name, Amanda, that reminded me of my own name, the one I’d quite unceremoniously been stripped of. Rhythmically, they are the same: ah-MAN-dah and nah-NAH-mah. They have the same three-syllable beat and, with the exception of “d”, all of the letters in Amanda are also in Nana-Ama. I think that’s why I didn’t, in the end, choose Amanda. I didn’t want to be called a name that would forever remind of me of my original name.
Next were the names that began with “z” which, perhaps because it’s the last letter in the alphabet, seems to throw a shade of mystery onto everything in which it appears. It wasn’t hard to envision myself as a Zelda, Zoe, Zora or even Zeva. Ah, but those names commanded attention; they were bold, the exact opposite of what I was convinced I needed: an ordinary name that would blend in, bring an end to the teasing and make the pain of being me—heavily accented me, dark-skinned black girl me, African me—miraculously disappear.
Eventually, I just returned to my own given names. You see, I had not just one but two Christian names. In addition to Mildred, there was also an English middle name: Mary.
The name felt too deeply rooted in religion for someone such as I, who has always entertained doubt. Nevertheless, I changed the spelling to Meri to make it uniquely my own. For years, that name served me well; it enabled me to move through American society without the additional scrutiny and xenophobia that comes with having a name that’s “different”, “funny”, “difficult to pronounce”, a name that announces one’s origins.
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