New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  In the dark and the silence you wish you could vanish, at least crawl beneath the desk without her noticing and hide. But she barely seems conscious as she sits in the doorway, her lace like a pile of used tissues, a cloud.

  And that’s when it hits you. Your mother isn’t coming. Wherever she’s gone it’s a place without life. What life there was in her was choked out by hatred; whatever light in her eyes was the glint of that hate. And whom did she hate so? Her brother? Her mother? Your father? It doesn’t matter. They live. She is dead.

  This is what you’re left with: a life with these people. This place and these women. Comfort. Ruby. Khadijeh. Who—it suddenly occurs to you, with an odd kind of clarity, as you watch from the window—mustn’t be left to die, too.

  So you go to her, stumbling over the hem of the garment as you cross the Persian rug and she looks up, face smeared. The kohl make-up runs down her cheeks like black tears. You sit down beside her, laying your head in her lap.

  “Edem,” she whispers faintly.

  “Yes, Auntie.” You start to cry. A familiar sound, peculiar: the sound of your name. You put your arms around her waist. It is softer than you’d imagined it. You hold her very tightly, and she holds you as if for life. You wish there was something you could say, to comfort her. But what? In the peculiar hierarchy of African households the only rung lower than motherless child is childless mother.

  Lola Shoneyin

  A Nigerian poet and writer, she graduated from Ogun State University in 1995. She is the author of three books of poems—So All the Time I Was Sitting on an Egg (1998), Song of a Riverbird (2002) and For the Love of Flight (2010)—and a children’s book titled Mayowa and the Masquerades (2010), as well as her debut novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2011), which in the same year was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award and the Ken Saro Wiwa Prose Prize. She is the founder of Book Buzz Foundation—an NGO devoted to promoting literacy, creating reading spaces, and organising cultural events such as the Aké Arts and Book Festival and Kaduna Book and Arts Festival. She recently founded Ouida Books, a new publishing house for the adventurous reader. She lives in Lagos, Nigeria.

  How We Were

  (For Bade)

  Hot afternoon.

  You on the couch.

  Me tapping keys.

  You making music.

  Me pacing the room.

  You curling up with an ulcer.

  Me stroking your cheek.

  You saying how painful pain is.

  Me saying that would suck on a sticker.

  You shaking your head.

  Me lifting your chin.

  You looking up.

  You winning.

  Me getting the call.

  Me thinking what the fuck.

  Me calling your name.

  You lying there.

  You motionless.

  You mouth open.

  You mid-song.

  Me stroking your cheek.

  Me punching the wall.

  Me kicking myself.

  Me slapping the wheel.

  Me speaking at your wake.

  Me breaking down.

  Me weeping at your wake.

  Me swimming in memories.

  You dancing at ’Politan Vibes.

  You fluttering rainbow wings.

  You belting out Kidjo songs.

  You getting laid in New Orleans.

  Me loving you.

  Me losing you.

  Me losing.

  You.

  Falling

  I tell you of my darkness.

  And every time you ask: there’s more?

  I cannot see your hand that reaches for me

  when gloom outshines light.

  I say I am near the end.

  You watch me fret and fight the current.

  It is the madness, not the method

  that keeps me beneath the surface.

  I am accustomed to the futility

  of war against a water wall.

  You tell me you are here.

  You say I have to ride it.

  I imagine myself on a magic carpet,

  falling through the roof of my living room.

  No doorbells, no doors, just a pink post-it note

  to remind me that I am still here.

  Buni Yadi

  There will be no glory in this war, no victor,

  no worn, torn leaves in history books,

  no praise-song for homecoming kings,

  no applause for the cause,

  no clanging of swords,

  no song for the cymbals.

  When the North is nothing but a scrawl on a black board,

  and the East is eating the South,

  the West will pull out its teeth

  and hold blood in its mouth.

  Everyone will remember the days

  when we knew the shoemaker

  from the brush in hand,

  the hand in bush,

  the bush burning the hand at wrist.

  Everyone will remember

  when a school was painted with the blood

  of sixty-nine boys whose names we never call,

  Everyone will remember

  when virgins hanged themselves by their hymens,

  when three hundred girls slept with the snakes

  of Sambisa—forest of the forsaken.

  For God or for country,

  the only moral for these mortals is loss.

  In this lock-horn of cross and crescent,

  smiths in red loincloth widen the needle’s eye

  for the chalked camel

  on her dance to the riverbed.

  Zadie Smith

  Born in London to an English father and Jamaican mother (Yvonne Bailey-Smith), she published her first novel, White Teeth, aged 24 in the year 2000. The book went on to win a number of awards and prizes, including The Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book). It has been translated into more than 20 languages, was adapted for Channel 4 television in 2002, and in 2018 became a stage play, premiering at the Kiln Theatre. She is also the author of The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005), Changing My Mind (2009), The Embassy of Cambodia (2013), NW (2012), Swing Time (2016) and a 2018 collection of essays, Feel Free. She has been a tenured Professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University since 2010. She made the following speech when receiving the Langston Hughes Medal in November 2017.

  Speech for Langston

  I am so moved to be here this evening that I knew I couldn’t trust myself to speak off the cuff, so I’ve written it down. If you’ll indulge me I want to tell you two anecdotes that I hope will explain what this prize means to me.

  I came to the States about ten years ago. It was before my daughter was in school so I used to come for six months to New York to teach and then back to London again. This one time, I got off a plane at Heathrow very early in the morning, headed to Willesden, and reaching our house, found it dusty, cold and silent—as houses are liable to be if you leave them long enough. I put on the heating and the lights and the radio and started tidying up. On the radio I could hear four older white gentlemen having a conversation. They sounded pretty learned, like they were experts in something or another. And they were having a learned conversation about who gets to be British—who, in the final analysis, is really British. They spent a long time discussing this question: I’d filled the dishwasher, done a wash of towels and bed linen, and gone through all the unopened mail before they were done. But as I passed a cloth over my kitchen table they finally reached their learned conclusion. Turned out, you were only truly British if all four of your great-grandparents were born in Britain. That was their expert view. And I sat down, exhausted, and just started to laugh. It was sort of a crazy laugh—a mixture of laughter and tears, and if you’d heard it you probably would have thought it sounded unhinged. I sat the
re in my old neighborhood, in my new-ish house, and thought of all those years I’d spent as a child in England trying to prove that I was both Black and British; that I knew their plays and poems and history, that I could get into the finest institutions of education they had to offer, that I could perhaps even add a few words to the history of their literature—that I, too, was England. But something turned in me that morning and I realized I just didn’t care anymore. The whole thing seemed totally absurd. The British could argue amongst themselves about who was or wasn’t British but it just didn’t matter to me any longer whether or not they included me in their narrow, claustrophobic self-definitions. And for the first time in a long time I felt free.

  Six months later I flew back to New York, and one of the first things I did was visit that old Barnes and Noble on Sixth Avenue that’s been closed now for about five years as no one can afford to pay the rent on that space, not even Barnes and Noble. Anyway, I was browsing in there, in the African-American corner of the store, when I spotted a book of mine, On Beauty, sitting snug in that corner, after Ms Morrison but before Ms Walker. And I started to laugh-cry again. I thought: well look at this. In England, they’re still trying to decide if a person like me is really English at all. Meanwhile, over here in New York, I’ve been adopted! I’m in the wrong part of the bookstore, sitting alongside writers who have meant so much to me, and even though everybody probably knows it’s not quite right, I’m still here on this shelf, a kissing cousin, an interloper, an admirer from across the sea, and nobody’s demanding to see my passport, and no-one cares where my goddamn great-grandfather came from. Because in that corner of the bookstore, American wasn’t the operative word. African was. That’s also why, when I came to America, for the first time I heard people call me sister in the street, sister in the supermarket, sister in the airport or the bar. I had entered a broader consciousness in which national borders had little meaning. I was part of a historical and geographic diaspora that has penetrated every corner of this globe, and which no single passport can contain or express.

  Receiving this prize makes me want to laugh-cry. With pride and amazement. I don’t know what I am doing on a list of names that includes James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott and Octavia Butler, but I am so grateful to find myself in their company. Growing up in England, in the eighties, these were some of the writers my mother gave me, to remind me that no country has the power to decide whether or not it will “tolerate” a black child or decide on her true identity, for the black child’s inheritance is borderless and enormous and needs no such external authentication. Nor is it a monolith. At the root of blackness lies Africa, but from that rich soil spreads innumerable branches, each with its own character, own style, own struggles and victories. A diaspora is always by definition E pluribus unum, and that which spread from Africa is uniquely flexible, able to fit into its oneness a dazzling plurality while at the same time recognizing a sibling relation across time and space. My sister. My brother.

  Despite all contrasts of history and nation Langston Hughes is also my brother. He was a mixed-up sort of person, of the kind I can relate to. He had black ancestry and white ancestry, native American ancestry and Jewish ancestry, he had men in his life and women, he was a communist and a capitalist, he was a poet and a playwright and a novelist, a believer in the uptown working man, and a lover of downtown intellectuals. He was always conflicted. He could write of the “eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul” and he could also write: “I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everyone knows—except us—that all Negroes have rhythm, so they elected me class poet.” He expressed these beautiful conflicts in everything he wrote. Are we truly a people of rhythm? Or is all that a myth? Are we a people? Are middle-class negroes still negroes? What does it even mean to be a negro? These are the kinds of questions he asked himself, and he was beautifully inconsistent in his answers, being a poet and not a politician. But the thing I really love about Langston is his insistence, from the very start, that black lives not only matter but are beautiful, ugly, sad, happy, angry, joyful, and finally undefinable because so complex and so various, just as white lives are understood to be. That’s knowledge we need right now. In our benighted present it feels natural and necessary to reach back into the past for guidance. Jimmy Baldwin reminds us how to fight the threat we’re facing. Langston reminds us what we’re fighting for. The freedom to be ourselves, in all our wonderful variety. Langston put his arms around the whole diaspora, no matter how distant or mongrel, no matter how unlike we all may be in history or culture, and in this way he inspired diaspora artists of every subsequent generation and all around the world. In Langston’s worldview black sibling-hood stretched the earth. And I am so thankful that tonight it has stretched far enough to include a Black-British woman like me, a freckle-faced woman like me, a mixed-marriage woman like me, a green-card holder like me, an immigrant like me, a second-generation Jamaican like me, a distant but not forgotten daughter of Africa, like me. Thank you.

  Attillah Springer

  Born in Trinidad, she describes herself as “a writer and jouvayist”. She has a longstanding interest in social justice movements and has organised and taken part in events around climate change, women’s rights and sustainability in Trinidad, England, Iceland and India since 2005, using Carnival and other indigenous festival arts as forms of protest or awareness building. She writes on culture and memory and has presented papers and written commissioned work on traditional mas, resistance and African spirituality. She is also a Director of Idakeda Group, a collective of women in her family creating cultural interventions for social change especially among women and youth in Trinidad and Tobago.

  Castle in the Sand

  25 May 2013

  At a bend in the road, you turn right at the University of Cape Coast and the sight of the sea is startling. Not just for the sun shining silver on its surface. The row of coconut trees makes me feel like I’ve fallen asleep and woken up back in Trinidad, on the road to Manzanilla. And I remember all those times I have stood on the other side of the Atlantic, watching the same sun shining silver on the sea’s surface imagining what the coast in Africa looked like.

  But I am on West African soil, in Ghana and there is a lump in my throat and a sense of dread building in my ears. Elmina is a pleasant enough fishing village. Some of the inhabitants are light-skinned, a leave over legacy from 400 years of ownership of Elmina Castle by the Dutch, the Portuguese and finally the English. They say they came here first for gold. But as we enter the Castle and begin the tour our guide says they were always on a mission to trade in humans.

  We go down into the dungeons where the stench of centuries of human decay is still palpable. We go down into the belly of the castle to meet the noise of ancestors screaming out in agony. The roar of the sea is distant as is the sun’s light. He shows us where the Governor would stand and select women captives to rape. He shows us the death dungeon with the skull and crossbones over the door where no-one came out alive. By the time we get to the Door of No Return I am plotting ways to escape. The doorways are so very narrow, the final insult for those who survive the horrendous conditions to make the crossing is that you have to bend, practically crawl into the last dungeon.

  We retrace the steps of millions of people whose names we do not know. Who died here covered in the filth of others. Who suffered every possible indignity known to humankind to make others wealthy. My mother, Eintou, gives me guinea pepper and white rum to stabilise my Ori. I hold the seeds and liquid in my mouth, focusing on the heat to counter the feeling that my head is about to explode.

  To those who say it is time to forget, I say that the stench of 400 years of human waste is unforgettable. To those who say black people should get over it, I say we need more than ever now to understand that enslavement is real and present and as much a threat now as it was 170 years ago
. Some of us choose enslavement now. To material things. And people. And the god of someone else’s ancestors. And the drivel of politicians. And looking like someone else.

  We have the freedom to choose these prisons. Far from Elmina. Far from the plantations. Far from the stinking, fetid dungeons and ships, we choose to be shackled to death and decay. It is history, but it still lives. The virulent strain of capitalism that runs the world right now will not think twice about reintroducing chattel slavery. And they might not ship us across the Atlantic anymore. But some of us don’t mind the cheap labour that makes our laptops. The sweat shops that make our clothes.

  Some of us don’t see the connection between the material possessions that we crave that keep other people in grinding poverty. Elmina is Elmina. Elmina is also a clothing factory in Bangladesh that collapses under the weight of its own greed. Elmina is a mine in South Africa where police officers shoot to kill when the miners demand better wages and working conditions. Elmina is the scorn poured on trafficked women from South America in a police-run whorehouse in Trinidad.

  Elmina lives and breathes and laughs in our faces. The dungeons are still full of the stench of our complicity in the enslavement of others for our benefit. I flee from the stench and the darkness. I run from the Door of No Return, hoping to never have to be there again. In that hot, dark place. Bent and broken.

  With my modern mind that knows only this version of freedom I wonder whether I would have survived this place in that time. Whether I would have chosen death rather than face the uncertainty of the dungeons, the crossing, the plantation. Survival is a mark of defiance. I feel another surge of pride that I belong to them. They must have had serious belly. They must have been the bad-minded ones. I wonder if they didn’t long to join the sea’s percussion. Their bones the rhythm section for the waves’ endless bass.