New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  Possible root causes of fear: Her mother. Her mother’s religion. Heaven and hell. Being pumped with the idea that sex before marriage will take her straight to hell’s gates.

  A year later, she is back home in Ghana. Her mother has dragged her to an all-night service in a church the size of an airplane hangar. This church has seized her mother’s commonsense. This is the first time she’s been to church in over a year. The pastor’s voice is hoarse and he flails about, spinning like a Damba dancer. She finds it difficult to believe he’s sincere. Add to the mix the Mercedes sparkling outside the church, under its own special awning, and the young, yellow wife in blood red lipstick sitting in the front pew. He is preaching on fornication. Her mother is lifting her hands to the sky, shouting Amens, proud her daughter is still a virgin. She wonders why her mother has fallen for such a cliché, why her mother has become such a cliché. She wonders what conversations her mother will have with this pastor and with God when she loses her special pearl of virginity.

  She turns twenty-seven, a reasonable time to shed the special pearl, because she really isn’t sure what purpose it serves any more. A red stain of broken hymen on white cotton isn’t going to be paraded before a jury of old ladies, after all. If anything, it is keeping her away from love.

  On OkCupid, she meets Promise—a fellow African transplant, working in a rival pharmaceutical company (seems like destiny), apartment in Queens, a G-train ride away from her place. She swallows a shot of whiskey to unclench herself. Then another and another. The next day she’s sore, deflowered. She doesn’t remember if she cried or if she enjoyed it or if she bled. She wonders if she now bears a stamp that lets people know. Can people sniff these things? She can never go back to before. The thought is sobering.

  Like when she was seven, all is not OK down there. She walks into a women’s health clinic, not far from her one-bedroom apartment. The air reeks of antiseptic mixed with something foul like urine. This time, the speculum slides in. She feels its full presence, tries to squeeze it out, but it stays. This time, swabs are swiped. If you don’t hear back from us in a week or two, all’s clear, she’s told.

  The dreaded phone call: “We would like you to come back to the clinic.”

  She phones her best friend, choking on tears. She should have stayed whole, shouldn’t have slept with Promise, even if it was just once. It’s going to be a brush with death, she knows.

  It is an infection that is cleared with antibiotics. Most women catch it at one point or another. Even virgins get it. Promise breaks up with her after three dates. Dates that have taken weeks to schedule. Dates that have ended in disappointment, because he had to work the next day and wouldn’t come back to her apartment or invite her to his. She’d wanted the experience with no masks, no alcohol.

  “Also, how do I say this without sounding like a douche? It’s the virgin thing,” he says, as if he hasn’t already snatched it away from her.

  She cries on the train home.

  Her friends have been talking about a church they all go to, one with young people and preachers-who-get-it. She goes. She enjoys the music, the congregation is bright and shiny and youthful. Beautiful. She likes the message of being and doing good, and yet she doesn’t believe in heaven and hell any more, a life beyond here and now doesn’t scare her. She concludes she’s one of those people who isn’t wired to believe. On the day she decides once again to quit church, she meets a man from Panama on her way home.

  He is like the dress one wears to give girlfriends red-eyed envy. He charms, he dances like he is boneless. When he drinks, the charm melts away like butter on a hot day. He had started going to church to face his demons, but they are too much for even Jesus. He does not last long, but leaves her with an infection—this time, the kind that virgins don’t get. Thankfully, it is treatable.

  She adopts a new rule. The next person she lets into her body will have met her family and will have done the customary knocking rites, the traditional engagement, and a tasteful white wedding. He won’t get to touch her until the honeymoon.

  She fails at chastity.

  There is a one-night stand on Valentine’s Day with a ghost of a man; there are others that last a few months and fizzle out. She gives up on counting.

  Thoroughly desensitized, she goes for vagina screenings every year. She is careful, becomes an expert at beating infections, and begins to think what they say about immunity and children is true. To make them immune, they have to play in muck, swallow some germs.

  But now the gynecologist has unwrapped a condom, placed it around his transducer and inserted it into her body, waved it around like a wand. With his stale cigarette smell and loud jazz, he has kneaded her belly and knotted his brow. He has told her she has fibroids. His music is way too loud. She had liked that he played jazz music when she had first visited his clinic. Now, she wishes he would be more considerate to his patients.

  She’s never been broody. She’s never really thought about how many children she wants. She’s never really thought about her womb. Her vagina has been her preoccupation. She calls her mother.

  “Mine went away with menopause,” says her mother. “Most of your aunts have had them.”

  One even had a hysterectomy. She never married and lives in the Bronx. Over palmnut soup and fufu, Auntie says, “It’s the black woman’s curse. Fibroids are our unborn children.” Auntie licks the line of palm oil snaking down her wrist and continues. “A long time ago, we used to have children much earlier. The fibroids we get now are sending us a message that we’re being unnatural. Do the operation and then get pregnant as soon as you can.”

  Her belly is sliced open, scraped clean and sewn up again. When she comes to, her mother is hovering over her, lips moving non-stop. She shouts, “Praise Jesus! Praise Jesus!” Her mother tells her they took out forty fibroids.

  The orderly, when no one is around, asks if she wants to see them. She hesitates, then nods. He dashes out and returns with a metal pan full of meat. Some as tiny as beans. One as large as a mango. Forty. She can’t imagine what she’s done forty times to warrant forty growths in her womb. Forty unborn children.

  Jay Bernard

  A writer, film programmer and archivist from London, their work is multidisciplinary, critical, queer and rooted in archives. Recent works—inspired by the 1981 New Cross house fire, in which 13 young people died, and by archives held at the George Padmore Institute— include a short film, Something Said, and the multi-media performance work Surge: Side A, which won the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for new poetry. Their 2016 pamphlet, The Red and Yellow Nothing, a queer-techno-medieval misadventure, was previously shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. They were elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, along with 39 other writers under the age of 40.

  I resist the urge to destroy my own records by reflecting on archives, how I use them, and what they have meant to me

  1.

  Ask, then ask again

  Work alone

  Speak plainly

  Show your working

  Lucidity not obfuscation

  Deep black on plain white

  Write quickly, then edit

  It shouldn’t be expensive

  Who is looking at what from where

  Bring everything to the table

  Source as structure

  Be wrong

  Tell your truth, not theirs

  2.

  Archives—that sacred upward vowel sound, striving and reverent. Then we are brought back down to earth. What is lovely is usually, often, locked away. I am interested in the act of archiving, in the poetics of archives, but I am not interested in any vision—creative or political—that derives value from locking people out.

  3.

  I used to be a bit of a club kid. Went to Scala, Egg, Bootylicious, Other People’s Property, Twat Boutique, T Club, Bar Wotever. Suddenly it started to feel like I was in someone else’s domain. Other spaces, like First Out, which was once full of queer people e
very day of the week, disappeared. So did the Oak Bar, where myself and a friend had one of our first (incredibly awkward) encounters with the queer world, although we were too scared to go in. Candy Bar closed. So did the Glass Bar. Star Bar stopped being an especially queer establishment; when I walk past it now, I remember one night when myself and an old lover went in and had beers and were delighted to bask in the steely gaze of the lesbian behind the bar. Things come and go. Whole neighbourhoods, establishments, subcultures, identities.

  I used to be a bit of a psychogeographer. All criticisms considered, I used to like the term, the ideas, and made a zine for a short time called Psychogeography for the Modern Black Woman. I equated my gender with the city around me. I was not simply a woman, but a specific knot of places, perceptions, possibilities. It detailed my walks around London and mentioned the bookshops, squats and other spaces I used to go to—Silver Moon, Index, Kennington Books, New Beacon—locations that made me make sense. Only one of those, New Beacon, still exists.

  Isn’t that just what happens? Things disappear.

  4.

  Clearing my room, I find a magazine from 2013, a roundtable I participated in for the Black British issue of Feminist Review; myself and my interlocutor, Camel Gupta:

  J: I am regularly assumed to be trans. It’s not that I mind, but I wonder. The fact that I use “she” is as troubling to some queers as my chin hairs are to my parents. I once had someone ask when I intended to have chest surgery. Why does that happen? Why is it so often your ID is broken into three parts, so you’ve got this beginning bit where you’re clueless and then this middle bit where you’re on your way to something else.

  C: And then you reach the promised land of your true self.

  It’s such a strange sentence—“I am regularly assumed . . .” I go back through all the text we produced for this roundtable, all the bits that did not make the final cut. I wonder why I have not expressed all the things I felt back then, about gender, about wanting to own my masculinity, about binding, about feeling suspicious of the binary categories of man and woman, even though I was happy to take on the label and the politics. I question how honest I was being at the time, and I question how much I am revising now to make myself fit a particular narrative of always having known.

  I text my reflections to the third participant in the roundtable, Sita, who replies: “Zadie Smith has made a virtue out of changing her mind, I reckon the rest of us can too.”

  5.

  The other day I watched footage of myself at the hospital in Brighton. It was ten days after my chest surgery. I was lying on the bed and the surgeon came over and pulled the stitches out. What I was feeling in that moment was less an affirmation of my body or identity, more an affirmation of what was possible. I am not satisfied with or convinced by the notion that this latest phase in gender politics is the “last frontier” of civil rights in this country—a notion much beloved by the media.

  For one thing, there are intersex people and a multitude of other genders and orientations that barely get a look in. For another, we seem to be waging war against migrants—the criminalisation of movement has been accepted to the extent that we as a nation are happy to let thousands of people drown at sea, and accept that we must show our passports now when we go to work, get medical treatment, try to rent a house. You can move between genders—hooray—but you cannot move across borders. Once upon a time it was the other way around. Either way, there is no final frontier.

  You are not simply cis or trans. Whenever a binary is created, there will be people somewhere in the middle. For many years I identified as cis-gendered, because I thought that trans definitely meant surgery, hormones, dysphoria. I really understood something about trans people when I was about nineteen. I was on the 109 bus to Croydon, probably reading Pat Califia, and I said to myself, “You definitely have something in common with these people.” But what did that mean? Years of battling with the NHS? Taking hormones? Coming out again? My experience as a woman had not been miserable, it had simply been. I felt no desperation to be a man, but I had always felt more like a boy than anything else. Then I realised you could be trans and perfectly happy with being totally misaligned. That you could in fact make a virtue out of oscillating from one thing to another, of changing your mind. The point is not that gender is a fun game of Guess Who, in which you might be wearing a moustache or a beret, but that I am black and therefore have never been fully a part of what someone means when they say “woman”. And I have never cared to be.

  6.

  Archives exist as loci of queer identity in the absence of any respectable authority, also because so many of the other spaces have shut down. This requires a revision of the division between social and commercial and educational; as queer spaces of the past celebrated themselves, provided homes, romantic encounters, a sense of belonging, this new shift might be about finding spaces for reflection, spiritual growth, twinning of activism and education, and might re-orient the social figure of the queer person from hedonist to guardian of a more fully illuminated past, a more critical and loving present, some kind of hardy, compassionate, social fabric.

  7.

  I don’t know how much longer I will be here, I probably won’t have any children, I own nothing of any significant value. I am thirty. Maybe this new direction has come because I am—right on cue—beginning to fear death.

  8.

  I walk around New Cross—and London—with a sense of belonging that I do not feel anywhere else. I (often) feel myself to be English, of England, because I feel I have a very specific history here; I know where things used to be, I know the poems, I know the songs, I know who used to live where. I get a lot from imagining black queer people in the seventies, eighties, nineties on the same bus routes I travel now—having house parties in Loughborough Junction, Brixton, Streatham, Camberwell. I used to hang out at the Lambeth Women’s Centre (now taken over by a school) and read my poems to a room full of delightful queer people—feminists, community activists, librarians for tomorrow. Britain is black/queer Britain.

  9.

  I am wedded to the history of the New Cross Fire. I made a film about it, Something Said, in which I wrote back to Yvonne Ruddock, the young woman whose birthday it was, and who died that night. I read all the interviews, in particular the ones of people who were not at the party but who witnessed the incident. For the first time I really felt a piece of black British history and saw its effects and remnants all around me—in short, the first time I have been haunted.

  I sent an early version of the film to a friend who immediately responded: “You have put yourself in the story. Why?” I panicked. It was true. I had tried to tell the story from my position as a queer person looking back, but instead of expressing that notion of haunting, it just looked like me talking about my boobs in the same breath as thirteen dead children. I had a few weeks before I needed to turn the film in. I re-wrote the script that night.

  10.

  From A Stranger in the Archive, 2017, after the Grenfell fire:

  There is a mystery at the centre of both stories.

  The people who died were not rich enough, in the eyes of the state, to be consequential.

  The mystery is not how the fire started or why these people died.

  The mystery is why we always find ourselves in the same place, the same moment.

  A poet can’t deliver justice but they can ask a different kind of question.

  In the audience at the ICA, I’m watching films by Ngozi Onwurah; stunning films about what it was like to be black in the eighties: narratives of scrubbing her skin, dog shit through the letter box. A heated debate follows. Onwurah herself says over and over, things have not changed. Do I agree with that statement? One of the films, The Body Beautiful (1991) features Onwurah’s mother, who had a mastectomy. Bravely, she appears on camera naked, and talks about what it means to have a mixed-race child, what it means to desire the love of a black man. I doubt that my perspective was on her mind when she
was making that film, or the idea that someone like myself, nearly thirty years later, might be touched by it as the closest thing I have seen to the experience of black Britishness and the experience of losing (losing?) a breast uttered in the same breath.

  11.

  I suspect that one of the reasons I look to archives is that they have rules. To be broken, questioned, respected. These rules, these authority figures who are neither celebrities nor tyrants, might be the kind of authority we long for in this age of spiritual crisis.

  In queer society we face a deadening of our own community in the tragedy that is pinkwashing, horrific racism, misogyny and proud ignorance in the commercial gay scene, in the gleeful and unrelenting destruction of queer and lesbian spaces, in the pitiless and vile attack on trans people in the media (even as we are media fodder), in the baffling cisgendered rage being exhibited by otherwise insightful feminists, in the gusto with which opposing factions tear each other apart, in the fact that much of this plays out on corporate platforms we do not own, manipulated by silent, indifferent algorithms which do not operate in our interests.

  The irony is that this deadening might be remedied by the metaphorical liveness of the archives. I am now finding that this is one of the real sources of spiritual comfort I have. I never thought I would say those words and desire them: connection, groundedness, structured oneness with everything around you. A quiet place to be haunted.