I nodded.
—And your people, where are they from?
—My people?
—Yes, your parents.
—Aren’t we all from the same place, I said, still smiling. You, me, everyone in this country, everyone around the world, aren’t we all from the same place?
He hadn’t replied; he’d merely given me a look that suggested I was nowhere as intelligent as I thought I was. I realized then that I was never going to have him as a client. Our meeting hadn’t gone long before his phone rang and he said he needed to leave. What was I to do? Let him tell me where I was from? For the sake of a commission? If Papa were sitting in my place, Papa would have told this man all about his ancestral village in Cameroon, the place he knew he was from. He would have told this man about his ancestors whose blood flowed in his veins. He would have spoken about the music of his people, and their food, and the dresses the women wore for celebrations. I’d never been able to claim any of that the same way.
—Papa, I said, you were right when you told us that this country would never be your country.
—It’ll never be mine, he said, but it’s yours. You have every right to it.
—I’m sorry, Papa. I’m tired, I’m confused; this conversation is going in a very strange direction. What is it you want? This is not your country, but you want to be buried here?
—I want to remain here with you and your sister. I have nothing left for me in Cameroon.
—There’s nothing left for any of us in Cameroon, Papa. Except Mama’s grave. And the graves of Mammi and Big Papa. Are you telling me you do not want to be buried next to them?
—Please do not try to shame me. I do not need any of that.
—I’m not trying to shame you! When Mama died we travelled for three days and drove on that horrible road so we could bury her in the village of your birth. And I’ll do the same for you, because if there’s one thing you’ve told me over and over it’s that a man should be buried in his village, among his people—
—I go to your mother’s grave every night. I sit there and tell her goodnight before I close my eyes. Every single night I do that.
He sniffed, and for a few seconds he said nothing.
I remained silent too, imagining him sitting alone on his bed, lights turned off, talking to the air, hoping that somehow his words would fly over bodies of water and hills and plains and valleys and arrive at Mama’s grave. None of us had been to the grave since we buried her ten years ago. None of us had visited Cameroon since then.
—I promise you, Papa, I’ll take you back home and bury you right next to Mama. If you’re saying this to me because you don’t want me to go through all this for you—
—I’m saying it because it’s what I want. I want you to bury me right here in Brooklyn.
—You’re telling me you want to be buried next to strangers when there’s a place all set for you right between your wife and your mother?
—Yes, I’m telling you that you and your sister are all I have left. And until the day you both get married and have children, and even after then, I don’t want you to be without me. Your mother is all the way in the village. I don’t want to leave you here by yourselves, in another man’s country.
Nadifa Mohamed
Born in Somalia, she studied history and politics at St Hilda’s College, Oxford University. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy (2010), won the Betty Trask Prize, was longlisted for the Orange Prize, and shortlisted for The Guardian First Book Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award. In 2013 she was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and in 2014 was on the Africa 39 list of significant African writers aged under 40. Her second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls (2013), won a Somerset Maugham Prize and the Prix Albert Bernard, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She contributed to the anthology Reader, I Married Him (2016, celebrating the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth), and writes regularly for The Guardian, the New York Times, Lithub, and Freeman’s. In 2018 she was elected to the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded a Literary Arts Fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation. Here she makes a rare outing as a poet.
A lime jewel
A little girl,
a gold-wrapped
bonbon damp in
her cherry-skinned fist,
the mellow swirl
of another, whirling
in her mouth.
Lime.
Mango.
Banana.
Papaya.
The fruit of
the black soil
caught in a jewel of sugar.
Beneath her powdered feet,
rubble,
beneath the rubble,
pitted tarmac,
asleep beneath the tarmac,
black Jacobins.
She sucks,
They dream,
She appraises,
They dream,
She weeps,
They dream.
She tints the world with the lime of her bonbon.
Bitter. Sweet.
Wasteland melting into dreamland,
Cold, crystalline and curiously lit.
The light of Haiti,
once filtered
by palm fronds,
then cutlassed
by cane,
is now caught tight
in a lime jewel.
A symphony of blood
gushes in her,
her skin is the shroud
of saints,
dreams are breathed out of the earth,
and into her,
Cold, crystalline and curiously lit.
The symphony
You: Will you forget me?
Me: I will never forget you.
You: Do you remember the sweetness of my milk?
Me: Like the taste of my blood.
You: Can you feel the nape of my neck?
Me: It is hot to the touch.
You: Do you remember my eyes?
Me: I see the world through them.
You: You carry my soul.
Me: It is a burden.
You: Cast it off.
Me: Then I will be free, lost, unmoored.
You: Sing to raise the dead and give life to the living. Nufyahay orodoo arligi qaboo, halkii aad ku ogeyd ka soo eeg.
Me: I have lost your language.
You: It is in your footsteps, in the click of your fingers, in your howl of pain.
Me: I can howl no more.
You: Then sing.
Natalia Molebatsi
Born in the township of Tembisa, near Johannesburg in South Africa, she is a poet, singer and cultural worker. She is the editor of We Are: A Poetry Anthology (2008), and author of Sardo Dance (2009) and Elephant Woman Song (2017). Her poetry and music CDs include Natalia Molebatsi & the Soul Making and Come as You Are: Poems for Four Strings. Her academic writing is included in, among other journals, Scrutiny2, Rhodes Journalism Review and Muziki.
a mending season
for miriam tlali
11.11.33—24.02.17
you are a song
singing in the deepest
voice of my people
a lullaby cusping tears
an amandla song
to every child of the storm
someone said that you
are the wind beneath
the broken wing of my people
another one said
that women like you
are the mending season of our aching
women like you give and give and give
their last breath to ignite fires called revolution
even when they force-fed you the rules of silence
you fought for your story to be told
in the season of your voice and inside your body
reside the melodies of your people
you with an uncontainable wail
that grew louder and larger
than the tight grip of oppression
with words that forced open
the doors of a world that was never
and will never be ready for our kind
it’s time now for moon to night you
with your secret conversations
and moments of endearment
the same moon that will welcome you
on an orbit of black magic
woman wonderments
you will let this world know
that you loved her more
than she loved you
how do i thank you for your pain?
your banned and jailed
and unacknowledged dreams?
Your dreams are gifts to my bag of memories
through which i will craft songs
for tomorrow’s healing
the healer
for sibongile khumalo and the song inside her voice
when the world burns she is cooling water
a breath of life and light this woman
a gift from her people to ours
when the cows are crying
and the children
and the dogs too
i close my eyes
to see her sound move
an entire world of oceans and bones
an affirmation that god lives here
in undertones and vibrations
wiping the heavy tears of this earth
the gods live here
inside the vein of this music
Melody
for fatima meer
12.08.28—12.03.10
there are memories of love and struggle
falling and flying off silent walls
you lifted silent things into screams
made them remember
marked them in place as
reference as lineage
hid colour and brush
in spaces of private touch and longing
rolled them up and smuggled them
in and out of bodies
these words are just a pact
to evoke your name and spirit
as a work of an open heart
another way of recollecting you
as a melody and a story of ours
Aja Monet
An internationally established American poet of Cuban-Jamaican descent, she was the youngest individual to win the legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title, recognised for combining her spellbinding voice and powerful imagery on stage. She was a featured speaker at the Women’s March on Washington, DC, in 2017 where she read the title poem of her book My Mother Was A Freedom Fighter. In 2018, the book was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry. Her other collections include Inner-City Chants & Cyborg Cyphers (2015), The Black Unicorn Sings (2015), and a collaboration with poet/musician Saul Williams, Chorus: a literary mixtape. She currently lives in Little Haiti, Miami where she is co-founder of Smoke Signals Studio and dedicates her time to merging arts and culture with community organising through her work with the Dream Defenders and the Community Justice Project.
hexes
and there was a reckoning
for all the harm
and for all the evil eyes
and our strength was cute until it wasn’t
and we were weak until we weren’t
and your longing will be long
and your days will be numbered
and we are counting
on the stems who had their petals taken
in this spell for flowers
on the busted lips
and bruised cheeks
and there was loss
and our smiles will terrify you
because we will be laughing
and we will be cruel
and there will be no remorse
and your children will be ours
and we will make new ways without you
and you will miss who you could’ve been
admit you were never intent on loving
anyone but yourself
and sacrifice is the ego’s kryptonite
and your heart is a tomb
mummified corpses
where we, are only body parts
and the thighs will haunt you
and the breasts will mock you
and the asses will shit wherever you lay
and the fists will find you
on street corners, in the alleys
or offices
in a titty bar or atop a lover
or below one
erotic and afraid
every where there will be a fist
and your knees will buckle
and there was a curse
some manner of sorcery
stanzas upon stanzas of stories
and we will feed you morsels
of your own medicine
pages and pages of feeds
and the pharmaceutical industry will go broke
and the doctors will all become witches
enter the roots of plants, sayings, and sorts of rituals
and banks will go bankrupt
values of play, a fair negotiation between gifts
and land will be unowned
where the mountains meet man
and hurricanes demolish your safety
and police will wither in confinement
with no commissary, mad sirens looped
fidgeting in the corridors of time
and developers will lose their hair and teeth
and supreme court will drown in menstrual blood
pages and pages of blood
and we are the book of revelations
and the end is near.
and this is where you pray
and this is where your god doesn’t answer
and this god don’t take bribes
unless
of course you repent
except repenting doesn’t reverse nature
it cleanses
and only love
only love
only
love will get you through.
what riots true
if we don’t talk about the moments
we fought back
the efforts to resist,
we will forever go down in history
as being complacent with our oppression
and therein complicit in the oppression of others
tell the stories of those who fought back and why
what compels a person
to anger
to radical love
they’ll tell you militancy is
a story of soldiers intended to kill
and not of lovers intent on living
nor of the grass that uproots concrete pavement,
or storms that cleanse land
nature is militant toward survival.
we are taught a history of misconceptions
distorted partial truths
indifference is a deafening death
the scripts we live by animate us
with meaning, we argue from dawn to sunset
but if we are not united, we will be enemies tomorrow
if we do not have food we cannot think
full bellies let us reason
with nuance
hunger is a person not full
half empty people obey any hand that feeds them
do not argue with hunger
unless
you are prepared
to have your hand bitten off.
depressed as you may be
this too shall pass
everybody is mourning
its not just the family
no one owns the pain
everyone is terrorized
let go of yourself
you can only move as fast as you will
even the best of us is no better than the worse
once a word is spoken you cannot take it back
there’s no such things as th
ose children
its our children or its no children
when young people can’t vote,
their political voice is protest
it’s much easier to organize a rebellion
when all the tanks are pointed at the same place
then your identity is who am i
what kind of person will i become
it didn’t occur to us that you can come back from a beating
until fannie lou
hypocrisy makes people happy
and truth makes them sad
compassion hushes wrath
a generation destroyed by facebook
the human face is undecipherable
and they can’t read anything that doesn’t look
like them
everyone can hear your thoughts before you think them
we quarrel with self
conversations are quiet mediations
poems wrinkled by loneliness
google maps the heart
passion is a prison of surveillance
emotions are actionless
and actions are emotionless
people expect comfort
more than freedom
and individualism becomes self-care
but the women are freeing their nipples
true or false
Glaydah Namukasa
Born in Uganda, she is a community psychologist, midwife and a writer: the author of one novel, The Deadly Ambition (2006), and a young adult novella, Voice of a Dream (2006), which was awarded the Macmillan Writers Prize for Africa in 2006. Her short stories have been published in Uganda, South Africa, the UK, the US and Sweden. She is a recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center residency in 2013, Mike and Marylee Fairbanks Fellowship in 2006, and in 2008 was awarded the title of Honorary Fellow by the International Writing Program, University of Iowa. In 2014 she was selected on the Hay Festival Africa39 list. In 2018 she received the URSB award for Ugandan Women in Literary Creativity. She has completed her third novel.
The last time I played Mirundi
“Look Babirye, you have it between your legs,” my twin brother Kato says and laughs.
I laugh too because one, Kato has a laugh which makes you laugh when you see it. Kato’s laugh is like this: his upper lip goes up into his nose and his red red gum comes out and smiles. Two, I laugh because I think Kato is talking about the ball; our new jesa-milk-kaveera-ball. The bouncing ball we made for our Mirundi Ball Competition.
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