Where I find myself in my writing, Mbuya found fulfilment in embodying a saying she often repeated: “Mukadzi haa gariri mawoko.” A woman does not sit on her hands. With those hands, she built a rich world as caregiver, farmer, gardener, cook, baker, needle worker, doily-maker, cultivating a spirituality that is the basis of the worlds about which I attempt to write.
When we visited my grandmother she often had the radio on, listening intently to the news, the talk shows and music of the day. Sometimes, when I’d leave she would tease me, saying, “Panashe, we will talk on Facebook.” When we lamented the changing weather patterns, she would comment, “It’s this issue of global warming making this happen.” Her little cell phone was always ringing, young and old alike calling for advice on this or that life matter. If it wasn’t on the phone, they came to consult her directly in her bedroom that my family called the “head office” or “the court”.
That is how she survived twenty-two years after a stroke. That is not the work of the body. That is the work of the spirit.
Anaïs Duplan
Born in Haiti and now living in the US, they are the author of a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (2017). Their poems and essays have been published by Hyperallergic, PBS News Hour, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Bettering American Poetry and Ploughshares. As a music critic, they have appeared in Complex magazine and THUMP, and as a curator have facilitated artists’ projects and exhibitions in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, Reykjavík and Copenhagen. Their video art has shown in exhibitions at Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in LA. They are the founder of the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, and currently a joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Ode to the Happy Negro Hugging the Flag in Robert Colescott’s “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware”
I have waited all my life to find me find you
perched around my black neck in repose
songing of me in repose your black legs
songing of me in repose
your black legs a dangle around me I have waited to
find you find your black toes to find them
sundering at the base your black toes your black toe-
nails hale and bright your black feet a straddle around me
around my black waist a straddle I finding I was born I was
born who operated
in the white was born who was born
who operated in the white chapel
who found your black thighs in repose
songing to each other in repose
across
my chest an extended black for blocks a
neighborhood song in repose
your crotch an extended black
at my neck your black groin a straddle
around me in repose what life what
there it is there I had been looked at
there o lord sucked His black
thorax which spanned as a fracture
spanned as I
who grow up in you there as a fracture find your
black breast o lord quiescing
atop my head your other black
breast o lord hale and bright around me o lord
a pendulum o lord to my black ear
my black ear that finds you songing
of me in repose in your stature
toppling to one side of my one side
find your black shoulders a gaping
around me death your body armless
around me death none can
skirt it in your mother’s way o lord
is finding black fingers there your black
neck is finding lord is rising past
the cumulus-line an extended black
o lord is an extended black o lord
is thinking of self and thinking of self is
finding you there so that when I entered I entered
the pulpit I entered
“I Know This Is No Longer Sustainable,” Etc.
You enter, in pain, a bestial marriage. Your head is a shroud at your neck. Your thought beckons to you. Your tongue is clipped. “I wish not to love you at all . . .”
There are birds of prey at the subway station. In all their bloodsoft. I will not come out on Friday. I will hold a paper bag tight. An apple juice carton, a bottle of kerosene.
You are too eager to get on with it. You haven’t the blood of the sages. You plaster his face onto your faces. The inherent danger of strangulation.
I will tell you all of what happen to me. First I went to save him. Second he drowned. Prohibit that the earth be inflamed, o lord, by your bright animal nature.
The mountaintop is a blackhorse a’throttle in your mother. Your new haircut brings the black in closer. I even leaned forward—
How this people’s fire must be reflexed in your teeth! The nude holograph of an unburdened sex. These are the commonplace things. I find your car keys in the freezer.
The flocked places inside of the train. You’re either on the train or the train is on you, Marianna. The compulsive image of one prefigured violence.
I am the blue eyes at an evening ball in Mariona. My father in a ball gown, singing, “Mud is sweeter than money.” I know this is no longer sustainable, etc.
A rural scene. My heart’s in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand’s in the bag, and the bag is caught. Everybody clap your hands. In autumn, the sumac is wild.
Safia Elhillo
She is the author of The January Children (2017), recipient of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and a 2018 Arab American Book Award. Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, and a Cave Canem fellow, she holds an MFA in poetry from the New School. In addition to appearing in several journals and anthologies, her work has been translated into Arabic, Japanese, Estonian, Portuguese and Greek, and commissioned by Under Armour and the Bavarian State Ballet. She is the recipient of a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (2017).
border / softer
in the new year or when i grow up or
if i live through the night i want to be
ungovernable no longer a citizen
to any of the names assigned my body
& then how boundless could i make my life
which for all its smallness still exhausts me
balancing act of all my margins all my conjugations
of cannot if i live through the night i will bleed
into all my edges until i am no longer a stroke
of some careless man’s pen after
a particularly liquid lunch churchill was said
to have created [ ] with a stroke of his [ ]
& isn’t a map only a joke we all agreed into a fact
& where can i touch the equator & how will i know
i am touching it & where is the end of my country
the beginning of the next how will i know i’ve crossed over
how to say
after Agha Shahid Ali
in the divorce i separate to two piles books: english love
songs: arabic
my angers my schooling my long repeating name english
English arabic
i am someone’s daughter but i am american born it shows in my
short memory
my ahistoric glamour my clumsy tongue when i forget the word for
[ ] in arabic
i sleep unbroken dark hours on airplanes home & dream i’ve
missed my
connecting flight i dream a new & fluent mouth full of gauzy
swathes of arabic
i dream my alternate selves each with a face borrowed from
photographs of
>
the girl who became my grandmother brows & body rounded &
cursive like arabic
but wake to the usual borderlands i crowd shining slivers of english
to my mouth
iris crocus inlet heron how dare i love a word without knowing
it in arabic
& what even is translation is immigration without irony safia
means pure all my life it’s been true even in my clouded
arabic
boys like me better when they can’t place where i’m from
1
i tell a story sometimes that
whitepeople love it’s about
summer in khartoum in the
back of a pickup truck with
my cousins eating sunflower
seeds with the shells dangling
from our dark lower lips & we
played our favorite game which
was to yell into the street the names
we knew best the names we all
had mohammed ahmed
omar & see how many dozens
of strangers would answer
2
do you like it do you like
the way i mimic my mother’s
accent when saying aloud a word i
cannot pronounce & have only
ever seen written down
3
or is it my diasporic stink
my halved tongue wandering
forever at the borderlands i
never learned the word am i a
girl or am i an aperture born by
the absence of a river & broken
where the blue & white nile meet
the story is not new nor is it
monogamous i was not born i
was planted at the place where
the world cracked in two & crawled
from the wound as a new kind of tree
swaying forever back & forth for your
translated pleasure
in the harmattan wind
ars poetica
Autobiography practiced in the enemy’s language has the texture of fiction.
—Assia Djebar, Fantasia
in ohio i tell a classroom of white students a story i mean to be beautiful
about my grandfather retreating in his old age to his first tongue
in which there are no separate words for like & love once at a
restaurant meaning i think to say i would like some tomato soup
repeats
to our flustered waitress i love tomato soup i love tomato soup
& the white students & the white professors like my story they
think i mean it
to be comic the room balloons with their delight they are laughing
at my grandfather & it is my fault for carving tendernesses from
my old life
without context parading to strangers my weak translations
now they think i am joking & lap at my every dripping word
& isn’t this why i learned this language to graduate
from my thick & pungent newness my accent & my nameless
shoes to float
my hands like a conductor redirect the laughter to a body not
my own
for a moment of quiet inside my traitor’s head
Ashley Makue
A writer and facilitator from South Africa, she was the Current State of Poetry South African National Slam champion for 2016/17. Her debut collection, i know how to fix myself, was released in April 2017 by the African Poetry Book Fund as part of their New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Box Set: Nne. Her work has been included in multiple journals, including Pain, published by the Icelandic Partus Press. She was longlisted for the Sol Plaatje European Union Prize, and selected as a finalist for the 2018 Sillerman Poetry Book Prize. She writes for AfroElle magazine and freelances as a literary editor.
mali
(blood)
The ancestry of sadness
to be born
by definition
to be blood
to begin
not at the very beginning
to begin
at lineage
to begin
before you begin
My mother, ’Mamaseko, bleeds with me. We cry on the phone together some days, bounded by torment, ribs bending together for (or against) agony. Our rocks cling together over the old country (Lesotho) and our loss is one colour (river border sand blue left to someplace else). We have both left. I crossed the bridge over a border drawn by a quiet river. She left, midnight in shoulder-deep Mohokari (river separating Lesotho from South Africa: water between home and what will become home). I was five years old. I ate fat cakes and drank sweet orange juice: easy transit. Ease of belonging here, and then there. But my mother, at sixteen, felt the old country leave her.
And I wonder what it means to be beings of blood: to relate by blood, and to live by blood.
My grandmother, Motlagomang, left South Africa to set up home in a country lent to her by marriage. She visits us every year and during these short visits, her body becomes sick with longing for the borrowed country. In a few months, I will move to my wife’s birth country. And there, I shall stay—if I forget to run.
My great-grandmother, Josephine (after whom I was named), was a nomad. She moved around South Africa and died before naming any one place “home”. Beyond our name, Josephine and I share a resemblance that is marked by circles around the mouth, knees knocking together and our yen to leave. We come together by (and through) a memory of loss (or the loss of memory), haunting my breathing body, and rattling her corpse—the loss of homes we did not choose, and the loss of the homes we almost found.
And I do not know if the inheritance of generational trauma has clotted our blood bonds. And if this clotting means anything for our relational identities. If I am my mother’s daughter because of our blood, am I also her daughter for the pain we have shared: the loss of my father, and then a sister, and the scolding hands of a man whose jabs stayed in her heart, and so in mine? Am I my grandmother’s for the homes we find in the countries of our spouses? Am I Josephine’s to fulfil her name? To seek and never find? For the hunger we cannot fill?
our womxn
are known for their cry
and knee bent wailing
impepho floating above them
from them our men
look for girls with large mouths
and husk over their voices
and their tongues split
between countries
of men who are fathers
and men who are trees
and their daughters are planted
by the blight and they are starved
until they know how to plead
how to lie on their stomachs and cry
until they are ours
My mother, and her mother, and her mother’s mother have loved and married bad-mood men. My mother’s husband punishes her mistakes (and other faultless acts of autonomy) with silence. He goes days, sometimes weeks withholding affection to make his displeasures known (and there are many). Much like my grandfather who left my grandmother for ten complete years—scapegoating an argument that got ugly. My great-grandmother never found a soft love. All of her affairs were with men who loved her as much as they hated her. And for many years my relationships followed this pattern. My lovers had the same incapacity for stable emotional tenderness.
Is it possible that I have inherited this way of love from the womxn who came before me?
I look for the root of my heart’s constant sacrifice in the bending of my head, and my mother’s, and my grandmother’s and my greatgrandmother’s. And I know (how) to hold the edge of the sharp knife injuring my marriage. I know the hymn that quickens forgiveness. The apology that soothes the war and brings my bride into the warmth of our bed. I know the cup that runneth over, and I pour its honey over our burning for sprint and flight. I know how to bring softness
back to her breasts. How to pull the lines that sweeten her mouth. I know how to put us out. And in the same way, I know how to drown us. How to hold against her, words said in(to) anger. I know how to heighten the flame. How to call my troops to battle. How to dress up in defensive armour. I turn cold for myself. And I turn cold for my mother, and my grandmother, and my great-grandmother. I set the table for five and I know my wife has no weapon for ghosts. But I am theirs, in sickness more than in health. And the blood that binds is heavy—falls clotted from my vagina.
sometimes love is a crowded place
a swollen stomach
water in the lungs
a dam
and algae
a room waiting to put both of its arms around you
to gather all its walls around you
sometimes love is a house
living in your ducts
even after you’ve left it
an old picture in circular motion
repeating itself
rehashing itself
a heart holding a past
a mind recreating a past
sometimes love is ghost
that will not go
We are sick. Habitually. I hold a hand over my head and it hurts. My mother cuts the tip of her finger and her blood ails. My grandmother presses her chest and it abates beneath her palm. The sugar rots my great-grandmother from inside her mouth and her stomach. And through the blood, we know how to erode on our feet. How to lie with wolves and wake before dawn to hunt for them.
If this is hereditary illness, will we find our medicine together? Will we drink aloe, eat cayenne pepper and heal at once?
in the year of healing
antihistamine shall
be a mirror
turned toward the heart
and the rot shall
be cached no longer
and the finger
pointed inward shall
pull out the dirt
and the leaving
of trauma will hurt
like any feet
turned against
the pain will flush
through you
and another death
shall take your father
and another country
New Daughters of Africa Page 107