New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  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