New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  shall steal your mother’s

  softness

  and another night shall

  begin and remain a year

  and another ballot shall come

  and you will not be the choice

  the pus pressed out

  shall be the memory

  of a lover who could

  only stay in your heart

  the anesthesia shall

  leave by the second loss

  of a name of a face

  and the completion

  shall be a room

  with all your sadnesses

  and the sun rushing in

  We are lonely. And sad. My mother engulfs herself in a husband and his children, pours herself into a Jesus so opaque she cannot see him. She leaves me, to complete the opening. To forget the face of the love that she lost. My grandmother flees her country, labours children and grandchildren to deter the quiet until her ears fail her. Until they begin to send the noise out. And by then, she is ready to lie still and sleep. My great-grandmother spent her whole life longing for someplace else, someone else, a new face, a new year. And I don’t know how to sit still.

  a body split

  between countries

  is a ship

  standing

  to be wrecked

  the doors open

  into landmines

  and ghosts of

  our fathers

  and of girls

  who came

  and never left

  who stayed

  for the sad music

  requiem for the womxn

  who broke open

  to labour children

  psalm for the children

  whose feet remained

  in the womb

  who toss and kick

  but never begin

  the treasures of

  witchcraft venomoid

  rusted under the clutter

  of histories and recollections

  dust settling deeper

  into this day

  and the doors creaking

  open into daggers

  into rope

  into gas

  into hemlock

  into bullet

  into ocean at night

  calling the body

  into itself

  at the break of dawn

  encircled by an army

  of icebergs of lovers

  and icebergs of friends

  breaking in four parts

  and then falling into

  and remaining in

  I am starving for strangers and a new country and faces I have never seen. I am starving for another day. For another body. Another face. I am starving for my mother’s country. I am starving for my grandmother’s womb. I am starving for my great-grandmother’s heart. I am starving for the blood that makes me theirs. For the clotting. For the wounds that bring us together. For the losses that make me my mother’s daughter, that make her my grandmother’s daughter, that make my grandmother my great-grandmother’s daughter.

  And when I cry, they wear my face. The rift shortens. And we are the country we have lost, pulling us back but sending the wolves to eat our faces before we are home again. We are the men’s wounding tongues. An accusing finger. A wild fire turned inside.

  and my daughters

  too

  will know

  the pain of the womb

  which transcends

  the blood cord

  they will know

  the grave melancholy

  of breaking open

  for another to be

  and they that be

  shall forever

  know the wailing

  of extraction

  and then

  the emptying

  longing

  the endless

  wanting

  the moonless sky

  pining

  insatiable anguish

  unmediated

  by a day of love

  my daughters

  will come to know

  the little deaths

  of waiting

  and waiting

  of being unwanted

  by everything

  and

  the haunt

  that came

  upon us

  will not go

  unless we

  go with it

  Bridget Minamore

  A British-Ghanaian writer from south-east London, she was shortlisted to be London’s first Young Poet Laureate, has been commissioned by the Royal Opera House and the Tate Modern, and writes regularly for The Guardian and The Stage about pop culture, theatre, music, race and class. She was chosen as one of The Hospital Club’s Emerging Creatives, as well as one of Speaking Volumes’ 40 Stars of Black British Literature. Titanic, her debut pamphlet of poems on modern love and loss, came out in 2016.

  New Daughters of Africa

  You will get your hair done.

  Your Auntie who’s not your Auntie works from the hive of her high rise, seven stories up in the air. The lifts round here are always broken, so you climb: one step, two step, leap to avoid a puddle of piss, four step, five step, six step, manoeuvre around the boys who have colonised this stairwell, eight step, nine step, land on the tenth. Twist your body and do the same steps all over again—now you are on the first floor. Repeat six times. Arrive at a black gate, rusted but strong. Ball your fist and knock through the gap you find between two wrought strips of iron, wait for the door to swing open away from your body, wait for the gate to swing open into your face, look at the child who has opened both door and gate, step inside.

  Time passes. Your Auntie who’s not your Auntie is perched on the edge of a wooden hard-backed chair. She speaks into her mobile phone, the cracked-screen link to back home resting taut between her chin and collarbone; Aunties round here like to multitask. Aunties round here like to talk. She speaks a language you only half-understand, or, she speaks a language you don’t understand at all, or, she speaks a pidgin hybrid that you understand more the more you listen to it. Her mouth is wide, her voice is wider. The sound of her speaking to someone who is not you fills the room, richochets off the highlife she plays on a loop from a weathered stereo, bounces around and settles a little too loudly inside your ears.

  You are sitting cross-legged on a frayed, patterned cushion: bum sore, legs cramped, mind resigned. Your back is a solid mass against the warmth of her crotch—you and this woman have become so close you are now the same person, perhaps. Both machine and its end product. Your neck rests taut between her knees, your head, periodically pulled from side to side as she braids each weft of hair. Right-hand thumb and middle finger slip the strands together, index hooks underneath, wrist turns and pulls the hair under (never over), left hand and left fingers join in to mirror these movements, and now she has begun. Her fingertips are ballet-dancing in the air between your head and her breasts; your Auntie who is not your Auntie is making magic from and through and with your hair. For hour upon hour you stay here, in this spot, nothing to focus on beyond the volume of her voice, the hum of her music, and the yelps her two (or three?) (or is that four?) children make as they buzz by the back of the front door. Loud mothers breed loud daughters, loud mothers breed loud sons.

  Products of our parenting. You sit, get your hair braided, watch the similarities across generations and wonder: is it this obvious when people see you and your own mother? Or your cousins and their kids? Or the girls from church and their children? Round here maternity feels mandatory sometimes, despite old stigma of young bellies weighed down with new life. These ends where babies seemed to be born before their mothers. Meanwhile mums rarely got credit for moulding and building their kids in a kiln of cracked pavement slabs. There are less of them now, you think, unripe teenagers, all baby hairs and too-early baby bellies. Still. You remember the newspapers from your own teenage years, large fonts and graphically close photos, headlines decrying these singular mothers, blami
ng them for the fact their children were being cut down like weeds. Why have we had no follow-ups? Front pages used to scream “Teenage mums in record highs” but no one has gone back to show the twenty-nine-year-olds you know feeding and clothing and preparing their own teens to go out into the world.

  Still. Life turned out different for you. You might have read Keisha the Sket but you didn’t act on it. You might have met the mandem down the park but never for too long, you kept your head down instead. Facefirst in books back then, knee-deep in toil these days, because every day is workday. Grinding because if you don’t, who will? You work as hard as your mother does: overburdened and underhyped. Find it easier to cross between worlds than your brothers can—dark boys who colonise stairwells on estates—often, their voices aren’t allowed to codeswitch across postcodes like yours is. Their voices could be wrought against silver but they’d still fall on ears too beeswaxed to hear. Dark boys round here are heard as having dark voices everywhere. Yours, though? Yours is tempered by your gender. You are allowed to have a posh voice, and a road voice, and you are not sure which voice is yours. You have chipped away at your voice for so long you have forgotten what you actually sound like.

  There are many of you. Black girls the wrong side of a line made of brown paper bags, parents low-incomed but hardworking, you new daughters of Africa born with expectation tattooed across your backs. You made your way to centuries-old universities in this new land—buildings so white your skin felt dirty—where elites commented politely on the way you mispronounced hyperbole, epitome, segue, but also water, laughing, mother. You would drop your Ts and Gs, find a V where there is none: waughah, larfin, muvva. Wrong, they would say. Wrong.

  So you shaved your words into shape. You scrubbed your council flat from the flat of your tongue, you learnt to move your mouth and hands less, you convinced yourself your accent was a mess, and so you point-blank banished blatently, and yeah but, and wallahi, and nah, and rah, and oh my days. Years of being told you sounded white, or stoosh, or posh, but now? Now you are road. Now you are. You are. You. Posh-voiced. Bouncing between dialects depending upon who you are speaking to. You talk to people and you want to cry sometimes because you cannot tell if this is what you are supposed to sound like. If this is your real voice. Now you have forgotten your first language. Not the one your parents speak, or the pidgin hybrid that you understand more the more you listen to it. No, with every passing day you lose the language of your only true home, the words wrought from cracked pavement slabs, those weighted words spoken by boys who colonise stairwells.

  Now you know how to speak p r o p e r l y.

  You will get your hair done, and you speak to your Auntie who’s not your Auntie in an accent that mimics her own. You use the same strange voice that starts to appear somewhere down the high road, somewhere along your long walk to weave the strands that sprout from your scalp. Getting your hair done round here means navigating an obstacle course of women with babies strapped to their backs, women peering through shop windows and spilling from doorways. It means avoiding too-quick-to-see-until-it’s-too-late grabs from taloned rows of French-tipped fingertip claws, it means ignoring the hissing meant to catch your attention. Ssssss, sssss, can I do your hair? Sometime along this walk, somewhere inside your No, I’m alright, I’ve got someone already repeated response, your voice changes. An accent appears. It is involuntary, subconcious, and it happens every time you speak to an African elder.

  You arrive at your Auntie who’s not your Auntie’s high-rise front door to get your hair done. This voice—your voice for today—is fully formed now, a voice wrought against the paving stones that surround this block. The lifts round here are always broken so you climb seven stories up in the air, sweat pooling at the base of your silk scarf-covered neck with each step. You have always had to work hard to make your hair work. One-step, two-step, leap to avoid a puddle of piss, four-step, five-step, six-step, manoeuvre around a group of boys who look, to so many, like men. The stairwell they have colonised smells like weed and opportunity because these boys are always working. You glance over them, a murder of navy and black, a shoal of Nike tracksuits and side bags. These flightless birds, these fish still swimming out of water. You wonder how hard it must have been for them to grow here, to sprout from the cracks in the paving-slabs.

  You breathe in. Breathe in. Breathe. Let the grimey afrobeat trap drill rap beats that seep from their cracked screens fill the bottom of your lungs. What does it mean that the music they are making now sounds like what you were raised on? Or sounds like what their parents escaped from? Back home drum beats vs artillery fire. You go to raves with your mates and are reminded of Daddy Lumba ringing in your ears as your mother forced you to pass an uncle another bottle of Supermalt, petulance splayed across your face. You scour YouTube and hear gunshots. The music these boys play, loudly and proudly from phones in the corners of stairwells, is fresh off a boat that sailed straight from your diaspora childhood and you are in awe of it. Their music is London and Accra and Birmingham and Lagos and Leeds, their music doesn’t need anything more than what it is, their music is settled in its chaos. You know they are as you are: desperate to connect with parents, and parents’ parents, and parents’ parents’ parents, you and they are desperate to have a home somewhere. But. You know as they know this is perhaps impossible, so you and they want to at least sound like you’ve all found one.

  You will get your hair done. Walking past boys who have colonised concrete they had no right to, you ascend: eight step, nine step, land on the tenth. Seven stories in the air, fist poised to knock through a wrought-iron gap, you assess the ways you have changed since the early days of coming to this home to get your hair braided. You are older now, your head is lighter now, less weighted with expectation and too-full braids. Still. Sometimes you look so heavy. It happens more the older you get. You wear a lot of jewellery because it’s nice to be reminded there is something else that weighs you down. You keep your too-long acrylics on because being physically unable to do every single task you’re asked to calms your anxiety. You took the earrings and nails off at university. Sent them away alongside a voice you once had that you’re not sure is still yours, but now your jewellry and acrylics and voicebox have returned. As have you. Hair today, here tomorrow, and the next, and the next. Now you have accepted you are part of this place. Now you have accepted you are part of this. Now you have accepted you are. Now you are. You are. You.

  Chibundu Onuzo

  Born in Nigeria, she moved to England when she was 14. She began writing her first novel, The Spider King’s Daughter (2012), at the age of 17 and it was published by Faber and Faber when she was 21. The novel won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize. It was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and for the Etisalat Prize for Literature. In 2014 she was selected for the Hay Festival’s Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers under 40 with the potential to define future trends in African literature. In 2018 she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its 40 Under 40 initiative. Reviewing her second novel, Welcome to Lagos (2016), Helon Habila wrote in The Guardian: “. . . her ability to bring her characters to life, including the city of Lagos, perhaps the best-painted character of all, is impressive.”

  Sunita

  Dọlapọ twirled a strand of premium Brazilian hair around her finger, round and round until the dark hair completely covered her nail. It was a tic for white girls, this constant fiddling with hair, flicking pony tails, running hands through locks, tucking strands behind ears, sweeping ringlets aside, tossing manes back, seduction rippling in a million follicles. An ex-boyfriend had tried to run his hand through her afro once. His fingers remained painfully stuck at the roots, his nail snagged on a tight curl.

  Herbert would have been able to poke his pink fingers into her new tresses, rising until he reached the contraption of cornrows and thread that held it all together. It was a good weave. It was not stif
f, proclaiming by its rigour that it was a helmet of synthetic fibres, immoveable in the face of earthquake or hurricane. Her weave bounced, swayed, flew into her mouth at the slightest gust of wind. Her weave was smooth, silken, glossy, a buoyant advert for Pantene and yet she was dissatisfied with her new look.

  First, there was the unnaturalness of it. Real, human, hair from somebody else’s scalp now framed her face and rested on her clavicles. Then there was the cost of three hundred pounds. There had been cheaper options, hair swept up from the cutting floors of salons and stitched onto a double wefted track. Mongrel hair, her aunties said, assembled from a hundred different heads, coarse strands, smooth strands, blonde strands, red strands, grey strands all dyed a uniform black that hid their imperfections. Get quality, her cousins said. You can reuse quality. Wear it, wash it, use it again. Wear it, wash it, use it again.

  There was nothing wrong with her new weave. John, a course-mate in whom she had once harboured a vague interest, had said to her, “Love the new look, Dollop. Very glamorous.”

  “Actually, I’m calling myself Dolly now,” she had wanted to reply but he was gone, striding away in his Abercrombie shirt, body of a band lead, brains the consistency of hair gel.

  She had been christened Dollop by the girls in her Wiltshire boarding-school, their slender, Anglo-Saxon tongues unable to wrap themselves round the chunky syllables of Dọlapọ. Dumpling Dollop, dimpled doughnut. She had been chubby back then, breathless at the sight of a lacrosse stick. She lost weight in the summer before university, sprinting on a treadmill for an hour each day, living on nuts and red berries like a squirrel. She had lost thirty pounds in two months. She should have lost her nickname as well.

  “Don’t tell me you introduce yourself to people as dollop?” her mentor Daisy had said in their first meeting. “That makes you sound like a blob of cream on the end of a spoon.”

  “No one can pronounce Dọlapọ.”

  “And nobody can pronounce Adaeze. Doesn’t mean I call myself dazed. I walk into a room, confidently with my shoulders back and say, ‘Hi my name is Adaeze, but you can call me Daisy.’ Now go out, come back in and introduce yourself again.”