Redemption Ground

by Lorna Goodison

  meant to share a kitchen. I see her light skin,

  she reads my face and says ‘I’m coloured’.

  Her story is set in district six, Cape Town where she

  and her husband Albert made life, making art. Black

  and White Indian Chinese and Coloured mixed

  till the state roared in with tear gas

  and attack dogs.

  Gladys shows snapshots of her husband then doing ninety days

  for staging Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage. He is standing

  outside their good brick house; around his feet

  a riot of yellow flowers. Uprooted

  into hardscrabble township.

  She considered setting fire to the house; but chose instead

  to hand the woman in her story kerosene and matches.

  We cook a chicken dinner; break the wishbone:

  Free South Africa! Talk till we can see through

  the windows of the Mayflower

  the Chinese writer executing a kata along the Iowa’s jade green

  banks. He spends waking hours outdoors after being ten

  years locked down in a cell because of a story he wrote.

  In our shared kitchen we brew strong black tea

  We applaud his morning dance.

  When I said goodbye to Gladys in 1983, we never thought that we would see each other again. Ours was one tearful parting. Unlike Nelson Mandela – the Prophet, Warrior-king, Peacemaker, Repairer of the Breach, Father of the Nation and new-human-being-cultured-over-twenty-seven-years-for-the-benefit-of-all-humanity – I was not at all sure that South Africa would be free in this lifetime.

  And all someone like me could do was to participate in countless anti-Apartheid rallies and grieve about the conditions under which someone like Winnie Mandela lived and suffered as a banned person.

  And one day I was walking along the street in the city of Kingston and a clipping from a newspaper, right there on the sidewalk, caught my eye. The news story stated that Winnie Mandela’s home had been raided by the police, and that they had seized a number of her personal items in this raid, including a bedspread. The bedspread had been taken into custody because it was in the colours of the flag of the African National Congress. That had to be a poem.

  ‘Bedspread’

  Sometimes in the still unchanging afternoons

  when the memories crowded hot and hopeless

  against her brow, she would seek its cool colours

  and signal him to lie down in his cell.

  It is three in the afternoon, Nelson.

  Let us lie here together on this bright bank draped

  in Freedom colour.

  It was woven by women with slender capable hands

  accustomed to binding wounds.

  Hands that closed the eyes of dead children

  that fought for the right to speak in their own lands

  in their own schools.

  They wove the bedspread and knotted notes of hope

  in each strand, and selvaged the edges with ancient blessings

  older than any white man’s coming.

  Nelson my husband I meet you in dreams.

  Beloved, much of the world too is asleep.

  Blind to the tyranny and evil devouring our people.

  But Mandela you are rock on this sand.

  harder than any metal in the bowels of this land

  You are purer than any gold tempered by fire.

  Shall we lie here wrapped in the colours of our free Azania?

  They arrested the bedspread. They and their friends are working

  to arrest the dreams in our heads.

  But the women accustomed to closing the eyes of the dead

  are weaving cloths still brighter, to drape us in glory

  in a free Azania.

  I had the honour of reading that poem to Winnie when the Mandelas visited Jamaica right after his release from prison.

  For many of us writers and artists and musicians in the African diaspora, Africa is never far from our minds. And South Africa never, ever left our minds during the time of Apartheid.

  Under the British colonial school system in Jamaica, we were never taught that there was such a thing as an African writer; but for me the living presence of Peter Abrahams in Jamaica was proof that Africans did write books, and this led to my discovery of other African writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Wole Soyinka. But the women – I needed to find the women writers of Africa. The women who were the scribes who had set down those stories that used to be scripted by tongues and stored in books of memory. Women writers who would look and sound more like me, whose stories would perhaps help to connect me to a place and a time and a history and to traditions lost in the great watery graveyard of the Atlantic.

  So I went in search of the work of African women writers, and as time went on I actually had the privilege of meeting and even on occasion sharing a stage with some of them, including the venerable Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga and our own dear Miriam Tlali, who once told me that during the time of Apartheid she would sometimes write her stories then wrap them in plastic bags and bury them in her backyard in case her home was raided by the police. Miriam Tlali, Bessie Head, Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing, Noni Jabavu, Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan and Ingrid Jonker are no longer with us, but we owe them a great debt for the ways in which their lives and works have nourished and sustained humanity.

  And then of course there is the great iconic figure: Nadine Gordimer.

  I had the enormous privilege of meeting Mrs Gordimer – I always call her Mrs Gordimer – at a Commonwealth writers conference in Manchester, England, organised by the brilliant Michael Schmidt of Carcanet Press. I confess that I was starstruck. Completely starstruck. For one thing, I expected her to be much bigger in stature. And I concluded that this was because her stories are written on such a monumental scale, written with a kind of courage and power that is not usual. In real life, she was a petite and quite pretty lady who wore the most gorgeous diamond earrings I have ever seen, and who was quite comfortable wearing my husband’s leather jacket one day when it rained. I believe she grew fond of Ted after she found out that he was a Professor of Comparative Literature and an expert witness in Aboriginal land claims issues and that he was instrumental in putting together a land claim for a group of Bushmen or San people in the Kalahari Desert. He wrote about all this in If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?

  When he told Mrs Gordimer that three of the people involved in the land claim were the sisters Una, Kais and Abakas, she was visibly moved as she explained how, in 1936, she had been taken to the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg where she saw, on display, a family of Bushmen of the Kalahari with three young girls around her age. Those girls were the same Una, Kais and Abakas whose singing, storytelling and personal witness played a big part in the success of the land claim.

  And Nadine Gordimer never forgot them. It is safe to say that something transcendent must have passed between those small girls – one very privileged, staring at the three others set there in a dehumanising, objectifying display as the last of the Bushmen – a look passed between them that said, ‘We see you. I see you. We see you. I see you for who you really are.’

  Because something of that clear seeing shines through all of Mrs Gordimer’s work; that unflinching refusal to look away from the toughest things, a determination to name them, describe them, shame them if necessary, and to fashion bold new forms to contain them as you go along. Cutting your cloth to fit your coat, as my dressmaker mother would say, in the shape of our ever-evolving, not-usual, who-knows-how-it-will-all-end story.

  I want to reference here the ending to Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People. Cinematic, apocalyptic, prophetic – these days I keep reading and re-reading that ending. These days I also find myself reading and re-reading her novel The Pickup. I read too, her short stories that defy categorising. She is a writer that other writers learn from.

  And
I learned quite a few things about what women writers can bring to the writing enterprise from watching Mrs Gordimer for those few days in Manchester. For one, she had no problems with being placed on a programme with other writers who were nowhere near as accomplished and acclaimed as she was. She had the same fifteen minutes as the other three writers, the line-up went in alphabetical order, so she read second, and she had cut and pasted and timed her presentation so that it ran to exactly fifteen minutes, not a millisecond over. Done and dusted. During the question and answer period she was agreeable and amiable enough, but she also made it clear that she did not consider herself to be an acknowledged or unacknowledged legislator of the world, that she saw herself first and foremost as a writer, and that she would rather talk about matters that pertained to writing.

  Coming from a writer who had been as actively politically engaged as Nadine Gordimer that was a stunning thing to hear; but it was also a freeing thing to hear for those of us who sometimes feel that there are occasions when we can best represent ourselves in the world by writing our poems and stories in such a way that they function like the look that passed between Nadine and Una, Kais and Abakas.

  A look that says: I see you and I see that these are not the last days for your or for my people. In fact, we are part of a brave new future in a country that will be a shining example to the rest of the world. I see you, we see you, and we will work and suffer and struggle and rejoice together as we write this future into being.

  This poem is an elegy for my mother, Doris, and I dedicate it to all the African women writers who shape and inspire us.

  ‘After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down’

  August, her large heart slows down then stops.

  Fall now, and trees flame, catch a fire and riot

  last leaves in scarlet and gold fever burning.

  Remember when you heard Bob Marley hymn

  ‘Redemption Song,’ and from his tone and timbre

  you sensed him traveling? He had sent the band home

  and was just keeping himself company, cooling star,

  sad rudeboy fretting on cowboy box guitar

  in a studio with stray echo and wailing sound

  lost singing scatting through the door of no return.

  When the green goes, beloved, the secret is opened.

  The breath falls still, the life covenant is broken.

  Dress my mother’s cold body in a deep green gown.

  Catch a fire and let fall and flame time come,

  after the green gown of my mother gone down.

  We laid her down, full of days,

  chant griot from the book of life,

  summon her kin from the long-

  lived line of David and Margaret.

  Come Cleodine, Albertha,

  Flavius, Edmund, Howard and Rose,

  Marcus her husband gone before

  come and walk Dear Doris home.

  And the Blue Mountains will open to her

  to seal her corporeal self in.

  From the ancient vault that is their lapis lazuli heart

  the headwaters of all our rivers spring.

  Headwaters, wash away the embalmer’s myrrh resin,

  the dredging of white powder caking her cold limbs.

  Return her ripe body clean

  to fallow the earth.

  Her eyes to become brown agate stones.

  From her forehead let there dawn

  bright mornings.

  May her white hair contribute to the massing of clouds,

  cause the blood settled in her palms

  to sink into fish-filled lagoons.

  Earth, she was a mother like you

  who birthed and nursed her children.

  Look, cherubim and angels, see her name

  written down in the index of the faithful

  in the mother-of-pearl book of saints.

  Mama, Aunt Ann says

  that she saw Aunt Rose

  come out of an orchard

  red with ripe fruit

  and called out laughing to you.

  And that you scaled the wall

  like two young girls

  scampering barefoot among

  the lush fruit groves.

  ‘My Mother’s Sea Chanty’

  I dream that I am washing

  my mother’s body in the night sea

  and that she sings slow

  and that she still breathes.

  I see my sweet mother

  a plump mermaid in my dreams

  and I wash her white hair

  with ambergris and foaming seaweed.

  I watch my mother under water

  gather the loose pearls she finds,

  scrub them free from nacre

  and string them on a lost fishing line.

  I hear my dark mother

  speaking sea-speak with pilot fish,

  showing them how to direct barks

  that bear away our grief.

  I pray my mother breaks free

  from the fish pots and marine chores

  of her residence beneath the sea,

  and that she rides a wild white horse.

  5

  I-Land

  AS A SMALL CHILD, I did not really have a very strong sense of being on an island. Maybe that is because I was born in the city of Kingston, which back then was a busy bustling metropolis, where something exciting was always happening. Kingston was no sleepy island outpost when I was growing up there. Every important person in the world seemed to pass through ‘Town’ as we called it, from Paul Robeson to Winston Churchill, the Bolshoi Ballet, Marion Anderson, George Bernard Shaw, Zora Neale Hurston, Sammy Davis Jr, Duke Ellington and every single member of the royal family. It was only after I began to visit my mother’s birthplace, where I would bathe in the river named for her family and roam freely through the bush enjoying the pastoral delights of rural Jamaica with my cousins, that I began to think of myself as being more than a Kingstonian.

  As for always looking longingly at the horizon and wondering what was beyond it – as people who live on islands are thought to do – I did not do much of that when I was a child. If I wondered what was over the horizon, it was only because my mother’s sisters had emigrated to Montreal, Canada in the 1930s and they would send us letters and parcels that came from a faraway place referred to as ‘abroad’.

  If I had a sense of being on an island at all, it was from the way in which the people around me always described Jamaica as ‘the Island of Jamaica’, or ‘Our Island Home’. Also, all the songs I heard or sang about Jamaica had ‘island’ in them. Perhaps my most vivid idea of what it was to live on an island came from my mother, who showed me that on the map of the world, Jamaica is shaped like a swimming turtle, so I got the point about being surrounded by water.

  The boundary around my known world was more the boundaries set by humans, particularly by my family. I’m one of nine children. I grew up surrounded by a sea of people.

  But I always loved the sensuousness of island life. I love ‘sun-hot’, as Jamaicans say. I enjoy bathing in the Caribbean Sea and I am certain that there are no fruits in the world that taste as good as Jamaican naseberries, mangoes, pineapples, star apples and sweetsops. Seriously nothing in the world tastes as good as a plate of Jamaican fruit. I believe that Jamaica is one of the most beautiful places in the world and I have been known to burst into tears at the sight of the Blue Mountains. In my best dreams I’m bathing in the warm Caribbean as I gaze up at the Blue Mountains. My engagement with the sheer beauty and the chaos of the island never goes away, and it drives a great deal of my work. The colours, the music, the speech, the smells, the intensity of everything, good and bad. There is nothing watered down in Jamaica, it is all concentrated and I try to draw on that.

  But one of the downsides to island life is that it can be very limiting: circumscribed, provincial, petty, tribal.

  Life in larger land masses such as the USA, Canada and Europe allows for much gr
eater variety, complexity and freedom of movement. Living away from island society also allows you to change and grow and reinvent yourself away from the prying and often judgmental eyes of people who presume that because they have known you for much of your life, they are qualified to assess just what you are capable of, and to decide just how far you should go.

  One of the many things I love and admire about the USA and Canada is the sense of possibility that abounds in such big places. This sense of possibility is not as available to people in island societies, and many people who experience difficulty finding ways to thrive in small island communities often grow and flourish remarkably well upon finding themselves in large metropolitan centres.

  Still, I carry my islandness with me wherever I go. l always miss the sea when I’m away from it and I like to know that it is close by even if I cannot actually see it. I will even settle for a small man-made body of water – a sort of sea surrogate – like the one set down in the marshlands behind the apartment complex called The Ponds in Ann Arbor, where I lived for years. These days I am lucky to find myself living beside the Salish Sea in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia, for being by the sea makes me feel more whole, more balanced somehow. I’d like to think it might be ‘deep calleth unto deep’, and all that, or maybe it is just that people who come from islands have this need to be near the water.

  One of the things I always have to explain to students in North America is that Caribbean island nations are far from being homogenous. That, in fact, they are quite proud of their differences, often in contentious ways. Still, islands in the Caribbean, the Pacific and the North Atlantic do have shared characteristics. Being surrounded by water – especially in the old days before aeroplane travel – meant it was not easy to get away. That did not stop people from trying, and as a child I remember sometimes hearing stories about men stowing away in the dark holds of those big ships that docked in Kingston Harbour.