Knowingly or not, he’d dropped me off at the wrong address, and as I walked to my destination I kept looking back and seeing that the cab was still parked there at the exact spot where he’d dropped me off.
This was not the first time in my life I’d been at the receiving end of open racial abuse. Growing up in Jamaica I was always fully aware that Jamaicans practise their own shameful terrible forms of colour prejudice and that darker skinned Jamaicans were often considered less-than in a culture where people would say things like ‘anything too black never good,’ about their own selves.
But give thanks and praises to Marcus Garvey and to Rastafarians, who insisted that Black is Beautiful so there was something of a built-in corrective to that bullshit sel-fhating thinking that many Jamaicans wrestle with. That terrible self-hatred that manifests itself nowadays in skin-bleaching. Still, I insist there have always been Jamaicans who are very proud of their dark skin. ‘Mi black but mi comely, a so di Queen a Sheba tell king Salaman, and me black and me well comely,’ I once heard a woman on a street in Kingston say.
But back to where we left the London taxi driver.
To this day, I do not know why I said those words, instead of cursing back at him, which anybody who knows me knows that I am well capable of doing. In fact, that incident seemed to open the way for two other similar incidents (these tests always seem to come in threes) that I responded to in entirely different ways.
A few days after the taxi incident, I went, with two Jamaican friends (one whose name is Canute, yes, like the king who tried to stay the waves) to the theatre to see Catch My Soul, a musical inspired by Shakespeare’s Othello. At the intermission, I went to the ladies’ room, and while I was in there I heard the woman who was in charge of cleaning the bathrooms say to someone waiting outside the door, ‘There’s a nigger in there.’
When I came out, I said ‘I heard you’; and then I said something I am now ashamed of, I said, ‘What can I expect? You clean toilets.’ Even then, I knew that there were perfectly decent people who clean toilets, but she was not one of them.
The next incident had to do with an advertising campaign for Australia. I had been assigned to a creative team at McCann who were working on a campaign for the Australian Tourist Board. I was happily contributing my opinions on copy and layout for the ads but when the day of the presentation came around I noticed everyone behaving awkwardly. The copywriter, whose name I do not remember, who was a light-skinned Indian woman, took me to one side and said ‘Look, neither you nor I will be going into the presentation, because Australia has a “Whites Only” policy.’ And there and then I remembered a sentence in one of my reading books at primary school that said – I swear it was written down there for us to read – ‘Australia is a white man’s country.’ I responded to that incident by taking off early and walking around Kensington Market and deciding that I would never visit Australia. I still have not done so, but maybe I’m changing my mind about that. Especially after having spent so many years of my life living and working in the USA and Canada where I have grown used to random acts of racism: like the drunk in New York who spat at me in the street (luckily, he missed) and called me the N word. If you want to know what the temperature in the Arctic feels like, try being the only Black person in a room in some places in Canada.
But I still have to say that I was genuinely shocked that there were so many people in the state of Michigan, where I lived and worked for over twenty years – surely I met some of them – who voted for the 45th president and who still support him even after he failed to condemn tiki-torch bearing, hate-spewing neo-Nazis, and after what he said about immigration from Haiti and Africa and places where Black people come from.
I recently saw a brilliant documentary on James Baldwin, whose acuity of voice and vision is even more relevant today than before.
I am haunted by the story of Sandra Bland, who gets pulled over by a policeman who claimed she switched lanes without indicating, and who days later ended up hanging in a jail cell. All that I could do was write a poem.
‘Say Her Name: Sandra Bland’
O Sandra Bland she was cast in a low budget
remake of mean streets; as lone woman driver
who sights a cop car framed in her rearview mirror;
and in panic crosses the white line.
Blue uniform in a rage swears she did not indicate.
Fires orders for her to put out her cigarette.
She went off script; told him it was her car.
She was entitled to smoke in it if she wanted.
The camera captures how she is flung to the curb.
Restrained then locked down in a jail cell
on the third day she rises hanged by the neck;
feet frantic pressing at the last on air brakes.
A critic on Fox writes her off; gives her a thumbs
down for acting arrogant, not taking directions.
For her part all she did was leave home, drive
and change lanes. Say her name: Sandra Bland.
There are days when I admit to being genuinely afraid when I watch the news.
Maybe it is alright for me to go to Australia now.
Racists are everywhere. Jesus help us.
But fortunately, so are beautiful, righteous, decent, generous and loving people and I am lucky to call many such people friends and colleagues. Gracious, warm-hearted, loving, upright, caring human beings who live in Britain and in every state of the USA and all over Canada and just about everywhere I have ever been, and whom I am sure, greatly, thankfully, outnumber the vicious crazies with their tiki-torches and their hate and spite spit and worse, way worse, their guns and ammunition.
These are scary times. God help us.
24
For Keith Jarrett Rainmaker – Iowa City
Piano man,
my roots are African.
I dwell in the centre of the sun.
I am used to its warmth
I am used to its heat
I am seared by its vengeance,
(it has a vengeful streak)
my prayers are usually
for rain.
My people are farmers
and artists
sometimes the lines blur
and a painting becomes
a December of sorrel;
a carving heaps like a yam hill,
or a song of redemption
wings like petals
of resurrection lilies.
All these require rain.
So this Sunday
when my walk misses
my son’s balance
on my hips,
I’ll be alright
if you pull down
for me, waterfalls of rain.
I never thought a piano
could divine,
but I’m hearing you this morning
and right on time
its drizzling now,
I’ll open the curtains and
watch the lightning conduct
your hands.
FOR A LONG TIME, what is known as ‘world literature’ was lopsided, mainly because the inhabitants of places conquered by great imperial powers like England were taught that ‘literature’ was written elsewhere. Mostly by Europeans and sometimes the odd Russian and that, as Thomas Macaulay said, ‘A single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’
Macaulay would probably be alarmed to hear that Rumi is possibly the best-selling poet in the western world today, and when he wrote those words, how was he to know that in 1913, the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore would go on to become the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
I mention these two poets because both of them have had enormous influence on my own ideas about poetry – Rumi, whose work I was introduced to by my friend, the Egyptian writer Ali Darwish, and Tagore, whose gorgeous Gitanjali I discovered when I worked at my first job as a bookmobile librarian in Jam
aica.
Rumi and Tagore are both poets who drew deeply from their local culture and both are adepts of the spiritual, who, as a character in a story written by V. S. Naipaul says, write poems that ‘sing to all humanity’. If this sounds as if I’m about to take off on a rant about post-colonial literature, I want to assure you that I am not. I am trying to move past post-colonial; I am looking forward to the day post-colonial officially ends, so that something new can be made manifest.
But to go back to where I started, generations of people in places like what used to be called the British West Indies were taught that real literature was not something produced locally because that sort of writing would have no appeal to international audiences. Hence, we were encouraged to regard the poems of Robert Burns, written in deep Scots dialect, as ‘great literature’, and to trivialise the poems of Louise Bennett, who wrote in Jamaican dialect. For a good part of her life, Louise Bennett had to contend with the wrath of the gatekeepers of Jamaican society who claimed that, by writing in a language that most Jamaicans spoke, she was bringing about the collapse of, if not western civilisation, then certainly, West Indian civilisation.
But one of the unintended and happier results of this insult to local literature was that there are generations of West Indian writers who are entirely comfortable with the great books in that good European Library to which Macaulay referred. Great writers like Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, who repeatedly emphasised his love for ‘his canon’, even as he produced some of the most excellent poems written in modern times, poems inspired by local Caribbean culture. Thanks to a number of gifted writers, including Walcott, the world has come to accept that great writing can and does come from places like the Caribbean.
I believe that, here, I should hazard a guess as to what exactly caused the (current) interest in world literature. Time maybe, and without a doubt, the tireless efforts of a few stubborn independent publishers like Jessica Huntley of Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications and the heroic John La Rose and his partner Sarah White, who started New Beacon Books in London for the sole purpose of publishing the works of African, Black British, Caribbean, Asian and African American writers, who were, as we Jamaicans say, ‘less counted’ by mainstream publishers.
New Beacon Books and the Race Today Collective also hosted the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, a dynamic gathering of writers, artists and independent publishers who came from all over the world to the city of London in the mid-to late-1980s. Poetry readings and musical performances by international artists were a regular feature of these events, where the world-famous Jamaican British poet and social activist Linton Kwesi Johnson is rightly credited with introducing the world to extraordinary writers like the late Mikey Smith.
It is safe to say that the success of what was possibly the world’s first Black book fair helped to convince some mainstream publishers to look again at the market for world literature.
World literature also owes a great debt to the pioneering efforts of Margaret Busby, whose publishing house, Allison and Busby, was a game-changer in the world of books. Her Daughters of Africa, which focused on Black women writers in the African diaspora, was published in conjunction with another great supporter of the written word, Candida Lacey, and helped to pave the way for the rise of a number of women writers who are now big names in world literature.
Gifted translators also played a major part in bringing about this change in attitude, as did the increased freedom of movement between once far-flung places.
In the USA, individuals like the poet and publisher Haki Madhubuti, through his Third World Press in Chicago, helped to raise the level of awareness about the richness of world literature.
But I believe that the Iowa International Writing Program has done more for world literature than any other organistion. It would probably take someone like Malcolm Gladwell to figure out just how many students were inspired to a love of world literature through exposure to the IWP: becoming authors, professors, publishers, journalists, agents, literary critics and avid readers spreading enthusiasm and appreciation for the works of writers from the wider world.
In 1983 I was fortunate to become the first Jamaican to participate in the IWP. This came about in part through the efforts of the then US Ambassador to Jamaica, Bill Hewitt, who was a long-time supporter of the programme and a personal friend of Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh Engle, beautiful dreamers both. One of the writers in the programme that year, who was making his first trip outside of Africa, was the Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, whose highly original work continues to have a significant impact on literature today. At his reading in Iowa City, he was given a rock-star welcome by a massive crowd of students and lovers of literature, even as some writers and critics in his own country were still dismissing his project as eccentric and primitive. His fans from Iowa proved to be on the winning side of history because his work has gone on to make such an indelible mark on the rest of the world that there is actually a character in the television series Law and Order SVU (Odafin Tutuola) named for him.
I was an early beneficiary of the IWP back in 1983, before the Berlin Wall came down, before Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and Apartheid ended, before the so-called Iron Curtain buckled under its own weight, before the Arab Spring, and before the USA elected their first Black president, Barack Obama. The IWP brings writers from all over the known world and sets them down amidst not alien corn but the golden corn of hospitality and enlightenment that gives nourishment to writers and artists who, at their best, feed and nourish the world.
25
People I’d like to meet
AS I GROW OLDER, the list of people I’d like to meet before I leave this earth gets shorter and shorter. Some of the people I most love and admire have gone ahead so there is now no chance I’ll meet them here below. All things considered, I’ve done pretty well in the meeting-of-important-people department. I will refrain from providing a full list here, but I will mention that I met Fidel Castro twice, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu once personally thanked me for reading some of my poems, as did Ahmed Kathrada, for whom I read at a function hosted for him by Professor Nesha Haniff in the Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Michigan. I once went to a small dinner where Harry Belafonte was the guest of honour, and Toni Morrison once chatted amiably with me at a gathering at the University of Toronto. I have spent time, on more than one occasion, in the company of Wole Soyinka, and Bob Marley used to nod to me like a mandarin whenever we passed each other on the streets of Kingston.
When Nelson Mandela died, I cried as much as I did on the day he was released from prison. That is to say, I bawled. Although my husband Ted and I once had the good fortune to sit one table away from him at a dinner at the Vergelegen Estate in South Africa, I never did actually meet him.
I did, however, meet Winnie Mandela, and I read her my poem ‘Bedspread’ (p.35) which I wrote for her. She cried openly and said that she’d been hearing about my poem for years, but she’d had no way of getting hold of it because she was a banned person. Then she hugged me very tightly for what seemed like a long time. After that hug I somehow felt much stronger, as if she had managed to transmit some of her enormous courage and fearlessness to me. That was one of the highlights of my life.
I always wanted to meet Muhammad Ali, I never did, and I know that a light went out in the world when he died. I felt the same when Seamus Heaney went home, after telling us not to be afraid. ‘Noli timere,’ he told his wife, and I believe he meant it for all of us. I was beyond sad. But I did meet him just once in person, and I can honestly say that as people go he was one of the sweetest souls that I have ever encountered. I only mention him because I had always hoped to meet him again.
I once shared a stage with Maya Angelou. Hers was an extraordinary presence. I am glad I met her because I think she was perhaps one of the wisest people who ever lived. Something she said once in an interview has helped me to make sense of my own life, w
ith its hard and sometimes frantic questing to find the ‘one’ with whom I could build a life. To paraphrase: Maya Angelou said that she no longer answered questions about her romantic relationships and marriages; that she went into every one of them with all the right appetites for what makes such unions work, they did not, and she chose to keep on moving. But, said she, there are people who elect to remain in dead relationships who somehow think that their decision to stay entombed in this way, gives them the right to look down on others who do not. I learned from her that I am not under any obligation to explain anything to anybody about my somewhat ramshackle romantic track record.
I wish I’d met Zora Neale Hurston in person. My dear, dear old friend Ivy Coverley who spent time in Zora’s company told me that the great writer had a ball when she visited Jamaica in 1939, and that her stay had been greatly enhanced by the ministrations of a particularly good-looking Jamaican man and a fair measure of fine Jamaican rum. I also heard from Edna Manley that, during that same visit, she’d taken Zora to a Pocomania meeting in Jones Town. Mrs Manley said that things had been going really well up until a fight broke out at a political meeting that was taking place near the Poco yard. When the stone throwing between rival political factions started they had no choice but to run. So, Zora Neale Hurston and Edna Manley ran. They raced through the streets whooping and laughing like two wild young girls, laughing in the face of danger, loving all the excitement as they sprinted through the dark streets of West Kingston back up to the Manleys’ palatial residence at Drumblair.
And it was only after they were safely home and had settled in to have a few drinks, that Edna remembered that she had driven them to the meeting, and that her car was still back there parked outside the Poco shepherd’s yard.
Redemption Ground Page 13