by Kei Miller
9
THERE ARE TRUTHS HIDDEN IN OUR BODIES
It is always the body that I return to—our bodies and their various meanings.
This is what happened: in the winter of 2004, a woman enters a shop in Manchester, England. It is a student shop attached to the student union and all the workers here either study at Manchester Metropolitan University or the University of Manchester. The vibe of the shop is a relaxed one, and the student workers have not only devised a rota for their work shifts and their lunch breaks, but also one for DJ privileges—each taking turns to play their music as it filters through the speakers of the shop.
The woman who has entered the shop seems to carry with her the weight of some deep annoyance. At the till she is unimpressed by the man (the man is me) who smiles brightly at her and asks, as he has been taught to, “Anything else for you?” There is something about her eyes and the curl of her lip that seems almost disgusted by him, but the man does not feel this is directed towards him. How could it be? What could he have done to earn such a visceral reaction by a stranger? She does not answer his question with words, but with a sort of twitch of the head signals, no, no . . . nothing else. I just want to leave. As the man scans and cashes her goods and then sorts out her change from the ten-pound note she has handed him, it seems the woman can finally hold it in no longer. “For godsake could you turn that music off! Don’t you know how hateful it is?”
It is 2004. Terrifying stories have been leaking out about the violent homophobia on the island. Across England, Jamaican artistes are frequently being unbooked from shows after protest by LGBT rights groups accusing them of peddling hate music. In 2006 it will all culminate in an article in Time magazine declaring Jamaica “The Most Homophobic Place On Earth”. It is only when the woman snaps, it is only when she asks, “Don’t you know how hateful it is?” that the man (who is me) realises that he has been humming all along to the music in the background, that the rota says he has DJ rights for this hour and so he has been playing music from his island. It is only now that he listens more intently to the words of I Wayne singing “Lava Ground”:
Deya pon de lava ground
An’ nuff a dem ah look fi see I mawga down
hype pon warrior true dem have a gun
but tell dem seh de warriors naah guh run (naah guh run!)
Firm upon de lava ground.
A loose prose translation of the lines could be this: We are here on this troubled ground, and lots of people would love to see us diminished, they taunt us because they have guns, but tell them that we, the warriors, will not run. We will not run! We stand firm upon this troubled ground.
The man wonders what could possibly be seen as hateful in this declaration of defiance, this insistence on standing one’s ground, this refusal to be intimidated even when we are approached with guns or with the threat of violence—this stance which has in fact been the stance of so many heroic LGBT Jamaicans? It takes the man a second—a solitary second of being reduced by the woman’s stare, her clear repulsion of him and his body, to understand what she is hearing and understanding. She understands correctly that the music is Jamaican and she understands that the man is also Jamaican. She had observed him—his over-200-pound black, male body, his dreadlocks—and having read all the stories, she understands that Jamaica is a homophobic island and that much of its music stridently advocates for the killing of gay men. It stands to reason then—the big black man in front of her who is clearly the cause of this Jamaican music, who is singing along to it, must necessarily be humming a tune of hatred. If Jamaica is only defined by its homophobia, then every Jamaican must be either an agent of or a victim of such hate. She has, in her mind, some imagination of the broken, brown queer body. It is that body on whose behalf she believes she is now speaking. She does not imagine that the body before her is one such body. She does not understand that in the actual moment of encountering a brown, queer body from Jamaica, all she does is to berate that body and silence it. But because the customer is always white (or is it that the customer is always right? In that moment they mean very much the same thing) the man turns off the radio and hands his DJ rights over to another student worker whose music, being less black, will undoubtedly be less offensive.
This is also what happened: On a train from Heathrow Airport I sit across from two men who seem very much in love, and who it seems have flown across from America to England for a vacation. Their love is not the extravagant kind, but the deeper one that has settled into a comfortable place. They, almost unconsciously, touch each other often—a hand on the other’s knee as they talk, or ask a question. A finger raised to the other’s face to wipe away a ketchup stain. It is so sweet, I cannot help but smile.
One of the men looks up and catches me staring and his face turns into a scowl. “What?” he barks at me. “You got a problem with gay people!?”
I stammer. I turn away.
This is what has happened more times than I can count: it is close to midnight in Manchester, or sometimes London, and I am in a line outside inching towards a door. Whenever the door opens, the hard thump of a kind of techno beat leaks out into the street. My friends have decided on a “big night out”. This will involve drinking and dancing into the wee hours of the morning. There are no women in this line, but some of the men are shivering in that same way you often see women shivering in lines outside of clubs, pulling the jackets of their boyfriends tight around them. The men who are shivering are sometimes shirtless—wearing just a pair of shorts and a leather harness around their chests. It is no wonder they are cold.
Finally, at the door, the bouncer—a man about 6-foot 5 and almost as wide—looks at me with a stern face. His sternness is not only reserved for me. It is the face he presents to everyone, but still it seems that he considers me for a longer moment, blocking my entrance.
“You know what kind of club this is?” he finally asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“You sure you want to go in?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“I don’t want any trouble,” he says.
“Sure,” I say.
This is a truth—a difficult and complicated truth: the place where I have always felt most comfortably gay is in Jamaica. In Jamaica, I know the language and the mannerisms of queerness. In Jamaica, I know how to dance. In Jamaica, I do not have to constantly translate my sexuality into mannerisms and speech and dances that sometimes feel to me, profoundly British. That sometimes feel profoundly white. In Britain I often have to dance my queerness to the hard thump of a techno beat. It is difficult to dance my queerness to soca or to dancehall or to reggae. In Britain, my black body often hides the truth of my queerness.
This is what happened: it is 6 August 2012—the fiftieth anniversary of Jamaica’s independence. I am back in Glasgow. At this moment in time, Scotland is contemplating her own possible independence. In two years’ time a referendum will be held on the matter, and though it will be unsuccessful, Glasgow as a city will vote overwhelmingly in favour of it. The mood, the appetite for an end to the British union is palpable in Scotland’s largest city, so the African and Caribbean Society have convened a panel not only to celebrate Jamaica’s independence but to ask what lessons Scotland might take from the island it once helped rule—an island that gained its independence as much from Scotland as it had from England.
An old man in the audience says he was a young British soldier stationed in Jamaica on 6 August 1962. He watched with tears in eyes as they raised the black, green and gold saltire flag over an independent country. He says, with a tremor in his voice, that there is nothing he would want more than to live to see the blue and white saltire raised over an independent Scotland. As someone else who has lived between Scotland and Jamaica, I have been brought in to moderate this panel.
After the old man has spoken, a much younger man in a blue plaid shirt raises his hand for the roving audienc
e microphone to be passed to him. He stands and adjusts his glasses while reading from his notes, the telltale sign of a journalist preparing for an article. He asks, “But how can we celebrate Jamaica’s independence when there is a whole section of the population who have never felt included as citizens?” The man in the blue plaid shirt has undoubtedly heard the worst stories, and though the worst stories are indeed the worst, it does not stop them from being true. He has read about gay Jamaican men who have been run out from their houses, or who have been stoned, or who have been chopped with machetes and killed. Some have been lucky enough to jump on a plane and seek asylum elsewhere. The man in the blue plaid shirt cannot see into the future. He cannot know that in a year’s time, on this exact day, the Jamaican reggae singer, Queen Ifrica, will be on stage at Jamaica’s National Stadium and will pause her performance at this Independence event to celebrate the straight people present in the audience. Only the straight people. “Woman and man we say!” she will shout into her microphone. “No gays round here!” This would add to his point. There is another future he cannot see; in three years’ time, on this exact day, Jamaica Pride will have its first successful staging. They will tie the idea of their own independence to the independence of the island, and this would subtract from the man’s point.
Still, the man in the blue plaid shirt is not writing for the future; he is writing an article for an LGBT magazine today, and today his question is an urgent one. I would have liked to answer it myself—not that such questions can ever be properly answered, they can only be engaged with—but I remember that my role is to moderate. I dutifully pass the question over to the panel.
The panellists are all men. They all identify as straight. They are all black. They were born in the Caribbean or on the African continent. They speak with accents that belong to hotter climates. They are unprepared for this question. They hem and they haw. Their denunciation of the homophobia that too often defines black communities is neither fulsome nor convincing. Their answers satisfy neither me nor the man in the blue plaid shirt, who is once again on his feet, who has not yet given up the microphone, whose face is now flushed with a fury that reveals the piece he is writing is not just journalism but a cause that he genuinely believes in. He is shouting now, “Well quite frankly, if I was a gay man in Jamaica, I would want to kill myself!” And the statement slaps the air right out of me.
But I didn’t want to kill myself; it wasn’t like that! is what I want to shout back, except that isn’t really the point. Except there would have been boys in Jamaica who had wanted to kill themselves, and some who had been successful—boys who had decided to be the orchestrators of their own deaths rather than give the pleasure to an angry mob. Of course this fact is not unique to my island—across the world the rate of suicides amongst LGBT youths is consistently higher than that of the general population. But to follow that line of thought is to go down the same road that the panellists before me had just fumblingly travelled. To travel that particular road is to be an apologist—to defend the indefensible.
No. It is something else. It is that the man in the blue plaid shirt is speaking for me. He is speaking on behalf of my body. It is that my body hides its truth from him. It is that his own body hides mine. It is that his genuine anger, the volume that he has brought to the microphone, depends on the silence of my body. It is that his words do not give voice to a voiceless community, but instead they make that community voiceless. It is that, although I am sitting on stage right in front of him, I am still only a figment of his imagination. It is that it is disturbing to watch someone trying to imagine the thing he does not know he is looking at. It is that he has become just another white man who can only imagine my body as dead or desiring death.
Of course, I do not say any of this. I do not think he wants to hear my truth. His anger and his righteousness are simple. Easy. The truth that my body hides is not. It is complicated. It is difficult. And I do not say my truth because it is too important.
10
THE WHITE WOMEN AND THE LANGUAGE OF BEES
I
must be given words so that the bees
in my blood’s buzzing brain of memory
will make flowers, will make flocks of birds,
will make sky . . .
– Kamau Brathwaite
I write a message to the white woman, though right now I do not know if someone like me have the right words to say to someone like she. I press “send” all the same. I think that right now she might be hiding from a man. The man is not me, but sometimes I think he may as well be me, which is to say that he is tall and black and he write all kinda books that try to capture the lushness and the harshness of these rocks that we call islands that we call home. This man decide to take it on himself to tell the white woman that she is not one of us, that she don’t speak for us or even to us. In fact, he is quite surprised (this is what he tell she) whenever he pick up a newspaper and see her face staring back at him. He is surprised when him see people calling her a writer from these rocks that we call islands that we call home. He want to know what someone like she could ever know about people like we, and about these rocks, and about these flowers, and about the language of bees. The man’s words move sharp as a cutlass and open up an old wound on the white woman’s skin. A world of anxiety festers in that wound.
I know that this man is just a carry-down artist. He see people trodding on whatever Zion-road they be trodding on, and he try to carry them down, even to carry them down to nothing. It is true that the white woman was not born on these rocks. She has this in common with the man—that they both live in places they were not born to. They are both immigrants. But the white woman has lived on these rocks for longer than he has lived away from them. And she has given birth on these rocks. And when she writes, she uses the range of languages and dialects that springs from these rocks. How many years and decades must pass before we can belong to a place and to its words? How much time before we can write it? In my message I tell the white woman that it is he—the carry-down man—who does not speak for us. He certainly don’t speak for me. The white woman tells me how she did wake up that morning and place her head under a tap of water and she just stay there while the hand of the clock moved itself from morning to lunchtime. She let the water beat over her head and I do not know whether this was some sort of punishment or just a way to wash away the awfulness of the carry-down man’s words.
She say to me, Kei—look at me. I weigh 400 pounds. I cannot hide. And she say it as if pounds was the same as years, like she was saying, I weigh 400 years—as if hers was the entire weight of our history, of cane fields and the Atlantic. And also, she ask me, what is the raasclawt language of bees? I wonder to myself what kind of man could make a woman feel so bad bout herself—could leave her numb by a tap of water considering how she might fit herself down the drain. And I can’t find the tongue to say O Daughter of Zion, lift up thine head. For yours is the weight of love and livity. Four hundred pounds is the weight of 20,000 hibiscuses, or better yet, the weight of 1.3 million bees—the weight of venom you should have applied to the man.
In truth, the white woman don’t need my help nor my benevolence. Perhaps that is my own arrogance—a lesson that I too have to learn. Still, I tell the white woman what little words I have to say and she tell me thanks and that my words mean something. But in time it is she who will pick her own self up, and it is she who will find her own tongue in her own mouth and will say, “Daughter of Zion . . . Daughter of Zion . . . Daughter of Zion,” and she will say it until the words create a kind of energy and the energy lift her right back to her own Zion-road, and along that Zion-road she find a poem and then another poem and then another, and the poems will build up one by one to form a whole new book, and the book will be a thing indisputably of the rock. It is she—the white woman—who will recognise the man not for his blackness nor for his manness but for what is fragile and tremulous underneath it all.
/> I sit down to read the latest book of the white woman. No. It is not the same white woman. I know that sometimes it could seem that way, which is the whole point of this thing. At the same time that I read the latest book of the white woman, the white woman is reading my latest book (I know this because she has said as much) and I think it is a funny thing this, to live simultaneously in each other’s words. I must say that I feel relieved that I like the white woman’s book. For true, she understands the lushness and the ugliness of these rocks, and sometimes she describes things in such a way that make me see a landscape I have always known, but in a whole different light. This land is hers too, and also the water. She knows better than me the direction of rivers, and the colours that play on its surface. She knows the names of things—of trees and flowers and vines that grow along the bank of the river, and the peculiar shape of the roots. She knows the quality of heat that wraps itself around everything like a blanket. I find myself thinking that this is some of the best writing I have read from the white woman, and yet still I have questions. Yet still, something feel wrong.
All of this keen observation is coming out of the mouth of a man that the white woman has invented. According to the white woman’s invention, this man have no education to speak of. So how is he speaking these things? It is not that I don’t believe that such a man would observe all the things that he observes, but I do not believe the language of his observation. I feel like the white woman has not trusted the eloquence of her own character—has not imagined him as a man capable of saying the things she would like him to say but in his own way. It is as if she grew frustrated and decided to put his own voice to the side and put her own white woman’s voice in his mouth. This land is hers too, and also the water, and also the language.