by Kei Miller
This thing is complicated. It is not that I believe that a writer—the novelist to be specific—must be some kind of sociolinguist. I do not believe that the writer must make people say exactly the things that they would usually say. That is a kind of laziness, a dereliction of duty. I believe something else entirely. I believe the novelist must sometimes give to their characters things to say that they are fully capable of saying, but which they might not have thought to say themselves. In this way writing can give itself back to people and extend them. So I sit there reading the white woman’s book that has been written so beautifully, but is not the voice of the man who saying all these beautiful things. It is not his beauty—for I know this man, and I know he has his own beautiful way of seeing and saying things.
I wonder why the white woman hasn’t given herself access to this man’s voice, or given the man access to his own voice and his own possibilities. Maybe the white woman has her reasons, and maybe they are very good reasons, but suddenly is like I feel the hand of the white woman as she is writing the very page that I am reading, as if I have stepped through some portal of time, and is like I notice that her hand is trembling. Was she really afraid? Was she nervous about people like me reading her book and throwing words like “appropriation” about? Am I a part of her anxiety?
I think all these things but I do not know how to say any of it to the white woman. Would she be defensive? Worse, would she see me as yet another tall, black man attacking her and questioning her rightful place in this world? No. I would not want to make her feel like that, so I say nothing. And my mind run again on Dionne Brand’s essay—how race mediates all our exchanges, how there are some things we can say and other things we cannot say. And always, the most important things are the things we cannot say.
I am with the white woman who once again is not the same white woman. It seem an obvious thing to say, but sometimes we must say the obvious: not every white woman is the same white woman; and not every black man is the same black man. Our racial identities matter, but plenty times it is the personalities behind those identities that matter even more. It is our personalities that make us use our black-man-ness or our white-woman-ness in such different ways, as shield and as spear.
So me and this white woman are on a beach on an island in the Caribbean, and here it don’t seem that night falls so much as it rises out of the water and then covers everything. I ignore the mosquitoes and my eyes are trained on the beach and to the darkening. I am here to see something I never seen before. I feel glad that the white woman has taken me here. As the waves tumble into the sand, so do the turtles. They allow themselves to be pushed in by the salty current of their own world. They are huge—these turtles—leatherbacks. The small ones weigh 400 pounds, and they get much bigger still.
All day I had caught glimpses of them, out there in the deep water, every now and then raising their snake-like heads up for a breath. They were waiting for the night—for this moment when they allow themselves to be pushed onto land. They look like dinosaurs to me—like something prehistoric—the way they lumber out of their wet world and how on land they seem to lose all of their grace. In water they move like ballerinas. On land, they are clumsy, hauling their bulk to some spot along the beach where they can dig their deep holes and lay their hundred or so eggs. They fall into a trance when they do this and you can even touch them if you want to, but I do not. Even gazing at them with the white woman, observing their ancient ritual feels like an intrusion of sorts, like we have let ourselves into a woman’s birthing bed.
Some of these turtles have not been back to this land—to this particular beach—for thirty years. They were too busy growing up in the waters of Canada. The waters of North America have been kind to them. They have settled there. It is only the need to give birth that pulls them back to the very beach where they had been born years ago. In the time in between they have not visited—but when they become full of their eggs and of the future, something like the cord of love pulls them back. They will trust their eggs to no other sand but the one found on these rocks that we call islands that we call home. These are the original natives. These are the original immigrants. They do not worry or politicise their various migrations. They simply are.
Have you ever witnessed the tears of turtles? It is a well-known phenomenon that when they come onto land they seem to cry—not no cow-bawling mind you. The beach isn’t suddenly full of the sound of wailing. This is just a polite drop of water moving down their eyes as if these mothers are experiencing all the pain and joy of homecoming. We are told now that there is no emotion attached to this eyewater. It is just biology—the removing of excess salt from their bodies, and also a way to protect their eyes from the sand. The white woman beside me however is really crying. Real tears. Real emotion. She is upset by a man who is not me, but it may as well have been.
The man had written this thing about the white woman and his words had moved like a cutlass, but it was many years ago and I am surprised that the white woman is still so upset by it. She cries as if this thing had happened yesterday. I know I do not have the right to say how long pain should last, or what we have the right to be upset about, but these days I find it harder and harder to extend sympathy to the white woman. I cannot find in me the tongue to say, Daughter of Zion, lift up thine head, because—Lord forgive me—I do not think of her as a Daughter of Zion. I think she is Daughter of another place.
Like the sea turtles, she too had migrated. And then she started writing these books, and they were very good books. She had been back before—often—but now she came back as a writer and seemed to discover so many things about the selfsame place where she had been born. The white woman wrote an article about this coming back, about finding out to her great surprise that on these rocks that we call islands that we call home that there were actually writers. Who would have believed such a thing? Writers who live on rocks! And not only that—some of them were actually quite good!
One could have read the white woman’s article for its generosity, or else one could have read it for its ignorance. The man had read the article for its ignorance and he had frowned. For days he had walked around with something like an annoyance growing inside him. It is true that the man was young—that age where things can seem to be more than they really are. The woman had written an article that few people would have read or even remembered, but the man had read it, and his annoyance grew and grew.
He thought about this white woman who was born on these rocks but who had become a writer elsewhere and so did not seem to know things. He could not forgive the white woman for her naïveté. His annoyance grew and became its own article. His article was many times larger than the small stub the white woman had written. In the man’s article he calls the white woman a modern-day Columbus, for she had discovered what was already there.
Upon reading this, the white woman had cried for days and days, and even years later sitting on a beach and watching the turtles, she is still crying. She tell me again how the wicked man has ruined her. She tell me again that what the wicked man has written is libellous. She tell me again that she was tempted to file a big fat lawsuit gainst the man, but I think whichever lawyer she did talk to and who tell her that such a case was winnable was a samfy man, a merchant of snake oil, who did only want to take away what little money the white woman did have in her pockets. In any case, I glad she did not sue, for how would that have looked? A white writer from foreign sues a black man in the Caribbean—for what? Forgetting his place? Because he had the audacity and was renk enough to roll up all his smallness and blackness and use it as a weapon against her? She would not have survived the backlash.
There was a time when I did sympathise with the white woman who is also my friend. I used to tell her yes, yes, the man’s words were harsh . . . because they really was harsh, but then I would add softly . . . even though they were true. You understand that, right? There was truth in his words. She didn’t e
ver hear the last part. I suspect now, she could hear little beyond the sound of her own heart breaking. Every year I would try to say it a little bit louder: there was truth in the man’s words. You hurt him too! Do you understand that? You hurt him. You hurt me! But she would never hear that sentence. She did not know how to.
All those plenty years ago when this thing started, I used to stay on the phone while the white woman cried and cried and one time she did tell me, brazen-like, that the problem with Caribbean literature is all the men. Is all those blasted black men who walk bout like them is some kind of king. And I did swallow at the other end of the line wondering if maybe she did forget who she was talking to—and wondering if she really thought that every white woman was the same white woman, and every black man was the same black man.
While the night rises up and the turtles lay their eggs, I tell the white woman, Look nah! There are so many things we need to sort through and so many things we need to think through. There are so many conversations we still need to have, and many of them will not be polite. We not always going to play nice. But we must talk the things all the same. What we cannot do is throw a tantrum every time someone say something that get under our skin.
The white woman says, That is all well and good for you to say, but talk to me when you too have been bullied by a black man. Talk to me after a man has aimed a steamroller at you and made you into nothing. I think about these words. I think about this depiction of the black man as bully, as savage, as brute. And I think of the man who had frowned at the white woman’s words and who in turn had strong words for the white woman, but how this man was really just a young writer from a small place who understood the largeness of his heritage. I think of what the white woman does not know, and what I do not know, and what she will never grasp, and what I will never grasp—what it means to be black in this world, what it means to be a woman in this world—and I think about the distance that will always be between us. I think too about the white woman who had placed her head under a tap of water. Things is never straightforward. Sometimes a man like me will wield words against the white woman, and the blade of those words are sharpened by the stone of his own insecurities, but another time the man will wield words against the white woman, and the blade of these words are sharpened by the stone of truth.
“Did I really deserve that? Am I such an awful person?” the white woman is pleading with me. I swallow something in my throat. Is she still looking for my help and benevolence? I know she is not an awful person. She is like all of us. Sometimes there is goodness in her heart and sometimes there is darkness; I have seen both. But still and all, I think these questions are unfair. This thing have nothing to do with who deserves what, or being an awful person. And I think of how she so easily imagines the black man as a brute and a bully and a savage. I suspect it is the way she thinks of me when it suits her. It is the way that the past is always present. I feel the salt gathering in my own eye and so turn back to watch the turtles.
There was once a white woman who wrote a book about white women who were from these rocks and the book became very famous indeed. That white woman has died—though even now whenever we see Mad Bertha burning herself up in the flames of Thornfield, we can’t help but think Antoinette! What a way them do you wrong, Antoinette!
That famous book begins like this: They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
Today, a white woman is running through the streets of a nameless Caribbean island and shouting, Close ranks! Close ranks! And I wonder if maybe she has read the famous book but not understood it completely—its implicit critique.
Whatever the case, the white woman is running through the streets but no one is bothering with her. They not batting an eyelid. It is like people saying to themselves, Oh God! This again! She again! I cannot bother with she and she madness today. And so as the white woman runs and her feet grow weary she find herself getting angry at all the tall white gates with all the good good white people behind them, and how none of them have come out to close ranks behind her.
The next day, this is what the white woman says to the other white woman: Where were you? I was shouting and shouting for us to close ranks!
And this is what the other white woman responds: Wha’ de ass!! We still playing that Mas? Nah! I not into that!
The white woman says: But I was being attacked! The critics came for me with sharp knives. And when one of us is attacked, all of us are attacked!
The other white woman says: Nah! When you is attacked it mean that you is attacked. It mean you have to ask yourself, what have I done? And you gots to put on your big girl pants and your big girl shoes, and you parse out what is truth from what is fuckery and you deal with it.
The white woman says: But I was being attacked! The critics came for me with sharp knives. And when one of us is . . .
The other white woman interrupts: You listening to anything I saying, or you just going to repeat the same stupidness over and over?
The white woman says: But look at our skin! (and she puts her hand against the other white woman’s hands, their freckles merging into one). We are sisters!
The other white woman says: Nah! That’s not how this thing works. I am sister to everyone who is from these rocks and who sit down to try and write the lushness and ugliness of our existence.
The white woman takes out from her pocket a passport and says: Well then look! I am your sister. I am from here too.
The other white woman frowns: In a way, yes. But there is more. This thing have to do with more than just passports and birth certificates and the accidents of our birth. It have to do with the where that we choose, and the where that chooses us. It have to do with knowing the names of things. Of trees and flowers. It have to do with language. It have to do with knowing the word that we use is “sidewalk” and not “pavement”, and that the word we use is “while” and not “whilst”. You can’t be writing this place and putting the wrong words in people’s mouths. This rock is not made of granite or limestone, but with words. You must be given the right words. And these, my dear sister, are things you have yet to learn.
And when the other white woman says this, a swarm of bees rise up from a patch of yellow flowers, as if to say yes, and yes, and Amen!
The white women and I have things in common, bodies that are profoundly marked, though in different ways. One day I might admit this to the white women: My dears, I know what it is to live in a body that is constantly marked as not belonging to the place in which it resides, but to tell the truth, I cannot comprehend the further pain of living in a body marked as not belonging even to the place to which it most profoundly belongs—marked as foreign even in its own home.
The body of the white woman often gives her easy access to worlds for which I have no visa, but my own body gives me easier access to the words that make up my craft. We envy each other these things—these things that our bodies give us access to. If we could, would we trade our bodies, one for the other? I suspect not. So there is no real end to this, to this game, to this table that the black men and the white women dance around. Tomorrow there will be some new hurt, but who will cause it and who will nurse it is anyone’s guess.
This evening, perhaps, the white women will find themselves sitting on rocks and looking out to the great expanse that is the Caribbean Sea. There are so many things in that sea like ships and their sad cargos, and the dying dolphins and the dying turtles and the dying sharks and all this damned dying that make the white women and the black men want to bawl together. And even the night that seems to grow large from all the relentless dying seems to rise out from the salty depths. And when the night rises and envelops everything, the white women, because they are writers, will grab hold of it and squeeze out their own small portion of ink. And if they are so lucky it will be that kind of night that buzzes like bees, and from its ink they will form words, and the words will form flowers that will for
m flocks of birds that will form sky.
11
DEAR BINYAVANGA, I AM NOT WRITING ABOUT AFRICA
(Binyavanga Wainaina, 1971–2019, was a Kenyan writer. He wrote the now famous essay, “How to Write About Africa” and the memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place.)
Dear Binj,
I am here, at last, because I promised.
No, that isn’t quite true. In fact, it was you who promised to come to Jamaica, but then life happened, or more precisely, its opposite. You had your first big stroke. It was big enough that you actually noticed this one. Big enough that you ended up in hospital and big enough that you lost some of your speech. We all heard about it and so I adjusted our plans. If you couldn’t come to Jamaica, then I would come to Kenya. So here I am, at last. It is almost a dozen months and a dozen strokes too late, and you are already dead.
Dear Binj,
I did not know that you were dying, or that you knew you were dying—and that you carried this around with you, this sense of the impending. Even then, when we met, the clock had already been set and was running down. How much time exactly was unclear. Five years—three years—a matter of months? Nothing specific. Only that you were not long for this world. American doctors told you to stay put in America, near to a hospital stocked with American medicine, and where they promised they had all the things that could keep your body going for as long as they could keep it going—which is a strange promise when you think about it, for everyone can promise at least that. You said naah anyway. You packed up and returned to Kenya. I get that.
Dear Binj,
I am here and writing to you and would like to assure you that I am not writing about Africa. I am only writing about myself in Africa—this place, this continent, where I think my body should make a kind of sense, but so far it doesn’t make as much as I would like. I do not yet understand the end of that thought—only that it feels true and that there is some hurt at the end of the thought which I must face soon enough. I am starting here in Kenya, then I will go across the border to Ethiopia, and then I will fly all the way west, across to Ghana.