New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  About Me in Africa—Politics and Religion in my Childhood

  In my childhood I did not know that Egypt is in Africa. The Egyptian government under King Farouk did not consider Egypt as part of Africa. They followed the British colonizers, who divided Africa into Black and White. Divide and Rule has been the main plan of any colonizers throughout history.

  To exploit people, you must veil their minds, and create conflicts and wars between them. This is happening today in our life as happened in earlier societies.

  Religion is the best tool to veil the minds of people and divide them. The Egyptian educational system followed that of the British colonizers and contained many racist, patriarchal, religious, and capitalist ideas.

  I was brainwashed by my official education as a Muslim, Egyptian girl from the working class. In primary school the British and Egyptian teachers praised the upper-class girls, with fair white skin. My maternal Turkish grandmother despised my dark skin, which I inherited from the poor peasant family of my father.

  My maternal aunt used to hide my dark skin with white powder, and would straighten my hair with a hot iron. I liberated my mind from this slavery by educating myself. Also, my enlightened mother and father helped me to undo what teachers did to me.

  To weaken the human mind you need an absolute power in Heaven and on Earth. Obedience must be the rule, to God, the King or the President. In Ancient Egypt, God was the King. In fact, “God’s power” was created by the statesmen or the politicians to conceal the King’s domination and exploitation. Throughout human history, political economic power was the origin of all religions. Obedience to God is inseparable from obedience to the ruler. The idea of secularism, or of separating religion from state, is misleading. No state can control its peoples without their submission to God’s Will, which hides their submission to the government or ruler.

  Democracy and secularism are deceptive words, among others, masking the politics behind religion. The post-modern, so-called, Daesh, El Quaida, Taliban, Boko Haram, Muslim, Christian, Jewish state, and all other religious fundamentalist states or groups, are political imperialist capitalist powers, created by global-local colonizers under the name of God.

  When I was a primary school student during the 1940s, I noticed that King Farouk, who was head of the state and the army in Egypt, had more power over the Egyptian people than God and his Prophet Mohamed. However, the British general of the invading army in Egypt had more power over King Farouk and the Egyptian army and government. My father told me one day that the British army had surrounded the palace of King Farouk and threatened to kick him off the throne if he did not obey the British order to appoint El Nahhas Pasha as prime minister of the Egyptian government.

  Al Azhar, the highest Islamic power in Egypt, could not defend the King, though its top Islamic sheikhs declared every Friday, in all the country’s mosques, that His Majesty the King was protected by His Majesty God and His Prophet from all evils, and that he, the King, would rule Egypt for ever, never to be de-throned unless by God’s Will.

  I asked my father this question: “How can the British Will be above God’s Will?” My father replied that no human will can be above the Will of God, but God can use the British colonizer or any human being as a tool to punish our king Farouk, who was corrupt and unjust.

  In July 1952, while I was a student in the medical faculty, King Farouk was overthrown by the Free Officers Movement led by Nasser. My father said that God used Nasser and his group as a tool to realize God’s Will. It became clear to my mind that, in reality, the only Will working is that of the state and the army.

  In fact, religion is needed today, as in all times and places, to transform the human being into a tool in the hands of the dominating global-local powers. Today we use the new word “glocal” to show that the global and local are inseparable.

  My father died in February 1959; he did not live to witness the big defeat of Nasser in June 1967, but the top Islamic sheikh declared that the defeat was God’s Will, not the Will of the British-French-Israeli-American powers. He considered Nasser a communist atheist secular dictator and that God had punished him.

  Nasser died in September 1970 and the new ruler, Sadat, opened the doors of Egypt to American-Israeli goods, he signed a peace treaty with Israel, changed the constitution to declare Egypt an Islamic state, and named himself The Believer, The Father. Sadat would start his speeches with God’s name—Allah—and end with the Prophet Mohamed’s name.

  The leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood were released from Nasser’s prison and were encouraged to hold political and religious posts. Women and even female children started to wear the veil. In September 1981 Sadat imprisoned all opposition leaders, men and women, who criticized his policies, including myself. I was accused of being against Sadat and God.

  I used to see God in my dreams when I was a child. He was inseparable from Satan the Devil. When I started my childhood diary, both of them, God and Satan, were always together. I could not separate them in my imagination or in reality. Imagination was inseparable from reality. When God resigned in any of my novels, Satan had to resign. And when Satan resigned, God had to resign.

  It was not my fault. Since I started reading the three monotheistic holy books— The Qur’an, the New and Old Testaments—I have found God and Satan together all the time. I was severely punished by political-religious powers because I did not separate between God and the local-global President.

  Anyway, I stopped hiding my dark skin very early in my life, since I discovered that Egypt is in Africa, not in the so-called Middle East. In fact, I never use the term Middle East.

  December 2017

  Cairo, Egypt

  Adrienne Kennedy

  Influential as a playwright and memoirist, she was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She draws on myth, autobiography and history to explore issues of race, kinship, and violence in her work, which has been produced, read and taught internationally for more than six decades. She is best known for her one-act play Funnyhouse of a Negro, which was written in 1960, the year she visited Ghana, and won an Obie Award in 1964. Other notable works followed, including The Owl Answers (1965), A Rat’s Mass (1967), A Beast Story (1969), and June and Jean in Concert (1996), earning her many prestigious honours, among them a Guggenheim fellowship (1967), an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in Literature (1994), the 2003 Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theatre award (2006), and an Obie Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. Her most recent play, He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, premiered in 2018. In November 2018, she was inducted into the US Theater Hall of Fame.

  Forget

  I met my white grandfather a few times.

  of course he lived on the white side of town.

  he sent his chauffeur who was black and his name was Austin

  in a black car to

  my grandmother’s house to get us.

  my mother wanted my brother, herself, and me to walk

  but he insisted.

  we went to his house.

  his white wife wanted us to go in the back

  door,

  but he insisted we come into the front.

  full of contradictions,

  he sent my mother and her half-sister to college,

  bought them beautiful things

  but still maintained the distance. they called him

  by his surname and he never shared a meal with them.

  we sat in his parlor twice.

  he was slightly fascinated by my brother and me.

  he said something like you all have northern accents.

  he was interested in our schooling in Cleveland.

  he was interested in the fact that people

  said I was smart.

  at that time the thirties and before the WAR

  he owned a lot of the town

  and had three children by black women.

  my mother’s mother was
fifteen, worked in the peach orchards.

  like the South itself, he was an unfathomable

  mixture of complexities,

  these are two generations of white men

  removed

  who went all the way to Africa to get SLAVES,

  quite mad.

  I was lucky enough to spend a day and evening in his

  and his family’s house. built about 1860

  where he was born . . . his father was the town’s first bank owner.

  the house, white, wooden in weeping willow trees

  down a long archway.

  by 1940, when I visited, the house had one usable

  room, the rest all boarded up

  and was lived in by black COUSINS

  of his Negro family.

  despite her Atlanta Univ education and marrying a Morehouse man

  and making a nice life in Cleveland,

  my mother found it impossible to say her mother’s name.

  and impossible to call her father by anything but his

  surname.

  she used to say to me when I was a child,

  Adrienne, when I went to town to get the

  mail, they would always say

  here comes that little yellow bastard.

  1940s

  Andaiye

  Guyanese-born, she has been described as a transformative figure in the region’s political struggle, particularly in the late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. She has devoted most of her adult life to left and women’s politics in the Caribbean and internationally. She was an early member of the Executive of Guyana’s Working People’s Alliance with (among others) Walter Rodney and worked alongside him as he wrote A History of the Guyanese Working People: 1881–1905. She was a founder of Red Thread women’s collective, and served on the Regional Executive of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA). Later, she was associated internationally with Women of Colour in the Global Women’s Strike. A cancer survivor twice, she was a founder of the Guyana Cancer Society and Cancer Survivors Action Group. She has published articles and chapters, mainly on women in Guyana and the Caribbean, and continues to support organising for radical change.

  Audre, There’s Rosemary, That’s For Remembrance

  For Audre Lorde (1992)

  I met Audre Lorde toward the end of 1988 at the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA) meeting. I was chairing (they call it facilitating) a session. CAFRA members were being—as usual—disorderly, and why not? I was in my best head-teacher mode. Audre came in late. I recognized her face from the back cover of books, but I had to make a point; she was late. I asked her to identify herself. She said, looking a little surprised (she was not humble): “Audre Lorde.” I led the acknowledgement by thumping the table. She acknowledged the recognition with a slight raising of the eyebrow, a ducking of the head.

  A short time after, I was asked if I could be interviewed with Audre. I agreed. It took some time to get the interview together. When I was free, I heard she was tired. When she wasn’t, I was busy. I wasn’t trying to be difficult. I hadn’t read the cancer books; I didn’t know about her struggle with cancer. Eventually we did the interview at a table (I think; my memory is bad) in a room full of people and smoke. I think, too, I was smoking myself. As I said, I didn’t know she had cancer. And I didn’t know I had cancer.

  Somewhere in the next six months I learned she had cancer. Somewhere in the next six months—on International Women’s Day, 1989—I learned that I, too, had cancer.

  I remember only fragments of what happened over the next few days. I remember being at my father’s house and people coming in, the women breaking the silence of awkwardness by asking me what I needed washed or ironed or bought for the hospital; the men, not socialized into housework, having nothing to break the silence. I remember my friend, Jocelyn Dow, taking me to see a play that was on in celebration of IWD: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. I remember going to the home of another friend, Alice Thomas, where I cried and Alice said, “Done, done, never mind, the diagnosis probably wrong.” Mother words. I remember yet another friend, Nesha Haniff, saying angrily that we all know Guyana’s medical services had fallen apart so why were we so stupid as to believe they could read any slides? I remember my father sitting with Jocelyn making arrangements for me to go to Canada for the diagnosis to be checked, even as he denied the possibility it might be right. I remember him calling my mother, who was in England, and who did what she did best—pretended she was coping well; how was her daughter? I remember my brother, Abyssinian, calling to say that he would leave his job in New York (as he did) and come wherever I would be, to be my nurse (as he was). I know I spoke during those few days, too, to other women who became major supports; the thing I call not yet a women’s movement called in.

  I do not remember when I wrote Audre but I did, and I remember that she answered immediately and sent me a copy of A Burst of Light with the inscription, “Sister Survivor—May these words be a bridge over that place where there are no words—or where they are so difficult as to sound like a scream!”

  And so began my friendship with Audre Lorde, around the sharing of the fear of living with, perhaps dying from, cancer. She wrote often, mostly on cards. She’d say, “I need your words too.” I couldn’t write too many. So I called, often. And she called too.

  West Indians are a people who, for good or evil, express the serious as joke, so across all my weekly and monthly phone calls with Audre in four years, here’s what I remember most sharply.

  I was well into my treatment and had developed a reputation as a person who was dealing well with cancer and chemotherapy. And I was brave. I knew from reading that the drugs I was using would cause me to lose my hair. I arranged to shave it all off when it began to fall. I was determined that I would be in control. Every time I went for chemo I vomited my guts out, then, vomiting over, called for soup with pigtail, which my Aunt Elsene or mother made. I watched people watching me with pity—hair gone, cheeks deformed by steroids—and managed to laugh. My friend Karen de Souza, a photographer, would come from Guyana to visit me and climb up high to take pictures of the sun shining on my head and my cheeks, so that (she said) I could see later where I had been and acknowledge the journey. I genuinely found that funny. At least she assumed there would be a later.

  I was brave until the day I was told I had to lose several teeth, which, given the teeth I had been losing since childhood, meant that I had to get a plate.

  A plate, teeth in a cup, at night; worse than cancer, a metaphor for old age. I went back to the home where I was staying with my friend Elsie Yong, entered my bedroom, closed the door, climbed into my bed, went into the foetal position and lay.

  Somewhere within this—the same day, next day?—Audre called.

  “Hi, girlfriend,” she said.

  “Hi,” I muttered, the first time I had ever felt or sounded not glad to hear her voice.

  She chatted and then eventually asked what was wrong.

  I said, “I have to take out teeth and get a plate and soak it in the night like old people.” One breath, whining.

  I heard a noise like a person who hadn’t managed to get her hand over the phone before she giggled. Then Audre said, “I lost my two front teeth. Which teeth are you losing?”

  “The remaining ones on the right side,” I answered.

  “Oh, that’s bad,” she said. “But not as bad as front teeth.”

  I sucked the teeth I had left.

  “Listen,” she said. “You know I’m supposed to be so brave? Well, when I lost my two front teeth I felt worse than when I lost my breast. I mean, you don’t have to show your breast or use it every minute, but your teeth!”

  I giggled, then said, “But this is it. This is the end. This is teeth in a cup, in the night. The end of . . .”

  “No,” she interrupted. “Here’s what I do. In the night, I go into the bathroom and close the door, firmly. I
take out my two front teeth. I brush the teeth in my mouth, then the teeth in my hand. Then I put the teeth in my hand in my mouth. I go to bed. Now, if you have expectations (and, girlfriend, you and I might seem to have different expectations but they’re really the same expectations), you wait till the expectations are met or if none are forthcoming you raise some . . .”

  I giggled.

  “Stop interrupting,” she went on. “After your expectations are met (she/he approaching, you approaching), you wait for the right moment (she/he asleep) and you take out your teeth (if you think you must) and place them strategically under your pillow.”

  I giggled.

  “Girlfriend, you put them there so you can get at them quickly if any further expectations come up. And if they don’t, in the morning you get up, take them quickly from under the pillow, go to the bathroom, close the door firmly, brush the teeth in your mouth then the teeth in your hand, put the teeth in your hand in your mouth and you’re ready to meet any further expectations . . .”

  “OK, OK, OK,” I giggled. “OK.”

  It occurred to me then, it occurs to me now, that the story had been made up out of whole cloth. But what does that matter?

  A few times Audre called me because she needed to find company in the place she was in. When the alternative therapy that had helped her stay alive for so long wasn’t shrinking her liver tumor anymore or even keeping it the same size, the question was whether finally to take chemotherapy even though she was tired of carrying her life every day in her hands.