New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

I think of my father and

  the shameful relief that came when

  he went back into the hospital

  becoming someone else’s responsibility

  so I didn’t have to worry for one

  night, maybe two

  Jasmine is in Hastings with her

  kids and her husband a survivor himself

  bare feet scrambling over sliding rocks

  to slip into the icy sea

  for her, that same relief

  respite for one

  night, maybe two

  and yesterday Adrienne took

  me to lunch before heading to her

  aunt’s 80th birthday party

  pancreatic cancer will claim her

  too but for now they bought rose

  bushes and planted them

  in her garden

  perhaps roses will outlive us too

  5/26/18

  Diana Evans

  A British writer and critic, born in London to a Nigerian mother and English father, she is the author of the novels 26a (2005), The Wonder (2009) and Ordinary People (2018), with prize nominations that include the Whitbread First Novel (2005), The Guardian First Book, the Commonwealth Best First Book awards (2006), and the Andrew Carnegie medal for Excellence in Fiction (2018). She has been a deciBel Writer of the Year winner at the British Book Awards (2006) and was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers (2006). She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and was a Royal Literary Fellow at the London College of Fashion and the University of Kent. She lives in London.

  Thunder

  “I’m going out,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “To post a letter.”

  “We haven’t finished talking.”

  “I don’t want to talk anymore. We’ve talked about all of this before. I think half our problem is we’ve talked too much. We’ve killed ourselves with words.”

  There were roses dying in the streets. It was early September, an angry summer. Some days it rained and the wind was cold, others the heat lashed down, a violence from above. On the high street there were groups of girls in their freedom clothes, out of uniform. In the summer they found themselves, they were more, almost frightening, the force of their lives. She remembered feeling like that.

  She was wearing a long thin coat of a dark blue, which waved around her ankles. She had never liked revealing her shape. It was what Gene had liked about her in the beginning, how unexpected she was, in her warmth, her richness, the secrecy in her folds. Her hair was tied back, her lonely face jutting out into the world with all its difficult bravery.

  Nowadays the people who worked in post offices always asked whether you wanted standard or special post. They were trained that way, to miss out the middle option, recorded. They made more money like that, but it was dishonest. She asked for recorded (it was a letter to her father, telling him she and Gene were separating; he would take it more easily with a letter, that they were separating even though they had never married). Then they ask if you want to open a post-office account, buy some envelopes, any currency. She pitied them. The cashier was a bald man in a white shirt in the late years of his working life. Money, the thirst for money, had charged the air with desperation. He couldn’t do anything about it. He asked all the questions he was told to ask.

  The road was thick with traffic. She hated it, the thunder of London, like an earthquake. She had wanted them to go and live with the children at the edge of Ankara, where she was born. She came here when she was nine, with her parents who were medical students. The country had never left her—the crooked horizon, the red hill behind the house, the unquestioning sky, the school classroom with its aisles of benches. She often thought of herself as still sitting on one of those benches, waiting for the next instruction, the next transference of knowledge. Here her mind did not retain things. She did not remember numbers or facts the way she used to. Knowledge slipped over her like a river going backwards. But she knew how she felt.

  A white lorry paused in the road, its wheels like canons. She looked back once and felt a spot of rain on her forehead.

  It had been like this for almost a year. He still loved her but love was incidental. They had decided to be together for the children, on the surface. Neither could give up the sight of one of them emerging from sleep in the morning, a dream still in their faces, drawing them back, into the lightness of their consciousness. There was a girl and a boy. She was sensible, a little nervous, occasional asthma. He was brash, more sure of himself than anyone they had ever known. They were both shy people, and they wondered where this confidence had come from. Was it that Asya had made him think of himself as a king, that he never bowed, for anyone? In this country they teach children to be afraid, of themselves and of the world, she said. And when I came here I became afraid like everyone else. You have never really known me, she told Gene. That’s why it’s never going to work. It never began, not as far as I’m concerned.

  Gene stands in the living-room, looking out at the burning roses. Upstairs there is music playing. He is a stout man, thickly built, strong. He used to lift her off the bed after lovemaking, her legs wrapped around him, they would go to the window and see the cemetery where she liked to walk, observing the stones. He had felt like the maker of the earth, as if everything belonged to him, or at least, as if he had access to everything. There were no obstructions anymore. Love freed him from himself.

  He met her in a church. She was walking out into the sun, it was winter, and he was walking in, looking for peace, which he saw instantly in her face, so immediately that he had to stop her. He said, “Where are you going?”

  “Where am I going?” she said.

  “Sorry. It’s just that I feel like I know you.”

  Then she looked at him, studied him, frowning. A softer moment happened in her face, a little laugh.

  She said, “You don’t know me,” and walked away, and he spent the longest week of his life hoping to come across her. He vowed never again to let a fundamental mystery go, no matter the humiliation of catching it. Embrace the light and hold it close when it finds its way to you. The next time he saw her he asked her to marry him and she said no.

  Now the girl came into the room. Olivia. She had long braids and was wearing her mother’s lipstick. He grabbed her and picked her up. “What’s that paint on your face? Better wash your face this minute!” She tried to wriggle free but he was too strong for her. She suddenly flipped over so that she was upside down, the top of her head touching the carpet. You’re the angel in my life, he told her most days, sometimes only in his head, if she had made him angry or if he was too tired to tell them of his heart. They demanded so much of him, their health, their souls, their security, their future, it was not always possible to make sure they knew that they were cherished. Especially now, that the love that had spawned them was dissipating, turning into ether. It terrified him, the absence of it. His freedom on the brink of return. To be faced again with himself, that dark image, that trouble. To walk on the common ground again like all the others, like beetles, looking for themselves, or a way out.

  In the astrological twilight she had offered her lips to him, hungry. He melted in her magic. He gave her everything, his legs, his heat, his faith, his riches. Nights fell gently over Canning Town.

  On this Thursday in the afternoon of the third decade of her life with the rain just beginning she stepped into the road as the lorry was turning. She was thinking that at the end of something there is a gift to salvage from the wreckage. There is a jewel, glowing out, a particular memory that makes a good carriage. And she was thinking of the glittered hours when the children were born and that this might be the carriage, that waking in the morning to the quiet snow and the lifting of the child for the first time, how these things will endure.

  The big left-hand mirror flashed and blinded for a moment. A confusion of direction, a curse.

  And last April, when she had walked
the gorge in Crete, the mountains and cliffs heavenward on either side of her. The rocks and clear brooks and flat wooden bridges. Returning to Gene and the children in the hotel in the evening with the sun burning down, a swelling above the road. They had eaten dinner off silver trays on the terrace in the music of a man with a guitar.

  Death did not warn her. It plucked her swiftly from the earth with no explanation, no reason. You disappear. You are a sudden small history lying in the road.

  Gene is standing before the mirror, holding the woman’s hair in his left hand, the scissors in his right. He cuts two inches. A black cloud falls to the floor.

  “I don’t want any off the top,” the woman says. “Just trim it at the bottom, let it fall and meet.”

  She is a tiny woman. She tells him she has three children and he cannot imagine a pregnancy at her body, narrow, like a girl. He scans the women in this way; it is mostly women who come to him. There are frightened women, aspiring women, urgent women, women who cook for their husbands (“he won’t eat if I don’t feed him”), women who have been alone for centuries. They come to straighten their hair, curl it, blow-dry it, set it. To emerge from his door on to the street outside more brilliant, armoured by a temporary, nebulous beauty. He likes their company.

  “My son is fourteen, my daughter is seventeen. They have to help clean the house or they’re not going out. Simple as that.”

  There is a sharp tone in his voice when he speaks of them, a mixture of pride, compassion and disgust. He has spent all the years with them, so much time, it is impossible to separate that time from himself. He is the father, in the street, in the salon, in the house. He is one voice, one life. He has never had Asya’s problem, that desire to preserve oneself, to keep a part of yourself safe from everything, from the intrusions of duty. Her absence has left questions over their lives. He has tried to teach them to be whole and present in the storm, to be strong right through.

  “My daughter has very long hair,” he says. “I plait it for her. Almost to her waist.”

  “She’s lucky. A man who knows hair. You can teach her,” the woman says.

  He is thick around the middle now, rounder, but still strong. The muscles in his arms swell as he works. She has soft, natural hair, thinning at the temples. It is the activity, the art of it that he loves. You cut a dimensional shape, according to the face. You manipulate and arrange. The use of water, raining away the previous formation and giving way to another. He has looked at so many faces in the glass and witnessed the secret expressions of disappointment. It has always seemed important to him to enable the power of aesthetic beauty to bring a blanket to the continual problem of facing the world and carrying oneself through it.

  “I didn’t have a choice,” he says, cutting another row. “Their mother died. She was run over. She went to post a letter and never came back.”

  The woman turns her head towards him slightly, to see his face. It is excruciating to him when they move even just a little. They must stay absolutely still.

  “That’s horrible,” she says. “God.”

  He draws over a stool. At eye level he can achieve a perfect line. He thinks of Asya lying in the road. She is covered in a dark grey blanket, her left hand pummelled by the mighty wheel. He has wondered for years about her last thoughts, and where she went afterwards. Was it to a cool place or a hot place? She had believed in the concept of heaven and hell, and that your entrance is determined not by whether you have been good or bad, but whether you have manifested yourself, whether you have lived as the person you were intended to be, or whether you have lost your way and listened too closely to other voices. It didn’t matter if you had not reached your full potential. That was beside the point. It was more to do with whether you were on the right path. Were you trying?

  Olivia would stand by the window waiting for her, the long blue coat, the concentrating face. Whenever the doorbell rang she ran into the hall. In the end Gene dismantled the bell. People had to knock at the window instead. He missed deliveries that way, and had to keep going to the post office.

  He is overcome now by a sea of tiredness. He wants to lean his head on the woman’s small shoulder. He feels old as mountains, heavy as Jupiter. The red leaves of autumn are swirling in the street.

  Deise Faria Nunes

  Born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, she grew up near the border between Brazil and Uruguay. She discovered a passion for dance and traditional performance during her childhood participation in Carnival, and this was her earliest experience of artistic expression. In the mid-1980s, her family moved to Pelotas, where she studied electro-engineering, though her dream was to work in the arts. In 1999 she moved to Norway, where she freelanced as a performer, while studying literature, theatre and performance at the University of Oslo, going on to an apprenticeship at Odin Teatret in Holstebro, Denmark. She has since worked in theatre in Norway as a performer, producer, dramaturge, teacher and critic. In 2017 she established her company Golden Mirrors Arts Norway, focusing on black women in the arts, culture and politics.

  The person in the boat

  Some fellowships we do not choose: we are born into them. Others we walk voluntarily into, with our eyes wide open, even though we do not know what will meet us on the other side.

  In the pantheistic, Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé Ketu, with roots in West Africa, the initiation rites are so transformative that the whole process is seen as a new birth. The person being initiated is isolated in the temple, where s/he performs several rituals, led by priests and helpers. The process may last up to several months. The initiation is never individual, and the groups of novices are called boats. In a Candomblé temple—or terreiro—the members might say about each other: “I know her well. We were on the same boat.” Then it is understood that these two people were initiated together.

  One may be led to join a religious fellowship like Candomblé for many different reasons. Whatever the reason, it is a choice that means the devotee shall dedicate their life to the religion, and that the Orishas—a pantheon of sixteen dancing anthropomorphic gods and goddesses who reign over the forces of nature—will decide one’s destiny in the near and remote future. There is no way of undoing an initiation—it is a decision for life.

  I grew up in the time right after the twenty-one-year-long military dictatorship in Brazil. I believed in freedom and equality, not in inexplicable hierarchies where the gods and the fellowship created in their name rule over the individual. But I knew Candomblé was a part of my family history, so I wanted to go and see, I wanted to be there to challenge all my perspectives: the superstitious, Afro-syncretic, Catholic, South-American perspective from my upbringing; the politically awakened, freedom seeking and power challenging perspective from my youth, which had become coloured by the secular, sober, North-European way of thinking I had been exposed to after living in Scandinavia for nearly ten years.

  As a child, I was told stories of deities.

  I called it earth

  They called it Nana Buruku

  The eldest woman.

  I called it a tree

  They called it Iroko

  The ravages of time.

  I called it fire

  They called it Shango

  The lord of thunder.

  I called it wind

  They called it Yansan

  The woman who dances with the dead.

  I called it water

  They called it Oshun

  The river’s body.

  I called it sea

  They called it Yemanjá

  The mother of all fish.

  I said: nobody owns the forest

  They said: the forest belongs to Oshosi

  The constant hunter.

  I called it air

  They called it Obatala

  The wine loving sculptor.

  I was thirty-six years old the first time I arrived at a place called Gantois, a hill in the heart of Brazil’s black capital, Salvador. Gantois is the home of one of the best-k
nown terreiros in the country. I came alone. The ritual that night was dedicated to the creator god, Obatala, meaning that everyone was supposed to wear white from top to toe.

  The big ceremony room was full of people. The beautiful wooden floor was covered with leaves. Some of those in attendance were initiated in the religion, others not. The so-called open rituals are just as the name suggests, open, and they attract many people, both from the neighbourhood and around the world. The doors are open throughout the entire event and people can go in and out freely.

  Three drums were placed at the rear of the space. As the main ritual instruments, they were embellished with white ribbons and green leaves. The biggest drum is called rum, the middle sized one, rumpi, and the smallest one, lé. By the drums is a chair, also adorned with flowers and white cotton fabric: it is the seat of the temple’s leader, the priestess often called Yá or mãe (mother). Behind her, a door that leads to the private rooms in the temple, where the rituals are prepared.

  We would soon move back in time. The drums would play the sacred, ancient rhythms and the deities would be called down. By possessing the body-mind of a few, well prepared ritual participants the gods and goddesses would enter the room to dance—both alone and with each other—and dramatically re-enact mythological tales, using specific costumes and objects.

  The fellowship’s highest values lie in the collective adoration of the gods. Is there a place for the individual in this context?

  The people being initiated are divided in different categories, and the ritual varies accordingly, even if they are in the same boat. The categories are determined by the organizational structure of the religion and encompass several functions: some are helpers, some are chefs, some are musicians, some make tools for agriculture, hunting, fishing or slaughtering, some are butchers, some take care of plants, mixtures and teas. And some are mediums—the channels used by the deities to visit Earth. No matter their function, everyone has “their” god or goddess, who indicates their destiny through different sorts of oracles. The leader Yá possesses the knowledge to read the oracles. According to the North American theatre director and scholar Richard Schechner’s thoughts on performance, ritual is not self-assertive, meaning it does not affirm the self; it is self-transcendent, it reaches beyond the self (Performance Theory. London: Routledge, p. 17. 2009 [1977]). Nevertheless, ritual has a transformative power that makes it both affirmative and transcendent of the self.