New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  A return to that purely philosophical enquiry is now needed. The current trajectory of increased instrumentalist positioning around women’s rights will not result in a feminist epiphany from economically driven stakeholders for whom women’s rights have been tangential at best and irrelevant at worst in relation to their own goals. Having to convince people that furthering equality is good because it can also further an economic bottom line somewhere is not where we should be in the twenty-first century. A mushrooming of interventions on the back of this are not signifiers of success in themselves. Without the ethical underpinnings of rights and justice that fundamentally challenge core beliefs and patriarchal systems, the battle for a feminist future will continue to not only be piecemeal but arguably deeply compromised.

  Rosamond S. King

  A creative and critical writer and performer living in Brooklyn, New York, with family from Trinidad and The Gambia, she creates work that is deeply informed by her cultures and communities, by history, and by a sense of play. Her poems are collected in the Lambda-award-winning Rock | Salt | Stone (2017), and appear in more than three dozen journals, blogs, and anthologies. Her performance art has been curated in venues including the NY Metropolitan Museum, the Encuentro Festival (Canada), and the African Performance Art Biennial (Zimbabwe). Her scholarly book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination received the 2015 Caribbean Studies Association best book award. She is Creative Editor of sx salon, President of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, and Associate Professor at Brooklyn College.

  This is for the women1

  Holds a gun like a claw

  It would tear out your humanity if

  it thought you had any

  Holds a badge like a claw

  to make your dignity bleed

  to make you gag

  this claw digs its blunt

  into you—swallow it

  or else

  the badge tells you to get

  naked and like it

  flashlight pricks your belly

  then asphalt grinds your knees

  gun tells you to like it

  so you like it better than prison

  better than more flashlights

  more badges more guns

  laughter, like a claw

  that never leaves you never removes

  its pointy end from your

  throat now stretched wide

  a claw to suck the flesh off of

  and your whole body

  is your throat stretched

  wide are you still screaming why

  are you still screaming a receptacle

  doesn’t scream a waste bin doesn’t

  scream a throat filled with a claw

  shouldn’t be able to

  a throat that is a whole body

  resonates at an other frequency

  sometimes in your everyday you feel

  the earth thrumming with

  the scream of a throat that is

  a body that a claw tried to fill

  and failed tried to fill and failed

  the throat that is a body pierced

  by the thing like a claw screams

  and bleeds and the blood dries

  but the scream goes on forever.

  It does not become a song

  But there is a song. The pierced hole

  Is a second throat a doubled

  sound scream is thrumming ground

  song is ringing ears hear

  ? hear! here

  !

  (the hotbox and the flood)

  The average human temperature is 98.6 degrees

  ; her normal is 101.3, radiating

  heat through walls and her skin

  , the woman who is not yet your

  lover but wants to be

  . This poem is aware

  that hotbox might also refer to torture

  devices in which humans are

  first warmed, then cooked. There is

  little of that here since the only

  latch is internal

  . She is the flood, her desire

  crashing waves across your

  modesty. They say a flood like

  hers once drowned the world

  — This poem does not know

  the future, but it imagines

  you two together

  , the hiss and boil

  that will ensue

  Untitled Poems

  each clump of grass or stone holds heat

  (like) every imprint of my wide foot

  smiling broadly at no one

  look up; look up the view

  from there is vast

  and you do not know more than any stone.

  very clean is the slate of your face

  not smirking, your face not mean

  this is my favorite; a photograph of water

  propped on pillows before me

  what were you thinking, you

  * * *

  scrub dark and soiled areas. scrub clean, scrub glee. pat dry.

  sterility guaranteed if package has been opened or tampered

  (tampon,

  tamper away!). otherwise all openings orifices are productive and procreative.

  child safe droppers, usually on the head. height and impact surface vary, though velocity is constant (provide velocity equation, using gravity).

  our thick, elegant, nongreasy formulation will be absorbed by poors. you’ll never have to wash again.

  * * *

  I do not want to be a monster.

  I do not want to be a cat.

  If I want to be a sexy nurse or valet,

  It will not be in public, where

  My mask is used daily.

  When it’s off, the gaze

  Sees caricature

  In my skin.

  Tell me,

  What is it like to want

  To be a monster?

  for Isatou for Haddy for Adama for Elle

  someone came looking for your kind and you looked at her

  considered how much she is not from here

  Asia all over her face and hair

  her English worse than yours

  and you opened your mouth

  whispering in your own compound

  afraid still

  but fear is as common as your own hair

  you wash it and comb it and

  plait it in rows

  I am looking for you

  I am looking for our kind

  will you open your mouth to me?

  we can scratch and oil each

  other’s scalp

  if we only open our mouths

  if we plait and unplait each

  other’s heads

  we don’t even have to speak

  it may never

  happen

  you and I are dangerous

  to each other

  one whisper causes bush fire here—

  you and I

  may even be cousins

  if we never meet

  if we never get to whisper together

  it is enough that

  you opened your mouth

  it is enough

  knowing

  that you exist

  my other

  in the long hours of doing

  and undoing your hair

  listen to the whispers

  you will know

  it is me

  you will recognize

  your own silent scream

  Beatrice Lamwaka

  A Ugandan-born writer who was recognised for her literary contribution by the Uganda Registration Service Bureau in 2018, she was also a recipient of the 2011 Young Achievers Award, was shortlisted for the 2015 Morland Writing Scholarship and the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing, and was a finalist for the 2009 South African PEN/Studzinski Literary Award. The anthology of short stories Queer Africa, to which she contributed, won the 26th Lambda Literary Award in 2014. Her children’s novel
la, Anena’s Victory (2005), is a supplementary reader in primary schools. Her stories have been translated into Spanish and Italian. She is working on her first novel, NyapaRosa.

  Missing Letter in the Alphabet

  I am not supposed to be sitting in an empty bed, weeping onto a piece of paper on my wedding night. This has never been part of my dream. I have been waiting for this moment all my life. Michael is the person, my mind, my soul and my body wants to be with. I would have said “and my clitoris”, I mean what is left after circumcision.

  Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t understand why he left. He wasn’t supposed to leave. Not now. Not ever. He is my husband now. He promised. He promised to be with me, no matter what. But he should have known that I am a Sabiny and that I may not be whole in some places like Acoli woman.

  My relatives and Michael’s are still at the hotel singing and dancing. I can hear people speaking in Kup Sabiny and Leb Acoli. My mother winked as we came to the room. I know she loves Michael; she has been doting over him ever since she met him. She has often said, “Marry another tribe, so that your children will not be circumcised.”

  I am happy the wedding is now over. We have done it. It seemed hard in the beginning, but we did it. We got the orchids we wanted. The colours were perfect. The dim light in the evening made Serena Hotel perfect.

  I am happy to say that my wedding was as I dreamt it would be. I worried about my gown, the food, the dancers and the musicians, but never did Michael cross my mind.

  I almost want to believe my friend who said Sabiny and Acoli marriage can never work. “Chesha, my friend, don’t get married to that Acoli man,” she often said. I never listened. Of course, she knew I would not listen. I never listen to her, anyway.

  I was hoping for a memorable wedding night that I would write about in my novel. I had never thought my wedding night would become something I can hardly recognize. I can still feel Michael’s fingers sliding on my thighs. His lips warm against mine. I had imagined this scene in my head so many times that when it started to happen differently, I was too shocked to know what to do. “Baby,” I murmured. Something I would never have allowed him before we were married.

  I felt his finger go limp as he touched where my clitoris should have been. Yes, many years ago the word “circumcision” meant my husband would stay with me and trust me, but today I am not sure what the word means anymore. It never meant he would leave me in bed.

  I don’t know what I did wrong. All I know is I did what every girl in Kapchorwa did, and was proud of it. My parents never forced me but everyone was doing it. I wanted to be a woman just like my age mates.

  I did get my clitoris cut, the source of evil. I had been prepared all my life. We didn’t even listen to what the women from the NGOs were saying. How could they say circumcision wasn’t good for us? It’s what our ancestors have always done. It was much later that I realized that the women were right. My clitoris was already gone and I had to live with it.

  But Michael should have known; did he think I wouldn’t have done it since I was marrying him? I didn’t know that when I was twelve. I wanted to belong so much. I would have sisters for life. I would be respected by everyone. Why wouldn’t I get circumcised? There were too many promises for me to not consider getting circumcised. After I sniffed the herb, there was no stopping for me, I had to get circumcised. We danced. We sang about the glory of becoming a woman.

  Circumcision was meant to keep me away from danger. With my friends, we said the word, but never imagined the pain we would undergo. Every time I think about the pain, I want to keep my legs together and never open them. Why didn’t anyone mention pain? Why didn’t anyone mention husbands walking away on wedding nights? Are they afraid of something?

  I talked about it with my friends. We were excited. Teachers talked about it. We would be sisters forever with the people we were circumcised with.

  It never occurred to me that when the day arrived, I would feel a tingle in my panties, or that it would be a near-death experience. My mother always brushed it off as something every woman has to experience. It was like childbirth: you celebrate soon after. I could see the lie in her eyes. So, every time I saw an older woman, I knew she had been circumcised. That something was missing, and it was already buried somewhere.

  We were the alphabet and the C was missing. Our clitorises were the missing letter in the alphabet of the world. It’s not a part of our bodies that we mourn. We celebrate its loss. The circumciser keeps it, bewitches us when we misbehave. That fear has always bonded me with the woman who caused me so much pain.

  Everybody knows what happened to us as young girls. We walk around, and people from other tribes don’t need to ask about clitorises. They know they are long gone.

  I am an alphabet. My C is missing, and my husband is missing. Not my fault, but may be my fault. It is amazing how the husband quickly slides off the paper. When my friends teased me that Michael was my husband, before we got married, I often quickly corrected them. “He is my boyfriend,” I said with a smile. Now I am calling him my husband, and he is nowhere to be seen.

  I don’t feel whole, not because I have a missing clitoris but because Michael has left me. I want to shout out: “I am whole,” but I wonder who cares. And who cares that my clitoris is missing? I am whole. I am a woman. I am Michael’s wife. I am me. I am Chesha.

  I now sound drunk. Maybe I should have drunk a little bit of the white wine at the reception. My shoes kept squeezing my feet. I didn’t want to deal with the consequences of the wine and the shoes as well. Then I didn’t know there was a lot more I would have to deal with. I wish I could push back the time. Back to the time when I had a choice whether to drink the wine or not, but not whether Michael will ever come back to me or if our marriage was actually a marriage or something else.

  Circumcision, the word is familiar to me now. Maybe it is actually mutilation. I remember the ordeal clearly. But it is the pain that will never leave. My wound healed fast, but the pain remained. I can still feel it, dream about it and it is so real. I don’t know why my clitoris was cut, but I know that maybe I will have to deal with the pain of Michael walking away from me on our wedding night.

  I remember the day Michael and I met for the first time. A month later, he sent me a friend request on Facebook. Soon afterwards, he said, “One day, I will marry you,” and I thought, “Stupid man.” And now I am the stupid one. I am waiting for a man who may or may not return and writing in my journal sober, maybe I should have been drunk—then I would feel less pain and sound more sensible.

  He loves me. I love him. And what makes this wrong? Love plus love should be more love.

  It is Michael who finds the weight I am trying to fight sexy, and my lips that I think are a little too big, good for kissing. He is the man I find easy to love. I can’t get angry with him. He smiles, and I forgive him everything. I love that I love him.

  I can’t stop thinking about him. I should think about something else. The moon for instance, it’s so bright. It makes me miss Michael more. He is my sugarcane. My fene. He is my everything.

  I think, during one of our late-night chats on Facebook, I hinted to Michael that my clitoris was no longer there. But tonight shows that the words didn’t hit home. It may have lingered on messenger and just reached him today. He has failed to be the Casanova he wanted to be, tonight.

  I don’t know how long I have been writing. I feel as if I am in a trance. I am hearing footsteps in the corridors. It sounds as if the person’s shoes are pressing him. The steps are not the kokokoko you hear when a woman is walking on high heels. The person must be a man. I can hear the beating of my heart. If it is Michael, I will stop writing and will have to tell him I will be the best woman he will ever find.

  The door opens, and there is my husband, holding his jacket in his hands. He looks very handsome. He smiles. I know he is willing to give it a try.

  “Honey, I am back,” he says.

  Of course, I can see him. I have been
waiting for him. I don’t want to scream from happiness. Maybe, I should sweep the ground he is walking on. I can’t let him know how happy I am. I feel a tear drop on my cheek. I will let it flow.

  Lebogang Mashile

  The daughter of exiled South African parents, she was born in the US and returned to South Africa in the mid-1990s after the end of apartheid. An actor, writer and performance poet, she appeared in the film Hotel Rwanda (2004) and has performed in several theatre productions, including Threads, and recorded a live performance album incorporating music and poetry, Lebo Mashile Live. In 2005, she published her first poetry collection, In a Ribbon of Rhythm, for which she received the Noma Award. She was named one of South Africa’s Awesome Women of 2005 by Cosmopolitan and was named Woman of the Year for 2010 in the category of Arts and Culture by Glamour magazine. She was cited as one of the Top 100 Africans by New African magazine in 2011, and in 2012 she won the Art Ambassador award at the inaugural Mbokodo Awards for South African Women in the Arts.

  Requiem for Winnie

  Rip off the string

  That keeps this fragile country

  In its form

  55 million petals separate

  Serrated blades guarding your bursting heart

  At the centre

  What did your father know

  When he raised you like a boy?

  Which part of your face’s perfection

  Broke your mother and every mother

  Howling behind mouths

  No one dares listen to?

  The little girl who holds a stick

  And beats a man’s world into submission

  Is the woman who lays diamonds

  On a murderous nation’s neck