smallgirl
smallgirl with moths in her mouth
speaks anger in glances knows the dagger of words
smallgirl big voice moves in silence
knows how earthquakes begin
in the rumbling of her stomach
entire families collapse
smallgirl cares too much for such a small girl
smallgirl with treacherous eyes
carries too much feeling in her lungs
knows the sting of lonely
smallgirl sees too much breathes too much
takes up too much air
smallgirl is too much mirror and expectation
too much wanting more
smallgirl should know better than to try fight the sun
smallgirl with hands of spades
smallgirl dreams too much. hopes too much
wants to plant and grow
smallgirl thinks she is the ocean
smallgirl is a stream
smallgirl will break her heart with all this want
smallgirl is not even the wind
smallgirl must learn to swallow
and be pretty
Mama I am burning
for Fezeka “Khwezi” Kuzwayo
I am burning mama. Mama, I’m burning.
In a box. Set on fire while I slept.
I slept mama.
A girl faced the bullets head on. She caught a bullet in her eye. She is blind mama.
Something is wrong mama. I kept pulling down my skirt.
Kept checking my lipstick. I was hiding in this box.
They found me hiding mama.
This fire is an uncle you trusted mama.
An uncle who promised to watch me while you were gone.
And while you were gone, in my sleep, the fire burned me mama.
While you were gone.
While I was sleeping.
I forgot to pull my skirt down. I put too much lipstick on.
I am burning mama. Mama, I am burning!
Her father’s tractor
after Xidu Heshang “Fictionalising Her”
When she is nine years old,
she pretends the woman in the front seat with her hand on her father’s lap does not exist.
When she is twelve years old,
she pretends the letter with a photograph of a baby boy in the cupboard does not exist.
When she is fifteen,
she pretends the mouth on her shoulder at her father’s braai does not exist.
At eighteen,
she pretends the phone call from a girl three years older than her does not exist.
At twenty-one,
she pretends the shame in her father’s eyes when she returns from the police station does not exist.
At twenty-four,
she pretends her stomach has never been pumped, and the woman half-dead in a motel with rum-soaked letters does not exist.
Three weeks into her twenty-fifth year,
she pretends the man shredded by a tractor plough does not exist.
Three days after they tell her,
she pretends she called to say happy birthday and her father’s face on the funeral programme does not exist.
Three months into the ground,
she pretends the growing holes in her womb and her chest do not exist.
The day before her thirtieth birthday,
she pretends her longing to follow him, in footsteps and grave, does not exist at all.
zakia henderson-brown
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she is the author of What Kind of Omen Am I, selected by Cate Marvin as winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2017 Chapbook Fellowship. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow, was a 2016 Poets House Emerging Poets fellow, and has received additional fellowships and support from the Fine Arts Work Center, Callaloo Journal, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her poems have appeared in Adroit Journal, African American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, North American Review and other outlets. She has been in residence at the T.S. Eliot House, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Louis Armstrong House Museum. She currently serves on the board of the Brooklyn Movement Center, where she co-founded the anti-gendered and sexualised street harassment collective, No Disrespect. She is an Editor and Strategic Partnerships Coordinator at nonprofit publisher The New Press.
unarmed
as in: has arms dark flesh: an intact heart,
but they are the city’s named prey
a shallow pond fatal to a foamed
still mouth at wound pistol, warm
dawn; a long undressing adrenal gland;
heavy rain. itself— a cold case.
A Man Walks into a Bar
Suspending the instinct to fold a life into a palm
then have it disappear some animals
practice small-scale mercy: a hiss or spray as warning;
a nuzzle before drawn jaws. I lived awhile
just beneath the knife of him
until the cold metal became a porch light turning on.
Did I indebt myself to fire? He claimed my pussy
scrambled his wires suggesting I was electric
if not already brain-dead body moving in mime
until essential functions stopped. His was a slow hiss
one I itched to drift toward:
melodic but unmasked soon enough
as just a slurred word behind a strong whiskey
a finger on my lips, then the smashed glass.
I Was Getting Out of Your Way
in memoriam, Sandra Bland
Just picked petunias sweetkiss my knuckles
Creating a genre of springtime. I succumb
To the urge to sing: what gift this small refuge
In my palm; the soft city wind, a lodestar.
Sudden rain catches me and I cinch
Like a ball of rubberbands, a noose thirsty
For air—then run, past an idle siren
Posing as a red vase: an empty vessel
Looking to transform whatever beauty.
It sees, in the skyline of my figure:
A smoking star; a token for what
Can bend or be taken, but breaks.
It determines, like a light turning green
That a wilderness resides in me
ex-slave with long memory
after Dorothea Lange’s
tunnels under concrete
bollworms lazing in soil
pipes guts and glaze
of this beast—
mine. known to wave
the long barrel of an F
for Ef it;
it’s all mine:
dirt mucus pavement
spit: anything i have
becomes silk or bone—
slay of the ax; air: mine
anything here i want
i loaned
in the shed of a house
called roam:
all these acres’ author
i cannot
be unknown.
the sun: mime bodies stacking:
mine. skeletons over
decomposed hearts until the sky
blackens—
Afua Hirsch
A writer, journalist and broadcaster, she was born in Norway, to a British father and a mother from Ghana, and was raised in Wimbledon, London. She studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University before going on to take a graduate degree in Law. She worked in international development in Senegal, practised law as a barrister in London, and was West Africa correspondent, based in Accra, Ghana, for The Guardian newspaper, where she is now a columnist. She was the Social Affairs and Education Editor for Sky News from 2014 until 2017. She writes and makes documentaries around questions of race, identity and belonging—the subject of her 2018 book Brit(ish).
What Does It Mean To Be African?
What does it mean to be African?
Some would define it, I think, as simply being someone who doesn
’t feel the need to ask that question. Isn’t it a question only an outsider would ask? What kind of black person, I recalled being asked, in one of the lines in my book Brit(ish) that people seemed to find most entertaining, writes a book about being black?
I am a black person who writes a book about being black. I am an African who agonises over what it means to be African. I quote Kwame Nkrumah—who as president of Ghana led the first black African country to win independence—because he tells me what I want to hear: that I am African because I choose to be.
I am not African because I was born in Africa, but because Africa was born in me.
I listen to Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah—the title means victorious in battle—and I listen to all the sages. Maya Angelou told me it was a question of knowing your past:
For Africa to me . . . is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.
Down the road from Wimbledon, the south-west London suburb where I grew up, the British-Trinidadian poet Roger Robinson said—writing in the heart of Britain’s black community—it was a question of mental integrity, and purpose:
People talk about toxic waste
being dumped in Africa, but toxic
waste has already been dumped
in your minds. Some of you don’t know
how you came to be in Brixton. Hell,
some of you don’t know you’re African.
(Roger Robinson, The Butterfly Hotel, Peepal Tree Press, 2013, p. 17)
But maybe the words that haunt me come from an earlier time. This exchange between expatriate American author Richard Wright and J.B. Danquah—one of the architects of Ghana’s independence over decades of activism in the early twentieth century—is etched into my memory. They met during Wright’s visit in 1953 to the then Gold Coast and Wright recounts in his book Black Power that Danquah starts by asking:
“How long have you been in Africa?” . . .
“About two months,” I said.
“Stay longer and you’ll feel your race,” he told me.
“What?”
“You’ll feel it,” he assured me. “It’ll all come back to you.”
“What’ll come back?”
“The knowledge of your race.” He was explicit.
I liked the man, but not as a Negro or African; I liked his directness, his willingness to be open. Yet, I knew that I’d never feel an identification with Africans on a “racial” basis. “I doubt that,” I said softly.
(Wright, Black Power, 1954, pp. 218–19)
What does it mean to “feel” African?
That’s not the same as what it means to “feel Africa”. Tourists do that every day—exposing their senses to the immersive bath of sound, smell and energy, and finding it thrilling. I just love Africa, it’s SO colourful! The people are SO friendly! The bustle has SO much energy! The food is so spicy! . . .
Everything my parents had to do required hard work: buying a house, raising money for school fees, creating the kind of home environment in which they thought—rightly—my sister and I would be able to experience joyful childhoods and emerge as functional, accomplished adults. My mother worked hard at everything, except sustaining an African identity, which seemed to require no effort at all. She has spent most of her life in a place that—as is the way of Britain—performs whiteness without knowing that whiteness is what it is. The leafy London suburb where I grew up is not multicultural like the rest of this great city of cultures, languages, cuisines and slangs; it is chronically preserved in a detached house, fruit-tree-populated lawn kind of Englishness, so attractive it has been commodified—in the guise of lawn tennis, and inflated property prices—and exported around the world. But my mother has navigated this locality, as is the way of her generation, surviving, without fussing or even vocalising the intensity of the experience, journeying silently to the nearest black place for hair products or fufu flour, fulfilling the functions of the eldest child in an Akan family, nursing herself on light soup when sick.
I don’t think it occurred to either her or my father—who is British, and white—that Africanness was something that would be relevant to me. And so preserving for my generation a connection with our African heritage was not part of my parents’ deliberate thinking. They were both secure in their own identities, which were cultural and national rather than racial. Identity was not the primary struggle of their lives—there were plenty of material things to worry about—and ours would take care of themselves.
But identities take on different strains when planted in new soil. It didn’t occur to my parents that a mixed-heritage child, labelled casually as “black” by the loaded gaze of a white society, would crave substantial, positive messages about the source of her blackness. They did not know what it was like to be born and raised in a place where your identity is defined as a minority—by a sense of otherness and difference. They didn’t foresee that beneath the blackness with which I was labelled, I—the second-generation, mixed-heritage, British girl—would feel my race. I was African. At least, that was my dream.
What did it mean to be African? Is it to bear a name?
Africans from the diaspora, reversing in the wake of the slave vessels by returning to the continent of their blackness, often find, when they land on African soil, that the first thing to do is to take a name. Some take on mine, if they were born on a Friday, as is the Akan way. Ghanaians often think, when I introduce myself by name, that I am African-American or Caribbean and have latterly chosen a new label for a newly African identity. My name is Afua, I say. Oh! Are you sure? they reply. You know what that name means? They school me. It’s a lesson that causes me to wince. British people massacre my name. Ghanaians simply don’t believe it is mine.
Is being African to live in Africa?
I thought it was. And I returned to the idea, like a creature bound by homing, that to heal one’s identity was to journey to the place from which it springs. So one day, in my early thirties, bundling my then six-month-old daughter against the London snow, I packed up and moved to Ghana. My daughter would know this land first-hand, I decided, not as a narrative filtered through the British gaze, the still stale mess of a hopeless continent, ahistorical and doomed. She would, unlike me, understand the Ghanaian seasons and festivals, the pattern of a week where the emptied streets pour into churches on Sunday, where offices hum to the clash of local prints on Friday, where cryptic hand movements indicate the destination of a tro-tro bus, and where the fading of the light and the rising spice of kelewele frying fall with the rhythmic certainty of sunset. Maybe this would make her African, and—whatever happens to me—I will have given her that gift.
Is being African learning to speak?
Language gives structure to our thoughts, a fact not lost on the architects of the European imperial project of breaking the African spirit and disbanding the historic and cultural continuity of the peoples they overran. When I read of the short story by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o “The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright”, published in an unprecedented forty-seven African languages—a much needed attack on what Ngũgĩ describes as the problem of “intellectual production in Africa [being] done in European languages”—I applauded. Then realised that I, of course, would be reading it in English. And if the route to casting off the colonial legacy is embracing our African languages, where does that leave those of us—like me—who can’t speak any? Learning to speak—and hence think—in a different way, may be the project of my whole lifetime.
My understanding of what it is to be African has been a process of elimination. I have been named in Twi, I have eaten light soup. I have worn kente and ankara, I have lived and worked across the African continent, I have studied languages, I have observed and repeated gestures, and intonations, rituals and gaits. I have done these things and they have shaped me. But if there is a tipping point at which the conditioning of this colonial p
ower that raised me slips over into the African conditioning that I want to shape me, I don’t know where it is.
The problem with the cultural delineations of what it means to be African is the temptation to fall into the trap created by the white gaze in which people like me have been immersed for most of our lives. Can we really escape the imperially stained nostalgia for the perceived Africa of the past—that loaded longing for a primordial world—that classic symptom of true outsider-ness? It is so tempting a tonic for those like me, who wish to connect with the Africa of their parents’ memories, preserved as an antidote to an immigrant life in a hostile host nation, and who feel sentimental about the communal flow of life in the village where we have never actually lived. Our cousins who do live in the village are not romanticising ideas of “Africa”. They are rooted in communities, regions and nations where the hustle is king—finding the power to charge their phones, struggling through school lessons taught by barely literate teachers, or trying to import Chinese fridges. They are urgently inventing the new.
No one is waiting, breath bated, for us to define what it means to be African. Yet still we continue to search for a reason to ask the question, for hope that an answer exists. And for a sense of purpose. “Africa,” said John Henrik Clark, the Pan-African historian, “is our centre of gravity, our cultural and spiritual mother and father, our beating heart, no matter where we live on the face of this earth.” Being African is to believe it. At least that’s what being African means to me.
Naomi Jackson
Of West Indian parentage, she was born in Brooklyn and is a graduate of Williams College. She travelled on a Fulbright Scholarship to South Africa, receiving an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, and subsequently studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her debut novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill (2015), was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. The Black Caucus of the American Library Association named it an Honor Book for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, The Caribbean Writer and Obsidian. She is the recipient of residencies and fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House, Camargo Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
New Daughters of Africa Page 95
