New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

I nodded.

  —And your people, where are they from?

  —My people?

  —Yes, your parents.

  —Aren’t we all from the same place, I said, still smiling. You, me, everyone in this country, everyone around the world, aren’t we all from the same place?

  He hadn’t replied; he’d merely given me a look that suggested I was nowhere as intelligent as I thought I was. I realized then that I was never going to have him as a client. Our meeting hadn’t gone long before his phone rang and he said he needed to leave. What was I to do? Let him tell me where I was from? For the sake of a commission? If Papa were sitting in my place, Papa would have told this man all about his ancestral village in Cameroon, the place he knew he was from. He would have told this man about his ancestors whose blood flowed in his veins. He would have spoken about the music of his people, and their food, and the dresses the women wore for celebrations. I’d never been able to claim any of that the same way.

  —Papa, I said, you were right when you told us that this country would never be your country.

  —It’ll never be mine, he said, but it’s yours. You have every right to it.

  —I’m sorry, Papa. I’m tired, I’m confused; this conversation is going in a very strange direction. What is it you want? This is not your country, but you want to be buried here?

  —I want to remain here with you and your sister. I have nothing left for me in Cameroon.

  —There’s nothing left for any of us in Cameroon, Papa. Except Mama’s grave. And the graves of Mammi and Big Papa. Are you telling me you do not want to be buried next to them?

  —Please do not try to shame me. I do not need any of that.

  —I’m not trying to shame you! When Mama died we travelled for three days and drove on that horrible road so we could bury her in the village of your birth. And I’ll do the same for you, because if there’s one thing you’ve told me over and over it’s that a man should be buried in his village, among his people—

  —I go to your mother’s grave every night. I sit there and tell her goodnight before I close my eyes. Every single night I do that.

  He sniffed, and for a few seconds he said nothing.

  I remained silent too, imagining him sitting alone on his bed, lights turned off, talking to the air, hoping that somehow his words would fly over bodies of water and hills and plains and valleys and arrive at Mama’s grave. None of us had been to the grave since we buried her ten years ago. None of us had visited Cameroon since then.

  —I promise you, Papa, I’ll take you back home and bury you right next to Mama. If you’re saying this to me because you don’t want me to go through all this for you—

  —I’m saying it because it’s what I want. I want you to bury me right here in Brooklyn.

  —You’re telling me you want to be buried next to strangers when there’s a place all set for you right between your wife and your mother?

  —Yes, I’m telling you that you and your sister are all I have left. And until the day you both get married and have children, and even after then, I don’t want you to be without me. Your mother is all the way in the village. I don’t want to leave you here by yourselves, in another man’s country.

  Nadifa Mohamed

  Born in Somalia, she studied history and politics at St Hilda’s College, Oxford University. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy (2010), won the Betty Trask Prize, was longlisted for the Orange Prize, and shortlisted for The Guardian First Book Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award. In 2013 she was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and in 2014 was on the Africa 39 list of significant African writers aged under 40. Her second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls (2013), won a Somerset Maugham Prize and the Prix Albert Bernard, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She contributed to the anthology Reader, I Married Him (2016, celebrating the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth), and writes regularly for The Guardian, the New York Times, Lithub, and Freeman’s. In 2018 she was elected to the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded a Literary Arts Fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation. Here she makes a rare outing as a poet.

  A lime jewel

  A little girl,

  a gold-wrapped

  bonbon damp in

  her cherry-skinned fist,

  the mellow swirl

  of another, whirling

  in her mouth.

  Lime.

  Mango.

  Banana.

  Papaya.

  The fruit of

  the black soil

  caught in a jewel of sugar.

  Beneath her powdered feet,

  rubble,

  beneath the rubble,

  pitted tarmac,

  asleep beneath the tarmac,

  black Jacobins.

  She sucks,

  They dream,

  She appraises,

  They dream,

  She weeps,

  They dream.

  She tints the world with the lime of her bonbon.

  Bitter. Sweet.

  Wasteland melting into dreamland,

  Cold, crystalline and curiously lit.

  The light of Haiti,

  once filtered

  by palm fronds,

  then cutlassed

  by cane,

  is now caught tight

  in a lime jewel.

  A symphony of blood

  gushes in her,

  her skin is the shroud

  of saints,

  dreams are breathed out of the earth,

  and into her,

  Cold, crystalline and curiously lit.

  The symphony

  You: Will you forget me?

  Me: I will never forget you.

  You: Do you remember the sweetness of my milk?

  Me: Like the taste of my blood.

  You: Can you feel the nape of my neck?

  Me: It is hot to the touch.

  You: Do you remember my eyes?

  Me: I see the world through them.

  You: You carry my soul.

  Me: It is a burden.

  You: Cast it off.

  Me: Then I will be free, lost, unmoored.

  You: Sing to raise the dead and give life to the living. Nufyahay orodoo arligi qaboo, halkii aad ku ogeyd ka soo eeg.

  Me: I have lost your language.

  You: It is in your footsteps, in the click of your fingers, in your howl of pain.

  Me: I can howl no more.

  You: Then sing.

  Natalia Molebatsi

  Born in the township of Tembisa, near Johannesburg in South Africa, she is a poet, singer and cultural worker. She is the editor of We Are: A Poetry Anthology (2008), and author of Sardo Dance (2009) and Elephant Woman Song (2017). Her poetry and music CDs include Natalia Molebatsi & the Soul Making and Come as You Are: Poems for Four Strings. Her academic writing is included in, among other journals, Scrutiny2, Rhodes Journalism Review and Muziki.

  a mending season

  for miriam tlali

  11.11.33—24.02.17

  you are a song

  singing in the deepest

  voice of my people

  a lullaby cusping tears

  an amandla song

  to every child of the storm

  someone said that you

  are the wind beneath

  the broken wing of my people

  another one said

  that women like you

  are the mending season of our aching

  women like you give and give and give

  their last breath to ignite fires called revolution

  even when they force-fed you the rules of silence

  you fought for your story to be told

  in the season of your voice and inside your body

  reside the melodies of your people

  you with an uncontainable wail

  that grew louder and larger />
  than the tight grip of oppression

  with words that forced open

  the doors of a world that was never

  and will never be ready for our kind

  it’s time now for moon to night you

  with your secret conversations

  and moments of endearment

  the same moon that will welcome you

  on an orbit of black magic

  woman wonderments

  you will let this world know

  that you loved her more

  than she loved you

  how do i thank you for your pain?

  your banned and jailed

  and unacknowledged dreams?

  Your dreams are gifts to my bag of memories

  through which i will craft songs

  for tomorrow’s healing

  the healer

  for sibongile khumalo and the song inside her voice

  when the world burns she is cooling water

  a breath of life and light this woman

  a gift from her people to ours

  when the cows are crying

  and the children

  and the dogs too

  i close my eyes

  to see her sound move

  an entire world of oceans and bones

  an affirmation that god lives here

  in undertones and vibrations

  wiping the heavy tears of this earth

  the gods live here

  inside the vein of this music

  Melody

  for fatima meer

  12.08.28—12.03.10

  there are memories of love and struggle

  falling and flying off silent walls

  you lifted silent things into screams

  made them remember

  marked them in place as

  reference as lineage

  hid colour and brush

  in spaces of private touch and longing

  rolled them up and smuggled them

  in and out of bodies

  these words are just a pact

  to evoke your name and spirit

  as a work of an open heart

  another way of recollecting you

  as a melody and a story of ours

  Aja Monet

  An internationally established American poet of Cuban-Jamaican descent, she was the youngest individual to win the legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title, recognised for combining her spellbinding voice and powerful imagery on stage. She was a featured speaker at the Women’s March on Washington, DC, in 2017 where she read the title poem of her book My Mother Was A Freedom Fighter. In 2018, the book was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry. Her other collections include Inner-City Chants & Cyborg Cyphers (2015), The Black Unicorn Sings (2015), and a collaboration with poet/musician Saul Williams, Chorus: a literary mixtape. She currently lives in Little Haiti, Miami where she is co-founder of Smoke Signals Studio and dedicates her time to merging arts and culture with community organising through her work with the Dream Defenders and the Community Justice Project.

  hexes

  and there was a reckoning

  for all the harm

  and for all the evil eyes

  and our strength was cute until it wasn’t

  and we were weak until we weren’t

  and your longing will be long

  and your days will be numbered

  and we are counting

  on the stems who had their petals taken

  in this spell for flowers

  on the busted lips

  and bruised cheeks

  and there was loss

  and our smiles will terrify you

  because we will be laughing

  and we will be cruel

  and there will be no remorse

  and your children will be ours

  and we will make new ways without you

  and you will miss who you could’ve been

  admit you were never intent on loving

  anyone but yourself

  and sacrifice is the ego’s kryptonite

  and your heart is a tomb

  mummified corpses

  where we, are only body parts

  and the thighs will haunt you

  and the breasts will mock you

  and the asses will shit wherever you lay

  and the fists will find you

  on street corners, in the alleys

  or offices

  in a titty bar or atop a lover

  or below one

  erotic and afraid

  every where there will be a fist

  and your knees will buckle

  and there was a curse

  some manner of sorcery

  stanzas upon stanzas of stories

  and we will feed you morsels

  of your own medicine

  pages and pages of feeds

  and the pharmaceutical industry will go broke

  and the doctors will all become witches

  enter the roots of plants, sayings, and sorts of rituals

  and banks will go bankrupt

  values of play, a fair negotiation between gifts

  and land will be unowned

  where the mountains meet man

  and hurricanes demolish your safety

  and police will wither in confinement

  with no commissary, mad sirens looped

  fidgeting in the corridors of time

  and developers will lose their hair and teeth

  and supreme court will drown in menstrual blood

  pages and pages of blood

  and we are the book of revelations

  and the end is near.

  and this is where you pray

  and this is where your god doesn’t answer

  and this god don’t take bribes

  unless

  of course you repent

  except repenting doesn’t reverse nature

  it cleanses

  and only love

  only love

  only

  love will get you through.

  what riots true

  if we don’t talk about the moments

  we fought back

  the efforts to resist,

  we will forever go down in history

  as being complacent with our oppression

  and therein complicit in the oppression of others

  tell the stories of those who fought back and why

  what compels a person

  to anger

  to radical love

  they’ll tell you militancy is

  a story of soldiers intended to kill

  and not of lovers intent on living

  nor of the grass that uproots concrete pavement,

  or storms that cleanse land

  nature is militant toward survival.

  we are taught a history of misconceptions

  distorted partial truths

  indifference is a deafening death

  the scripts we live by animate us

  with meaning, we argue from dawn to sunset

  but if we are not united, we will be enemies tomorrow

  if we do not have food we cannot think

  full bellies let us reason

  with nuance

  hunger is a person not full

  half empty people obey any hand that feeds them

  do not argue with hunger

  unless

  you are prepared

  to have your hand bitten off.

  depressed as you may be

  this too shall pass

  everybody is mourning

  its not just the family

  no one owns the pain

  everyone is terrorized

  let go of yourself

  you can only move as fast as you will

  even the best of us is no better than the worse

  once a word is spoken you cannot take it back

  there’s no such things as th
ose children

  its our children or its no children

  when young people can’t vote,

  their political voice is protest

  it’s much easier to organize a rebellion

  when all the tanks are pointed at the same place

  then your identity is who am i

  what kind of person will i become

  it didn’t occur to us that you can come back from a beating

  until fannie lou

  hypocrisy makes people happy

  and truth makes them sad

  compassion hushes wrath

  a generation destroyed by facebook

  the human face is undecipherable

  and they can’t read anything that doesn’t look

  like them

  everyone can hear your thoughts before you think them

  we quarrel with self

  conversations are quiet mediations

  poems wrinkled by loneliness

  google maps the heart

  passion is a prison of surveillance

  emotions are actionless

  and actions are emotionless

  people expect comfort

  more than freedom

  and individualism becomes self-care

  but the women are freeing their nipples

  true or false

  Glaydah Namukasa

  Born in Uganda, she is a community psychologist, midwife and a writer: the author of one novel, The Deadly Ambition (2006), and a young adult novella, Voice of a Dream (2006), which was awarded the Macmillan Writers Prize for Africa in 2006. Her short stories have been published in Uganda, South Africa, the UK, the US and Sweden. She is a recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center residency in 2013, Mike and Marylee Fairbanks Fellowship in 2006, and in 2008 was awarded the title of Honorary Fellow by the International Writing Program, University of Iowa. In 2014 she was selected on the Hay Festival Africa39 list. In 2018 she received the URSB award for Ugandan Women in Literary Creativity. She has completed her third novel.

  The last time I played Mirundi

  “Look Babirye, you have it between your legs,” my twin brother Kato says and laughs.

  I laugh too because one, Kato has a laugh which makes you laugh when you see it. Kato’s laugh is like this: his upper lip goes up into his nose and his red red gum comes out and smiles. Two, I laugh because I think Kato is talking about the ball; our new jesa-milk-kaveera-ball. The bouncing ball we made for our Mirundi Ball Competition.