Triangular Road

by Paule Marshall

  All of it would be there for those capable of reading in depth.

  “Never let what really happened get in the way of the truth,” a sage, somewhere, is known to have said.

  That first day back in Grenada, the paralysis broken, I wrote nonstop until it was time for my standing date with my son at Grande Anse Beach.

  The green flash at sunset?

  Even with the siege lifted I still never managed to see it in our almost year-long stay in Grenada.

  I’VE KNOWN OCEANS: THE ATLANTC

  An entire ocean permanently sitting shivah.

  FESTAC ’77 was the unofficial name of the Second World Festival of Black and African Arts held in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1977. FESTAC ’77 was also for me the second major plum of an all-expense-paid overseas cultural conference to come my way since the State Department tour of Europe with Mr. Hughes well over a decade earlier. This particular plum was an almost month-long festival of the arts lavishly underwritten by the Nigerian government. Its purpose was to celebrate the ending of colonialism by bringing together artists, writers and scholars from the entire continent, Cairo to Cape Town, as well as those from the far-flung African Diaspora—Brazil to Brooklyn, as it were.

  It was to be nearly four weeks of performances, recitals, readings, exhibits, concerts, colloquiums, forums and the like; nearly four weeks, moreover, of meeting, conversing and interacting with fellow artists in a spirit of confraternity.

  Not that FESTAC ’77 didn’t have its critics, the harshest being the citizenry of Lagos, the oppressively hot and humid, grossly overpopulated Nigerian capital in the Gulf of Guinea. The local folk complained bitterly about “the millions upon millions” of naira (the Nigerian dollar) being spent by the government just so that it could, as they put it, “play the high muck-a-muck” in Africa and the world; also, so that it could surpass the first and highly successful black arts festival that had been held in Dakar, Senegal, a decade earlier. (Mr. Hughes had been the official American representative to the Dakar event. The State Department had even sent him on an extensive tour of Africa when the festival ended—this, just a year before my elder friend and mentor died in 1967.)

  The people of Lagos also decried the brand new National Theatre that had been built specifically for FESTAC ’77. A huge, dun-gray, window-less mausoleum of a building, it was an exact copy of a theater their president had admired while on a visit to Eastern Europe. The populace was even more outraged at the rumored amount of dash (read: bribes) involved in the large housing complex that had been built to accommodate the thousands of visitors. The European company that finally won the contract had been forced to dash so liberally, it was said, that to realize a profit, the work had been shoddily done using inferior materials. Proof was the faulty plumbing and portions of the brand-new ceilings that collapsed in some of the rooms.

  Dash! The modus operandi for doing business in Nigeria.

  Public criticism continued unabated up to the opening day of FESTAC. Then—and apparently to no one’s surprise—what looked to be the entire population of Lagos proudly turned out for the inaugural ceremony in the city’s National Stadium. Inside the huge stadium, the stands were packed hours before the event was due to begin. Outside, another multitude stood angrily demanding to be admitted although there were no tickets left, the stadium of a hundred thousand completely filled. Not to be deterred, any number of daredevil young men attempted to scale the stadium’s high walls. A few of them actually succeeded, only to encounter the wrath of the ticketholders in the stands as they came crashing down in their midst. Some of the men in the audience flung the gatecrashers tier by tier down the stands until they landed on the playing field. A number were seriously injured. Two, in fact, later died, according to the newspaper the following day.

  An inauspicious beginning to FESTAC ’77.

  The opening ceremony was modeled on the Olympic Games grand parade, with each country clearly determined to outshine all the others both in pageantry and patriotic zeal. The hours-long procession was an endless display of national flags, national dress, along with outsized photographs of the national leaders (Nyerere of Tanzania, Kaunda of Zambia, Kenyatta of Kenya and the other presidents at the time) emblazoned on huge banners held aloft, as well as on the marchers’ matching outfits. Each country’s troupe of drummers, dancers and musicians was accompanied by a large corps of singers repeating the national anthem nonstop, all the while waving mini versions of the national flag—a veritable blizzard of the little flags—up at the stands.

  The Egyptians stole the early phase of the show hands down. Not only were they among the largest delegations present, their parade was indisputably the most spectacular. Ushering their sizable troupe into the stadium was no less than a half-dozen beautifully caparisoned, fancy-stepping, white Arabian show horses—with, seated high on each of their backs, a Sahara-brown beauty. The women riders were as sumptuously costumed as their mounts in great billowing Scheherazade trousers, tunics and sheer flowing scarves. Their arms and ears bejeweled. The glint of jewels as well in their elaborately dressed hair. Kohl rimmed their eyes, adding to their drama. Each rider was a Cleopatra look-alike holding aloft an outsized red, white and black Egyptian flag.

  The crowd wildly cheered them.

  Given the alphabetical order of the march, our delegation of perhaps eighty or more was positioned near the end of the massive lineup. Ours was a hot and endless wait in the holding area under the stadium. Uganda came just before us. Only after its name was finally announced and its large delegation left the holding area and were well into its march around the field was it finally our turn, the U. S. of A, us, “ussuns,” Aunt Hagar’s children. Unlike the other parades, ours was totally lacking in pageantry: no matching clothing or costumes, no established marching order, no well-rehearsed troupe of entertainers, no horses of any kind, no little handheld Stars ’n’ Stripes to wave to the crowd and certainly no banners emblazoned with Gerald Ford’s image.

  Truth is, we were totally unprepared for an Olympics-style display. Not only did most in our delegation come from widely different parts of the States, many had arrived in Lagos only a day or two before the opening ceremony. There had been no time to organize even a halfway decent parade, especially one that would have satisfied the differing politics among us—these ranging from the revolutionary Black Nationalists to the moderate NAACP types and every ideology in between. Thus our parade, such as it was, turned out to be a make-do affair that reflected our divisions. One large group went charging onto the field, fists pumping in the Black Power salute, while singing, oddly, a jazzed-up, belligerent-sounding version of the old “Amen” gospel hymn.

  My son, whom I had brought on the trip, was among this group. The book-party baby was all of seventeen by now, already well on his way to independent-thinking young manhood. Indeed, this would be one of our last trips together. So off he went, his raised fist like a piston in the air, his increasingly deepening voice revolutionizing the old “Amen” hymn along with the others.

  Another large but more orderly group within our contingent tried drowning them out by repeatedly singing the Negro National Anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—the verses they knew by heart, that is. For my part, I found myself marching with an equally large but undefined group that seemed to serve as a buffer or neutral zone between the other two.

  My People. My People. Unprepared. Unrehearsed. Improvised. Disorganized.

  The crowd nonetheless loved us.

  From the moment the name “the United States of America” issued from the loudspeakers situated around the stadium and Aunt Hagar’s offspring appeared at the entrance to the field, the stadium of a hundred thousand strong rose in a single body to roar its welcome.

  The welcome continued throughout our straggly march around the huge field. Contained in the nonstop applause was pure Omowale joy—Omowale meaning, in the Yoruba language, “The child has returned.” Their joy at our return, at our presence among them, was a hosanna heard across the l
ength and breadth of Lagos. There was also a large, discernible measure of pride that “the displaced child” had returned representing the wealthiest and most powerful “high muck-a-muck” nation in the world. There was admiration at how the Omowalies, often mistreated in what was now their home, continued to agitate for their full rights as citizens: the sit-ins, the jail-ins, the marches, rallies, protests, boycotts, demonstrations, the court battles, and the leaders, heroes and foot soldiers alike who had been sacrificed in the cause.

  A praise song to them all.

  Indeed, the outsized, nonstop welcome was like a long traditional West African praise song that was being composed on the spot in our honor. Its excessive length was also partly driven, I sensed, by a large measure of guilt and sorrow. As well it should be! After all, there was the old shameful footnote of history between us: between the Omowalies marching in disarray around the stadium and the hundred thousand in the stands applauding us nonstop. Because hadn’t their forebears been complicit, some of them, in the nefarious trade that had reduced ours—the forebears of the present day Omowalies—to mere articles of trade, commodities, merchandise, goods, cargo, chattel cargo! to be bought and sold and whipped and worked for free! And hadn’t that commerce, continuing for five centuries, left us, their descendants, today’s Omowalies, feeling at times like permanent Displaced Persons?

  I know I felt that way at times. Guilt. Shame. Sorrow. They, too—if I was hearing correctly—underscored the extravagant welcome being accorded us.

  All’s forgiven. I said this privately, silently to an elderly woman I spotted in a front-row seat in the stands. Far too old to be on her feet applauding, she sat quietly looking on, a matriarch, an elder surrounded by the members of her family who were wildly hailing the Omowalies in her stead. Ancient as she was she had nevertheless dressed to the nines for the occasion. Yards of colorful, gold-threaded cloth draped her bent, dry form in an elaborate, dressed-up version of the traditional Nigerian long wrapper and blouse. An artfully arranged headscarf or gelee, the same palette of colors as her dress, crowned her head. As for the black, deeply lined face under the gelee, it appeared to be at once ancient and ageless, altogether immune to time. She could well have been alive, still only a young girl, when the first Portuguese caravel sailed into the Gulf of Guinea circa AD 1300 and the buying and selling that would continue for five hundred years began! If so, she had to have witnessed the collusion of her own.

  Were those tears on the timeless face under the gold-threaded gelee? Or simply perspiration, rivulets of perspiration, given the steam-bath heat and humidity of Lagos?

  I took them to be tears.

  All’s forgiven.

  Over the next three to four weeks of FESTAC, amid the endless round of cultural events, there were many other instances of reconciliation, of forgiveness. Members of our delegation were constantly claimed, reclaimed and embraced, including even those among us who were far more white than black in appearance. Our African colleagues seemed desperate to make amends for the past. We often found ourselves the object of heated debates among them as to our possible lineage. Singling out cheekbones, foreheads, the shape of our eyes, our heads, the size and design of our lips, the particular spread and flare to our nostrils, our jawlines, examining all this they would declare us to be variously Yoruba, Fanti, Ibo, Akan, Igbo, Fulani, Temne, Luo. . . .

  At a reception following a large-scale reading in which I participated, a bearded poet from Ghana hurried over to claim that I was pure Ashanti. The fleshy knob at the end of my nose was a distinctly Ashanti feature, according to him. He was immediately challenged by a young schoolteacher from Zambia in the crowd gathered around us. According to the schoolteacher I looked exactly like an aunt of his and therefore had to be of the Bemba people. In fact, the resemblance was so strong, he said, he considered me to be his aunt’s American twin. Indeed, whenever I encountered the young schoolteacher afterward, he would tender me a respectful little bow reserved for an elder. The same one, I’m sure, he accorded his aunt, “my Bemba twin,” in Zambia.

  To be claimed by so many! To possess a face that was generic apparently to the entire continent below the Sahara!

  FESTAC ’77 ended with a palm-wine gala on the roof terrace of the ugly, showpiece National Theatre. I spent most of the party reassuring my friends among the African writers that this would not be my sole visit to the continent. I had to keep promising them that my return was a foregone conclusion as far as I was concerned.

  After all, my life, as I saw it, was a thing divided in three: There was Brooklyn, U.S.A., and specifically the tight, little, ingrown immigrant world of Bajan Brooklyn that I had fled. Then, once I started writing, the Caribbean and its conga line of islands had been home off and on for any number of years. While all the time, lying in wait across the Atlantic, in a direct line almost with tiny wallflower Barbados, had been the Gulf of Guinea and the colossus of ancestral Africa, the greater portion of my tripartite self that I had yet to discover, yet to know.

  Of course I would be back! In fact, I could have confided to my friends on the roof terrace that while packing my suitcases earlier in the day I had already started thinking of how to underwrite my return. Africa, it was clear, would call for a higher order of grant than the Guggenheim that had supported me so handsomely in Grenada. Also, the Guggenheim had been only for a year. The long, leisurely sojourn south of the Sahara I had in mind would require one of the truly heavyweight grants, a Rockefeller or Ford Foundation. Or the kind of State Department-sponsored cultural tours that had sent Mr. Hughes repeatedly around the world. Or a Fulbright! A generous, unlimited Fulbright that would allow me to remain on the Mother Continent writing, doing research, traveling—and with no questions asked, no strings attached.

  Dare I hope?

  I raised my glass of palm wine to Lady Luck. Happily, she didn’t disappoint me. Her help wasn’t in the form of a heavyweight grant. (That would come a decade later with the MacArthur Fellowship.) Instead, three years after FESTAC the Kenyan government invited a group of black American artists and writers, including yours truly, to visit the country, all expenses paid. On my own, I included a side trip to Uganda, which, unfortunately, proved to be an unwise choice at the time. I also tried but failed to enter Tanzania as well as Zambia, home of my Bemba twin.

  At present, I’m in the throes of writing about that limited and frustrating East African experience. Then it’ll be back to my primary love: the novel, the short story.

  Copyright © 2009 by Paule Marshall

  Published by BasicCivitas Books,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Marshall, Paule, 1929-

  Triangular road : a memoir / Paule Marshall.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-0-786-74421-3

  1. Marshall, Paule, 1929- 2. African American authors—

  Biography. 3. Women and literature—United States—History—

  20th century. 4. Hughes, Langston, 1902-1967. 5. African

  Americans—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title.

  PS3563.A7223Z46 2008

  813’.54—dc22

  2008036671