of a West African village. Dance for the times
you’ve been stalked by store detectives
for a lady on a bus, for the look of disgust
on the face of a boy too young to understand
why he hates but only that he must. Dance
for Sammy, dead and penniless, and for the
thousands still scraping a buck as street-corner
hoofers who, though they dance for their food,
move as if it is only them and the drums, talking.
calling a spade a spade
‘What is the subconscious process of healing? What does it take? Perhaps it is something like how old schoolers would say you heal from a snake bite: having to spit out the venom again and again until there is no more’ – SAUL WILLIAMS
The N Word
I.
You sly devil. Lounging in a Pinter script
or pitched from a transit van’s rolled-down window;
my shadow on this unlit road, though you’ve been
smuggled from polite conversation. So when
a friend of a friend has you poised on his lips
you are not what he means, no call for balled fist,
since he’s only signifyin(g) on the sign;
making wine from the bad blood of history.
Think of how you came into my life that day,
of leaves strewn as I had never seen them strewn,
knocking me about the head with your dark hands.
II.
‘Pretty little lighty but I can get dark’ – ‘Get Dark’, MZ BRATT
You came back as rubber lips, pepper grains, blik
you’re so black you’re blik and how the word stuck to
our tongues eclipsing – or so we thought – all fear
that any moment anyone might notice
and we’d be deemed the wrong side of a night sky.
Lately you are a pretty little lighty who can
get dark because, even now, dark means street
which means beast which means leave now for Benfleet.
These days I can’t watch a music video
online without you trolling in the comments,
dressed to kill in your new age binary clothes.
Alterity
Our match maker, the only other other
kid in class, was my best friend after the urge
passed to slap your negritude out of his mouth.
Knowing what it was to have the spotlight
we stood in line for auditions in the hall.
In lieu of a third we were the two magi,
honouring a blue-eyed plastic messiah,
bearing our gifts of thrifty chinoiserie.
The holy mother was a girl named Phyllis.
I had my words down three weeks before the show:
Come, Melchior; let’s make the best of the light.
The Cricket Test
Picture a cricket match, first week at upper
school, blacks versus whites, that slight hesitation
on choosing a side, and you’re close to knowing
why I’ve been trying to master this language.
Raised as I was, some words in this argot catch
in the throat, seemingly made for someone else
(the sticking point from which all else is fixed).
We lost to a one-handed catch. After the match
our changing room was a shrine to apartheid.
When I crossed the threshold, Danny asked me why
I’d stand here when I could be there, with my kind.
The Conservatoire System
All of that to fetch up here, on secondment
to the institute of whiteface minstrelsy –
where I must flay myself nightly or risk
the indignity of being seen, in blackness,
as I am or as I’ve been taught, from without,
I am; an unconvincing Everyman.
But why would I want to be that dry bastard
with his pronouncements on all that can be seen
and practice this, his art of self-effacement, by which
he shakes off the vulgarity of being,
the better to make himself praiseworthy?
On Reading ‘Colloquy in Black Rock’
Just when I think I’ve shaken you off, you’re there,
innocuous, in Lowell’s poem – a flag
out of fashion, still flown by a patriot.
The seminar tutor tiptoes round you now.
Ours is to note the working mind behind the word
not what remains unsaid: there is us and them.
Cut to requisite dreads, beads, a wooden pendant
in the shape of a home I can’t remember,
Our first time alone together she asks
me why no one in my pictures is white.
Varsity Blues
an all-white production of for colored girls …
I expect my lecturer to get the joke
but he’s credulous, the theatrical risk
becoming, in his mind, a piece in The Stage:
Drama student critiques our post-race moment.
I cast a banker’s daughter from the second year
as the Lady in Blue in spite of the minstrel-
show tone she affects to suggest otherness.
A student reporter praises the vision
of the production, the authenticity
of the performances, the light and shade.
Casting
My agent says I have to use my street voice.
Though my talent is for rakes and fops I’ll drop
the necessary octaves, stifle a laugh
at the playwright’s misplaced get me blud and safe.
If I get it they’ll ask how long it takes me
to grow cornrows without the small screen’s knowing
wink. Three years RADA, two years rep and I’m sick
of playing lean dark men who may have guns.
I have a book of poems in my rucksack,
blank pad, two pens, tattered A-Z, headphones
that know Prokofiev as well as Prince Paul.
Callbacks
I have to stop working on my one-man show
to take the call. They liked me, but could I try
being Riley, sotto voce, the blind negro?
When I got signed, my agent told me never
say no to good money. She left out the part
about playing Sam in every room, itching,
of course, to play a tune. I take it (rent’s due).
Besides, I would like to divide critical
opinion just once. I’ll play him well-spoken.
My agent is elated. That’s great, she says,
you’re perfect for this role, you were born to play it.
Normative Ethics
In the safe distance of objectivity,
you can speak, with a straight face, of being
on the margins, being thought no longer cool
(if you don’t know the curse that coolness confers):
women who prize your chocolate voice above
your words, or look at you like you’ve deserted
the cause because you are holding hands with your
Muzungu. Men who tut like you’ve stolen
their birthright. A colleague, who doesn’t see you,
angry at her own half-blackness, who can’t
believe her best friend is fucking a nigger.
Curfew
This was soldier curfew he says, apropos
of nothing, the way the best stories come
round this table that just about holds us,
bwali all but eaten, the flash of the thought
a flame lighting up his face. He rests the tip
of a finger in the space between his eyes,
past curfew there were no warning shots.
Auntie chip
s in as if this were little more
than a scene they were rehearsing: you had
to have a man with you at all times, especially
at night, so my cousin would walk me home.
In trousers and squared shoulders she could pass.
She smiles a knowing smile at our scandalised
faces. Faces we’ve bent into anguished shapes
when she could smell a lie but let us improvise
wildly until, hoist by our respective petards,
we came clean, deferring to the knowledge
of a woman who was a girl who could climb
out of a window in hotpants and platforms,
dance to the last ache in her legs and make
it back before the cockerel crowed morning.
25 October, 1964
‘Recently, a very close friend of mine declared it would take us another twenty years to be really independent. Was he right? I am afraid there is a lot of truth in this’ – DR. KENNETH KAUNDA, 1966
We danced like Celts the day the news of it
kicked the District Commissioner’s fat rump.
Teachers who beat us till we couldn’t sit
over little things, were, by lunch, so drunk
Mr Chishala shut the school and followed
his staff to a bar where colonial notes
came back as loose change, baked groundnuts, hallowed
pitchers of the local brew (a throat song
known as Mosi). They drank to the freedom
our children would inherit, then raised a glass
to Leyland’s Hippo-shaped buses, heaving
with the copper belt’s weary underclass
who, in spite of a new nation, were still dressed
in hunched shoulders, the shame of unpuffed chests.
Legerdemain
and, at last, you have come upon
the jewel in the crown of our collection
here at the Royal Museum for Central Africa:
a magnifying glass used by one
of the King’s functionaries
who, by Royal decree, remained
unsung among the sons of Europe
until recently. Note the engraving
on the ivory handle that tells us
this glass was used in the Kasai.
Since the official report was redacted
some of you might be unaware
of this particular brand of magic:
the ‘trick was to use a magnifying
glass to light a cigar, “after which
the white man explained his intimate
relation to the sun, and declared
that if he were to request [the sun]
to burn up his black brother’s
village it would be done”’–
and so it was the land changed hands
as a cigar, given light, becomes a stub
and its smoke that stays with you
is the smoke from a burning village.
How to Build Cathedrals
after Cildo Meireles
To think, when the Cessna’s
wheels bumped the makeshift
runway, women-folk walked
uncovered and the men knew
nothing of their godly duties.
I started them on the Gospels.
Marianne instilled the finer points
of feminine deportment. Before long
they knew the principal scriptures
by heart and could recite the Hail Mary
in the perfect broken English
our predecessors bequeathed them.
We’ve had a number of successes:
children wake afraid of God’s wrath,
ladies wear brassieres and the gents
cease gambling on the Sabbath day.
In the last sermon before hurricane season
I say, tapping my breast, this is a church.
Waves
The year waves came in, when we sang
you’re sweet like chocolate, boy
without shame, everyone had a method
for taming even the most rebellious head
of pepper grains into slick, crazy-paved,
deference to R&B stars looming large
from hoardings, pasted into diaries
and exercise books, their lyrics written
out on the backs of hands. We wanted
to be wanted like that, so we slept with
our mothers’ head wraps tight, to keep
the facade in place. Some taught themselves
the grace of clippers, so they could tidy
up their edges in the bathroom mirror,
others sought the counsel of barbers,
technicians of the razor blade
who could elevate a trim to a thing
of head-turning, transcendent beauty.
But for all we tried to hide our stubble,
ashamed of the hair’s natural grain,
it came back unbidden as if each follicle
knew that soon we would covet shaved
lines in sideburns, eyebrows, anything
to set ourselves apart, betray our roots.
Malumbo
for Malaika
Your parents rejected my suggestion.
I told them you could pull off Ethel.
The jury is still out, Alesha out of the question
(ditto Shaniqua and Chantelle).
I’ve a soft spot for Dambisa, Malaika, or Mambwe
but, whatever you are called, you should know
we’ve all been waiting for your birthday;
the look on your face as you apprehend snow.
I hope you hold on to your wonder
that you’ll never grow so stiffly poised
a scent or song is not enough to conjure
that smile of yours, the fullness of your voice.
Orientation
Buy yourself a copy of Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. Turn to page 83. Read the fourteenth sentence aloud. Speaking these words will cause a set of coordinates to be burned into the skin of your left forearm. Follow them till you reach a war monument where you will see a man in a homemade lobster costume. Ask him if he has any suppositories. Let him guide you to a quiet spot where he’ll produce an apple strudel which you should eat. Outside a ‘67 Pontiac Firebird will wait. Take the driver’s seat by force. Under the seat you’ll find a sheaf of papers. On these papers will be written, in a script only you can decipher, your original name.
How to Cry
I’m going to fold, as an overloaded trestle folds,
in the middle of Romford Market and bawl
the way my small niece bawls for her mother
when she leaves the room. In spite
of our assurances, already the little one knows
that those who leave might never come back.
Though I keep God in a small closed box
I’ll prostrate myself outside Argos,
beat the cobbles with my palm
till blood rings in my fingertips. There, amid
cockneys selling fish, box-fresh from Billingsgate,
tears will occur to eyes I thought I’d cried out.
I want to be set off by our red brick uni,
its array of strange faces. Show me round
the flat that stinks of our sleeplessness,
plans hatched in the whispers of small hours.
I’m tired of this strength. Let me be bereft,
watching the white limousine as it drives away.
Loch Long by Ardgartan, Argyll
Where night is a crow
troubling the surface of the water
and the light of morning
is the breadth of a lover’s gaze
and the loch-side mist
gives you back to landscape
I’ll wait for you.
Where headlights are slow fish
swimming miles of cobbled river
and this cigarette�
�s glow
is the effortless grace of a firefly
and your troubles are bright
as paper lanterns given to the sky
by fire, you’ll find me.
Where the ends of the earth
are the view from a cabin window
and the past is an old song
nobody knows how to sing anymore
and this moment is sudden rain
soaking you through to the skin
I’ll meet you.
Kumukanda
Since I haven’t danced among my fellow initiates,
following a looped procession from woods at the edge
of a village, Tata’s people would think me unfinished –
a child who never sloughed off the childish estate
to cross the river boys of our tribe must cross
in order to die and come back grown.
I was raised in a strange land, by small increments:
when I bathed my mother the days she was too weak,
when auntie broke the news and I chose a yellow suit
and white shoes to dress my mother’s body,
at the grave-side when the man I almost grew to call
dad, though we both needed a hug, shook my hand.
If my alternate self, who never left, could see me
what would he make of these literary pretensions,
this need to speak with a tongue that isn’t mine?
Would he be strange to me as I to him, frowning
as he greets me in the language of my father
and my father’s father and my father’s father’s father?
H-O-R-S-E
August. Each of us in shorts, a white tee.
This warmth has brought the ballers out in force.
And though he’s been dead since 1993
my father and I play a game of H-O-R-S-E.
Next to us, a group of friends play three on three
backed by Biggie’s elegant contortions
(to better demonstrate the importance