Contents
Elsewhere
The poems in the 'Elsewhere' section of the collection (no's. 1-18) are thematically organised but it is not, formally, a sequence.
1. Grey
2. Coup
3. West Indies, USA
4. Whales
5. Counter-commentary at Kensington Oval
6. Colonial Love Song
7. On Redduit Beach
8. Dominoes
9. Ti-Maru
10. Jaguar
11. Happy-Hour
12. Days
13. Pirogue Lore
14. Colonial Remainders
15. Looking for Cuba
16. The Hotel Normandie Pool
17. Sunset on Paradise
18. Morning
*************
Homework
19. Glad Rags
*************
Africa
20. Elmina
*********************************************
Elsewhere
Somewhere women tire of the shawled sea’s
weeping, for the fishermen’s dories
still go out. It is blue as peace.
(Derek Walcott. ‘Elsewhere’ The Arkansas Testament)
1.
Grey
Perched here above grey wing above grey cloud
letting windows on grey-blue Atlantic -
the trimmings of my beard shorn for the tropics
grey against the barber's sky-blue cape -
and Michael Aspel in the in-flight magazine
proclaiming 'grey is beautiful'
and the grey-green cabin plastic
bland and reassuring to the grey faced woman
next to me pretending calm
and England's grey, absorbing, self deceiving balm:
this plane is taking me elsewhere.
I write this in mid-air, between the grey Schweppes
diet lemonade and the plastic headset's piped grey music,
their terminal greys dissolving our descent
into another life, a different spite of shades.
2.
Coup
Coming into Hewanora the four
enormous black guys start to move:
bull necks, baseball caps, the works.
Imagine the scenario; an island coup,
the plane down, confusion, hostages
exchanged for the old men, a few shots.
Someone has to die - just to confirm
that its for real - some fat, unidentified
tourist slumped on tarmac for the zooms.
Is that the signal, when Big Boy
screws his ear with his forefinger?
The painted hostess screams and swoons,
the Pitons surfacing through cloud
like dolphins breaking Caribbean lace
3.
West Indies, USA
Cruising at thirty thousand feet above the endless green
the islands seem like dice tossed on a casino’s baize,
some come up lucky, others not. Puerto Rico takes the pot,
the Dallas of the West Indies, silver linings on the clouds
as we descend are hall-marked, San Juan glitters
like a maverick’s gold ring.
All across the Caribbean
we’d collected terminals - airports are like calling cards,
cultural fingermarks; the hand-written signs at Port-
au-Prince, Piarco’s sleazy tourist art, the lethargic
contempt of the baggage boys at ‘Vere Bird’ in St. Johns…
And now for plush San Juan.
But the pilot’s bland,
you’re safe in my hands drawl crackles as we land,
“US regulations demand all passengers not disembarking
at San Juan stay on the plane, I repeat, stay on the plane.”
Subtle Uncle Sam, afraid too many desperate blacks
might re-enslave this Island of the free,
might jump the barbed
electric fence around ‘America’s
back yard’ and claim that vaunted sanctuary…’give me your poor…’
Through toughened, tinted glass the contrasts tantalise;
US patrol cars glide across the shimmering tarmac,
containered baggage trucks unload with fierce efficiency.
So soon we’re climbing,
low above the pulsing city streets;
galvanised shanties overseen by condominiums
polished Cadillacs shimmying past Rastas with pushcarts
and as we climb, San Juan’s fool’s glitter calls to mind
the shattered innards of a TV set that’s fallen
off the back of a lorry, all painted valves and circuits
the roads like twisted wires,
the bright cars, micro-chips
It’s sharp and jagged and dangerous, and belonged to someone else.
4.
Whales.
Each Christmas they come
white and blubbery from the frozen North,
strange bloated creatures pale as snow
cruising in vast, unnatural shoals.
Whales: the great white whales of myth
and history in all their arrogant splendour.
Flopped ungainly along the sea’s edge
or hiding, blistered, under a shadowed palm,
incredibly ugly, somehow, in their difference.
Designated a protected species
they are chauffeured around, pampered like babes
and generally kept in the shade.
Few stay long or leave anything behind
except litter and small hostilities.
‘Peace and Love’ we tell them -
the government says we must show respect -
so we smile, sing, play Sambo:
secretly long for a black Ahab.
5.
Counter-commentary at Kensington Oval
Against the plummy platitudes
of Chris Martin-Jenkins
on the ball-by-ball, this broad
bare-footed cane cutter,
taking his ease and Cockspur
in the Mitchie Hew..
getting drunker as the day proceeds
offers us all - can’t be
restrained from - his loud
counter commentary
CMJ: And Greenwich is being tied down just at the moment by some tight bowling from England…
He kaahn handle it?
Why he don’ jus handle it?
Good batsman, you g’now,
he ol’ but he a good batsman still.
CMJ: And that’s a fine piece of fielding by Smith at extra cover…
Proper fieldin’, man!
Him put him fut, man,
‘e hit the ball like Glory!
CMJ: And one feels now that Richards is just setting himself for the battle to come…
Watchin’ that man Richards is a money worth itself, man
Richards is a A class batsman, man..
CMJ: Devon Malcolm was brave, or perhaps foolhardy, enough to say that he thought
he had the measure of Richards, we shall see…
Yorker boy, leh go a yorker boy,
that’s what you need for he
Crowd e up man, crowd e up,
put all de men around he, behind he,
inside he…Crowd e up!
He flashin at de win’!
Outside de off stump, Glory!
CMJ: What can one say, that’s Richard’s third six off Malcolm in two overs…
The somewhat embarrassing affliction that has been discomforting the great man
in recent months* doesn’t seem to be troubling him at this moment…or perhaps it is!
Bwoy him arse pain im, him arse pain im HOT!*
Malcolm, know you place when you meet the greatest, boy,
know you place
CMJ: And Malcolm, perhaps in desperation, is showing the ball to the umpire
Ball burs’? Nuttin wrong wid de ball.
The man is joke!
CMJ: One senses that the crowd have mixed feelings towards Small and Malcolm
who both have family connections in the West Indies of course…
How the Englishman like black man for so!?
Dey tief Malcolm an’ Small man, dey tief dem.
Englishman they like to USE yu till yu dry -
Give back Small de ball man!
He kaan bowl again a’ready? He not a black man?!
CMJ: And he’s out, Richards is out trying just one hook too many…
The boy gone!
Yu see Richards get out wid that same hook he hookin’?
Too damn foolishness!
CMJ: What can one say about Richard’s dismissal Trevor, there was no need for him to play
that shot at this stage of the innings but I suppose those who live by the sword will often die by it…
I come here fe watch good cricket man
Is not so me come a see.
(* Around the time of this match Viv Richards had been reported as suffering from haemorrhoids.)
6.
Colonial Love Song
Dear Gaynor Howells,* Gaynor Howells
how we love your deep Welsh vowels.
In Georgetown, Fiji, Timbuktu
homesick expats lust after you.
That voice which echoes round the globe
still twangs its Valleys rock and roll
and more than any Oxbridge clone
evokes the green green hills of home.
Oh Gaynor Howells, Gaynor Howells
your every cadence twists our bowels,
like crumpets, roast beef and high tea
your voice evokes a world for we…
(*Gaynor Howells is a news reader on the BBC World Service)
7
On Reduit Beach
1.
The tame St Lucian parrot
in the hotel gardens calls
foreday morning. The beach
is empty but for a solitary
‘steward’ raking out the sand.
He croons a wan calypso
as he works, mechanically
ignoring the immense horizon
and the all-flags-flying cruise ship
and the schooners bobbing
on the morning's swell...
there is nothing to see,
and he has seen it:
in the glazed disdain of the tourists,
in the already knowing eyes
of his children, in the veined fortunes
of the sea almond's leaves
that he picks from the tines of his rake.
2.
That afternoon, among the trees
on Reduit, Kentry‚ 'Small Boy'‚
maybe just eighteen, passes on
some weed to 'Joe', a tourist,
taking his ease. "No big ting, y'know,
de boy jus mek a likkle deal."
But then, it seems, the CIA
unleashed its Drugs Enforcement Team‚
sent down to teach the locals
'how to keep control'... "Dem say
dat im resis arres, 'e ran‚
an so dey shoot im dead dead
on the san'.
That night two tourists
paid some recompense, worked over
as they walked along the shore.
The Drugs Enforcement Team
was sent back home and everything
went hush, blacked off the news. "The thing
too spooky‚ man, bad story… " No-one's
quite sure what’s happening to Joe.
3.
At sunset the compulsory
lone, black fisherman, erect
and dignified despite his rags,
stalking the lace trim of the sea
between the hotel and the mangroves
by the point, casting his white net
into the surf and hauling
it back indifferently
as the yachts moored out in the bay
endlessly lap lap lap...The island
rears behind him; Diabolesse.
8.
Dominoes
(for Andrew Boswell)
That crack of cards on board
is both a slap and a caress
That studied, fierce, disdain
is just a style, a nervousness
That shielding, holding hand
is both a fist and an embrace.
That knocking, knuckled "Pass"
is a confession, a defeat.
That euphoric "Daboda!"
is a conceit, the coup-de-grace
9.
Ti-Maru
The way they told it was like legend,
This Ti Maru, a one-eyed hop-an-drop
old man, reeking of rum, his mash-mouth twisted
out of speech, appeared one afternoon
unknown and unannounced, to bush
the hill behind the house. Down in the town
they’d sworn this place curse bad, and none would come
to clear the bamboo off the slope
no matter how much cash in hand, “and too
besides” they said “it steep like mountain side,
bush thick as hell!” But the ol’ man
just jump right off the deck with his machete
and start to hack, the jungle was reclaiming
back that view developers had charged
such thousands for but Ti Maru was more
than match for it, he hack and tramp and weave
himself a floor of cut bamboo
to reach the outer stems; he work like frenzy
like he posses, he took no res’ for water
or for food. But then the bees swarm, big
and black and fierce, African bees, angry too,
his cutlass mus’ a cut their nest right through,
they sting him bad bad, in his face, his mouth,
his hands - and there was nothing we could do,
we couldn’t get down there, we couldn’t fight
the bees off anyhow. The ol’ man he
just roll up in a ball and scream - some ugly noise
like nothin’ else you ever heard -
and sob him sobbin’ after - we thought he dead
right then an’ there but, when they lef’ him
finally he body start to crawl towards
the house till we could haul him out.
Then straight we knew him had to dead soon soon,
although we rush him into town, to hospital.
The nurse jus’ look at him an’ strups, could see
she thought he didn’t stand a chance.
But when we check next afternoon he’d gone,
just up and an’ lef’ that mornin’, couldn’ bear
to be inside, she said, and strups again.
We checked all round the town - till then
we didn’t even know his name - but Alphonse
in the rum shop knew, “That’s Ti Maru okay,”
when we described him, “he used to go prospecting
in the bush ‘round Mon Jemmie. He’s live out there
for years, it send him mad folks say.
He was a big man once, whole and strong
and liked his women. No-one seem to know
what happened to his eye, his mouth, his rotten foot,
but he still strong for true. An him can drink,
boy, he came in here one night las’ week
an nearly drink us dry, rum boy, jus’ straight
white rum. Is then he mus’ have heard about
your bush. The boys was sayin’, I suppose,
how your place curse, and though he mutter sof’
till then he roar burs’ out like thunder
with bad word, say how they don’t know what is curse
at all, an’ how he livin’ in the hills
with every kind a ghost an’ spirit an’ jumbie t’ing
an they is small boys to fear some ol’ woman’s
foolishness about your yard. An then he start
to preaching on ‘bout visions an’ how Death
come by that very morning - like a black cloud
screaming his name, he said - coming to claim him.
So he ran, all hop-an-drop, down into town
to hide an’ drink an’ make his peace, somehow.
And then he gone…” We left his money with Alphonse,
and some besides, and a message asking him
to please come by. But no-one saw old Ti-Maru again.
The bush engulfs the house on every side.
10.
Jaguar
Tearing the night apart
he purrs through sleeping
villages with eyes blazing.
Jaguar. Slick symbol
of speed and virility,
his ancient twin agonies howl
as they’re crashed into gear.
Dread: power restrained.
A sophisticated panther
this assimilated cat
knows his place. He remembers
that the Master had a whip
and is grateful that,
with the grace of his birth
and a little feline corruption,
he escaped the cage
of the jungle for the
wilderness of this rat race.
11.
Happy Hour
1.
Its not skin so much‚
there are white St. Lucians
and black Americans,
the few Africans,
are more the strangers
here than he:
so its
not skin so much
as costume…the 'tropical
shorts', the sunglasses,
the garish, floppy,
sugar-bag-waste hat...
The grinning man
who serves his Sundowners
insists there's no
pejorative for tourist
in his patois, but still
the surf's fierce hiss
confirms his sense
of being, just,
a welcome, necessary
but still uninvited, guest.
2
"Me, I curse that white ancestor,
Master, short-sighted plantation starter
who brought the blacks from Africa
and spoil paradise for me!
Me, I'd have charge the bastards for the trip!
Imperatives a’ history to rass!
If they so miserable here mek them go back
an grow their fuckin sugar cane elsewhere!"
12.
Days
The black lady in the Union Jack hat
outside the supermarket, is mad.
She barks and her eyes follow separate
orbits. No-one minds her: she begs
with her hands in unmistakable gestures
and survives. She’s been this way for years,
since her daughter was chewed up by rats
in the shack that they used as a home.
They say she left the child alone four days
while she whored with a Yankee sailor.
Her madness is hard to ignore: the barking jars
and her eyes appal; but still there are those
who won’t forgive. Their taunts
no longer reach her, can’t disturb that
stupid grin; she only barks
and stares hard at a dissolving world.
13.
Pirogue Lore
FAMINE AN DROUGHT
FREE MANDELLA
DEAD MEN DON'T COUNT
KOKAKOLA
JAH FORCE
BROTHERS & SISTERS
HOT SAUCE
HEAVY MANNERS
PEACE AN LOVE
DOWNTROD
HEAVEN ABOVE
THANKS GOD
SWEET HARMONY
QUEEN OF THE SEA
SUGAR SUGAR
14.
Colonial Remainders
or the bookseller’s irony?
Between The Black Presence in English Literature
and West Indian Poetry,
Pride and Prejudice and Notes on Robinson Crusoe.
15.
Looking for Cuba
Rolled flat by the sea
Crab rocks and slides across the coral,
a burnished, animated icon.
Trapped ocean foams and stutters
in the salt pocked reef
Crab silhouettes his brief rebellion,
a fist of glistening armour…
The sea swells in
and smashes him off the rocks, from here
you can almost hear the guns.
16.
The Hotel Normandie Pool
It’s not Ovid this mid-morning
stretched out on the pool-side deck
in the fickle shade of the Gros Michelle
but Calypso, browning a little more,
luxuriating in her own fascination,
Miss Trinidad...
The pool ripples electronically‚
"jet d'eau" the hotel card proclaims
although the shingles are all cracked,
and everywhere the paintwork’s peeling
but Calypso keeps up her vigil,
enticing me back, and back,
as if that flight to home, elsewhere
would be some kind of curse,
or a betrayal.
17.
Sunset on Paradise
The horizon gobbling the sun
like a zealous Communicant
taking the wafer of that Light
and suddenly the world's changed
Paradise filled with shadows
and a chill breeze swirling sand
and salt and debris in our eyes
and for the fishermen hauling
their nets the ocean's lullaby
becomes a worksong, a blues:
"Days, days, ev'ry one mus' done."
18.
Morning
Bright, purple waking,
nothing grey or sallow
about this Saint’s town
on a rum-scarred
morning…Sunlight squeezed
between bread-fruit
and galvanize splinters
across the yard. That
transforming lick
of fire, red and raucous
as our rooster,
has changed the world
has opened the eye-lids
of affection, turned
this exile to a home.
*****************************************************************************
Homework
19.
Glad Rags
Rummaging for old snapshots
through a house no longer home
I find Dad's private wardrobe
and discover, like a secret shame
his stockpile of 'retirement clothes' -
blazers, flannels, shirts and vests,
two pairs of buffed up brogues.
A smart man's hedge against
the grey inflation of his days
into a threadbare dotage.
It is ironic, this late hoarding
to see out a life so blessed
in its bare lack of acquisitions -
no house, no care, and nothing owed.
A life of grime, of beating steel
into a weekly envelope that could,
just, keep his family fed and clothed.
He would not have that pressed
and polished dignity betrayed now
by a pensioned shabbiness
still less leave on that final jaunt
turned out in any but his best.
Those furtive, moth-balled glad rags
are his chosen intimates,
his clothes to be seen dead in,
earned and paid for, like the rest.
*******************************************************************************
Africa
20.
Elmina
stalking the sun-
light, the dun-
geon unbars…
(Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Korabra’)
Tossing uneasy in my pink-washed
chalet at the Elmina Motel,
big seas and a thunderstorm flashing,
the breeze from the ocean a prize
beyond price in this stifling
season, I dream the unspeakable;
of ancestral complicities
woven in the fibres of this
pale skin I cannot shrug
for all my ethnic ambiguities -
‘The Jamaican poet’, so many
faces trying not to frown
when this Brown turns out not to be…
‘Onyimbo’, ‘Bature’, ‘Obroni’ -
always in West Africa
the stranger, no language here
for that West Indian romance
of fellowship. Here everything
is black and white, though things
are rarely quite as they appear
Elmina,
a depot on the mainline
of humanity’s horrors - Auschwitz,
Rwanda, Babi Yar, the killing
fields of history but hardly
recognised by History as we
were taught it in those twilight
suburbs of the Empire,
still those calamine’d scabs
across the face of the globe
were medals of honour, something
‘we’ could be proud of, notwith-
standing our own miseries
and slavery - whatever it might be -
was something ‘we’ had ended.
Elmina, if we had found it
on a map, was just another
muddy estuary along the Gold
Coast, nowhere, the back of beyond,
behind God’s back.
Maybe
it was that, though legend says
this squat stone fortress, clinging
to its rock, was built on holy ground
and that god’s curse was played out/
paid out down the centuries.
‘Amina’, in broken Portuguese;
the gold-mine’s maw or a city
of salt…either way the castle
is still processing its human
cargoes - now ‘African-Americans’
“coming back”, searching for roots
and reasons
(complaining that
they have to pay the First World
ticket price when they are really
Africans)
or puzzled whites
on a mystery tour, hoping
retribution won’t be paid out
on their skins.
But Heritage Site
or tourist trail, who cares - these castles
do good trade in souvenir’s -
postcards, badges, tee shirts, pens
(do they have these things at Auschwitz?)
some ‘local made’ but most imported:
Trade - West Africa is one big
market place - so Adewale says,
and always has been…Trade:
some people here would sell
their grandmothers if they could
make a decent profit - (okay,
okay, their neighbours
or their cousins once removed.)
So, sea-salt, souvenirs or slaves -
what’s the big deal…?
Hell, lets pass
the buck again, lets play this oldest
of Imperial games, lets blame
the victims… These forts were built
on rented ground, the slave pens
filled by local traders anxious
that their stock should not escape
and steal their profits.
Things here
are never quite as they appear.
Back to that dream…
The scene - Elmina Castle
a fat, bald white man,
sweating with each breath,
an English Prof
of African letters:
BA, MA, Ph.D. -
the card his university
has armed him with
proclaims his
titles and authority.
It is his job to be
detached, to have
some understanding
of the wider contexts -
the Renaissance,
the New World,
the mercantile im-
peratives that drive
all our histories…
We see him sceptically
traipsing round the
dungeons and the walls,
emotion dulled by
sun-scorch and
the simple brutality
of stone, indifferent
to the blackmail
of the coffles
and the bones,
all the clichéd
detritus
of inhumanity
that - in the scale
of things - is only
mundane horror,
all seen - and worse -
elsewhere:
The Coliseum
or The Tower,
in Carreg Cennan
or Rose Hall,
but always some-
how sanitised
by History or
its presentation.
Here Evil is
oppressive,
is personal,
though he resists
that sentimental
wallowing in guilts
he cannot own.
‘Sins of the fathers’ perhaps,
though not of mine, long
generations gone of rustics,
tradesmen, labourers
who hardly strayed from home
and each endured their un-fair
share of pain and exploitation.
But something in my conscience
prickles in this place, too much
like a raw wound in its grim lack
of all embellishments,
the alien fact of these stone walls,
this yard, these dingy passageways
and cells, the ‘feeding hatches’
and the cannon balls out in the sun
that ‘miscreants’ were chained to
through the day. And then that fetid
narrow way out to the sea
where writhing slaves were packed
like maggots in a fisherman’s
tray, desperate to escape
this torment into one hell or another.
To imagine them there,
torn between terror and their instinct
for survival….
As a man I quake with the distress of it…
As a man I quake with the distress of it…
only hear
how our language betrays us,
for though “imagination
knows no colour” somehow I cannot
enter in their heads, their faces
do not occupy my dreams…
But who was goading them like beasts
into a pen? Who man-handled them
as cargo on the ships, beat them
to silence below decks…?
These
are the men with whom my spirit
knows some awful kinship
defying all disclaimers of complicity.
Three of them come forward in my dream.
1: John Brown - soldier, in the condemned cell
If my fathers had been here
they would have been among
the squaddies, the labourers
press-ganged, conscripted
or driven by their shame
into another life. That class
of men who did what they were told
or took the bloody consequences.
So John Brown,
tossed into that stinking hole,
buried alive
for some chance misdemeanour
while all around
brute History unfolds,
is in despair.
He knows, once here, men starve
or rot, or - if in luck -
are just hauled out and hanged,
their bodies left
for vultures on St. Jagoe’s Hill.
But confronting
that darkness - now and to come -
he clings to scant hope…
that some whim makes the Governor
pause and relent,
decide merely to have the skin off
his back, have him
march in the sun with full pack
till he drops
or cast off with the blacks to far
Indies…God
how he envied them their lot….He
almost laughed.
Why does my imagination quail
at that one man’s degradation
more vividly than it will rage
at the full horror of this place?
2: John Smith - Trader in slaves
Or if not the poor accursed squaddie, then
the merchant/middle man who used
this ‘House of Trade’ to chose which stock
he’d send off to their Caribbean doom.
Perhaps with conscious irony
the Dutch who took this fortress
from the Portuguese, transformed
the Catholic church into a market
where new captives were displayed
for merchants to just pick and choose.
They were not popular, these middle-men,
and some - John Smith - rather than risk
the anger of their sturdy purchases,
preferred to view the market through
two peepholes in the old Confessional…
To stand - where he stood - now
and watch, unseen, black tourists
shuffling through the castle tour
is suddenly to be aware of blame
we all must share whose civilisation’s
grouted by such mean transactions
the triangle stamped in blood
that brands us down the generations.
Skulking out of the confessional
he’s noticed by a party of black pilgrims -
playing their parts /breaking their hearts
whose ancestors may once have borne
John Smith’s pale gaze. Their wry,
disdainful, head-shake smiles
condemn him absolutely to his skin
however much he would disclaim,
explain or empathise.
Understand
John Smith and all his kind
as ‘men of their time’
who could not have been otherwise
and lived, who had families
and lives elsewhere
and could be kind to horses
and to kids,
who were caught up in a game
they could not comprehend
or change, even had they
wanted to. Does that sound lame?
My fellow-travellers
from the USA might well say so,
if such excuses weren’t beneath disdain.
Understand him in his time?
Okay,
but who the Hell cares anyway -
there’s no forgiving,
no withholding of the blame
that they can say -
just outrage, anguish
and that simple, elegiac pain.
3. John Jones - Governor of Elmina
Its not the slave gates
or the auction block
or the feeding hatches
where the swill was slopped
that most offends
the tourists passing through.
Rather its the women’s
dungeon block,
an ugly courtyard, set apart,
where female slaves
were ‘exercised’
from time to time
and overlooked
from balconies
outside the Governor’s rooms.
Some days he’d choose
a lucky wench
to ‘visit’, as the tour guide says.
A ladder through
the floor of his apartment
was let down and then
the squaddies pushed
the chosen wretches through.
Of course she may have
clambered willingly enough,
swapped one hell for the next,
and clutched, again,
at that faint hope of a reprieve.
If she delivered up
a child pale skinned enough
the Governor could own it
then, the custom was,
both mother and her babe
were let go free….
It is John Jones who really haunts me:
Gentleman, Governor,
lover of fine wine and poetry,
ambitious now for better things,
aware of Elmina’s value
in the Empirical machine
but fearful too, in his dreams,
forever alert for signals
of incipient rebellion,
in no doubt where his head
would lie if the slaves rose up
or the town were to decide
this grim trade
was no longer to its liking.
He bore responsibilities
and maybe in his mind
they justified
his job’s few perks -
good wine, good food,
the spacious bedroom
set to catch the breeze,
and then the pick
of these poor wretches:
nubile, svelte,
sometimes unwilling -
fulfilling all his
darkest fantasies.
But proving, too,
that the excusers’ lied,
he knew these people
were not of some
‘lesser breed’,
these women
satisfied a need
beyond mere lust
or his delight
in the extravagance
of power - poor John Brown
rotting in his stinking
cell below. Their bodies
spoke to something soft
within himself, a
dangerous emotion
in this time and place -
something like sorrow
or apology, that
needs must be suppressed.
It is that weakness
which makes him most vivid
now: unwilling to deny
himself those dangerous
pleasures. Beyond fear
and duty and, even here,
his moral scruples,
when it was gifted
on a plate like that,
he took it -
as I’m quite
certain I’d have done.
And if like him in that,
why not the rest?
Come on,
we’re talking genocide here,
Middle Passage, mutilation,
rape, such cruelties
there are no words to say…
and you, old Mr. Softee,
who now debates the rights
and wrongs of standing on
the cockroaches infesting
your bathroom…
But the truth is
I’d have done it all, taken
whatever chance was my life’s
haul and not worried over much
about morality or justice
or the law. Does that make me
a monster? Would history
excuse me too? And where’s
the line? If I’d be John Jones
here why not the Commandant
of Auschwitz? If, really,
I must choose between
my skin and some poor Other’s
- pre-destined it would seem
to play the victim
in our cyclic inhumanity -
are there some things I
wouldn’t do…?
That’s
where the horror of Elmina is
for me: beyond the
unspeakable fate of the slaves
and the comfort blanket
of a generalised rage
that is the blame of race
complicity, beyond
the stench and contagion
and the shame of all our
histories….it is this
stripping away of the sham
that is my nineteen nineties
irony, my professional
detachment, my sneering,
shrugging, man-of-the-world-
machismo that has
seen it all before and asks
‘what else would you expect’
which means, ‘what else
would you expect from them.’
John Brown, John Smith, John
Jones, familial ghosts
who prove I am no stranger here
where everything is black
and white, though things are
never quite as they appear.