Read the Analysis of This Poem Here
But today I would join you, travelling river,
borne down the years of your patientest flowing,
past pains that would wreck us, sorrows arrest us,
hatred that washes us up on the flats;
and moving on through the plains that receive us,
processioned in tumult, come to the sea.
– Edward Brathwaite
Dear Lynda,
What is incalculably far from us
in point of distance can be near us.
Short distance is not itself nearness.
Nor is great distance remoteness . . .
Martin Heidegger
We who have been separated into one
by the troubled waters of the Atlantic ocean
and united into two by our uncommon pasts,
we must learn with those who have travelled
the snail’s trail with the tortoise
that those chased into rocky limits
must grow to pelt boulders at their assailants;
that seas reflect only objects above their surfaces,
none but divers may perceive secrets buried in their wombs;
and that those abandoned to the mercy of water
must practise to swim like the fish or perish.
I who have wandered across mountains
and across valleys in search of history,
I have recognized myself in the scars
of those who have survived the misdeeds
and the greed of our common ancestors,
ancestors who pandered to the passions
of pale gods from the Atlantic and the Sahara,
ancestors who grovelled after beads after mirrors and
after liquid fires with which to prop their sagging genitals,
ancestors who fashioned crude tools with which they punctured
our radiant early morning dew-drops
so that today our twin summer noons
embrace the same mad ocean of our related pasts.
Now I dip my soul into the ink-well
of our past and write to you
across the virulent atlantic pages of our separation;
I sing of you, muse with the full-moon face,
the magic egg of my many journeys,
native of the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago,
the terminal colon that stands your archipelago
in anticipation of future explications.
Lest we should forget so very soon
why progenitors of thunder-wielding ancestors
now chew grass beneath our ghettoes’ dirt heaps,
let us remember our related betrayals:
the chains the whips the sea and the sun,
let us remember your stray islands
which are bracketed between two visible Americas and appositioned to an invisible Africa
and a far Far East;
let us remember so as never to forget.
Antigua
where if you ask what the Kings chamber pot has
in common with the Princess who,
virgin no more, came on honeymoon in the sun,
you will be told by a proud black guide
that they both shared Clarence House on
Shirley’s Height which overlooks an English Harbour
away from the shores of England;
where too, at their Carnival, men reverse ancestral taboos
as mere mortals whip bull-homed masquerades
to the tune of God Save the Queen.
Barbados,
the nearest to and the furthest from Mother Africa,
where the apoplectic froth and foam
of Bathsheba Beach mock the complacency of the populace
(Bathsheba, concubine to King Solomon, Bathsheba, Mother of the Lion of Judah, the Jah in Jamaica,
I celebrate your anger;
if the Pacific so desires, let it stay peaceful,
it was never baptised with the blood of slaves);
and at Bridgetown’s Harbour,
overseen by Admiral Horatio Nelson,
you can watch the beach boys dive adroitly
for coins tossed by sun-hunters
from abroad the Jolly Roger
into the dark muck of the harbour,
and when the winner surfaces with a large grin,
he is greeted by the silver flash of the cameras
that mask the faces of the offspring of our past massas,
(but some day, dem beach boys going to dive
deep down, deeper down than dem tourists’ copper coins,
into the womb of our past to bring alive skeletons
that name the nameless names whose sweat
built these islands in the sun;
but until then,
let dem tourists keep on tossing dem coins
in the name of God, the Father,
God, the Son, and God, the Holy Ghost);
Amen.
Amen to Grenada
(the youngest cousin of Cuba, Cuba, that gonad
of our thunder), Amen to Grenada
where the little people of a little place
have shown that to be grenade-shaped
is not in itself enough for those
who wish to say no in thunder
from under.
Guyana,
(the home of Pat, the widow of our Walter),
Guyana, the land of failed leaders
and evaporating hopes,
we await the fulfiIment
of the thunder in your clouds.
Jamaica
gateway for Jah, the King of Kings,
where we went to the super –
market and found nothing for supper,
a nation under siege from itself,
a mecca where not even the gods are safe
as macho-men replace their manhood with guns
and advance the background sound of war
in their reggae to the frontdoors of their lives,
a haven where the failures of Man
have led the women to invite the Sea
into their thirsting wombs.
St. Lucia
Fair Helen that is fair no more
now that redeemers of every persuasion
go dim once they have become popular
and the fires of your fire-eaters are no match
for Soufriere’s spit-fire and the lightning thunder
that heralds the hurricanes into Castries.
Trinidad and Tobago,
the last of the archipelago,
a land muddy with the rust of several pasts,
a nation where the leaders start every race
as loud and clear as the cascading water of Maracas
but soon grow slow and devious like the Caroni river
which, navigable no more, now teams up with the Orinoco
to turn the blue of the sea
into the brown of barren deserts.
But above all,
I celebrate the one who says that inspite of all,
let there be a new beginning;
I will strap her like a diver’s goggles
and go in search of the clues
to our future imperfect
so that, as the Niger flows into the Atlantic
that washes the early morning face of the Caribbean,
we shall flow together to create new lives
who will swing no more between two extremes
like strung-up hammocks
still only when dormant,
they will learn neither the language
of the ancestors who sold us
nor that of those who bought us,
they will learn only the language
with which the land communes with the sea
such that they will grow to know
if one conspires to offer them
as sacrifices to the other.
Extend
my warm regards to Mum and Dad
brothers and sisters and our mutual friends;
may history preserve us together into the future.
Fondly yours,
Funso Aiyejina,
Ile-Ife,
January, 1981
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