After Keith Piper
The Black Man (body) projected with fears and fantasies never owning it’s presence
The Black Man (body) an object a commodity to be possessed and used and abused
The Black Man (body) traded for trinkets and spoons and guns then for sugar and cotton and rum
The Black Man (body) black mountain conquered claimed and reduced
The Black Man (body) once a boy breed as stud broken in like horse
A poem can start with the sound of water falling onto my body. Allow it’s curious wet teeth to sink into my flesh, to pull out chucks of questions to fuel a conversations with myself, later.
The ability to be present was a luxury my mother never had as she worked 3 jobs with her hand down toilets and fixed smile for the men with keys and brutal laughs.
I claim the ability to be present. To allow my yearning for a past to awaken a future I will imagine, as I salver my arms and legs and belly, housing a familiar homesickness I’m not sure where from, with coconut oil.
Turning cold hard oil, soft and warm against my skin, I reconstruct fragments of history, lost in colluded archives, and turn them into bleeding scars and pickled memories of somethings rather than nothings.
When I’m ready to forgive and understand, I’ll conjure Dad back from the dead, sit him down, and ask why he never ever mentioned love, in all his administering of disciplined care.
Dressed, hair twisted and walking across green fields, and under cherry blossom, I swallow doubts to turn a phase over and over against the roof of my mouth, rewriting with each footstep. Slide stepping cliches, kicking around experimental metaphors.
Or the poem could hit me full force when I walk into the coffee shop. Glasses steamed, journal in hand, eyes on drinks board, but already knowing my order by heart, the table I’ll take – number 13, my lucky number.
Acting like the fugitive from my life, here, I steal time to soften my gaze and repurpose the image of the sea into an open window that will startle you, dear reader, into a new perspective, into a new way of holding your mind and your heart towards yourself.
A poem can start with the sound of water
Falling onto my body
Allow it’s curious wet teeth to sink into my flesh
pulling out chucks of questions to fuel a conversations with myself later
The ability to be present was a luxury my mother never had as she worked 3 jobs with her hands down toilets and grinning at men with keys and brutal tongues
I claim the ability to be present
To allow my yearning for a past
To awaken a future
as I salver my arms and legs with cocoa butter.
After Marcia Michael
My body has a yearning for the past. In this country, I am duped to believe and live as if we were nothing .
Nothing until they allowed us into existence. Nothing until they opened their arms, and allowed us to carry on being their slaves into the 21st century.
Search and recovery, my body reclaims her history.
My mother transported it on her skin, buried in the stomach of the ship, boat, truck.
My father carried it in his voice, trapped in the belly of the ship, train, coffin.
I cannot rely on any colonial archives for finding me and my people. Now or in the future.
Colluded, concealed, constructed, the archives have fabricated the narrative that sees we as other.
Reduce us to a footnote, a scar, a tear.
My body is my archive.
My presence is a testimony.
My imagination will do the rest.
*Quote from Toni Morrison
There’s some deep grooves
laid down through the moves,
forced or voluntary,
in the migrant’s heart
a migrant’s heart will always be a split – colonialism running through the blood like dis-ease
stitched together, makeshift, with tartan, kente, plastic and twine, scattered cowrie shells divine.
a ghost of its former self,
a migrant’s heart will always beat
out of place and time.
Sunday afternoons, after fried curry and rice and West Indian dumplings,
we’d sit on a brushed flannel blanket covering the velvet settee. Legs too short to touch the multicoloured carpet beneath.
We’d sit straight, only our eyes moving, wandering over the bright yellow textured wallpaper, tracing patterns and exits until we were dizzy.
He sat in one armchair and her in the other. Armrests protected with white hugging linens. Dollies on head rest, sideboards, side tables. Everywhere.
Behind him hanging against the white washed wall was a black velvet scroll depicting the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. Home. A silence presence.
If he was in a good mood then there’d be port and a cigar and the gramophone sounding out with soul. Other times, black and white TV shows like Survival and the history of athletics, we had to watch. Still and silent.
We were his children brought up to do as we were told. To not ask why and call our elders uncle or Tantie . Any deviation from such a course of action would result in rage and beats.
My imagination became the place of expressing my range of emotions. My imagination became the place of power and choice. Freedom.
Pigeons. Standing there.
From a marionette flat
with a pebbledashed balcony
grey feathered birds, standing
there, there on the railings.
After Paula Dunn
based on the weather
handing over a landscape like a veil,
a limited palette
to keep things simple
but storm coming on, clouds layered,
winds textured
and dark low lying land brushmarked
and glazed for atmosphere
the yellows, oranges and browns brood
within depths of time and place
searching for a flick of white
to rest and breathe
After Lubaina Himid
Worn timber, cowrie shells,
currency and shoreline,
you sound like waves
and the creaking hull of death.
I try to imagine, she said, what it would be like to be taken from all that I knew, moving in a stinking wooden vessel over something I knew not what to call but it swallows our bodies whole. See sea, sea see. Propped against a white wall to suggest a wave in motion, the angle of pleasure, as I witness it, from the other side, here and now, I rumble with displaced memories. Memories that traumatise but hold onto me like seeds buried within my hair, bearing into my flesh.
After Althea McNish
Sunflowers
big and bold
inspired by Van Gogh’s
brandished
across a
yellow and white
striped field
black lines
outline floppy leaves
and dozing closed heads
bright colour carried to
this grey isle
not a luxury but a necessity
for survival
for blooming
another time
uprooted
sunflowers
Living Wild Studios 