of pre-militant partying, my father spotted
the shape of my mother across a room.
He raised his arm, the light was right; in autumn
night, a shadow fell, time goes by.
ACT TWO
Unlike the other darkies, he gets a speaking part; indeed
he’s the soundtrack of Rick’s, he moves with the man
from Paris to Casablanca – damn his private life, his needs
his desires, his family, the wo/man he loves. I see
how the lines are drawn: his piano can hold the transit
papers, but there is no transition for him. He plays
the tune, but he can’t dance. If you don’t know
the story, star-crossed lovers from Paris meet again
in Casablanca; there is a war on, stakes are high.
One lover, a bar owner (where the Black man plays)
sacrifices his feelings – we hope – for the greater good.
ACT THREE
In Kirsten’s story, I guess I’d be part of the greater
good, except that she doesn’t know my father never made it
to Algeria. She returned to Stockholm; she may have
had his picture, may have presumed him dead before cancer
took him – forever a hero in the frame of her memory.
Still, he was what she imagined – so full of love
with a capacity for the ruthless – as Mr Toft, spouse of
the Danish Consul found when he leered at my mother
likening her to coffee. My father gave him a 10-count, calmly
walked indoors to fetch the sturdy pistol he still had
a licence for from the 1960s – something from a Moroccan.
CLOSING CREDITS
The man (Mr Toft), given his belly, ran faster
than I’ve ever seen since, across the map of Africa,
earth beneath his feet. He may be in Brazzaville now
(a place of deceit and loss), with Renault and Rick.
Vogue
Some nights my sleep is vain, wants
to watch itself in mirrors, show off
its twists, its feints, its hilarious ability
to evade capture, how it dips its toes in
blue daydreams, then runs past desperate hours,
its compass north and awake, to the edge of
faded moon bliss – a cliff over which it just hangs
its legs, like kids in chairs too high for them,
singing questions into the altitude of my stillness
like a random herd of nuns or Von Trapps ambushed
by Alps green. It turns to its good left side
to watch itself twerk, checks out its abs
from the front, contemplates a Periscope® stream
by the backlight of an Android®. I’ve tried
everything sensible adults do to drift off – yes,
ev . ery . thing. I’ve had to go back to being a boy,
up in that bunk bed, chattering wild dreams down
to my brother until we wake up in the morning
astonished that we slept – like when I’m in love,
whispering across pillows. Some nights my sleep wants
company and it won’t settle its vogueing self for less.
Notes on Sequences
11-Page Letter to (A)nyemi (A)kpa
I have the peculiar, but not rare background of having heritage both from the diaspora (the African people that were taken from their lands and made to labour unpaid in the Americas and the Caribbean) and the remaining inhabitants of the continent of Africa. As a result of that I carry an English surname in addition to my Ga names. As a result of that my engagement with the world has always been in a minimum of two languages – one of which has always sought to belittle me. When I chose the name 11-Page Letter to (A)nyemi (A)kpa as the title of this sequence, I was consciously shifting the frame of reference to my first language of love while retaining a link to my first language of oppression. Anyemi in Ga has sibling as its closest equivalent in English, but, since we don’t have a separate word for cousins in Ga, it goes beyond sibling and – importantly – it is not gendered. Akpa means good – and it was such a joy to me that in coining a Ga compound word that would have the same abbreviation as ‘African-American’, I arrived at good sibling/cousin/fam. Our languages will always raise us to the level we deserve. I truly wanted to pay homage to Aaliyah at some point, but a 4-Page Letter was not enough and I also wanted the visual effect of two siblings standing side-by-side that 11 gives, as well as the mathematical resolution of one-two-one that shifts number into the language of conversation. I wanted to write this poem as a start of the conversation that we should be having amongst ourselves as continent and diaspora – away from all the distraction we have been taught as knowledge in languages that are not our own. I want us to talk about the wound of being taken away as well as the wound of being left behind and wondering if your abducted family will ever return – the silent trauma that many African communities carry that are reflected in taboos and social codes that we haven’t even began to unpack. As a child I never understood why I wasn’t supposed to whistle when the sun began to set until I found out as an adult that at the height of the slave trade people were kidnapped by mercenaries if they were not quiet. I also want us to talk about the things we have kept in spite of all that was taken from us; how the most affecting compliment we retain across centuries, seas and loss is naa bo, i’na bo ei, wo nono... ‘there you are’, ‘I see you’. How heartbreaking it is for us to be – in so many places – the invisible! This is a poem to say I see you.
Crossroad vs Blues
My late father raised me with a love for blues and one of the first CDs I bought was an 18-track John Lee Hooker album called Boogie Man from a UK blues magazine in 1994. I only owned 7 CDs at the time so I listened religiously and read all I could about the man. Summary? Illiterate, but a prolific lyricist – a perfect metaphor for oral styles of learning, history and growth. If proof were needed of
