Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: street life

  • men in dreads

    Two men unfolded themselves and stood up. One of them grabbed my hand. I was passing in front of the crowded colourful stalls which sell Bob Marley t shirts and long Ghanaian dresses. They had jangly sandals on display and drooping felt hats so dusty and untouched they might have been made for Stevie Nicks. “There she is!” cried the taller one, swinging hip length dreads. “Our sister from another mother.”

    I stood still, as they must have guessed I would do. The expression on my face was conscious, self conscious, enquiring. “We have met before,” his companion told me, “we spoke with you the other day.”

    I was quite certain I had never seen them before but fear of racism held me silent. Later I wondered how many Western women they trapped each week using this same trick: liberal women, hippie women, who are afraid of seeming prejudiced. Who feel responsible for the prejudice of others and when they travel the world, labour to make up for it.

    “We love your walk,” said the man in dreads. “So free and you walk like a soldier.” Do soldiers walk free? Aren’t they more inclined to march? But I knew what he meant. I was striding and looking about me. I was swinging my hands. African women, I suppose, undulate.

    There is a faceted splendour in all the people round me that keeps me always smiling and staring. I love that we find each other so compelling. People stop me in the street to say, “I love your height.” Men say outright, “Give me your number and I will call you.” I spend all day saying, “Thank you.” I say, “Thank you! Good evening!” “Thank you, but no.”

    I buy a ripe plump mango and the stallholder slices it for me with a curving blade into the palm of her hand. Walking home I eat it with a cocktail fork. I buy a Coke bottle filled with popped millet, like tiny buds of popcorn, and groundnuts – peanuts – which is perfectly salted, and in the morning I pour it on the bowl of mixed fruit I have chopped up for breakfast. My companion has never seen fruit salad and he looks askance at my heap of mango, banana, papaya, custard apple, and popcorn. Then he starts to eat and we both fall on it, good, delicious, fresh. I was not keen on the goat gizzard skewers. I am nerving myself to try grasscutter on a stick, which is a little rat-like creature grilled over the coals and eaten off a skewer. I buy kelewele, which is plantains rubbed in spices and grilled at the roadside. It’s sweet with a toffeed sharpness round the rim. I buy a coconut and the man lops it expertly, and after I have drunk the juice he chops the wood open so I can gouge long loops of slippery flesh and drop them like fishes to a seal into my mouth.

  • moon over Accra

    It’s a beautiful night in Ghana and the moon is very full. Immodestly so. What need has a moon of modesty? She has already pledged her love. “I will follow you though it turn me in circles all the rest of my rocky dry days.”

    I am sitting nursing a less and less cold beer at a local spot, at the junction. In Accra. These eight days I have sampled four of Ghana’s beers and I like this one. It has bitter local herbs and I am drinking it with a little sack of ripe plantain chips. I went back over to the lady nursing her child who bakes eight different kinds of chips and sets them out in little crisp cellulose bags. When I reached for the plantain chips she said, “Have you tried this one? It is ripe plantain. It’s better.”

    My first morning we went strolling through the hot dusty streets and, in my case, the jet lag, and found a lady selling mangoes from a bowl, who sliced me one, and a lady selling fat ripe bananas, and a woman with a tiny stall roofed in tarpaulin who fried up rice and beans with a headless fish and a curling slab of beef skin. She served it wrapped in a banana leaf and then two plastic bags. The beef skin quivered, nearly transparent, and I stared at it a long time before putting the corner very gingerly in my mouth. Oh, no.

    Jet lag is gone now and I am subsiding into this beautiful world. The moon is squared between four overhead wires and I gaze up, rustling the crisp cellulose bag with my fingertips, thinking of nothing at all. A man drawing a cart behind him heaped with yams stops to talk across the narrow garden bed to the spot’s owner. “How come you never buy my yams anymore? You buying from the other guys?”

    “No,” he says, “I will buy them soon.” I have watched this man, so relaxed under his awning of pink and white bougainvillea, tending his garden with a pointed stick to loosen the soil and a jar of tap water. The yam vendor creaks on and a man I don’t know, as I know nobody in Ghana, comes over the road and joins his friends. He says, “Good evening, madame. How are you.”

    “Good evening, sir. Thank you, I am well. How are you?”

    And he says, “You are feeling at home.”

    I raise my hand. I let it drop with its palm up and open. “It’s so beautiful here. I’m so happy. Your wonderful city.”

    Can one fall in love with an entire country? This one has.

    I came here on my second evening when the object of my visit was at work. I drank a cold beer and tried out the plantain chips. The owner of the little beer terrace invited me to share his table. Another man was sitting between us and he began drumming on the table’s edge, a rapid, complex rhythm, with his two stiffened fingers as though they were blades. I said, “Are you a musician?”

    And he said, “I hope so. I’ve got a couple of albums out.”

    Such a creative, thriving, diving, cormorant city. And so noisy. Wherever I go it is to a concert of honks and toots as every passing cab driver tries his luck. I joined Uber, with some nervousness, never having used it before, and was offered lifts in immaculate cars by drivers named Ernest, Ebenezer, Divine, Lord, Sumaila, and Wallestine. I spoke to a man on the street whose t shirt said LOVE and the O was the shape of Africa. “I love your t shirt.” “Where are you from?” And as we got talking he offered,

    “Let me give you my phone number. We just live in that house over there, the blue gate behind the plantain palms. If you need anything, or if you ever get in trouble or need help: you can call me.”

    This genteel, educated culture. This overwhelming sense that I am walking amongst gods. The tall, fit, gracious, courteously and warmly smiling people. Their patience and kindness. The sense that I’ve been right all along, and in our spoilt countries we have forgotten how to live. That these people in their exploited country are holding out something we are too miserable to grasp. Racism is envy. I have always known it and now I see it everywhere.

    The night passed serenely around us and I finished my beer and got up. My drummer acquaintance was at the next table. “What were you writing? A poem?”

    “Oh,” I said, touching my bag self consciously. “I was just writing about the moon.”

    He tipped his head back. “I hadn’t noticed it.”

    “Powerful moon, tonight.”

    “Eh,” he said, “Yes: it is full.”

    And I said, “Yes, and the crimes of passion and incidents of insanity are spiking tonight all round the world. The moon controls whole oceans. What are we but little seas? Sloshing with seawater.”

    “Seawater?”

    “Well,” I said, “salt water. We are mostly salt water. So the moon.”

    This is black Africa. The night treads endlessly on the sky. The lighted shop fronts with their sagging awnings and the smoke from the goat gizzard stall and the woman walking by with her fleet of buckets on her head are a world I have not met before and always, always longed for. As we stood there, a young man shot past on his bicycle, dressed all in white. A man carrying on his head a stack of neatly folded bright batiks walked by. “I am waiting for the pineapple woman,” my friend said. “I want pineapple.” Don’t we all. The heaps of fresh fruit, the dried fish, the bright plastic buckets. I have stepped off the planet of Europe and I may be gone some time.

  • the pretty wine shop

    Beautiful sunset over Berlin today: pink, stippled like wet sand, and spacious. The man in the wine shop made me laugh. They were listening to Bob Dylan, who is now, would you believe? a Nobel laureate. So I told him: I keep misreading the name of your store. For a long time I translated it to, “Emergency Burgundy.”

    Ah, he told me. We were going to go with that. But then we thought: let’s take that as a given.

  • me too, yesterday

    Monday morning I left my doors wearing a tiny skater skirt. I flung a leg over my bicycle. A guy standing up the street a ways said, “Wow.”

    To himself, not to me.

    I am old enough that this now seems flattering. I pedalled away, smiling to myself. Such a beautiful day. Around the corner I came along a quiet street in which another man followed me, in his car, too close behind, very slowly for the entire five blocks. It seemed to last for an hour. There were other cyclists on the street. The sun shone on my back and on his bonnet. What ran through my head as I pedalled forward and he kept pace was the conversation initiated by a friend this week in the wake of international outcry from all the women who have ever been sexually molested or assaulted. It has started to feel the quicker process would be for women who have not been abused to come forward. This friend asked, “he raped me”, or “I was raped” – which feels more real?

    I could feel the mood of angry unrest and how women were wanting to claim back our active sovereignty. We needed to use the active voice and be less passive. But for me, I felt, it has changed. First ‘I was raped’ was the overwhelming sentence pounding in my brain. It was the change in state in myself that I noticed, not him – he was the agent, he was unimportant in those first moments (which lasted years). Virginal and unknowing, curious and excited about maybe kissing, filled with fantasy and romance, 12 years old in a 17 year old’s body… then rupture. Pain. Overwhelm. Disbelief.

    Secondly because his congress on my body and his forced colonisation inside me split up my feeling of myself. It did render me passive. It did render me somehow compliant and I stayed in the relationship with the guy for 9 months, until his threats of weaponed violence woke me up and I had to climb the spiked wall. I was fresh out of a very repressive Lutheran school and imagined I would have to marry him now and have his children in order to redeem ‘my’ ‘sin.’

    It was his act, and I’m not ashamed of it anymore. It was his act. But he carried me under and moved on.

    He went into a career in Conservative politics and later switched parties as the first was not right wing enough.

  • late night lemons

    Late night supermarket in Berlin’s wild west. Two pretty girls in their pretty outfits are queuing ahead of me, they have high arses and high heels and high ponies, their hair spilling from the crowns of their heads. The blonde one rolls her three bottles away slightly from my lumpy ginger root and my mesh bag of greenish lemons.

    A cheap, everyday discounter supermarket. They had organic lemons cheaper than the poisoned. Yay, Germany.

    “We’re just buying these three bottles of wine,” she tells the cashier.

    “I wouldn’t have assumed anything different,” he says, primly, and shoots her a mischievous look. He is round as a pumpkin and his face splits into creases when he smiles. I suck in my breath, exaggerating, and start waving my stiff-legged fingers in front of my face. I am blowing on them to convey this is a bad burn. “Oh,” I say, “das tut weh.”

    That hurts. The girls are laughing. The cashier’s laughing. I’m laughing. We are laughing. They’re on their way out, I’ve been drawing and I’m on my way home, he’s just finishing his shift, and there’s room for us all in this sudden identically contagious grace of soft exhilaration. The brown-haired girl pretends to protest her complexity. “Or,” she says, rolling her hand over the lemons in their bright yellow mesh – “this could be all ours. Wine for tonight. And all this – is for the hangover.”

    “The hangover,” he chortles. ‘Hangover’ in German is Kater: tomcat. “You’ve thought of everything!” His hands are suspended like kangaroo paws above the till keys.

    We are partly laughing from love, partly laughing out of mirth. It occurred to me today as I was cycling to wonder why we burst out laughing yet burst into tears. Like the laughter is that which results from perspective, which puts us in touch with the wider greater world. The grief comes with acknowledging and unbarriering what is within.

    “Just come to me in the morning,” I tell the two girls, “and I’ll sort you out. I’ve got the ingredients.”

    They are smiling at me and their smiles are full of love. I’m smiling, too. “Where do you live?” It is hard to say why every sentence seems funnier than the last. When they’ve gone, intact in their miasma of beauty, the cashier and I face each other. You can buy a tiny bottle of schnapps at this checkout for fifty cents. We part, laughing a little still, and I carry my sack of citrus and my club-footed creature of ginger, the fruits and the root, and stash them in the bicycle basket and fling my leg over in its short flared woollen skirt. The nights are colder now but still fresh and all the dark roadside trees along the park seem to be reaching for me all the way home. Around me and above me the soft cold Berlin night. The passage of other bicycles, whose lights are not kaput like mine. The leaves which hurtle down between us without a sound and the wordless veering we make to give each other room.

  • everything in sequins

    Yesterday I was reading the paper over coffee in a huge, bleak market hall in Berlin. The place has all the atmosphere of an airplane hangar, it was raining hard outside and had turned bitterly cold. I was reading about the coward shooter in Vegas and had screwed up my mouth. He shot from behind the curtains. He had no courage and no manhood. Next to me two people browsed on their phones, one of them breastfeeding a baby. All of a sudden a familiar hoot rent the air. The guy flipping pancakes at the next stall was singing along, joyous and loud, to the Rolling Stones riff everybody recognised, the oooh hoo hoodoo hoodoo hoo from ‘Miss You.’ I looked up, people looked up. It was as though John Travolta had come strolling in, jive talking, with his panther grace and his hands in his pockets and leaving a trail of tiny sequins.

  • by force

    In an Italian cafe I saw two eight-year-olds locked in a passionate embrace. I had to blink. What on earth? On closer examination he had her locked, her neck was rigid, he had hold of her head in both his hands.

    Their lips were pressed on each other, hard and still. It was a Holywood endeavour, something they had seen and now copied; not something felt. I felt frozen, as did she. After a long time, perhaps a minute, the girl brought both her hands up and tried to prise him off her face. He lifted his head. She clapped both palms over her mouth to protect herself. But it was no use. He came in again, swooping on her, an unpleasant grin of entitlement souring his face like a sneer. Boys aren’t born with this expression. He kissed her again, if we could really call it a kiss. It was an occupation, a tiny, private siege that shamed her in this sunny public place.

    This is the first hot day in five weeks in Berlin’s climate disordered summer. It has rained and rained and it’s as cloudy as winter, that long grey fleece. Everybody was out. In the garden of the cafe people sat plunging long-handled spoons into gouts of melting ice cream, large men stirred tiny espressos with tiny tin spoons. The girl endured her assault in full view of everyone. So far as I could tell, I was the only one who noticed.

    I sat in an agony of empathic shame. This was the beginning for her and things would get worse. They had for me. I felt my legs tauten into springs and wanted to rush over there, but – to my horror – the thought of this tiny boy’s scorn frightened me and I was unable to protect her and could not even approach them.

    He broke it off just as the mother, mother of one or maybe – horrifying – both came back from the bathroom visit he had opportunistically expanded. The boy got onto his bike and bent his head. He was shorter than her, when she stood up, and her long caramel strands of hair hid her face. I saw the mother say something cheerful and I saw the girl trying to smile. This is what we breed by rearing our boys on porn, our girls on romantic comedies where persistent stalking always pays off and no means please. I paid my bill to the sneering Italian waiter whose courtesy deteriorates the more I am friendly to him and I always forget. Cycling home I thought about the feminist truism that patriarchy wounds men, too, and thought how different these wounds sometimes seem.

  • we call it Berlin snout

    In a second hand shop I tried on the superlong pair of creamy trousers that had had to be hung twice over the pavement rack. They were pearl coloured Thai silk and so long in the calf you could ruche them up tight, and then the bloomer shaped waistband region ballooned like a flower in water.

    For a while I stood considering myself in the old gilt mirror. Old guilt is a standard fitting in most of Germany. I took them off and hung them up and carried them back outside to where the shop owner, studded with piercings, was lounging in the sunshine with his two hairy mates.

    “Leider nicht,” I said, sadly, no, and handed the pants back to him. Berliners pride themselves on their snouty grouchiness and he pretended that he didn’t know why I was handing them over. “Was soll ich mit den?” What am I supposed to do with these?

    Oh, I said, I can easily hang them back on the rack myself, if you prefer.

    He gave a gusty sigh. No, no, he would do it. “But what’s wrong with them?”

    I plucked at the fabric to show him. “They’re beautiful. They would make a great performance outfit, I was thinking.”

    His mate reached past us to take hold of the nearer silken leg and stroked the sheer fabric, thoughtfully.

    “Totally transparent of course,” I pointed out. “It’s just one of those garments you would have to spend the whole evening organising. I’m too lazy.”

    “It takes a special kind of person to wear these,” the owner said, and I laughed.

    “All of my specialness is used up in other areas,” I said, spreading my hands. A crooked smile crept into the hang of his long mouth. “Oh, well,” he said, consolingly, stroking the pants as he hung them back up and draped the extra length over the rail. “Next time, we’ll have something for you, for sure.”

    These old punks with their 1980s businesses. Berlin brims with rebels who pierced their noses in 1976 and have held fast to their philosophy of DIY and punk ever since. Some of them collect bottles for a living. Some run resourceful squats. Some of these host outdoor cinema and restaurant venues in the summer and some are barred to visitors and spend all their energy, so I hear from my few resident friends, holding endless rounds of meetings to adjust the way the household is run. I got on my bike and swooped across the deep tram lines where a bicycle wheel can very easily get lodged. I live alone and have no piercings, not even in my earlobes. I have left the man who adorably called these his ‘earlimbs’ and now I make my way into the world again alone, greeting you, Berlin, willing to be shown what’s up, willing to cycle across town and see what’s going down, willing to stay home for days on end concentrating hard and then suddenly spring outdoors into the unexpected sunshine, willing to be across it all and to put up with all your crossness and snooty snoutiness. I know the smile that lies behind the sneer. The pink within punk.

  • it has sun

    In the cafe he showed me the pictures he had taken on his walk here, of a dog skateboarding in the park. “You should animate those into a thumb-book!” I said. Amy Winehouse was singing. “Or maybe a – gif.”

    We watched a couple walking past in their somehow sweet and somehow matching outfits. He had on a blend of waterfront worker and Clash renegade, a scarlet beanie; she was doused in a long, woollen coat with skirts, like she had stepped out of the moors to take the city air. I was struggling to put all of this into words and he said, “Their cute sort of karate look.”

    I pressed his hand. “Karate-karaoke-paparazzi.”

    We walked back past the housefront biliously painted with darker green highlights which says at arm height worst green ever. He had a conversation with the guy whose dog is wrapped in a torn army blanket, on the metal access ramp to the ATM foyer at the bank. This man is American and clearly made his life here years ago, but his German is poor. As is he. His devilish rock and roll grin greets bank customers and he swoops the door open, when they leave and when they enter, so courteously and with an infectious warmth.

    In the park, drug dealers and old ice: the frozen water kind. A girl cycles past, singing. The sun has been brief. “You should gig there,” he says, pointing over to a bar sunk underground with golden windows. “They host acoustic stuff.”

    “I’d love to,” I say, looking in at the knee-height windows shyly, as we pass. “If I ever start gigging again.”

  • pity flamingo

    Every week I cross town on the train and we pass a tower block of identical grey-frame units which have grey balconies. One balcony, at eye level with the train, has a bright pink inflatable flamingo hanging like a lurid fern, I guess somebody went to Florida or Havana and brought it back with them to bring back the tropics. It doesn’t look tropical. It looks more defeated. The air has shrivelled out of it, or perhaps shrunk in the bitter chill of Berlin’s below-zero winter. The bird sags, motionless, its head drooping over its breast and hanging down to the shrivelling feet.

    Poor tropical bird, alone trapped in glassy Berlin and its colourless end of year season, after all the other bright birds have vanished down to the southern shores to caw and preen.

    Snow lies on the ground in greying patches. Hardened scars of black ice have been strewn with sharp pocks of gravel from the big grey plastic bins. This fake bird is the only pink thing. Apparently flamingoes, naturally flamboyant or perhaps insecure on their wavering stalk legs, will not make babies unless a crowd of other bright pink flamingoes stands round them watching.

    Zoos have had to set up elaborate peacock tails of mirror to encourage them to breed. Gazing out at this sad blow-up bird sometimes I think about staging an intervention. What if every passenger put on a pair of Edna Everage sunglasses. What if we all stared out the windows and flapped our arms. Maybe the dying flamingo would stir on its still leaf of string. Maybe the neck would waggle and stretch, and the tiny head come up again to display proudly its improbable and superciliously curled coconut ice pink swan lip.

    But Berlin’s trains are courteous and pragmatic. People stand back tiredly to let each other on. This week I’ve passed a junkie shooting up right into the arm, against a pillar at my nearest U-Bahn station; five people in a row who were all reading books but seemed unaware of each other; and a sturdy Polish tourist who rolled, under my nose, a plump head of ganja into his palm so that when we all got off the train, he could light it.