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  • you my queen

    “Oh my queen,” said a man walking behind me in the dark African night, and we both walked on a little. There are streetlights intermittent every four hundred metres or so and I have missed this dark. It’s beguiling and mysterious. It’s sexy. Faces loom out of it and I know so few of them.

    “You, lady,” the same man said, and I turned. Me? His face was crumpled with disfigurement and he lifted his soft fingers bashfully when I waved. “Hello,” I said, and went on walking. “Oh,” he said, “oh yes, my lady.”

    You arrive at the stall and say, Good evening. Good evening, say all three stallholders, and ‘good evening’ has four syllables. Carrying my purchases I went past the wheel rim up on bricks which is filled with glowing coals, where a lady with her head wrapped in cloth deep fries bubbling plantain patties. I went past the hardware stall the size of a wardrobe where a cheerful man also sells homemade local toffee (sugar cane and coconut) bound in clotted ropes of plastic like tiny frankfurters. The toffee hangs looped among the pipe fittings and elbow joints strung like vast ceremonial necklaces on long lines. Everything glows, to me, as though this were the world I walked out of at twelve, leaving Java, and since then had sought the wardrobe door.

  • 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.

  • postcard torrent

    A few years ago I was living in Berlin and it felt indefinite. I had not made plans to stay and felt unable to leave. I felt homesick and unsure and one day I asked on facebook if anybody felt like sending me a postcard through the mail. I just love postcards. Occasionally I send them to myself.

    Weeks later I came home and opened my postbox at the door of my new sublet apartment with its old-fashioned sign, “Briefe und Zeitungen,” letters and newspapers. This torrent fell out. As we get closer to Christmas I want to remind myself and us all that this world is made up of seven billion diverse humans, and that by and large, humans are constituted of love.

  • 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.

  • out of nowhere

    My dad trained me to be raped, by minor and persistent infringements which he would not withdraw or desist in, no matter how I protested. He taught me saying No had no importance. I had no sovereignty over my body. For he would still cup my butt in his hand, rove his eye over my breast and comment on it. This started when I went into puberty and in later years the family made the excuse that he had done it to all of us: but not my brothers, no. Or, they said, he had always done it, as a mark of his harmless affection. But I remembered. It started when I grew hair and curves. It never happened when we were children.

    I was – I am – spirited, and fought back. When I told him to stop he looked invariably surprised and injured. “Oh, but darling, it’s only a bit of fun.” He would say, “I’m only tormenting you, pet.” I tried carrying my breakfast into another room when he sprawled at the table with pubic hair showing through the loose fly of his pyjamas. I tried sewing up the fly of his pyjamas in a scarlet thread. Right into his seventies he used to call me and my mother “my two girlfriends.” No amount of rage on my part could ever get him to let this go. In my teens I tried again and again to talk to my mother, who kept insisting I had a ‘dirty mind.’

    Dad used to come in at night to ‘say goodnight’ – always to me, never to the boys – and would fall asleep on my bed. When a boy at university when I was 17 started raping me regularly, these attentions from my father, creepily, stopped. It was like he had handed me over. After nearly a year I found the courage when this boy’s violence intensified to overcome the shame and tell my mother. I begged her not to tell Dad. They broke through the flimsy lock I had begged for on my bedroom door and beat the crap out of me. Calling me a slut and a tart. They stripped the sheets off me while I cowered. In the bed where I’d passed out from sexual pain so many times one held me down while the other walloped. Next day a neighbour my own age crept round, she had waited til Mum went out. Was I ok? she asked. She described how she had listened in agony, thinking she ought to call the police. She said, very quietly, “I thought they were going to kill you.”

    For years afterwards every time my father visited he would bring with him stored up stories of women who, supposedly, had concocted malicious fictions about rape as a way of destroying the careers of blameless men.

  • her wild laugh, like birds

    My date took me to a bar that was open late. We sat round a splendid banquette like pashas. At the table one tier down, a girl sitting with her friends unfurled a really strange laugh.

    It was high and sort of squeaky-grunty, very loud: within moments she had drained the whole place of its attention. People began to smile at each other over her head. A drunk guy tottered up to her, plump like a teddy bear, his arms comically held out, a skewed fishermen. The one that got away was this big.

    “Can I have a hug?” he asked the laughing girl, somberly. She couldn’t speak for squeaking but held up one hand for a high five. “Hug,” he said, nodding, insisting, reasonable. Drunk. So she opened up her arms and hugged him over the table. All the while her maniacal laugh was rising over his shoulder like a series of photos of the moon. Her male friend said, “She’s allergic to you.” Her female friend giggled. The drunk guy straightened and slowly smiled and only even slower realised, a bit hurt, a bit taken aback, “Really?”

    “Nah,” said the girl’s friend. “That’s really her laugh.” The girl’s shoulder’s shook and her honking squeals kept coming. By now everyone was laughing: the cute girl wiping the bar counter, the drunk guy’s drunk friends, my companion and I holding our sides, leaking tears. The hugged, drunken guy turned a sloppy somersault on his way back to his mates: an unforeseeable magical item.

    There was quite a lot of moon left in the high sky on the walk home but now these cold clouds have dulled it over. The exhaustion that comes from laughing too much is not like any other form of tiredness that I know of.

  • 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.

  • pedalling home

    Pedalling home along a tree-lined street which is set aside for bicycles, I heard a crash. A man reaching up to put his brown wine bottle in the brown glass bin had tipped forward and toppled like a tree – at first I thought he must be drunk. There was nobody about, just him and me. I had jammed on my brakes.

    He actually flung his legs up in the fall and took a few tips to settle, like a rocking horse set rocking. “Alles okay?” I leaned my bike and ran over. He was getting up painfully slowly and had that embarrassed expression that usually indicates want of serious injury. “Die Kante…” he explained as I reached him, the curbside had a camber…

    Falls, as we know, can be deadly in the elderly and I remember that Leonard Cohen had a serious fall, as so many older people do, in the days before his death. I remember locking myself in a wardrobe to cover my face and howl, when I heard that he had died, two weeks after Dad’s funeral. Our St Leonard of Koans.

    Shakily restored to his own feet, the man immediately turned to pick up his empty bottle and popped it in the open mouth of the brown bottle sorting station. They have three colours and beer bottles commonly have worn whited shoulders from rubbing companionably up against each other on all those trips back to the brewery and then the store. Och, Germany: you slay me. It’s like a magical land in which everyone behaves the way I’ve always done: we’re all in this together. I had just passed a crossing where another crash heralded a tipping bicycle, whose basket was filled with neatly sorted bottles, possibly heading for this same recycle station. They started to bounce and break all over the cobblestones. Before I could react a dozen people had swooped in to help, propping their own bikes and stooping like long-legged birds.

    I asked the elderly man, “Sind Sie verletzt?” Are you hurt? He passed a hand uncertainly over the crown of his head, showing me where there might be an injury, and in response to this mute plea for mothering I passed my own hand very softly over the tender scalp, as downy as a baby’s but for the sparse, short, grey, bristling old hairs. “How are you getting home?” I asked him, “you’re not driving, are you?” We stood there assuring each other. I told him the skin on his head was not broken. He told me he would be sure to be careful getting home. “Just be tender with yourself,” I told him, as I should rather more often tell myself.

    Nearer home I chatted on the phone for a long while with my dear friend, on a park bench under a stand of trees which were shedding their golden leaves as I watched. The light was just so. I found a stinking dog shit smear on the back of my hand, and made a face and started wiping it off on the grass, still talking. On the far side of the square a street dweller pulled from his breast pocket a little packet of paper handkerchiefs and drew out a fresh one and offered it to me. He bowed. I crossed over there and took it, still talking, thanking him.

    During the phone call I watched two dog owners whose dogs – one large, one small – had woven an enthusiastic wreath running counter-clockwise, passing the leashes over one another’s hands. They kept trying to untangle the beasts but the dogs running clockwise sniffing one another’s butts had passed into a blur. I saw a toddler pitched forward and running on the balls of his feet as he approached the road. There were no cars coming and his mother looked on unworried from a few paces behind but nonetheless a young girl stepping onto the pavement with her friend stopped her body in front of him, forming a kindly barrier. She stood mashing her feet and chatting to him, distracting him and making it a game, then stepped aside without a word when his mother had caught up with him and he was safe.

    This communal parenting moves me to tears. I told my friend and we both laughed with joy. I described to him the two dogs blurring themselves into a wreath on the cobbles, their owners doe-sie-doeing from above. It was dark when I put my phone back in my bag and walked uphill past the man who was still standing by his bench, with his beer, gazing up into the trees. He had on a leather hat with a feather to its brim and standing by him was a trussed wheelbarrow loaded with his things. I had gathered all my groceries in two hands and clutched them to my chest to stop them falling. “Thanks again,” I said, “for the handkerchief,” and the man said, ascending to the familiar or affectionate you, “You’re very welcome,” and I said, matching his informality, “That was love of you,” das war lieb von dir, and he bowed and pressed his hand upon his heart, and I pressed my crowded with bottles hand over my heart which was cluttered with a jar of honey, a bottle of biodegradable cleaning spray and a heavy bottle of milk; the other, free hand was splayed to keep hold of a second jar and a second bottle and I pressed the glass into my heart and we smiled at each other, at the end of an autumn day so beautiful it would make you want to resurrect belief of some kind in some kind of deity.