First wasp kiss of summer. She was drinking the sweet sweat under my arm, a wasp with good taste. Feeling the tickle I disturbed her, and: youch. Glass of prosecco took the edge off and we were seated so cosy under the green dense spreading trees, as low and even as though they had been a roof. People walked past wearing cloth beards with elastic round the ears. I read an email with good news. A man in the bar opposite was hanging a beautiful painting in the window.
Blog
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#NotAllLives
Thinking this afternoon about the insulting phrase All Lives Matter, and its to me clear and obvious translation: “Black Lives Do Not Matter to Me.” It seems to me we may need an alternative explanatory phrase for those who are unwilling to get it. Something like this:
White lives matter too much. White lives are going to have to be valued less, so that black lives can matter enough.
We cannot level the playing field without giving up privilege, if we have it.
It reminds me of the idea that All Life is Sacred, and other such phrases used by forced birthing advocates to render women into breeding boxes. This prefaces the life of the unborn foetus over the life of the labouring mother. “All Lives Matter” zooms out so far it is a sentimentalising sepia soft focus: if we keep telling ourselves we are practicing Universal Love, we can save ourselves the difficult and exacting work of again and again learning to love the individual and faceted real human next to us. -
a money carrier
It is summer and the lockdown is easing; I went to pick up my disreputable, battered guitar from a studio where I’d left it lying, the week before the virus took hold. Such a beautiful morning. The clouds are massed on spires like whipped cream on biscuits and the trees bend in all along the avenues, blessing Berlin. Riding home I stopped for eggs and a loaf of bread. The woman who begs silently outside the greengrocers sat on her accustomed stool; we always smile at each other. This morning however her smile was as sad as my chest. I stood in the doorway with the doors opening and shutting either side of me, holding a fist to my heart. Yes, she said, nodding, her eyes brimming.
In Germany you can buy bread nearly everywhere. Even on this quiet street there is another baker four doors down. I stood there trying not to wonder. Once you start to wonder, paralysis is apt to set in: they offer 35 varieties of loaf and I once went into a freeze in another busy bakery where I counted 73 kinds of bread. With sunflower seeds? or without. What kind of grain? Then you must decide: the whole loaf or only the half? Sliced, or not? Sliced thick? or thin. The woman handed me my whole loaf and I said, blurring through the cotton mask, Ah, no – just the half, please.
She pulled out half the slices and laid them aside, unsaleable now. “It’s hard to be clear, isn’t it,” I said. “Because of the masks.”
I had ducked in here last week to get milk and as I walked in I uddenly remembered: no mask. So I decided for once to bolt through without wearing protection. At the fridges a German woman remarked to someone standing behind me, “She – has no mask on!” Germanness is kindly meant and makes everything everybody’s business. But it can also leave a gracious lady begging outside a store unattended, and can lead strangers to speak about rather than to one another, as though we were merely objects on a landscape.
I chose two apples, perfectly reeded with green and red, glossy and plump. Outside, I offered one to my friend. One for me, I showed her: one for you. They link us. She smiled faintly as she rubbed it on her skirts to clean the wax. As I unlocked my bike an older lady with frantic eyes approached from inside the store. “Have you lost a Portmonnaie?” A money carrier. I clapped myself all over for my purse. “Oh, wow, I must have left it behind.”
“What does it look like?” I described it. I didn’t know the German word for ‘battered.’ She held it out to triumphantly, concealed very neatly under her own. “That is so kind of you, thank you,” I said, stashing the purse in my bag. “And now,” she went out, holding out her hand, ” – you give me five euros finder’s fee.”
“Oh!” Behind me I could see the Romany woman shaking her head. “Well, that’s – “
“Five times I have given back purses,” she said, “and no one ever even thanks me.”
“Oh! But I do thank you!” I propped the scarred guitar in my basket lest it fall. “It’s very kind, I appreciate it. But it seems – “
“If not,” she said, “then I – “
“You take back the purse?” I started to wheel my bike away. Her claw hand came down on the rim of its basket. “You’re actually trying to stop me from leaving?”
The electric glass doors opened and I raised my voice just enough to be audible at the bakery counter. “Hello? This lady has found my purse. She won’t let me go without a five euro finder fee.”
The bakery assistant came hurriedly round the counter and stood between us on the footpath. The older woman began to shout. “Five times! I have given back purses! No one even thanks me!”
“But I do thank you,” I said again. “Thank you very much.”
“She should give five euros. It’s just a finder fee. Otherwise I take the purse back and give it to the police.”
A woman entering the shop had paused. “Look at her,” she told my assailant, gesturing at my ragged basket, my rusted bike, my outfit. Thanks! “She also has nothing. She’s also doing it hard. Look, she has to play on this terrible old guitar in the streets, just to make a little money.”
I said, “It’s lovely that you have helped me.” The woman was still shouting. “But I don’t wish to be yelled at by you just because you have done something kind.”
“This is the last time!” she was shouting. “I’ll never give a purse back again. Next time, the police. You have changed my character.”
I had started to cry. The expression on the face of my Rom friend, to whom in three years of passing this spot I had never given five euros, was full of a complex wry compassion. How different it feels, to be asked, to have something demanded. How varied is privilege and presumption. How difficult we make it, to do right by one another. Yet it’s always still possible. “Be kind whenever possible. It’s always possible.” I thanked the bakery saleswoman from the grocery store and thanked the customer and pushed my bike uphill, discombobulated utterly. The shouting woman, still shouting, had climbed on her own bike. We had to travel in a convoy a little way and she kept shouting, to the world at large. “This woman owes me five euros! She won’t give it!” I turned away up my own street and bent my head to the handlebars, crying. Why is this place so desperate and why is the summer so short? How could he leave after such a stupid fight? How come the bookshops, like this one with its wheeled gondolas colouring the streetside, stayed open right through the pandemic and yet we treat each other, sometimes in some places, as though kindness and insight were a mere imposition, as though I were the only one here. -
for crying out quiet
Eleven weeks ago today my husband walked out. I went to the park and when I came home, he was gone. When I closed the door behind me that morning there was no warning this would be our last night under the same roof, our last day as beloveds, the last time I would ever kiss him behind his little ear, or hear his voice under my cheek.
We weren’t actually married. But how he loved to call me his wife. Every taxi driver and all his friends: Mrs Him, my woman, my wife.
He had moved to Berlin to be with me, never having left Ghana before. His whole family came down eight hours from the village and he stepped bravely onto a plane all alone after his secondhand phone died suddenly overnight. Imagine walking away. You go through the passport control, take off your shoes. You leave the ground. And now – you’re in the air. Accra falls away like a toy, like safety. You fly nine hours across Africa, and across the white continent where everything costs five times as much. In your pocket, the phone is dead, no way of contacting her, or anyone.
It had taken us fifteen months to get him here, five lawyers, a serially declined student visa, a costly private college sponsored by my mother, who believed in our love. We moved in together to my artist’s apartment so joyously. The little cat fell in love. Then the winter came and then, corona: the twelve weeks’ isolation at home, at the end of winter’s grim five-month lockdown. We both got stressed, alongside everyone else on this earth; we had a fight, and spent the night in separate rooms. In the morning I went out to sit under the trees and read a little while to calm my mind. We had been six weeks in lockdown: I read Mary Beard, on women and power. Then I came home, and he was just gone.
Eleven weeks. I have seen him only about half a dozen times. I had only been gone about an hour. There was no note or sign but the door was deadlocked and his bicycle was gone; as I entered the house his absence quivered in the air like a guitar string. I had no way of knowing I would never kiss this sweet man all round the hinge of his jaw again, white people kisses he calls them, on the hairline, and he wondered aloud with his friend who has a German girlfriend, “What did I do to deserve all these kisses?”
For three days he didn’t answer my messages and I lay awake wondering was he ok, would a person breaking the curfew get arrested, was he sleeping in a park, where would he go? I tried not to imagine Berlin’s fearsome Neo Nazis having cornered him and pulped him, that he might be brought home in a wheelbarrow. Another Ghanaian man who lives in our street had been menaced right around the corner, a gang of seven spread out across the road, they toyed with him until they had made him afraid and then, he said, he all of a sudden just got so tired. He said in German, Ich will einfach nach Hause. I just wanna go home. And the leader told his gang: let him go home.
Let him come home. It’s been two and a half months and my throat thickens with sick tears every time I think of him and how we’ve parted. It’s so abrupt, sometimes my heart itself still feels quivering, like a guitar string dying into silence. That he will not give our sweet love a chance. That he believes I would move mountains to get him here and then on a whim in a rage tell him, get out, you have no place to go. That I said to him: Get out! Get out of my house. How could I, a white woman, say this to an African man. I cannot forgive myself and at the same time, I can’t understand like a dog locked outside this endless punishment. It feels like we were on a long journey together, we own a tiny property in Ghana, we have a business, we spoke of our longing to raise a child. His friends called me Mrs Him. She misses him. We were on our long road trip into our lives, two lives sustained by love and enhanced and emboldened by each other into great and wild adventure. He threw me out of the car, and drove off. He left me here standing at the roadside in a landscape I don’t recognise, and just drove off without me.
Everything in our world, as Europeans so comfortably call the place, must be so foreign and so strange. We went walking and he was wearing a Rolling Stones t-shirt, with the tongue. “Are you a fan of the Rolling Stones?” I asked, and he said, “What rolling stones.”
When he wrote to my mother to thank her for her sponsorship, he signed the letter with his name and Cx. That’s how I always sign mine. I guess he just thought that’s how white people end their emails.
Can’t you be curious, I have said, about the miscommunications that evolved between us, for it was never a difference in our values, it was never a lack of love. When I put my hand round him in bed he yelped my name. The two of us were strong and open and free together. Don’t you want to be loved, I have asked him: don’t you want love and affection in your life. My love and affection. Don’t you even want to be curious about what might still be possible? Why would you move across the world to be with someone, that someone being me, and then… refuse to have the painful or uncomfortable conversations, including with yourself, that might have cleared up our enterprise and given us our free channel down through the mangroves and out into the lovely sea.
How life is transformed when love is present. How everyday living is sweetened by waking up with someone whose presence fills you with longing and desire, by taking our breakfast together, just coming home and hearing his voice. I had been living alone, and eating every meal alone it felt like, for a thousand years. Now I was outside my lonely castle and at large in the free and wild ransom of the garden.
It was two and a half years. Australian poet, Ghanaian athlete. Our conversation had a terrific ease right from the start. We met online and I went to Accra to meet him, for three weeks, stayed three months, cried at Kotoka Airport. We went from penpals to shacking up together on our first night, so ridiculous and it shouldn’t have worked – but did. I am a few months older than his mother. When he met me at the airport we’d had only a few satellite calls spaced by a bad line, hollering, What? Can you repeat that? He went to work our first morning and came home and I felt I was home at last; the second night when he texted to say, I am at our gate, I ran pelting down the alleyway my bare feet slapping on the concrete and flung myself against the steel gate and he grabbed me and dragged me against him and we pressed each other close between the curling bars and kissed passionately.
Why would you leave that. How could you leave.
No one ever crossed the world before to be with me. Then he fled as abruptly as a battered woman flees a violent man. Waiting for the moment of safety when he is out of the house. He fled carrying only his passport. He won’t tell even his mother where he is living. Do not call me, he said, and I tried and tried not to call. For eight weeks, very little contact, and I sent the most occasional possible messages. Yearning for him. Sleepless for the smell of his skin.
He said, nightmares, and not sleeping, and I kept thinking somehow maybe he would come home. I was angry, too. He didn’t listen, men don’t listen. He tried to tell me what I am. I could feel once he had gone how he was vibrating with fear and trauma and I longed so to comfort my young lover, just to hold him and calm him and be held and cosseted, without these elements of safety and love what is my life even for. My heart bleeds pain all day and night. I am so crushed and devastated, I’m unable to rise, and he writes me ‘I am trying to get up from this blow.’ He says he loves me, he tells all our friends, I love her. Then he says, no hope, please don’t hold out any hope. I come home to my rooms from the suddenly radiant day and have to hold the radiator while dizziness passes, I am trembling like an animal.
I cannot understand and that makes me not forget. My heart is a hot water bottle far too full. “I have something to live for now,” he said, casual ly explanatory one day, months ago in Accra, “- and that’s you.” If all my love, and my devotion, and all that I am, was not worth fighting for – then what am I. What is this life, if we cannot get through to one another. “I love her,” he says to my mother, on the phone one night: “I love her.” “He said it over and over, maybe five or six times,” she tells me, and I bow forward on my couch where he lay around me with the tiny sickened cat in our arms a little family for those few sweet weeks or months or really – were they years – and we waited together the three of us for the vet to come.
One minute we were a little family, the three of us, two naked and one wearing her sweet lovely fur coat. The next minute unexpectedly she had died, horribly and in pain; he has simply vanished. I stay alone in the house with this long, slow, sharp pain. On the phone my mother starts up her familiar orchestra. Oh, so delicately. “I think maybe you were too much for him.”
We were living on separate continents, having grown up in different worlds. Every day I spoke to universities and read student forums and called lawyers. He was turned down for his visa and we had to appeal. A year went by. One afternoon the phone rang and his lawyer said, he’s got it! I said, “What? I’m crying!” and the lawyer said, “So am I.”
I booked him a ticket and went to Tegel to meet him. As I stood there waiting I had the feeling I had been standing waiting at the airport for eighteen months, to bring him home.
He won’t discuss it. “I have something to live for now, and that’s you.” When the Berlin bank gave him a debit card he handed it solemnly over. “You keep this, sweetheart, in case you need to spend it. Because I won’t be using it.” He told me, “We are one.” His friends say they have never seen him walking with a girl before. I weigh up his innocence with his responsibilities. His mother phones and tells me he’s not sleeping, he is ok, he’s having nightmares, he is fine. Her name is Patience, and she tells me, “We are all one family now.” We meet at last on the old abandoned meadows unkempt and flowering in the middle of Berlin, and I forfeit this chance to talk by breaking into hopeless tears and he lets me drop my head on his knee and cry until the denim is soaked through and when, ridiculous in grief, I howl, “Am I somehow unlovable? My mother keeps telling me there’s something wrong with me,” he is so angry he has to jump up and walk around, his voice breaks when he bursts out, “Well that’s just a big fat lie.”
The tawdry but beloved little honeymoon cottage in Accra, the mouse droppings in the cupboards. The three weeks become three months, and the tall steel gate. The flowers he sent me before we had even met, on his meagre salary, freely, beautifully, the casual sacrifice of such extravagance. The super-costly one way air ticket purchased at short notice at the height of summer in Europe and the feeling, as I prepared my house to receive him and told my cat, that now – I will be able to breathe again.
He texts me saying do I need anything, let me be there for you. He makes insightful suggestions about our business, which just as we paid off our loan totally stalled, the borders were closed and all our tiny guesthouse bookings were cancelled. He gets angry. Nearly every time we speak, he says, I love you.
Two years ago I took a screenshot of one of our video calls, to capture him, so far away, his soulful gaze and the interruption by satellite which ran an explanatory text across our screens, ‘Your connection is poor.’ “I disagree,” I told him, “I think our connection is rich and deep.” My sleep champion, my healthy role model of sleep, lying awake in some room whose address I must not know, sleeping on the couch of some friend he will not name, Europe looming on all sides of him like high white cliffs.
And me left behind, in the wrong kind of abandonment a lover dreads. I have rearranged my house; I’ve dragged furniture on rugs and hammered in pictures before it gets too late. I’ve asked him to redirect his mail. He has lied to me about money and told me the truth, today, about Tinder. He has told me: I don’t love you anymore. -
how white people got this way
Hey Europe! It’s like this. We stole the whole world from everyone. Retired behind desks to administer the plunder, lost our fitness. So we envy the godlike build of men who spent generations labouring enslaved. Fantasise about their sexual prowess/accuse them of rape. Racism is envy.
Now we mistrust everyone because they ‘want what we have,’ retreat to gated communities and single-person households. We imagine ‘them’ envying our riches and ignore that the reverse is also true: we are most of us longing for connection and family, searching for purpose and meaningful service. So we spend our days whining in five-bathroom houses with a pool table, “I’m so lonely. So depressed. So bored.” Consuming and disposing of the little left of everything that has not already been ruined — for comfort. The End. -
stay with me
Once an Islander man stepped out onto the pavement as I was passing. We both stopped and stood facing one another. My heart was beating very fast. He had intricate ranking tattoos all over his face and his eyes were very dark. ‘Don’t go,’ he said, ‘stay with me for a while.’
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trombone
I went down to the square to catch some sun. I had been sitting on the couch reading stories and eating toffees all day, though both toffees and stories were those I had made myself. It’s so warm! Warmer than it’s been in five long months. I found a bench and sat down to wipe my beer with disinfectant.
As I was slowly reading a book of intense spiritual yearning and turning its pages splattered by shadows in the sun and sipping my green glass beer, high above our heads the church bells started to toll. For you. A man who likely hasn’t the luxury of sheltering at home came by to ask diffidently was I in need of the empty bottle or can he have it. He took it. The bells tolled on and on. Across the square a girl with her head knotted in blonde dreads raised suddenly her right arm holding a crutch and stabbed it upright at the sky as though leading all of us into battle. She let the crutch fall in a long arc slowed by its own light weight, it fell to the ground and she staggered forward on one remaining crutch towards her friend, standing and applauding. The bells died away like tide. And up on the uppermost balcony facing the square a man had started to play the saxophone. He played and we all sat and listened. On the opposite side of the playground a girl leaned her head in and bowed forward and she began to sing, hurling uneven phrases back up at him and starting up a patter with her syncopated clap. Three black women strolled past me talking very quietly and walking very slowly. A child cried out, Mama! Mama! The crutchless girl sank among the rose bushes and tugged at her raggedy hair. It’s nearly twenty degrees today, I turned a page in my book and read, “Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature.” St Augustine. The trumpet player ended on a remarkable languid flourish and I started up a clap and stomp which half a dozen people joined in with, and as our sound died away the sun was gone between the buildings which hasten the sundown in this hemisphere, where the sun’s arc is so shallow half the year, the air was immediately chill and somewhere nearby a trombone started playing, slowly and with seeming sarcasm, ‘Summertime.’
This is the twenty-eighth day of my solitude and here ends the reading, I will go back to my desk to write, now. -
bible full of prostitutes
Prostitution: my wife doesn’t understand me (by providing herself as a slave to my sexual needs)
Terrorism: the world doesn’t provide me with slaves to my sexual needs. All the pretty girls in high school never looked at me. I will martyr myself and be attended to by virgins.
Hollywood: a girl catches my eye. She is an element of the undifferentiated landscape which God (also a Lone Male Hero) has provided for my glorification and use. She resists me. I overcome her resistance via manly perseverance, knowing what she wants better than she knows herself, and stalking.
Bible > US Constitution: I have the right to own slaves, including willing women slaves, and to stalk the landscape stroking my gun. I will use enslaved peoples to bring the natural world into submission and use my much-stroked gun to force the rebellious world to heel.
World economy: see US Constitution.