Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: African

  • the surprise

    Things my African boyfriend wants to know: Why do white people need to take coffee or tea every morning? Why don’t you eat the head? It’s the best part. Can I have the bag? Let me carry that for you, let me help you with that.

    He has left Africa for the first time, left Ghana. When I want to visit my friend, he wonders – why don’t I just drop round? When we are watching a movie together and I get tired, too tired to walk home – why don’t my friend and I just climb into bed together and fall asleep?

    If you even have two or three friends watching, you may all climb in. Or perhaps the host sleeps on the floor. He is the host.

    Everybody sleeps.

    He says things to me like just relax, Cathoel; enjoy yourself. He asks, why are we rushing? And yet he is incredibly hard working. He scours the bath house then calls me to inspect it. He washes everything by hand. When I say, idly, late at night, oh there is a hole in that cushion, we have to stitch it up before we leave for Ghana, he fetches needle and thread and fixes it.

    When I show him the laundromat he wants to know, does the machine also squeeze it? That is, will the washing machine wring the water out of our clean clothes?

    Or do we do that ourselves, after carrying the heavier load home on our bicycles.

    We found him a bicycle, second hand, and a heavy coat and scarf, second hand. Two pairs of second hand gloves, which he wears one on top of the other then complains his hands are cold. He has never been below twenty five degrees before in all his life. When I was visiting during the rainy season several of his friends rang to assure me I should bring a jumper or a jacket, “It’s cold here.”

    He rides his bicycle like a Berliner, with both hands tucked smoothly under his armpits. My boyfriend doesn’t believe ladies should have to carry their own bicycles. Yet he thinks women make the best business owners, the best presidents. In Ghana women own the majority of businesses. He’s never watched porn and I can feel it in his touch. I can feel it in his gaze. At the store on the corner he says gravely, “Good morning.” He asks, “Why don’t you guys cherish each other?” When we reach the train station he carries both bicycles upstairs on his shoulders.

  • a birthday story

    It is my birthday and I had kind of a depressing morning because (various reasons). But I reckoned I could make a go of the afternoon, and I was right. Riding out into the day aboard my trusty, failsafe, foolproof bicycle I zoomed around town for an hour or two looking for the restaurant, cosy but decent, in which my friend arriving from Copenhagen this evening will treat me to dinner. He says I’ve got to choose. So I chose, and had lunch outdoors in the shade and a large German beer. Needing shade is such a luxury in grey chilly Berlin.

    The bowl of noodles was delicious and the beer made me feel better. I sauntered home on my wheels, spinning down the quiet side of an overgrown local park and only gradually noticing that the man crouched forward on his bench was speaking to me. You are traveling much too fast, he was saying, and then his forbidding German conformity dissolved into a slow salty smile when I smiled at him, raising my eyebrows without meaning to, a smile that turned flirty when he flirted back.

    “Sicher?” I said, slow and low – are you sure? “Absolut sicher,” he said, and his tone had evolved from censorious to self-mockery and enjoyment.

    The African men at the bottom of the park looked me over and I looked at them. I miss Africa. Noodling along the pavement on my way home, which you shouldn’t, but people do, I was warmed when three men in identical backpacks like Mormons stepped aside to let my bicycle pass. “Das ist lieb,” I told them, that is lovely. The tallest one said, gravely, “I come from Stuttgart.”

    “Oh,” I said over my shoulder as I zoomed past, “that is also lovely.”

    The little German birds are high in their voices like tree bells. When I was in Ghana all those months I kept thinking: the birds fly away to Africa for the winter. So here they are! I kept expecting I might meet one and we would recognise each other. Hey, I know you. I’ve seen you in Berlin.

  • 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.

  • Ghanaity

    Had to change trains twice to get home and I was reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, great, familiar, female, underrated. On the second train I glanced up when somebody laughed and saw a short, beautiful African man gazing longingly at me.

    It was so startling. I hurried back to Cranford, the village where the old ladies are not nearly so old as they were in Miss Matty’s own youth. At the next station I looked up, focussing between the heads of people sitting back to back all down the left side of the cabin, and saw that he was still looking at me. His eyes were soft and fond as though I were terribly familiar. We smiled. I went back to my book.

    Someone got off, occasioning the usual genteel German shuffling whereby everybody shifts their knees to one side saying, Bitte, Danke, Entschuldigung. All of a sudden the man who had been gazing plumped into the vacated seat opposite, he slung his bag down on the floor and had altogether an air of decision.

    So I looked up and said, How are you? Good, he said, and you? Good, I said. Thank you. Then we all travelled along in a kind of noisy trainside silence for a while.

    What are you learning?

    O, it’s not really study, just rereading a book I have read so many times before. I turned the cover to show him.

    You have a very nice face, I told him, and he smiled. You, too. Thank you, I said. In fact he was beautiful, with a pointed cat like chin and slanting eyes and in the middle of his forehead he had an asterisk-shaped scar as though someone had shattered him with a mallet and then put him back together again.

    The moon, upstairs, was rounding white and only slightly eroded down one side like an aspirin in water. I hadn’t seen it yet but later it led me right home. The man said, My name is Maxwell. And so I stuck out my hand and said, Cathoel. We shook hands and I said, Are you new in Berlin?

    Three months. Ah, I said, welcome. He had lived four years in Italy. So I speak Italian. But no Dutch.

    Ah, I said, again. And then he began talking to me about Jesus. Jesus knows how many hairs you have on your head. He took hold of a lock of his hair and tugged it.

    Well, I said, that must be very comforting. I am getting off here. Good luck in Berlin!

    But as I was standing on the platform he appeared beside me, standing too close. Are you married? No, I said. Why not? It’s not my way. I stepped away a half pace and he stepped up close to me again, in my shadow. Can I ask you a question, I am not a bad man.

    Thanks, I said: I don’t want to marry you.

    Ok, he said. But can I give you my phone number, friends? Friends. I am lonely and it’s good to have a friend in Berlin. Berlin is big.

    The train pulled in and he said, ingeniously, I can get on the train with you. I can always ride back again after I give you my number. Oh, well, I said. Okay then. But I am going to be reading my book.

    We sat opposite a lady with a fiery head of hair and a warm wrinkled smile. She was holding up a magnifying glass on its stalk to read some tiny photostatted text closed printed across an A4 page. She listened to our conversation, smiling at me over the man’s head, and when he got off, as promised, at the next station and I folded his phone number and put it in my pocket I said, in German, He wanted to talk because he is lonely, I think.

    Her smile grew warmer. She reached into her pocket and handed me a card, much creased, printed in black and white. This is a church where people get together, she said, plenty of African people go there, he can make friends.

    It was evident neither of us were native speakers. Oh, I said, then I am glad. I will pass it on. I got out at my own stop and walked up the stairs into the night and the incomplete moon made me gasp. If you are Ghanaian and you come here over Italy, you cannot access refugee services because you have Italian papers. The trees on either side of my road have bloomed and lost their bloom and though the forbidding Germanic cold has now returned still it seemed to me something warmer, something Springlike was afoot, a pussyfoot, an affair of the filigree trees, afar.

  • illicit flower factory

    Today my boyfriend discovered the illicit dried flower factory I have been running in his apartment. At first glance it looks as though a two-dimensional squirrel has made herself a nest out of private papers and unwanted official letters retrieved from the waste paper bin beside his desk.

    “What’s this?” he said, lifting away the heavy row of comic books along the shelf to reveal my little stack of flattened envelopes and folded paper.

    “Uhm,” I said, “that’s my dried flower factory. I have one at home, as well.”

    The whole city has burst into bloom and the streets are filled with love. On our way down to the post office a man in the street grabs me, both hands clasping my forearm in a grip surprisingly determined and strong. An African man, bearded, handsome, long muscular arms and that’s all I see of him. He is smiling, pleading, manly, he is wooing me in his own language. “Danke,” I keep saying, “Danke, nein, ich muss ~ ” and wrenching my arm away I turn back to the taller man I have come out with, my beloved, who is bristling and who wraps his hand possessively about me at the waist. “What was that?” he asks, “you don’t know that guy?” “No,” I say, “he just really liked me.” “You look confident today. But why would he grab you while you’re kissing me?” he growled, looking over his shoulder in a feint.

    “Well, that’s why,” I say, having understood the man in an instant. Perfect attraction is like that, if it so often only lasts a moment. “He liked it, I think, that I was laughing and teasing and reaching for you. I think maybe he thought, I’d like a woman to look at me that way and to kiss me like she loved me. I’d like that woman.”

    He isn’t really worried, because he knows I love him. Other men casting glances and women looking at him are not new. And I know that he loves me too, he treats me beautifully and his dark sweetness and deep limpid loving heart are my water and my salt in the desert of city sugar and fat. And I know that he understands me, better than the guy who grabbed me in the street and would not let go, his eyes imploring and his smile broad, might ever do.

  • a dog’s park life

    Crossing the park I passed the usual gatherings of African men standing about under trees, whiling away the hours until someone comes to buy some drugs off them. Sometimes they sidle up and say, “Alles klar?” and occasionally a whisper of “Grass?” comes up or, once, from a bolder guy, “Cocaine?” I’ve worked out at long last that not all of them are dealers, some are just hanging out because this is where they hang out; because they come from a culture where instead of everybody sitting in their own bedroom facing their own screen, you spend the day with everyone, you hang out. A shower of sparks fell across the park: four guys huddled round a low homemade brazier and fanning its coals with the lid of something. The smell of meat roasting. The sound of whickering trees. The way these recent settlers have brought the ineffable mystery of life back up under Germans’ noses. Two men were sitting on a bench in the shadows and a large, round, comfortably built black woman slowly passed. She was pushing a trolley. One called out to her, “Hey! Mama Africa!” “Yes,” she said, kindly but wearily, pausing, and I thought perhaps she was just someone whom everyone turned to for help, communities yield such persons, I explained to my companion this theory and he said, No, it’s even more beautiful. Mama Africa sells hot food to the dealers on cold nights, she goes around with her trolley and if they are hungry, they flag her down.

    A few hours earlier coming through the same park I came across three dog owners standing about warming their hands in their pockets, their four dogs channeling and chasing one another, noses to bottoms, noses to groins. Another dog raced in like a flash of black fur and then two more dogs arrived, a merry flurry, soon there were eight dogs weaving and circling and joining each other nose to tail like elephants or ants and the tallest dog owner, an old punk, said in his dark gravel or asphalt voice It’s a regular dogfest, “Es wird ein richtig Hunde-Party.”

     

     

  • night witches past

    Cycling through the park. It’s very dark but the sky is purple. Passing alongside the old Bahnhof I see the lights leap from one long window to the next. The medieval bridge with its turrets, the dark towers, the choppy dark water. The entrance to the park is guarded by forty black men. They own it, they share it, they deserve it. This is how you make your living until citizenship arrives. Their faces are hard to distinguish in the shadows. Alles klar? they say, cheerfully, Alles klar? It means, all clear, which means, is everything clear? do you need anything? do you want to buy drugs?

    All clear, and I’d like to keep it that way. Danke, danke. The trees along the broad straight path lean over me as I speed along in a gust of wind, gathering and whispering like old women with long fingers.

  • picked it up & have kept it

    Walking along a quiet street feeling grumpy I heard a loud, juicy burst of fat laughter. Coming towards me was a man on his phone, shortish, gleaming, African, with laughter rolling through him, like a wisp of weed rolling in the sandy sea. Further down the street I saw a dog waiting in the laundromat, wistful with big eyes turned to the door, and passed a middle-aged punk whose hair had almost entirely balded away. But he had worked the few strands growing over his forehead into a messy quiff, stiffened with product but still with his own native old man’s/little boy’s curls escaping, as though he were saying to Death “You’ll never take me alive.” Coming back to the house I found a small square of white paper stuck to the cobblestones, entirely blank on both sides, and I picked it up and have kept it.

  • lost girl

    lost girl

    Last night a lost soul brushed past me on the street and I could feel the black, sucking wind. She was very beautiful, extremely young, just-enormous eyes. Bare feet and ankles swollen like stumps. Bruises. Old bruises. She was leaving the curb as I reached it to cross the street, making a decision, counting out some kind of breath or strange fairytale with soft beats of her hand on the air. She crossed halfway and came back. Same again. Described a formal square on the asphalt with sober steps, watching her own feet, slightly smiling. In the middle she balanced herself on the white lines and turned to open her arms at the approaching traffic imploringly. I said, We have to help that girl. She cannot have heard me but her gaze focussed on me vaguely, like air. She came back over the road and put herself beside me, very close, her head yearning towards this source of passing kindness with a tilting raise of the chin. I stood beside her. I said, Kommst du mit uns? and invited her to cross the street. Now it was safe. The traffic gathered at a distance, thrumming bulls. She was so surrounded by the sense of imminent threat, or so it seemed to me, it was like she was towing a thunderstorm on a kite string.

    She looked into my eyes like a dog. A slow blink. “Alles ok?” I said. “No,” she said, very quietly, in English, very distinctly. I said, “Do you need help?” She sort of spread her hands on the air, two floating castles. Helplessness, helplessness: mine, hers, ours. A young girl like a flower, a roaring jungle infected with needles, coins, tricks. We crossed the road without her, her attention dissolved from me as love dissolves. I looked back and two friends had surrounded her, they carried her back in their intent to the side of the road. She was reasoning with them. In the park one of the African dealers caught my eye and I smiled and he smiled. Then he looked self-conscious, shy. “Are you laughing at me?” “No!” I said. “I’m smiling at you, because you’re beautiful.” He walked on a couple of paces alongside. “That,” he said, thoughtfully, “is a really nice thing.” The girl in my mind made a feint at the traffic from the roadside again, describing circles and air squares all paved in asphalt, more than a dog but less than her altered self, a welter of physical injuries, little fiend no doubt who would steal and shame and was lost in helplessness, waiting for her accident, a ghost already.

    H2O HoL bridge ashtray

  • a jeans under it

    a jeans under it

    An elderly couple pedalling uphill on a tandem bike: the Swiss are awesome! Casual bigotry in the marketplace: the Swiss are awful! These thoughts freewheeling through my head: generalizations are stupid! Yes: all of them.

    Decades back I was here and asked somebody, a travelled, educated person, what was the population of Switzerland. His lip curled. “Four million. And *one million* foreigners!” He was speaking of Italians. Now you see black faces in the street which then was not the case.

    Today I cycled to a nearby town in search of summer garments. Coming back to Berlin for winter I was only planning on three months, it was minus fifteen, I brought thick, fuzzy, woolly stuff and ugg boots. Now it is finally hot. The trees are blooming. In every shop I asked, Is there a second-hand shop in town somewhere? Maybe… the Red Cross? People not only looked blank, they sneered. I kept looking and finally on a back street found a merry collection of shoes, cheap suits, and household tat, with three African women presiding.

    They invited me to try stuff on in the kitchen and over their cups of tea offered encouraging remarks: Nice colour that one! If you don’t have a jeans under it, this fits great! A white man in his seventies came in and the conversation instantly dampened. I went foraging among the racks and when I came back, he had sat himself next to the youngest, prettiest one and slung an arm casually round the back of her chair. She was just standing up as I came in. She went and stood in the far corner of the kitchen with her back to the inner door.

    But you can’t keep a happy woman down and they kept talking around him, about a local woman who comes in causing trouble and pulling things off the shelves. “Police give me a card,” said the stout lady, reaching under the sink for her handbag to show it. I was pulling my sneakers back on, on the floor. The conversation between them was in a kind of pidgin, English and French with some German words, or is it a creole that people evolve when they are from different language groups and fetch up in the same place together? I think, creole. They were so kind and interesting and the atmosphere so pragmatic and humane, I too I would have liked to put my arms around them. I would have liked to stay on uninvited and bask in their presence all the afternoon long. I could understand his longing. His sleaziness, not so much.

    H2O HoL opshop manekin