Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: poverty

  • Make Africa Great Again

    We went out to the white people’s restaurant, as he calls it, which is a street stall on a dirt laneway behind the supermarket. There’s no street lighting, no cutlery. Collapsible plastic tables are set up between the parked cars. Vivid local tunes blast from the tiny bar across the road, which brings icy beers in brands no one drinks in Europe. We sit there for hours eating chicken and fish with our fingers. Last week a white girl got up and went over to the bar, carrying her phone. She persuaded the barkeep, who is a rapper, to link up her tunes to his speaker. Within seconds this wholly fresh and salty sound bathed the scene, and at their work and in their seats everyone was dancing.

    Tonight a man sitting against the wall behind us had on a MAGA hat. A black man. I looked closer. MAKE AFRICA GREAT AGAIN. I got up and went over. Close up his red baseball cap read MAKE AFRICA HOME AGAIN.

    I crouched beside his table to say hi as I do occasionally when a table of visitors have stiffed the boy dancers. “We can’t afford to give money every day,” they say, reasonably, demonstrating they can afford to eat out every day and I spread my hands, “I know, me too,” and persuade them that it’s ok not to give, it’s not ok to turn your stiffened faces away and keep eating while someone is standing there, sweating with performance, holding out an upturned cap. He is standing there. Treat him like a human. You are not greater nor less. Make whiteness great again.

    Since so much of our cruelty comes from diffidence, I offer scripts. “I say, I’m so sorry, I cannot help you this time.”

    “But then they don’t go away!”

    “Just be direct. It’s courteous. ‘I’ve said no three times, you have to leave now. Bye.’” I tell them the dancer who stuffed fire down his pants but was yet to bloom in puberty “came to our table after you, and he just looked so wounded.”

    Poverty is all around us like jackrabbits in the grass. Poverty, hard work, resourcefulness and struggle. We are like big birds of prayer gliding like clouds across the sun, idle on the air and wondering which one next we will swoop on to assist or exploit. Building our bullshit churches, insulting sufferers with thoughts & prayers in place of action, rendering free men into slaves, free woman into sex slaves. Calling the children they raise from rape ‘half caste’, as though only that portion of their humanity fell into any class we recognised.

    Next morning four boys came to the low wall around our house which keeps the goats out. Their upturned faces were lower than the wall and I had to go and peer over, to hear. “Please, we want you go buy us four bicycles.”

    Oho! I said. Well I would love to buy you four bicycles. I wish I could. I explained that I would love to have a bicycle, myself. But of course, I meant a second bicycle, here in my second home at which I arrive by jet plane.

    The spokesboy suggested, “Or maybe a ball.”

    My heart flooded with regret and shame, yearning and heat. Why shouldn’t these smiling, reasonable, kindly, and well spoken courteous boys have a ball? A ball to play with. A boy standing behind him said, “Bicycles!” and got cuffed for spoiling the deal. I asked, “Ee gon be how much?”

    They reasoned. “Well, ee cost 25 cedis.” Five dollars. The spokesboy explained, you can get them for 18 cedis, but… “They get spoilt?” I suggested, using a word that in the wealth world we use to describe unhappy children but which here means, I had a phone once, second hand from the markets, and now it doesn’t work.

    I tried to respond to this adventurous, eminently reasonable, and brave request the best way. I didn’t want them to feel that if this ball got spoilt they could just come ask the white lady for another, that a ball was nothing to me. I didn’t want them to feel I gave something which was nothing, it seemed insulting. I explained I had little money right now. All Africans know little money. It’s the most usual form of money. “But I will try. I’m going to try to find some money for you so we can buy a ball. I can’t promise you,” I said. “But I will do my best. Do you get me?”

    Of course I’m going to buy them a ball. I just want them to have a week of looking forward to it. I see school children carrying their homework under the awning of a shop which has a light. I see people eating yam for breakfast, just boiled yam. If you have a sauce on your rice, the sauce is a couple of spoonfuls of garnish; in Europe garnish is the main dish. The man in the MAKE AFRICA HOME AGAIN cap made me at home at his table and we spoke for some few minutes. Neither of us mentioned Trump. We exchanged our numbers, as Europe and Africa should do. We are so few and have so much. They are many, and have little. We, they. We spoke about the music. The rapper who brings beers played his own song again. Coming back to our table I was dancing, a little. In Ghana I always want to give everyone everything and as I build my tiny business I am finding out a way we might be able to do that, one transaction at a time. It’s not giving everything: it’s not giving at all. It’s giving up what we can afford of what we stole. It’s giving part of everything back.

  • a virgin busker

    On the subway a woman suddenly opened her mouth and began to sing. Her voice was tentative and good. She had a little loudspeaker rigged up through her mobile phone and had set herself to perform some songs in her own native Spanish. She was rugged up like the rest of us in a puffy blizzard jacket, was in her late middle age, and shy: and I would be willing to bet this was her first day out busking.

    She sang, Kiss me… kiss me all over, or as it renders in the Spanish, kiss me a lot. Her voice trembled with nerves but she kept going. She tried to set up a swing with her hips, stiffly, appealing to the stony crowd with outstretched hands. “Music?” her voice, her hands, her eyes seemed to be saying, “remember music?”

    I got up and went over to be nearer. She was standing in the doorway with her back turned to the glass doors. She smiled shyly at me and I smiled shyly back, nodding encouragingly, clinging to the yellow pole and hanging my head against it as though it were a mother.

    Shyness in public. It makes life so much more challenging. A little way into the song she switched up the tempo and the backing music began a familiar rumble. “Bamboleo,” she sang, wistfully but clear, “Bamboleah…” A moment later she was saying, thank you, danke schön, and pulling out of her jacket pocket a crumpled waxed-paper cup. It is easy to fall on hard times so rapidly. Well-dressed people are begging and collecting bottles for the deposit all over the city. I gave her two euros saying, Sie haben solch eine schöne Stimme, eine echt schöne Stimme. You have such a lovely voice, a really beautiful voice. This was perfectly true and she knew it. We thanked each other bashfully and she went off down the swaying carriage where to my surprise people pulled out their wallets and broke the fourth wall. I, too, am afraid to sing in public; I, too, have a voice. Her courage by this stage had moved me to tears and when the door at my station opened unexpectedly a second early, while the train was still moving, I stood back saying, “Whoa,” and smiling with surprise. German trains are seamless. The man waiting outside the doors stood facing me as the platform slowed. He smiled back. We smiled at one another. In the stairwell a man with his face turned to the wall was shooting up into his elbow, bared in the literally freezing grey cold.

  • 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.”

  • late night and overhead

    Late night walk through the freezing fog. “Like Blade Runner.” We turn down all the opportunities in the park to buy pot. Here is a street where all the houses are Fifties, which must have been a firebomb hell in the 1940s. I stand there picturing it. Smoke curls up from the narrow tin chimneys of the caravans walled in along the water’s edge. Overhead, a syncopated honking. “It’s very late… for gooses to be flying around in the sky.” The laughter escapes between my closed lips. “Oh,” he says self-consciously – “I mean geeses.”

  • god bless the adult

    I met a man with shit-stained pants on the subway and we sang together. He had been swaying by his pile of plastic bags for half an hour, offering speeches to the cabin. People ignored him and looked away. Only the Hispanic man behind us covered his face with split fingers and laughed into his hand. When at last a voice spoke, mysteriously, smoothly, over some unseen PA – good afternoon folks, sorry to disturb, I am going to be making a little music for you this evening – it startled us, mildly, and the shit-stained man looked over, eagerly, and we all saw a younger man, also black, beautifully groomed with a high-maintenance beard, bending to the floor to switch on his little blaster which filled the train with some R & B groove.

    He began to sing, effortlessly, like a bird on a branch who is free. He sang about Her, She’s gonna leave me, I know it, I know my heart is hers. Bending to the instrument again he chose a Michael Jackson groove, Rock with You, with that lovely tripping flute that everybody recognises instantly.

    Oh, Michael Jackson. We love you and we were happy to be transported by your music. Your music and the MTA. The shit-stained man left his pole and his pile of bags and ventured up into the cabin, dancing, smoothing his shoulders across the air. He tapped the singer on the shoulder and passed him some coin, “his last dollar” said my friend. Then he instantly, uncrazily, turned away and sashayed back to his post, his literal post, making no demands on the singer and not importuning. The man singing was emboldened to dance around a little. “He’s good,” said the fellow next to me, and I said, “He is! And he’s dancing like that while the train is crazy swaying.” I got up, grabbing a pole, and swung my hips a little, in joy with the music. When the singer came past collecting “anything you have helps, and if you don’t have, I love a smile,” we all dug eagerly into our pockets, you have gave us joy.

    The shit-stained man hollered, “Baby! You’re great! You need to get yourself in the studio!” The singer answered, ruefully, “Man. I am in the studio.” “You need an agent.” The man behind me was laughing anew. Tears fell in splinters from behind his outstretched fingers, he gripped his face and wept with the mercy of it. “Oh yes!” he was saying, helplessly, to himself: “He needs you to be his agent, baby!” New Yorkers are aware, I think, of one another’s ludicrises.

    The singer returned to his portable blaster, the subway doors still open, and he picked it up and called out thank you and left I thought how he could lose all his profit if someone grabbed the music box and ran away with it. The doors slid shut and we began to move. Left alone to his audience the man in stained pants began to declaim in song. He sang, movingly, God Bless the Child, in a cadence and tune of his own. I joined in, a lovely melody we wove and we were glancing at each other, shyly. I said, “You have a lovely voice.” He said, “I’m 71 years old. I begin to sometimes wonder, what is God’s plan for me.” “Ah,” I said: “that I don’t know.” He said, “My mother always told me when I was little. Boy, God has a special plan in mind for you. But I begin to wonder sometimes, what it is.”

    He collected all the crumpled bags at his feet, laboriously, very often missing when he went to grab them by their outstretched necks. At the next station he was gone and another busker came on, young, Mexican, radiant, and silent, a stocky boy wearing a sandwich board with his two stumps of arms held out in front of him, like Jesus on a candle. His sign read, Hi, my name is Felix. I lost both arms in a work accident. God bless you and thank you for any help you can give. The cabin fell silent. All the joy fell away. We are lost in an industrial accident, this fractured world. Soberly people fished in their pockets, to help. Felix’s face was suffused with the grace of joyous living. He came past and I fished shame-faced in my emptied-out purse. “I’m so sorry this happened to you.” “Thank you.” His voice was soft and filled with humour. “I just gave all my money to the busker,” I said, uselessly. He smiled at me, and I smiled at him a smile that turned down at the corners and pressed my hand to my heart where it ached, and at the next station he got off and walked away, inside his sandwich board, a human pyramid only one head high. As I watched him disappearing into the mystery of his own devilishly difficult life and its challenges, his form flickered with metal stripes as the train took off, I realised my hand was still pressed to where my heart lives and that, unlike the man in stains, this younger man trapped in his sandwich board “for life, as it were,” as Washington Square has it, has made, is making decisions; he has formulated a plan; he is not waiting for some unseen God to evidence in his life. God, if you’re there, bless the child that gets his own. Make us less helpless (we say, helplessly). Give us this day each the daily breadth to see where we are in this life, where we can get to in this world, and how we can all help each other. Amen.

  • so little, so long

    We say, they have so little, yet they complain so little. They have so much suffering and stress, yet they smile so much. Secretly we think, I think, That’s because they feel things less. Otherwise the difference would rub intolerably. Secretly we must think, the smiles mean they need less: we deserve all this.

    Imagine someone living in a long row of tents between two countries. Imagine them imagining a mansion, overspilling with one unhappy person who is home alone, with the maid, the cleaner, can’t count it all, a lottery winner to whom a lot means but a little. Imagine that lonely pioneer of loneliness is on the moon, left behind, shut out of the endlessly imagined Gatsby parties, a liner of communion which steams by while they are on their fur-lined raft. Once again they go to the fridge, open the two doors on the rows of shoes, can’t count and don’t count, roaming their overfilled unfulfilled life like a coin in a bloated cow’s belly. Or so we might imagine.

    Isn’t it amazing how bright the children smile? They have a sack filled with rags and are kicking it. Children are easy to love, like foetuses. The first tenet in an advice column “how to tell if your children are spoilt” was: do they find it difficult to enjoy themselves? Does nothing seem to make them happy?

     

  • so much spoilt

    It’s very nice to “take time every day to think through your day and see if there’s anything you can be genuinely grateful for”. But such advice also makes me a little sick. Why don’t our social-media lists of “today I am grateful for…” start with breathable air (thank you, Shanghai), clean running water (thank you, Sahara), and supermarkets overflowing with foodstuffs? How numb do you have to be before it requires a deliberate hunt through your day to see “if there’s anything” you can be glad of? If there’s anything? Anything? How slowly and creakingly does this process have to run before it will effect an actual change in our over-consuming, greedy, wasteful, polluting and entitled habits? We are wrecking our globe. Very fast. Not just for us but also for the people who have no clean running water and for the children of the children who work in toxic factories making our iPhones. There is no point blaming ourselves for the lassitude and ennui, the misery of depression and anxiety that too much meaningless abundance and a dearth of social connection and life’s meaning inevitably creates. I get that reminding ourselves to be grateful is a huge improvement on whinging and complaining, like the woman on the home renovations TV show who wailed when her house was passed in at auction This Is the Worst Thing That’s Ever Happened In My Entire Life!!! But I want us to change faster and wake up more thoroughly. And glib phrasings like this one on Upworthy “Add #365Grateful to your Instagram photos and instantly be part of the gratitude movement!” make me feel ashamed. How bleak would that sentence feel to a hungry person, a person without land or a roof, someone who’s living out their adulthood in an endless refugee camp that stretches in tents as far as the sandy horizon. How they must wish that people who have enough disposable income to give each other cards and presents on so many occasions annually that two weeks from Christmas we are already complaining about Valentines and Easter merchandise in the shops ~ ~ ~ would be more than grateful.