Women In Politics
I Say It Was The Women
Wednesday 26 November 2003
By Elliot Roache
(for all the tall upstanding sisters of the generation)
Hard poems bruise my mind
(you’re one of them)
but I can’t write them.
My slave age knees give way;
new tides of old ideas
shake my crumbling rock;
I fall asleep at the wrong moments
but I dream of your grave faces,
your dark earnest faces,
your daring voices hard in argument,
and in the dream I listen, I approve,
but in the bitter day I turn aside.
The long hard years confound me like a curse.
It’s not been easy.
Since the Trade began you perished;
you gave birth in coffles and slave ships;
the children died;
they flung each stillborn foetus to the sharks;
you spawned on slave plantations;
some of your young were you;
some were a splinter tribe;
white was the seed but black the soil
and brown the issue of that raving age.
You worked and spawned and wept
and nurtured and endured
throughout the mad Slave Trade, the mad slave system.
A black cook’s rhetoric,
but I say again it’s not been easy.
In the first freedom time in wattle mud-straw huts
you cradled a new age with bare hands,
shaping civilization from cow dung and marl and sweat,
working provision grounds,
tending black cooking pots on stones in dooryards
while mosquitoes and flies
raged round from bush and filth like Tartar horsemen.
I affirm it here,
I touched that generation and I know that you gave suck and succour,
taught faith and love and hope to your rock-clinging season
to lumbering men who else
had plunged into the precipice of chaos.
You raked the embers of the race out of its ashes.
Your breasts alone bridged eras.
In time, my time,
(don’t doubt a poet’s witness)
you cooked and washed and scrubbed,
planted and prayed and taught
in those harsh clapboard schools
that nurtured villages.
You fought too,
marching long barefoot marches
sweating, singing psalms
with the white captain and that Tubal Butler, killing the great beast that stood between us and a brighter sun,
breaking hard barricades of history,
bursting an Empire’s walls,
draining its fetid swamps.
Always some hide in terror
from the sweating seasons:
some turn to harlotry
and some disperse among the alien,
some under Jesus’ robes; and some go mad, staring in nightmare,
dreaming in the sun,
wailing like ghosts in alien cultures
from the broken ramparts of the race.
But still you turn and turn
to take the gown of honour,
the mud-stained shift, the purple of the race: you kiss tradition, fate and circumstance.
Our gospel truth
is harder than we know it.
Written in the ink of blood,
molasses and spent sweat,
it reads: Centuries of slavery
left the nigger naked,
stripped bare of human attributes
cropped back to the ape stock.
At one cold cutlass stroke religion went; down fellanother and the language went
and pride and names and cultures
all drained out like blood from mortal wounds- Africa dismembered, disembowelled.
I die maintaining this:
It was the women who restored us.
I’ve known them in my time-
mother, sister, teacher, wife,
a green corn row of lovers-
and in my last dry season, going blind,
I look on you who would not yield
to night nor nothing
I know the end’s not chaos,
that you have shaped an end, a destiny
and we shall grow
though we ourselves,
ashamed of our own shames,
shamed of our need to fight
those last and hardest battles with ourselves,
our waste, our worthlessness,
would silence you..
1973-1974
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