Always leaving: as in poetry, so in life
photo by Laker
‘There is no place for a soft / black / woman / there is no smile green enough or / summertime words warm enough to allow for my growth’
— Shake Loose My Skin, Sonia Sanchez
‘Somewhere between where I am and who I was, I decide to be both loved / and Lover, even though this is not how it is done where I am from.’
— Roots and Genesis, Amara Amaryah
Surrealism weaves itself into all of my poems, and because I am in need of a place to belong, I let it. This makes sense since I grew up mythologising a bunch of things that already existed in their own right. Me, growing up in London, wrapping my head around the concept of a Jamaica my family wouldn’t fly back to see — gave Jamaica its own mythologised status. I charged the jungles with their magic, fantasised about the rivers according to their spiritual, healing powers, used Brixton as the template and filled in the rest with my own preferred colours, animals and sounds. In the same way, without having the access to travel growing up, I created my own sense of what the world beyond England would be, and how I would magically understand how to exist in it. I think these very necessary realities though, ones with alternatives and untranslatable experiences that are so full of unfamiliarity that I, now a black woman, feel welcomed, beckoned to explore them and continue the work of adding to my imaginary worlds. I still consider it my most important task — imagining the multiplicity of ways we can be. For extra reference, I find myself drawn to black womyn and their obvious magic and it is normal to me, entirely. Nothing fantastical about it, purely life. This pull to the unreal, surreal, dream-like, fantasy is an entirely valid reaction to a world (this one, this ever-expanding Babylon) without enough space for us; we spill over to somewhere else and we leave, for a page or a slumber or a chapter in this life we are writing for ourselves.
As a poet, I write of mass Black exodus, ancient memory, unspoiled land and what I mean is that I want somewhere of my own. The very first poem that started my poetic career was actually an accidental Epic poem, set in an enchanted, untouched Edenic jungle, appropriate for my Black Eve and her Black Adam. What was supposed to be a two-stanza poem became a Miltonic 5-page love letter to a world I wanted deeply to live in and breathe into. A free one, that was unnamed and untroubled and fit for me, my future love lives, my children, their children and our undocumented softness — a place where we may fall on anything other than concrete, rise without the expected censorship or glorification. I write to leave. And so that I can take all of us, us black women and our chosen legacies, with me to this place where we might exist.
Now more than ever, my poems speak of other, more plentiful worlds that do — I am sure — exist somewhere, collectively in a carefree land where the trees talk to us in our own language and the earth strokes our feet on the hard days and the sky, perfectly pastel and cloudless, falls gently on us when we come home. If only for a page or a poem, I want my writing to be a testament to the reality of our need to escape to softer places often and without permission. When I write myself into the soils or the oceans of lands that dance or shiver or yes, speak with me, I am preparing myself to commune better with the Earth that has failed black women so often and so hard. In this dimension, I draft up spaces to access something wholly nourishing and almost remembered. Sometimes I am even conscious of it, a voice gently humming in the background of all of my stories, reminding me to keep making space for the lives we deserve to explore.
I see this elsewhere in my life too. I travel more and further nowadays, mostly alone and to places where I find nothing and no one who reminds me exclusively of the place I think of when I say home. In my movements from unfamiliar land to unfamiliar land, coast to city to mountain, you will hear me quietly creating new ways to be myself, sometimes a little more believable with each journey, sometimes not. I do this because, as a wandering, writing black woman, I believe I am living a fantasy. The fantasy is not travelling, the fantasy is leaving. Being able to. And coming back to myself, a little more full of some of the memories that were once mine and have been restored, by virtue of being in touch with the world, my world.
This is what feels good for me and so I do not timidly brush past it, I etch it into the poems I share with my listening community and with the unheard spectators that make up part of life. I’m writing as I’m living, to stubbornly seek out worlds for us, ones lush and adorned with all the vivid dreams we deserve, so that we might live with more fullness. I recommend we all do it, leave, log out, dream. At least once. Go somewhere you really want to, and speak loudly of it and as you do, write it down, please, so it may live forever to be accessed again, eternally affirming the undone boundaries of your being.
