eren_reads's reviews
428 reviews

to write about my father, his life and the distance which had come between us during my adolescence. Although it had something to do with class, it was different, indefinable. Like fractured love.

I am black and lesbian, and what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering.

If I were to meet the ghost
of my childhood running
with slipping shoulder-straps
and half-plaited hair
beside a brown expanse
of memorising water
and the mellow faces of wooden houses
half-hidden by a weave
of coconut, mango, guenip trees

I would say this was her childscape
this was where she was shaped
like first words formed on slate –

A raw and lyrical landscape
that witnessed her carelessness
of death, her fall from tree,
her near muddy-pool drowning
and how nothing seemed
to separate her from anything –
Not from the equatorial sun or sailing moon
or shooting stars of black tadpoles –

If I were to meet the ghost
of my childhood –
I would kneel beside her for a while –
this slip of a brown girl gazing at fish shapes
under brown sunlit water –
patwa, sunfish, butterfish –
mesmerised by their movement
and the silent scales of their music.

Then I’d straighten up
leaving her in her elementary world,
her bright aloneness. Oblivious of me. 

Yet it is that surreal, almost non-existent last visit that gives my passion its true meaning, which is precisely to be meaningless,  and to have been for two years the most violent and unaccountable reality ever.