Anansi meets
Miss Muffet on a Cross-Channel Ferry
Maggie
Harris
Folkestone. And
was my first landing a literary one? No, it was with my mate Emily,
we’d met at the factory, and me the water-crosser, the alien, the
migrant with whole stones in my mouth. The Queen’s English trembled
on my tongue, years of colonial implant; Creole and a host of ginger
lilies, not daffodils, regurgitated in my stomach. She was from
Shepherdswell, a village girl with a stammer, beautiful, blonde and
with an eye for fashion that had enticed me with her boldness, with
her strength. Meeting back at that plastics factory in Sandwich,
girls like us from Ramsgate, Ripple, Deal, joining the women who
chain-smoked over the machinery, turning out into pubs and clubs from
Margate to Bridge at the weekend. Through Emily I found out about the
King’s Road, about shoes that cost a month’s wages, about clothes
that belonged on the backs of willowy brunettes and not on factory
girls whose speech negotiated an entire rite of passage.
And my tongue would begin to ease itself into the locality, would
curl round the dropped h’s, revel in the ‘innits’, learn to use
the ‘f’ word with the regularity of breathing. But my body lacked
behind, skin and bones to her Munroesque stature, a shadow behind her
at Bridge Country Club, both wearing the dresses we made ...And Art
walked like a ghost behind me, a ghost uncomfortable in this new
place, the land of opportunity that had up-rooted me and my family
from a country dissolving post-independence. And it waited at the
back-door as both me and Emily got married, had babies, and it was
her move to Folkestone circa 1976 that saw us walking along Capel-le
Ferne.
A new skin grew
along that promenade, a new voice that blended Caribbean lullabies
with English ones, celebrating the blue of this baby’s eyes whilst
I sung her Marley’s reggae.
That walk along
the promenade, a million miles from home, was the first step to
marking this territory; that would see Art brush his ghost-dust off
his winter coat and lead me, sometime in the 80s into the Metropole.
The Arts Officer then was John Rice, a young Scottish guy with a
long black ponytail. The workshop through whose doors I’d
walked filled my mouth with stones as another self beat its small
fists against my breastbone. Many moons ago I had had aspirations of
being an artist. I wasn’t sure quite what kind of an artist: I drew
portraits prolifically, got an A at GCE, landed at Stansted with some
idea of being a dress designer. That was not to be, and playing with
paper and ink, oil, and watercolour had for some years existed
alongside raising my little girls, with some slight recognition –
submissions in exhibitions in Kent and the Mall Gallery. But the
two-dimensional form defeated me, words screamed in schizophrenic
frenzy in the way I spoke and imagined, in the way that memory and
recognition danced in a domestic home-space like stars. So I reached
for the pen, hence the workshop. And the sea on the Leas sang such a
song I knew its chorus, and my footsteps began to walk as if they
knew their way.
There would
come a time when my voice would be recognised, that I would be given
my first ‘gig’ as a performance poet, alongside John Agard at
Cranbrook Library; and came the day when I was asked to represent
Kent alongside Caroline Price in Europe on KCC’s European Women
Writers’ project, MUSE. And so to Folkestone I had come, the Leas
again, walking that promenade alongside women poets from Ireland and
the Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Bruges regions, our disparate voices
rising like starlings down past the harbour, ready to board the ferry
the next day for Calais. And that was the day my stomach, disturbed
at its good fortune, disturbed by rich food and the terror of being
brought into the light, began to plague me, a condition that would
torment me for years. Later it would be given a name, IBS; but the
battle between the physical and the mental, between the memory of
belonging and the fear of belonging, between the naked self and the
words that would eventually occupy a life of their own in
publications that went out into the world like teenage children, I
would come to realise had a purpose: this limboland I occupied was
the very source of my being an artist.
From where the
fear of water came I do not know. As a child I had steamed up-river
with my father, a tug-boat captain on the Berbice River, a river of
Amazonian breadth and depth, happily and fearlessly, running inside
the barges of bauxite like Natalie Wood on the train-
tracks in
This
Property is Condemned.
Health and Safety with its stifling paroxysms did not exist then. At
age 17 I had crossed the Atlantic boldly, daring to look out of the
windows. But boarding a cross-channel ferry would send my soul
tumbling to its darkest depths.
I had crossed it on previous occasions, on day trips, with family
and friends, and on factory outings with women whose raucous voices,
underlined by John Players and Embassy, had sung Vera Lynn and
knocked back shots of vodka even before the coach deposited us on the
ferry. I remember Emily getting pissed as a coot onboard before we’d
even got to the beer festival, and having to sleep it off on the
coach on the other side of the water whilst I had to find other
friends to play with. But on one crossing there was something about
its fathomless depths and the way the ferry dipped and rolled, that
had suddenly filled me with fear. Perhaps being a new mother had
something to do with it, I remember looking at my baby girl and
trembling, remembering the sudden death of my father when I was aged
fifteen. That, and the fact that I couldn’t swim; and that my
aspiration to be some sort of artist had not yet been realised. I
remember distinctly thinking myself into sanity: get a grip girl, you
ain’t seen nothing. You frightened of water? Let me tell you, if it
wasn’t for water you wouldn’t even exist. You think you got
problems? Well think of your father’s ancestors: think of them
rolling, pinned like sardines on a slave ship forcibly extricated
from an African homeland in the name of sugar. And some fat merchant
on this side of the Channel may well have been the one to build his
grand house of stone on the backs of your fathers. And from somewhere
the figure of Anansi had surfaced; that spider trickster had
travelled from Africa too, imported in the minds of all those
incarcerated on that ship and deposited in Guyana. And all those
nancy stories came to mind, heard from childhood, tales of charm and
trickery over-coming tumultuous odds, the souls of the enslaved
freeing themselves. John Agard is a master of Anansi stories. He had
imported Anansi, a much-travelled figure whose African DNA is now a
hybrid of Caribbean, North American and British fusion. John and I,
like so many from the Diaspora, are hot-house and hybrid, and it was
Anansi who had shown us the way.
I remember
writing a poem about Anansi on that ferry, he himself dictated the
words, singing as he spoke O Anansi O Anansi O Anansi O, You walk on
water, skip on land, and leave in your wake your fables like beads,
dangling from my hand. (Lament on ‘The
Pride of Dover’,
1999)
Recognition and acceptance are sisters, to misquote ... God grant me
the will to accept the things I cannot change and the strength to do
the things I can ...and my voice is no longer full of stones. I would
walk boldly into Saga that was, and ask for help for a festival, I
would run a workshop for their workers, I would have tea with Roger
de Haan in his office through whose windows the channel lurched in a
variety of disguises. I would receive a Year
of the Artist
award, would read my poetry under the canopy with its roof like sails
and in the Folkestone
Literature Festival;
and always remember my journey and those of others who had followed
the sweet smell of sugar.
A million miles
away from home. Home, where is my home? Grace Nichols wrote,
‘wherever I hang my knickers that’s my home’. I would move from
Kent to Wales, and constantly return; I would be the mother of the
bride as one of my beautiful daughters got married in St John’s
Church, would stand in a bevy of wedding guests along the Leas on a
bright August day where the bride glittered like the sea and
somewhere a little me with a mouth full of stones walked by. And
often now I walk the town with my grand-children, whose Folkestone
accents pepper the air at such speed I ask them to slow down,
enunciate. This Folkestone where my grand-daughter Kanisia would
bring her golden voice to the Bouverie Centre and win a singing
competition, Bouverie’s
Got Talent,
and where another grand-daughter Chloe writes poetry, and who has
been featured more than once in the local paper. And this year,
another gift: whilst attending a Live
Lit
workshop in Tontine Street, an idea evolved for the creation of a
performance piece, Daughters,
which will feature four women poets, and Chloe. I lost touch with
Emily many moons ago. But Folkestone, you have helped me to define
Martini
Girls
Maggie Harris
1976.
And me and my baby are riding the train
Her
curled to my belly, warm on my thighs
And
the train hiccups through Dover, skims
For
one surreal moment along the track
With
the sea to our left and a bright sun swimming
On
an emerald sea.
Then
the tunnels
And
a force-fed wind screaming its anger
At
our freedom to move through its confined space
And
I’m moving my fingers to cover her ears
Her
sweet baby four-month ears, remembering
The
classics, the occasional Bob Marleys
The
dancing with her still wrapped in my belly.
Folkestone.
And me and my baby meet Emily
(we’d
worked at the factory) , she’s wheeling her baby
I’m
carrying mine, the sun’s shining bright
And
we’re warped in delight at our beauty
21(ish)
real hair, good teeth, breasts fulsome
To
whistles, oestrogen dripping and both of us wearing
The
dresses we’d made,
Martini
labels on black, on red
Backless,
shoulder-less, full-skirted pretend Munroes
Teased
into being our mothers (but cool) with trips
(before
childbirth) to Jap and Joseph and Anyone
In
the Fulham Road.
Sun
hot on our heads we parade our babies
Along
Capel le Ferne. Watched the sea, swelled fatter
And
fatter as The World and His Wife took time off
From
strolling to peer at our babies and croon
How
like their mothers they were
And
they don’t stay babies for long, enjoy.
2001.
And this memory rises as I ride on the train
And
I think of my baby, now 25
And
her babies and Emily’s babies
And
Emily and wonder what happened
What
happened to those Frocks?
(from
From Berbice to Broadstairs, Mango Publishing, 2006)
Whilst
contemplating the sea
(from
the Saga Building)
Maggie
Harris
a
linen ceiling
dropped
like a handkerchief
chandelier
glass and light
steel
and chrome
freckled
ammonite concrete floor
a
place for brunches, lunches
business
meetings
who
shagged who the night before
the
sea like a voyeur
cinema
screening
panoramic
patio, tilt-backed chairs
the
smoking zone
remembering
the time
a
Zulu choir shattered
the
glass, reclaiming
a
space, returning
once-silenced
voices
out
over the Channel and home.
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