A Writer

A Writer

        “…and he was a foreigner from a former colony and so I completely missed him in my youth, distracted as I was by all the imperial notions of ‘proper’ writing. When I did find him, forty years later, it was through movies and sketches and bits of hero worshiping stories some true but mostly false.”

        “…it was in a movie, I got the first glimpse; a famous actor who played Him, whose claim to fame was that he’d been sued for having a big dick, and He was a drunk in Spain hanging around matadors and beautiful people drinking in cafés in some mythical Hollywood time. And He’d been injured and couldn’t fuck even though He had all these romantic encounters. I thought it really strange and it kind of added sexual tension to the narrative and the story went on until it just ended, like His short stories that I read much later and put down because they had no plot except running out of well-described words.”

        “…I preferred adjectives and adverbs and modes and explicit sex and adventures and narratives that took me to another time, country, sensibility, and culture; a plot that could drag me out of the prison of my youth. Bottled-up as I was on an island full of words and words on words written over centuries, dissected, pruned and graded by great universities and great myths and great legends and brilliant critics. It was safer for me to remain on the sports fields and the margins of industry and the dusty roads of the former empire scratching out songs of painful memories than admit that I could be….”

       

       

American Charity

AMERICAN CHARITY

Ships coming from a distance carry everyone’s dreams ashore. For some, they slip in like eddies of tides; for others they crash against the rocks of poor fortune . 

Each brings their new song of freedom, coming to America.

CHAPTER ONE

Charity Anasie waited at the side of the dusty roadway. The carrot red earth fought with the deep emerald green plants that exploded above her head. A canopy of shade formed over the hot asphalt. Charity stood under the shade and stretched her thin ebony arm above her head to hold up the drooping palm and prevent it from catching her hair. Despite having spent a whole day at work, her starched pink blouse and pleated blue skirt still held their neatness. Her long angular ebony face, wide smiling mouth and bright open eyes gave no hint of the stressful day she had spent in the Ghanaian Government statistics office, under high ceiling fans that continuallyed to circulated hot stale air. Charity was radiantly excited because she was going to the post office to pick up a letter, hopefully, from her husband, Conrad, who had been in America for over two years and away from her for nearly four years.

It was the end of 1994 the world was not a peaceful place, but it never had been. The civil war in Liberia and Sierra Leone seemed like just another African power struggle. It would be ten years for the world to learn the full extent of the horrors there. Ghana was at peace, the UK was at peace and the U.S. was at peace, despite their perennial political scandals. Charity was beginning to become concerned about Conrad being away so long. She had heard of many women in Ghana who had lost their husbands to the fast life of America. One of her cousins had even surprised her husband, on a trip to America, and found that he was married to a white woman! This, she prayed, would never happen to her! 

HOW TO SURVIVE IN AMERICA

HOW TO SURVIVE IN AMERICA

Step One –COMING TO AMERICA

Ships coming from a distance carry everyone’s dreams

ashore. For some they slip in with the eddies of the

      tides. For others, they crash against the rocks of poor          fortune. Each brings their new song of freedom,    

      Coming to America.                                          -     Zora Neale Hurston

 When I first visited New York and stumbled over the stacks of garbage on the corner of Fifth Avenue, I was amazed by such poverty side-by-side with such wealth. I later discovered that the city was going broke; and that New Yorkers were betting on the city’s demise. Years later, when I flew into San Francisco, I was greeted by quite the opposite spectacle. My wife’s sister picked us up in her 500 SL Mercedes and ferried us through a kaleidoscope of dazzling billboards advertising everything from gambling in sunbaked Reno, to giving humanitarian aid to Darfur. I was deposited, after a ride across the elegant Bay Bridge, at Lake Merritt, the pride of Oakland’s American-African bourgeoisie. I had to pinch myself to believe the opulence was real.

It was real. The American-African community of Oakland, California, is probably one of the richest Black communities in the world. The skyline houses that look down from the redwood hills of the East Bay are not the exclusive preserve of whites, as is often the case in many neo-colonial lands. The sun-drenched Mediterranean climate is host to one of the most diverse communities in America. Yet beyond the mortar and bricks of their homes, American-Africans own very little of the wealth of this fertile region.