Bessie Head

The late Bessie Head is one of Africa's most renowned writers.  I just finished reading her novel Maru.  The reading of the novel and what I know of her life inspired this poem.

You walked from there from the brink
from that place of apartheid
to hope for the quiet life
to escape the hell of the tragic life.
My heroine writer and spiritual mom.
One weekend I may have walked on 
the same soil and dust that you
moved upon as an exile with tired feet.
Like you I am an exile from centuries past
and like you I write to find my soul.
The brutality you lived under more blatant
in your face than the far more subtle
riddled one of denial I reside under here.
A quiet Pan-Africanism within you.
The mix breed girl of a white woman
and black stable hand early thrown
away displaced from the black and
mostly certainly the white.
I can see the horrors of that time
even though I was not there.
As an Diaspora African woman
and in a place that without words
forbids me to think, my mind still
treads all the horrors of the oppressed
anywhere. You wrote in Botswana 
to save yourself. Your small novels
of power and a pinch of poetics
are snapshots and paintings of 
the humanity of men and women.
It is all of them, us, and you 
universal pain and longing 
the displacement.  In your quiet room
the lamp on after dusk with pain 
and passion in your soul you peered out
the window at Serowe your adopted 
village and wrote of yourself and outside
yourself.  In Botswana they praised
you to me six years after your death.
To have sat with you sipping a cup 
of tea. To have sat at your feet to learn
the craft of writing the winds and pangs
of beauty and hurt in a land I am parted from.

decisions

too black
too ugly

too fat 
too ugly

too poor
too ugly

you sit on your toad stool
or your rotting throne
dictating, signing
physical and psychological
death warrants for millions

who are you to judge?
who are you to decide?