May 9, 2018 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
Kamil Ali
Almost at the end of her three-hour drive to her grandmother’s funeral in the country, a wrong turn forced Rita onto an unfamiliar curvy rural road. She made several attempts to turn around but aborted each try for fear of sliding off the narrow gravel road and getting stuck in the ditch. She searched for an intersection to make a U-turn but had already driven over ten miles without success.
Rita’s stomach churned when the old car
She set out in stockinged feet toward the main road with her high heel shoes in her hands and her handbag slung over her shoulder. Two miles into her journey, the midday sun disappeared behind a thick dark cloud. Blinding flashes of streak-lightning brought shadows to life. Booming thunder pounded her eardrums. Swirling winds pummeled her with dust and gravel at a hundred miles an hour. The temperature plummeted when the clouds burst open and unleashed a downpour of rain that flooded the ditches instantly.
With the undeterred resolve to press forward instead of returning to the car for shelter, Rita pulled up her collar against the chill. She used her handbag to shield her head and face from the high velocity churning debris and heavy raindrops that pelted her. She peered under the bag at the ground in front of her before taking each tentative step forward.
A bolt of lightning slammed the ground at her feet and bounced her into the air. The wind picked her up and lifted her above the treeline toward her grandma’s estate manor.
Her grandfather’s concrete tomb and an open one beside it for her grandma, stood a couple of hundred yards behind the huge ten-bedroom majestic home. Cornfields stretched beyond the graves for a hundred acres.
A tap on Rita’s right shoulder startled her. She spun around to come within inches of her grandfather’s grinning face. She swiveled her head to the other side. Her grandma smiled kindly as she had done during visits to Rita’s bedside, after the court had placed her in a mental institution for causing the death of her parents.
“You have to let go, Darling.” Her grandmother advised in her familiar soft-spoken tone.
“You cannot relive this nightmare over and over again.” Her grandfather beckoned to the cornfields. “You must forgive them.” They hooked each of Rita’s arm.
The trio glided over the corn plants until they reached a ten-foot-diameter-wide clearing in the middle of the vast field. After the wind lowered them to the ground, the spirits of dead people stepped out from behind the corn stalks, into the clearing.
“You have to free them and yourself.” Her grandma whispered in her ear. “Or forever continue to live this suspended day between the living and the dead.”
Her parents and her accusers, including her dad’s parents, stood with their heads bowed in shame. Her older brother, who had committed the arson, hid behind them.
Her parents and the other grandparents had believed her brother, when he’d accused Rita of setting her parents’ home on fire after she had run away at the age of nineteen from her dad’s abuse, which her mom denied.
Her brother, ten years her senior, had tried to kill his parents and implicate his sister for the crime, to remain the sole heir of the family estate. His parents lived long enough to support his false eyewitness account from their hospital beds.
Her dad’s parents had never forgiven Rita, for what they’d considered to be false allegations against their son. They had stained her character in the week-long trial. After enduring days of insults and left with no defence, Rita had suffered a mental breakdown.
At the sentencing hearing, her mom’s parents had stood up to the wave of angry confronters, with their own version of Rita’s upstanding behaviour and their belief in her.
A year later, the ever-growing greed of her brother’s wife and his aversion to work for a living, had sent him on another criminal venture.
Setting the scene to look like a burglary gone wrong, he had entered the home of his dad’s parents in the middle of the night and had bludgeoned them with a baseball bat. His grandma had died in shock when she recognized him, and his grandfather had used his dying moments to shoot him through the heart from the pistol he kept under his pillow.
“You’ve all put me through hell!” She spoke with scorn. “You deserve each other!” She pointed to her dad. “Tell them the truth!”
“Rita did not lie.” He glanced sideways at his wife’s feet with his head still hung low. “I did abuse her.”
“How could you?” Her mom glared at her husband. “Oh, Rita, I’m so sorry.” Her pleading eyes came too late to impact her daughter.
“I forgive you all.” Rita spun around in the arms of her grandparents. They squeezed and kissed her.
“Bye, Darling.” Her grandma combed her fingers through Rita’s hair. “Grandpa and I are proud of you now more than ever before.”
They waved goodbye and floated away. She turned around to confirm that every other trapped spirit had also moved on.
“You’re back with us.” The doctor held her hand and smiled. “After ten years in a coma with an hour-long spasm every day at noon like clockwork, you’ve returned to the land of the living.”
“I had to undertake a journey.” Rita’s smile of relief energized her body. “I’m hungry.” The nurses unhooked the life support equipment from Rita’s body.
The miracle of her survival from a decade long coma after being struck by lightning, headlined the news around the world.
The newest celebrity also inherited a sizeable fortune from the estates of both sets of grandparents.
Contentment filtered through her at the thought that she had freed each spirit to face the true verdict of the universe without influence from the flawed justice system of man-made laws.
irony of arrival
By Romeo Kaseram
Among the passengers disembarking the MV Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks, Essex, on June 22, 1948 was Lord Kitchener, at the time one of Trinidad and Tobago’s top calypsonians. Remarkably, as The Guardian reports, Pathé News was on hand “documenting ‘The Great British Black Invasion’. Asked to sing, Kitchener didn't miss a beat. ‘London is the place for me,’ he crooned, ‘London, this lovely city …’ He had yet to experience smog-bound austerity Brixton, whose labour exchange was first port of call for many of Kitchener's 500 fellow travellers”. In his essay, Migrant Literature and/as Cultural Change: The Case of ‘London Is the Place for Me’, Michael C. Frank takes up the narrative at the moment of arrival after the calypsonian is approached by the announcer, who identifies Lord Kitchener “as the ‘spokesman’ of the West Indians… ‘I am told that you are really the king of Calypso singers. Is that right?’ Visibly taken by surprise at this opening question, [Kitchener] duly replies: ‘Yes, that is true,’ a confirmation that is more polite than immodest. Born Robert Aldwyn in Arima, he was indeed a popular performer in both his native Trinidad and in Jamaica; after landing a first hit in the early 1940s, he had changed his sobriquet from Champion of Arima (where he had won four calypso contests) to the more grandiose Lord Kitchener. In the Pathé newsreel, the reporter continues his brash interviewing by asking him to sing one of his tunes. ‘Right now?’ Lord Kitchener asks before delivering an impromptu a cappella rendition of a brand-new composition of his, imitating the instrumental passages with his voice. The song’s chorus – ‘London is the place for me’ – forms the conclusion of the Pathé newsreel, thus giving Kitchener’s calypso the last word…”
In his text, Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies, Graham MacPhee adds background to this narrative of arrival: “The music of calypsonians like Lord Kitchener and Lord Beginner captures the complex mix of optimism and disappointment, inclusion and exclusion, experienced by the Windrush generation. Calypso, a musical form associated with the Trinidad carnival, traditionally had lyrics that addressed topical events and concerns, providing a means of popular expression and communication that circumvented the official channels of colonial culture. Once transplanted to Britain, calypso continued to provide sharp-eyed, witty and often poignant commentary on the daily lives of its practitioners and audiences, as well as celebrating the national and international events that most concerned them. In a song composed onboard the first Windrush voyage, Lord Kitchener famously sang that ‘London is the place for me’ and that ‘English people are very sociable’, declaring that ‘I am glad to know my mother country’. The song expresses the expectation of colonial subjects who had been educated in British history, literature and culture, and had been encouraged to view Britain not as an alien occupier but as the ‘mother country’. But after the experience of living in a cramped, expensive and hard to find lodgings in Britain, Kitchener would sing ‘Me landlady’s too rude… she likes to intrude’, comically articulating the common experience of coldness, exploitation and restrictive supervision and surveillance that defined a central area of conflict for migrants, housing.”
Among the noteworthy takeaways from this intervention involving Lord Kitchener is its overlapping of foreboding with hope in song, the imbrication occurring at the start of the connected sequence that would today become a chorus to the troubled narrative facing the Windrush generation in Britain. That the recent events involving this pioneering group have turned into such a nightmare is as unsavoury as it is detectable in hindsight when one looks at the ambivalence Pathé’s cameras captured when Lord Kitchener, in his impromptu performance, put into song the irony of arrival. It is unfortunate this arrival remains clouded with the travails of the thousands affected by such a hostile, modern-day deportation policy, which last month saw British Prime Minister Theresa May apologising to Caribbean leaders, and which led to the resignation of Home Secretary Amber Rudd.
That the MV Empire Windrush became the vessel for the start of this narrative, as Wikipedia points out, occurred out of nothing less than an opportunistic moment. The ship, en route from Australia to England via the Atlantic, docked in Kingston, Jamaica, to pick up servicemen who were on leave. Its passenger capacity was far from full, and as Wikipedia reports, “an opportunistic advertisement was placed in a Jamaican newspaper offering cheap transport on the ship for anybody who wanted to come and work in the UK”. Word got around Kingston, and many former servicemen seized the opportunity “to return to Britain with the hopes of rejoining the RAF, while others decided to make the journey just to see what England was like”. According to this report, 1,027 passengers began disembarking when the ship docked at the Port of Tilbury, near London, on June 21, 1948, and gives a different figure for the commonly cited total of 492 West Indian immigrants who landed on the terra firma of Essex that day: “A commonly given figure for the number of West Indian immigrants on board is 492. However, the ship's records, kept in the United Kingdom National Archives indicate 802 of the passengers gave their last place of residence as a country in the Caribbean.”
Despite the forward-looking line in Lord Kitchener’s calypso, London is the place for me: “London this lovely city… I am glad to know my mother country… Darling, London, that’s the place for me”, the arrival of the MV Empire Windrush “immediately prompted complaints from some members of parliament”, with the first pieces of legislation controlling immigration later passed in 1962. Notable among the passengers were Sam Beaver King, who arrived from Jamaica in his 20s, and who would become the first black Mayor of Southwark in London; also on board with Lord Kitchener were Lord Beginner, Lord Woodbine, and Mona Baptiste. Incredibly, there were two stowaways on board – one of them Evelyn Wauchope, a 39-year-old dressmaker, discovered seven days out of Kingston.
Sources for this exploration: Michael C. Frank’s, Migrant Literature and/as Cultural Change: The Case of “London Is the Place for Me; The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/16/lord-kitchener-empire-windrush;
Graham MacPhee’s, Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies; and Wikipedia.