Kamil Ali

middle of the pond depicted a dancer at rest with open arms. Buckets dipped into the pond provided water to cook, bathe, and wash after the expulsion of bodily waste. Square-cut old newspapers hung off a hook-shaped wire attached to the toilet wall to wipe away excess water after each wash. “Gawd, Buntin.” Norma stopped snoring. “Yo belly rotten.”
“Ah you feed mi di spile-food fuh dinnah.” Buntin’s tummy grumbled. “Mi gah fuh use de po-po.
“Haul yo tail to de latrin.” Norma covered her nose with her nightie. “Yo wan people fuh get sick or wah?” She sucked her teeth. “Di posey is only fuh numbah wan.”
“Yuh guh falla mi?” Buntin released some pressure of built-up gas. “Or mi kyan use di po-po outside di house an wash am in di marnin.” Going past the pond at night made him uneasy.
“Lawd gih mi fait wid dis man.” Norma spun around to face her husband with the nightie held at her nose and mouth. “Yuh guh kill mi wid dah piezon gyas.”
Covered in cold sweat, Buntin hopped off the bed and grabbed the small kerosene night-lantern from a nail on the wall.
“Ah weh yo ah guh wid dah lamp?” Norma raised her voice. “Yo know mi kyant sleep in de dark.” She gave him a long suck-teeth. “Ah wan full-moon night.” She glanced at the moonlight entering the room through cracks in the wooden wall. “Outside bright like ah day.”
Buntin returned the lamp to its place on the wall and scampered out of the backdoor. He glanced up at the moon in time to catch an opening in the rainclouds. The moonlight illuminated the pathway for a heart-pounding scurry past the pond without a side glance. He clambered onto the wooden toilet seat and squatted a split second before his intestines spewed its liquid contents through the hole in the seat.
A thick dark cloud plunged the backyard into blackness. A gust of wind shook the outhouse and rattled the zinc. The branches of large trees tapped the roof and the walls behind him. The village church’s tower clock banged midnight. A flash of streak lightning blinded him, and a clap of thunder made him jump. Large pellets of raindrops pounded the roof and opened the rusted holes to pass through and soak Buntin to the bone.
When the storm suddenly disappeared, the moonlight brightened the backyard with a soft yellow hue. Buntin gasped when the man-tree turned to face him. The outstretched arms moved forward in a gesture of welcome. A haunting female voice in the distance behind Buntin turned his blood cold. He prepared to flee to the safety of his home.
Before he could make a dash to the house, croaking frogs appeared from every direction and lined the pond’s edge. Other nocturnal animals joined them. Fireflies formed a canopy above the water and emitted flashing chandelier lights that reflected off the rippling surface of the water and the eyes of night birds in the trees. When the sweet serenade drew closer, Buntin aborted his escape plans and remained hidden in the safety of the outhouse. His mission to the latrine changed from visitor to nervous spectator.
A soft padded landing of a creature on the roof and its bright orange emanation lit the interior of the toilet and the surrounding area. The harmonious announcement of its arrival silenced every other sound. Buntin pressed his back against a wall. He did not move or breathe. The mournful melody pierced his heart and overwhelmed him with sadness.
The glow floated off the roof and glided toward the pond. The man-tree’s inviting arms followed its movement. Buntin’s heart fluttered when the orange ball took shape. He gazed in disbelief at the mythical firebird. The majestic bird’s radiance highlighted every detail of the pond and the immediate proximity to paint a portrait of nature’s astounding beauty to match its own. It’s long tail spread like the trail of an evening gown when it started a slow descent into the arms of the man-tree.
Once locked in an embrace, the man-tree and firebird swayed and swirled to the bird’s song. The night creatures joined in the melody with their own sounds. Another storm brewed in the distance and the creatures dispersed while the dancers made a final bow to each other. The firebird sailed into the night sky and disappeared before a heavy shower of rain brought the curtain down on the spectacular show.
Buntin related the event to Norma, who said she had heard of the phenomenon and suggested a visit to her hundred-year-old great-grandmother. The centenarian told Buntin that he had witnessed the legendary ‘Ballet of the Elements’ that occurs once every hundred years. The dance, which happens at random locations, realigns nature’s balance of earth from the tree-roots, water from the pond, wind from the storm, and fire from the bird.
“By di way, di belly-wuck nah cum by accident.” Her wrinkled lips parted to reveal a toothless smile. “Di wattah wah yo use fuh mek di limewattah fuh drink wid dinnah gih yo di runnins fuh mek yo di wan human witness wah di dance need fuh wuk.”
“Gud ting mi nah bin drink no limewattah.” Norma shook her head. “But mi sarry mi miss di greatest show pun Urt.”
After the incident, Buntin built a bench at the rim of the waterhole where he and Norma spent many a romantic evening humming the firebird’s song. They admired the man-tree and the creatures that suckled the pond’s crystal clear water.

By Romeo Kaseram

Andrea Levy was born on March 7, 1956, in London, England. Levy’s parents Winston and Amy were of Jamaican descent, the lineage containing African, Scottish, and Jewish ancestry. Levy’s father journeyed to England in 1948 on the Empire Windrush; her mother joined him soon after, travelling to London on a banana boat. Speaking with Caribbean Beat on her mixed heritage, Levy told Marina Salandy-Brown: “Levy is a Jewish name. Jews went to Jamaica in the 1600s. My paternal grandfather was born Orthodox Jewish, from a very strict family, but after fighting in the First World War he became a Christian, and came back and married my grandmother. His family disowned him, so I don’t know much about them.”
Levy grew up in Highbury, north London, in what was a typical working-class upbringing, Wikipedia reports; she attended Highbury Hill Grammar School, and later studied textile design and weaving at Middlesex Polytechnic. Backgrounding her early life was an identity formed in an in-between space – as Levy notes in Caribbean Beat, “[My parents] were not black, but coloured. They spent all their time trying to distance themselves from black, low-class Jamaicans. I would ask my mother what that meant, but she couldn’t explain. We were supposed to be high-class, but we lived on a council estate and were as poor as church mice. My mother taught us to be very wary of the black people, and to mix with the whites. She could never accept that they didn’t understand her, when she thought she was very well-spoken.” Levy adds: “I spent the first 21 years of my life thinking of myself as a white person, with no back-up at home when we encountered racism. We were one of the darkest families there, among the Greek Cypriots and white working-class, but the children played together in the street – until someone would come along and not like ‘darkies’, and we would be ostracised. With hindsight, it was not a good place for them to have located us.”
Levy’s early career saw her in roles as a costume assistant, working part-time in the costume departments of the BBC and the Royal Opera House; she also worked as dresser, and receptionist, and later as a designer, with her husband, Bill Mayblin, in their graphic design company.
The pressure building inside this ambivalence of identity hit crisis point when Levy was 26. Richard Lea, writing in The Guardian, tells us it occurred at a racial awareness session, where Levy had a “rude awakening” with colleagues at an Islington sex education project. As Levy later wrote, “We were asked to split into two groups, black and white. I walked over to the white side of the room. It was, ironically, where I felt most at home – all my friends, my boyfriend, my flatmates, were white. But my fellow workers had other ideas and I found myself being beckoned over by people on the black side. With some hesitation I crossed the floor.” It was a traumatising experience, and 12 years later, Levy translated this experience into her writing.
Up to the age of 23, Levy had not read a book. Her reading came afterwards, and as Wikipedia reports, soon she was reading “excessively”. Her writing did not begin until her mid-30s, following her father’s death. It was not therapeutic writing, Wikipedia reports – instead, it was an internal search to understand her origins in the denial of her ancestry, and her Jamaican roots. As the BBC reports, “Realising there were things to say about her Caribbean heritage and experience of integration, she joined a creative writing class,” adding it was here where Levy discovered a “voice she never knew she had”. Levy continued in creative writing classes for seven years.
Her writings are autobiographical, and in 1994, Levy published Every Light In The House Burnin', the story of a child of Jamaican parents in the north London of the 1960s dealing with her father’s cancer. Never Far From Nowhere followed in 1996, a story of two sisters of Jamaican parents. Then BBC notes Levy’s “pivotal” trip to Jamaica, which was made in the 1990s “to research her past and find the extended family her parents – ashamed of their Caribbean past – had never mentioned”; here she met many relatives she had not known.
Based on this journey of self-discovery, Levy wrote Fruit of the Lemon (1999), where the protagonist, Faith, a textiles graduate of Jamaican descent, journeys to England on a banana boat. Significantly, as the BBC notes, one message in Fruit of the Lemon is Faith assertively proclaiming an identity of the in-between, which is neither Jamaican nor English, saying: “I am the bastard child of Empire, and I will have my day.”
Levy came to prominence with Small Island (2004), which the BBC describes as her “break-out” novel. Says the BBC: “It is the story of two couples – one white, one black – who become bound up in each others’ lives. It is told from the perspective of each character in turn, addressing history from multiple perspectives… In it she paints on a broader canvas than before, skilfully charting the sense of disappointment felt by her parents’ generation. Britain and Jamaica, they found, were both small islands – but they did not easily mix.” According to the BBC, “Many stories from her parents’ lives went straight into the book, including her father’s failure to meet his wife off the banana boat and her mother’s humiliating rejection by the teaching profession.” Mike Phillips, writing in The Guardian in 2004, sums up the novel’s success and its purposeful reach, saying, “[Small Island] records some of the most unpleasant racist aspects of the period without displaying any sense of polemical intent, partly because her reliance on historical fact gives Levy a distance which allows her to be both dispassionate and compassionate.” For this novel, Levy won the Orange Prize, and the Whitbread Book of the Year; it sold more than a million copies, and was adapted for BBC television in 2009.
Sadly, Levy passed away last month, February 14, at 62, after battling metastatic breast cancer for 15 years.

Sources for this exploration: The BBC – www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-46897741; The Guardian – www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/15/andrea-levy-chronicler-of-the-windrush-generation-dies-aged-62; The Caribbean Beat – www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-70/was-not-small-story#axzz5fb7dUXoR; and Wikipedia; Levy’s website is located at www.andrealevy.co.uk.

 

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