-Y-
ONE ON ONE.
Tarzan is dying.
In the long run, it's about what we do with each of our own little individual steps. The singular soul facing the void, the chaos, the problem, the opportunity.
The skull speaks: "You know I went into those jungles alone? I faced..."
He pauses. His voice a weak whisper. I can barely hear him. I am forced to draw closer.
No. Nobody is forcing me. I'm curious. I want to hear what he has to say.
"I faced..."
He draws a difficult breath. Perhaps he faced the animals. The loneliness.
"No, none of that. I faced..."
At first I am surprised that he has read my thoughts and then I remember that Tarzan is in my head.
"I faced myself and learned to live with the people, live with the land. I did it. I jolly well did it. I lived. They loved me. I think. Maybe not as much as you love me. But, me, by myself. In the bush, I did it."
"And now?" I ask him.
"And now? Don't leave me." He says.
And then. Silence.
***
When the plane arrived in Ghana we needed a visa -- US$50 each for Nia and me. Very official stamps are inked into our USA passports: Visitor's Permit Form F. Valid for 30 days.
Three centuries ago when I left, the trip required neither visa nor passport. Just survival. If I endured, I went butt naked, headfirst into the new world.
Our heads were literally our bags. Everything and the only things we could take on this journey, we carried in our heads. In our hair. Social ideals and okra seeds. An indelibly black sense of soul and sound. But I did not need to come to Ghana to know this.
To return to Ghana on this trip required a yellow fever shot and a weekly regimen of malaria medicine. When we got here we had to avoid the water and our stomachs were too weak to eat all of the food. Again, I did not need to come to Ghana to know that. So why did I need to come to Ghana?
I didn't really need to, I could have lived, struggled and died without ever having made this trip. But I wanted to kill Tarzan.
I really, really wanted to kill Tarzan. So, I signed up. I volunteered for the job.
Once here I have found that the only way to kill this alien is to get in touch with myself. To feel. To taste. To smell. To hear. To see. Myself. To choose to be cleaved, grafted, bandaged, stuck, pressed back into the earth of my origin, into the very mud and dust of my history. To kill Tarzan I must choose to grow Africa within me and create me within Africa.
The Tarzan in me only dies when the Africa in me arrives -- otherwise I never grapple with all the psychosis of my African American upbringing. I never confront a major part of me: what I think, what I feel, my limitations, my potentials. Tarzan will never die unless and until I confront and secure the history of my existence -- including the trauma of birth.
No one can be born for me.
No one else may feel the need for birth completion that I do.
No one else may volunteer to put the knife in Tarzan.
But what others do or don't do in no way dictates the road I will travel.
I will fear no evil, for Africa is within me.
***
I know that London Bridge is falling down, falling down, that Babylon time a come, that the eagle can't fly forever, that indeed there is an end to his story. The wheels of the West are rusting.
The reality is that we can not continue to live in America with the social deterioration, mean spiritedness, and crass materialism which is polluting our individual and collective lives. We are literally a nation of drug addicts (alcohol and tobacco chief among our drugs of choice, with over-the-counter pain killers and headache remedies running a close third). We are suffering horrendous rates of violence and disease. There is a widening economic gap at a time when many of our major urban centers teeter on the brink of implosion: aging physical infrastructures such as bridges, sewer systems, housing; corrupt political administration; and increasing ethnic conflict. Something has got to give.
Shine, Shine, Shine, my sweet brotherman. The last time the ship went down you swam back to America. This time as the Titanic goes down on the last go round, some of us will swim back home again, only this time we'll be recrossing the Atlantic, each of us cutting our own stroke, forward into an ancient place our spirits know as Africa.
***
Should Black people go back to Africa?
Yes! And NO.
Yes. We in the diaspora should make the pilgrimage at least once in our lifetime. Christians go to Bethlehem. Muslims go to Mecca. Jews go to Israel. The diaspora should go to Africa. To know and learn, sense and experience from whence we came. To touch the essence of our future. Future because to the degree that Africa is strong, the whole of the diaspora will also benefit, and to the degree that Africa fails to develop, the conditions of those of us in the diaspora will continue our spiraling descent into social, material, and spiritual despair.
NO. We in the diaspora don't need to give up any of our hard won benefits, meager as they may be in comparative terms. Besides, most of us are addicted to the West. It is senseless to advocate a mass movement prior to preparations being made both by the host to receive the diaspora, and by the diaspora to embrace Africa.
To return unannounced and unexpected is to court disaster. Numerous are the tales and stories of those who romantically returned to Africa only to end up "returning back home" to the industrialized West discouraged and disillusioned.
Yes, we need a mental return and a spiritual return. In fact, rather than a return it might make more sense to think of what we need in terms of linkages.
We need to actualize linkages with the continent -- linkages that would facilitate not just the movement of people, but also the movement of ideas, of resources and responsibilities, and, most of all, facilitate the uniting of history, identity, purpose, and future. The real transition will not be a return back to Africa but a stepping forward with Africa, moving into the 21st century with Africa the continent and Africa the diaspora united.
I don't think the majority, or even a significant minority, of us can or will make this transition at this time. But as the 90s expire, more of us will seek other venues within which to live, work, struggle and die.
On the other hand, as Marcus Garvey demonstrated, millions of our people are ready to move. Millions of us recognize the bankruptcy of the West.
What it took in Garvey's time and what it will take now is simply one person striking when the conditions are right. Individuals standing, and in standing, inspiring others to rise.
Given the ripe historic moment, it only takes two: me and the other person I encounter. That is how history is made, how babies are born.
It only takes two you know. It only takes two.
I am one and Africa is another. I the diaspora. Africa the motherland.
I am Africa. And every African I encounter is the diaspora. Conversely and dialectically, every African is Africa and I am the diaspora seeking union.
Africa and I. Africa is I.
I and I.
Is all it takes.
Two.
I am one. And Africa is the other.
-Z-
CAN I ARTICULATE A NEW LANGUAGE?
There is so much more to tell, but I've run out of words.
The colonial alphabet is ended and I need another language to communicate the balance of my experiences, the connections which elude this vocabulary, the distances and disruptions so somber.
I need a new language. Not more words in proper English. But a whole other way to communicate.
Am I up to the task of relearning my ancestral tongue, of transforming my colonial tongue, of, perhaps, even creating a new tongue, creating a new language?
***
I consciously resist romanticizing Ghana.
My feelings, my thoughts, yes, even my dreams: I rein them in.
We have had a guided tour. Given the limits of their resources, the planning committee has rolled out the akwaaba mat. We stayed in hotels and guest houses. We rode in private buses, vans and cars. We had major meals provided for us. And we had money in our pockets, and spent freely. This one was like riding with the training wheels on and an elder holding you steady.
At the same time, I remember poet Jayne Cortez telling me I had a Ghanaian "vibe" and would probably like Ghana.
We all came from somewhere(s) specific and those specific essentials remain embedded in the core of our personalities both collectively and individually. Stronger in some than others. Barely felt in a few, but the African seed resides inside. Whether wilted or blooming, seedling sprouting or torn out of the soil of us leaving a gapping wound, Africa is, nonetheless, in one way or another, Africa is in all of us. And that is our blessing no oppressor can permanently curse.
***
Thinking back to the dungeon, I've been to the castle a number of times since that first night.
In the day light it is different. When there is not a large group of emotionally charged people with inchoate expectations fueling your imagination, the recently painted castle looks different. When you are there for a music program in the courtyard. It's different. This is why we need formal pilgrimages: planned tours that put us in touch with the people, places and experiences of Ghana at a level that is impossible to reach on a chance, individual encounter.
Another trip, even another conference in Ghana would be different.
I know that if I come here alone and spend days and nights bumping into unplanned experiences, my trip will be different.
I also know that time and distance will bring about a change.
I remember Brasil and Barbados -- thinking how I could live there. Or literally sitting under a coconut tree at Oyster Bay in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania dreaming and scheming. Even the fierce lushness of Surinam. There are a lot of places I could live.
The above notwithstanding, I am nevertheless thinking seriously about working in Ghana and living here at least part time. Time will tell and real world conditions will supply the motivation or discouragement.
***
I can't just up and go back to Africa. Someone else, maybe. But me. Every move I make needs to count in the computer I carry in my heart, and if I don't really feel it, I won't do it. Besides, there is so much work to be done in the States, so much is needed. But then, the truth is, neither the work nor the need has anything to do with the United States. Everywhere our people are there is so much work to do, so much is needed.
Each of us who wants to work for our people has the option, indeed, has the responsibility of choosing where we can most efficiently and effectively contribute. Not a mandate to be here, there, or any specific where, but a choice to be continuously evaluated and exercised as local and global conditions change, as doors of opportunity in various spheres are pried open and/or sealed shut.
Finally what will make the ultimate difference is the luck of the draw. Do I decide to hold or to fold. To move or to hang, even if only for the time being. I will sleep on it. Who knows what will inspire me, or anyone, to go one way or another. Each African minute is explosive.
It's been over a week since I received, or sought, any information about what is going on in the States. Perhaps when I recross the Atlantic back into the new world of the same old same old, perhaps the conditions will inform me.
We'll see.
***
Meanwhile, I know this much: Nia loves it here.
Nia blends in so well. The children love her, and she they. They ask her to write and give her their addresses on small scraps of paper, fervently hoping that she will not forget them. People spontaneously talk to Nia on the street. Once, in the township just outside Elmina, Nia stopped to dance in the street and later as we walked around, a woman sitting by a streetside stand pumped her arms in rhythmic motion and softly called to Nia, "you dance. You dance."
There is something in her that clicks in this environment. My habit of aloofness, observing from a distance in loud silence is harder to integrate into this reality. I'm comfortable but very little of me immediately blends with anything. I am the outsider by temperament and by choice. Many writers tend to be that way. But Nia connects on another plane. Perhaps it is Nia's calmness and quietness, her unhurried walk and her patient softness, so much like a Ghanaian.
***
My son Tutashinda is a master at working jigsaw puzzles, at figuring out which piece goes where. What fits together. How to work on different clusters simultaneously, a little here, a little over there.
I've seen him pick up a piece and somehow correctly sense what pile to put it in. He can see that way. And he is quick.
Can the puzzle that I am ever be put together -- indeed, was my puzzle ever whole?
How can the various pieces of Africa be fitted into one -- do the Pan African pieces fit without being forced? Or must the pieces be reshaped? Is Pan Africanism possible? What prosthesis -- artificial limbs, manufactured parts; what organ donations and heart transplants will be necessary; what long term therapy to make the body whole and healthy? Can it be done -- especially given we were never together in the first place? Africa has a need for, but no history of, unity.
This father needs his son. All parents need their children. We Africans seeking wholeness, need our children far, far more than our children need us.
I need him to guide me. Indeed, he is my guide, my compass, one of my certain ways of knowing if what I'm doing will mean anything beyond my own personal desires.
Whatever we find in Africa will be futile if it does not enrich the lives of our children, our grandchildren, the whole of our future, at the same time and to the same extent that the search honors the lives of our ancestors -- to investigate the possibilities of this aspiration is why I went to Ghana.
Accra & Cape Coast, Ghana
New Orleans, LA, USA
December 1994/January 1995
—kalamu ya salaam