A Burst of Light Read online

  In addition to being a tremendous high, these days are such a thrilling example to me of the real power of a small group of Black women of the Diaspora in action. Four community women, meeting after work for almost a year, dreamed, planned, financed, and executed this conference without institutional assistance. It has been an outstanding success, so much information and affirmation for those of us who participated as well as for those of us who attended.

  It was a very centering experience for me, an ideal place for me to step out again, and I was so proud to be a part of it, and to speak and read my work as a Caribbean woman.

  April 5, 1986

  ST. CROIX

  Yesterday was the eighteenth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s murder. Carnegie Hall, Duke Ellington, the Tougaloo Choir. Their young Black voices tear in my blood to this day. What the world needs now is love. . . . There was still a space left for hope then, but the shore was fading fast. I wonder where all those kids from Tougaloo are now who stood so brave and tearful and together in their aloneness. I wonder how each of their lives is being influenced/formed/informed by the emotions and events upon that stage of Carnegie Hall that night King died. I wonder if I will ever hear from any one of them again.

  April 20, 1986

  ST. CROIX

  Blanchie’s birthday. When Blanche had her mastectomy last year, it was the first time that I had to face, in a woman I loved, feelings and fears I had faced within my own self, but never dealt with externally. Now I had to speak to these feelings in some way that was meaningful and urgent in the name of my love. Somehow I had known for the past eight years that someday it would be this way, that personal salvation of whatever kind is never just personal.

  I talked with Blanchie today over the phone about this feeling I have that I must rally everything I know, made alive and immediate with the fire of what is.

  I have always been haunted by the fear of not being able to reach the women I am closest to, of not being able to make available to the women I love most dearly what I can make available to so many others. The women in my family, my closest friends. If what I know to be true cannot be of use to them, can it ever have been said to be true at all? On the other hand, that lays a terrible burden on all of us concerned, doesn’t it?

  It is a matter of learning languages, or of learning to use them with precision to do what needs to be done with them, and it is the Blanchie in myself to whom I need to speak with such urgency. It’s one of the great things friends are for each other when you’ve been very close for a long time.

  And of course cancer is political—look at how many of our comrades have died of it during the last ten years! As warriors, our job is to actively and consciously survive it for as long as possible, remembering that in order to win, the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive. Our battle is to define survival in ways that are acceptable and nourishing to us, meaning with substance and style. Substance. Our work. Style. True to our selves.

  What would it be like to be living in a place where the pursuit of definition within this crucial part of our lives was not circumscribed and fractionalized by the economics of disease in America? Here the first consideration concerning cancer is not what does this mean in my living, but how much is this going to cost?

  April 22, 1986

  ST. CROIX

  I got a letter from Ellen Kuzwayo this morning. Her sister in Botswana has died. I wish I were in Soweto to put my arms around her and rest her head on my shoulder. She sounds so strong and sanguine in her unshakable faith, yet so much alone. In the fabric of horrors that she and the other women live through daily in South Africa, this loss takes its place among so many others, at the same time particular and poignant.

  May 8, 1986

  NEW YORK CITY

  Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone; who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.

  It takes all of my selves, working together, to integrate what I learn of women of Color around the world into my consciousness and work. It takes all of my selves working together to effectively focus attention and action against the holocaust progressing in South Africa and the South Bronx and Black schools across this nation, not to speak of the streets. Laying myself on the line. It takes all of my selves working together to fight this death inside me. Every one of these battles generates energies useful in the others.

  I am on the cusp of change, and the curve is shifting fast.

  In the bleakest days I am kept afloat, maintained, empowered, by the positive energies of so many women who carry the breath of my loving like firelight in their strong hair.

  May 23, 1986

  NEW YORK CITY

  I spoke with Andrea in New Orleans this morning. She and Diana are helping to organize a Black Women’s Book Fair. Despite its size, there is not one feminist bookstore in the whole city. She’s very excited about the project, and it was a real charge talking to her about it. There are so many young Black women across this country stepping out wherever they may be and making themselves felt within their communities in very real ways. These women make the early silence and the doubts and the wear and tear of it all worth it. I feel like they are my inheritors, and sometimes I breathe a sigh of relief that they exist, that I don’t have to do it all.

  It’s a two-way street, and even I don’t always realize it. Like the little sister from AA who stood up at my poetry reading last week and talked about how much courage I’d given her, and I was quaking in my boots because when she began I’d thought she was about to lay a heavy cancer rap on me in public, and I just wasn’t quite ready for that yet. I feel very humbled behind that little episode. I want to acknowledge all those intricate connections between us by which we sustain and empower each other.

  June 20, 1986

  BONNIEUX,FRANCE

  How incredibly rich to be here in the south of France with the Zamani Soweto Sisters from South Africa. Gloria and I became acquainted with them through Ellen Kuzwayo and our fundraising work with the Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa. They are one of the groups we help support through contributions. I’m only sorry that Ellen couldn’t be here also, but at least I had a chance to share time and space with her in London on June 16th, the anniversary of the Soweto Uprising.

  I learn tremendous courage from these women, from their laughter and their tears, from their grace under constant adversity, from their joy in living which is one of their most potent weapons, from the deft power of their large, overworked bodies and their dancing, swollen feet. In this brief respite for us all made possible by Betty Wolpert’s kindness, these women have taught me so much courage and perspective.

  June 21, 1986

  BONNIEUX

  Sweet Solstice, and again the goddess smiles upon me. I am sitting in the stone-ringed yard of Les Quelles, a beautiful old reclaimed silk factory, now a villa. Gloria and the women of the Zamani Soweto Sisters surround me, all of us brilliant and subtle under the spreading flowers of a lime-tea tree. It looks and feels like what I’ve always imagined the women’s compound in some African village to have been, once. Some of us drink tea, some are sewing, sweeping the dirt ground of the yard, hanging out clothes in the sunlight at the edge of the enclosure, washing, combing each other’s hair. Acacia blossoms perfume the noon air as Vivian tells the stories behind the tears in her glowing amber eyes.

  The young students who do not ask their parents’ permission to run in the streets and die. The wealthy Black undertaker who lends his funeral hearses to the police to transport the bodies of the slain children.

  The three little children who saw a heavy-armored Caspir barreling down the road in Dube and ran to hide behind the silk-cotton tree at the edge of the yard, too young to know that they could be seen as the tank rolled down the road. The blond policeman leaning out from the side of the tank to fire behind the tree at the little ones as they hid, reaching back over his shoulder to fire again as the vehicle rolled along, just to m
ake sure the babies were all dead.

  She tells of the mothers in her street who stay home from work risking deportation to the barrenness of an alien “homeland,” trudging from police station to police station all over Soweto asking, “Are my children here? Please sirs, this is her picture this is his school name he is nine years of age are my children here?” Her son leaving detention dragging his heels forever, achilles tendons torn and festering from untreated police dog bites.

  Ruth, majestic and proud as Mujaji, ancient rain queen of the Lovedu. “I write my thoughts down on little scraps of paper,” she says, talking about where the ideas come from for her intricate quilts. “And sometimes I pull them all out and read them and then I say no, that’s not it at all and I throw them right away. But other times I smooth them out and save them for the quilts. I would like to keep a whole book of these stories from my life, but then a quilt is like a book of many stories done up together, and many people can read it all at the same time.”

  Gentle, strong, beautiful—the women of Soweto imprint their faces and their courage upon me. They enhance this French air, a cloud of soap and cosmetics and the lightest hint of hair cream. The knowledge of struggle never distant. Womanliness pervades this space.

  Thembi, called Alice, flames under her taut sweetness, walking a dangerously narrow path too close to the swamp where there are bright lights flashing like stars just below the murky surface in harmony with the voices of astonished frogs in the green night. She begs me to release her from the pain of not doing enough for our own, of not making our daughters into ourselves. She tells me to dream upon all of their stories and write them a poem.

  Petal, whose eyes are often too quiet as she moves about, short, solid, and graceful. We discuss love, comparing tales, and her eyes flash, amused and aglow. Other times they are wary, filled with distrust and grieving. Petal, who bore seven children and only two live. Who was tortured for weeks by the South African police. Who was helped by the International Hospital for Torture Victims in Switzerland.

  Sula, wry and generous, knows how to get any question answered with a gentle inescapable persistence. Sometimes she drinks a lot. Her first husband broke her heart, but she quickly married again. “The missionaries lied to us so much about our bodies,” she said, indignantly, “telling us they were dirty and we had to cover them up, and look now who is running about in bikinis on the Riviera, or naked and topless! I had a friend. . . ,” and she starts another story, like one most of these women tell, of a special woman friend who loved her past explaining.

  Sweet-faced Emily tells of the militant young comrades in Soweto, their defiance of the old ways, carrying their determination for change into the streets. She demonstrates for us a spirited and high-stepping rendition of their rousing machine-gun dance.

  She does not like to listen to the other women singing hymns. Emily, who loved her best friend so much she still cannot listen to the records they once enjoyed together, and it is five years already since her friend died.

  Linda of the hypnotic eyes who was questioned once by the South African police every single day for an entire month. About Zamani Soweto Sisters and subversive activities, such as a tiny ANC flag stitched on the little dead boy’s pocket in the corner of a funeral procession quilt. “The quilts tell stories from our own lives. We did not know it was forbidden to sew the truth, but we will caution the women never to stitch such a thing again. No, thank you, I do not wish to take a cup of tea with you.” I can hear her grave dignity speaking. She finishes the tale with a satisfied laugh.

  Linda has a nineteen-year-old daughter. The women joke and offer us their daughters to introduce to our sons and nephews in America. No one offers us their sons for our daughters.

  Mariah lives next door to a famous woman writer in Soweto and offers to carry a letter to her from Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Posted mail from abroad so often does not reach its destination in Soweto. Round, quick, and with a brilliant smile, Mariah sits near the top of the Executive Board of Zamani. There is a presence about her of a successful African market woman, sharp, pleasant, outgoing, and awake to every opportunity.

  Sofia keeps the books. She is quietly watchful and speaks with that soft humor that is shared by many of the women. She lives and sews alone now that her children are grown and gone away. She likes the way Gloria does her hair, and they discuss different hair preparations. Her eyes are encouraging and attentive as she sits and sews with tiny, rhythmical stitches.

  Vibrant young Etta of the beautiful body dances excitement in our frequent spontaneous dancing. She is also learning to run the film cameras. Etta is always laughing and full of frolic, and some of the older women watch her and shake their heads with that particular Black women’s look. But mostly they laugh back, because Etta’s gaiety is so infectious. Her face turns serious as she discusses what she wants to do with her life back home.

  Helen is another one of the young ones, as they are called by everyone else. Their relationship to the other women is clearly one of respect, almost like daughters-in-law. And this is in addition to the warmth and mutual esteem evident between all the women. Helen already moves in a dignified and considered way, but she has twinkling and mischievous eyes and tells me confidentially that she is the naughtiest one of all.

  Rita, the last of the young ones, is quiet and small and rather proper. All the “mas” like her a lot, and smile approvingly at her. She is always helpful and soft-voiced, and really enjoys singing religious songs.

  Bembe, light-skinned and small-boned, cleans and irons all day and sometimes at night when she is disturbed about something, like their imminent trip home. She is Zulu, like Etta, and loves to dance. Butterfly marks across her cheeks suggest she has lacked vitamins for a long time.

  Hannah sings a spirited and humorous song about marriage being a stamping out of a woman’s freedom, just like her signature in the marriage register is a stamping out of her own name as written in the book of life. All the other women join in the high-spirited chorus with much laughter. This is one of their favorite songs. Hannah talks about mothers-in-law, and how sometimes when they finally get to have their own way, they take it out on their sons’ wives. And by tradition, the daughters-in-law must remain meek and helpful, blowing their lungs out firing the wood braziers and coal stoves for the rest of the family every morning. She tells of her own young self rising at 4:00 a.m., even on the morning after her wedding night, lighting the fire to fix her father-in-law his coffee. But she not only eventually stopped this, she even joined her daughter once in punching out her daughter’s philandering husband, caught in the act in his wife’s bed.

  Mary, the oldest woman in the group, is called Number One. Witty, wise, and soft-spoken, she says love and concern came to her very late in life, once she started to work with Zamani. She is very grateful for the existence of the group, a sentiment that is often expressed by many of the other women in various ways. When we part she kisses me on my lips. “I love you, my sister,” she says.

  Wassa, round-cheeked and matter-of-fact, talks of her fear of reentry into Johannesburg. “But at least we will be all together,” she says, “so if something happens to one of us the others can tell her people.” I remember Ellen talking of the horror of hitting Jo’burg alone, and how you never know what the South African police might be planning for you at the airport, nor why.

  The night before we part we swim in the pool beneath the sweet evening of the grapevines. “We are naked here in this pool now,” Wassa says softly, “and we will be naked when we go back home.” We told the women we would carry them in our hearts until we were together again. Everyone is anxious to go back home, despite the fear, despite the uncertainty, despite the dangers.

  There is work to be done.

  August 12, 1986

  NEW YORK CITY

  Wonderful news! My liver scan shows both tumors slightly diminished. It feels good to be getting on with my life. I feel vindicated without ever becoming complacent—this is on
ly one victory of a long battle in which I’ve got to expect to win some and lose some. But it does put a different perspective upon things to know that pain can be a sign of a disintegrating tumor. Of course, my oncologist is surprised and puzzled. He admits he doesn’t understand what is happening, but it is a mark of his good spirit that he is genuinely pleased for me, nonetheless. I’m very pleased for me, too.

  A good autumn coming, if I remember to take it easily. I have interesting classes, and SISA is planning a benefit this fall around the quilt Gloria and I brought back from the Zamani Soweto Sisters in Europe. I’ll be doing another benefit for Kitchen Table in Boston. That feels real good. It will be six years next month since the vision of KTP became a reality through the hard work of Barbara and Cherrie and Myrna and the others.

  August 15, 1986

  NEW YORK CITY

  Women of Color in struggle all over the world, our separateness, our connectedness, so many more options for survival. Whatever I call them, I know them for sister, mother, daughter, voice and teacher, inheritor of fire. Alice of Soweto cursing the mission songs: “We have our own political songs now for the young people to sing—no more damn forgiveness!” Her voice is almost hysterically alone in the shocked silence of the other hymn-singing women.

  Katerina stands in the Berlin hall, two hours into the discussion that follows the poetry reading by her and other Afro-German women. “I have had enough,” she says, “and yes, you may need to continue to air your feelings of racism because for you they are a new discovery here tonight. But I have known them and lived with them all of my life and tonight it is now time for me to go home.” And she walks down the aisle and out, straight and beautiful, with that fine and familiar Black woman’s audacity in the face of a totally unsupported situation.

  Rangitunoa, Maori tribal woman, standing to speak in her people’s sacred place, the marae. Women have not spoken here before because they have not known the ancient language. In the old days, women did not speak in the marae at all. Now this young woman who loves women stands to speak in the tongue of her people, eloquently alone and suspect in her elders’ eyes.