Like a Tree, Walking by Vahni Capildeo

Author:Vahni Capildeo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

WINDRUSH REFLECTIONS

I. Windrush Lineage

They came in earlier ships,

Mahadai’s ancestors and mine,

with hope, and by imperialist design;

and I am too young to have seen them

dying, as she says, on streets.

I am resigned to dreaming them

wherever Victorian iron

palisades the public squares

like spears. I take her word

that the bread they died wanting

was British; the languages

and laws denied them were British,

for a quarter of the globe

rose pink to cry empire,

havoc, and natural resource.

This was recent.

Recent enough: my cousin

saw them too. The finish

of those ships overlapping

as ships ineluctably do

with others, keening the curled

wake with a forward-looking wave.

The sea is like this.

What you expect nobody

can expect. What you accept

nobody can’t accept.

What the great hungry puzzle

stamped with a crown is

must be big enough to see

big enough to ignore.

Why wouldn’t you

take a canoe, a pirogue,

carrack, caravel, ocean

liner, yacht, banana boat,

naval destroyer, oil tanker

or cruise ship, why wouldn’t you?

When survival becomes

an acquired taste, improvement

a second skin, and home

is a long-distance love affair

with loss, and home is an arranged

marriage to glorious, unseen London?

Windrush wasn’t the first.

The voyage was not an arrow

flying one way to lodge in sorrow.

Island people met island

people on the docks. Some were there

long time. Some stayed. Some went back.

Twelve to a room, cold in welcome,

post-war Britain already was home

by birthright: documentation

was not a prize or a promise

for this generation born under

the far-fetched Union Jack. Citizens

drilled in the hymns and nursery rhymes,

sweepings of a dust-devil map?

Singer, soldier, fabric designer,

novelist, nurse, BBC presenter,

stowaway, activist, carnival maker,

lawyer, bus driver, self-reinventor,

brought up as British in sightline and grip

crossing to Britain, the way some move

to Leeds from York. Surely. Sure. No more.

Sugar brickwork, tobacco boulevards

and bloody wool are the well-known parts

making Albion’s very groundsong

a subclass of Caribbean harmonies.

It takes a special effort

to tune out the transatlantic

jumbie jumble ripple

in the Humber and the Thames.

Hear now: Lord Beginner. Lord

Kitchener. Sam Selvon. V.S. Naipaul.

Mikey Smith, stoned to death in Jamaica.

Una Marson, ruling the airwaves.

Wilson Harris. The nationality

act in one of its ever-revisable

revisions. And a prime minister,

and a journalist…

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