I am with the white woman who once again is not the same white woman. It seem an obvious thing to say, but sometimes we must say the obvious: not every white woman is the same white woman; and not every black man is the same black man. Our racial identities matter, but plenty times it is the personalities behind those identities that matter even more. It is our personalities that make us use our black-man-ness or our white-woman-ness in such different ways, as shield and as spear. Now it is a well-known phenomenon that when the turtles come onto land they seem to cry – not no cow-bawling mind you! The beach isn’t suddenly full of the wailings of turtles. It is just a polite drop of water moving down their eyes as if these mothers are experiencing all the pain and joy of homecoming. We are told now that there is no emotion attached to this eyewater. It is just biology – the removing of excess salt from their bodies, and also a way to protect their eyes from the sand. The white woman beside me however is really crying. Real tears. Real emotion. She is upset by a man who is not me, but it may as well have been. The man had written this thing about the white woman and his words had moved like a cutlass, but it was many years ago and I am surprised that the white woman is still so upset by it. She cries as if this thing had happened yesterday. I know I do not have the right to say how long pain should last, or what we have the right to be upset about, but these days I find it harder and harder to extend sympathy to the white woman. I cannot find in me the tongue to say, Daughter of Zion, lift up thine head, because –Lord forgive me – I do not think of her as a Daughter of Zion. I think she is Daughter of another place. Like the sea turtles, she too had migrated. And then she started writing these books, and they were very good books. She had been back before – often – but now she came back as a writer and seemed to discover so many things about the self same place where she had been born. The white woman wrote an article about this coming back, about finding out to her great surprise that on these rocks that we call islands that we call home that there were actually writers. Who would have believed such a thing? Writers who live on rocks! And not only that – some of them were actually quite good! He thought about this white woman who was born on these rocks but who had become a writer elsewhere and so did not seem to know things. He could not forgive the white woman for her naiveté. His annoyance grew and became its own article. His article was many times larger than the small stub the white woman had written. In the man’s article he calls the white woman a modern-day Columbus, for she had discovered what was already there. Upon reading this the white woman had cried for days and days, and even years later sitting on a beach and watching the turtles, she is still crying. She tell me again how the wicked man has ruined her. She tell me again that what the wicked man has written is libellous. She tell me again that she was tempted to file a big fat lawsuit gainst the man, but I think whichever lawyer she did talk to and who tell her that such a case was winnable was a samfy man, a merchant of snake oil, who did only want to take away what little money the white woman did have in her pockets. In any case, I glad she did not sue, for how would that have looked? A white writer from foreign sues a black man in the Caribbean – for what? Forgetting his place? Because he had the audacity and was renk enough to roll up all his smallness and blackness and use it as a weapon against her? She would not have survived the backlash. There was a time when I did sympathise with the white woman who is also my friend. I used to tell her yes, yes, the man’s words were harsh…because they really was harsh, but then I would add softly…even though they were true. You understand that, right? There was truth in his words. She didn’t ever hear the last part. I suspect now, she could hear little beyond the sound of her own heart breaking. Every year I would try to say it a little bit louder: there was truth in the man’s words. You hurt him too! Do you understand that? You hurt him. You hurt me! But she would never hear that sentence. She did not know how to. Always, it was as if she needed me to see her pain, but never the place beyond it.
‘THE WHITE WOMEN AND THE LANGUAGE OF BEES’ by Kei Miller for PREE Lit (May 2018)