Communion and romantic friendships on the 5th floor over a portion of £3.50 chips. We pounded Harlem’s pavements and stood on the steps of Langston’s brownstone hoping to smell his kitchen awake, his name on the door still. 135th and Gil Scott-Heron. Have you ever seen the sun colour in five miles of concrete? A green-eyed sister sang to me about Black love in a uptown bookstore but I learned my accent from the BBC that I can’t pronounce and responded with cut off vowels, imitating a war of roses, feeling closer to my colonisers than ever. We were superheroes or revolutionaries rolling rizlas, I can’t remember the difference, but only in South London parks, on cheap blankets, on high hills. Homegrown. I choked myself on my 21st birthday with home truths, my throat was dry for 3 days, I stopped drinking. I saw Zora Howard read ‘Waffles’ twice with crispness similar to her chicken. Morrison, Baldwin and Díaz. Men that weren’t him said my name with urgency, believed in my thighs laid compensation and told me I would birth something each belonging to them. I preferred when I was too fat and they kept their distance with snakes around their necks in Brooklyn hallways. Now when the women are in bible class I obsess with illustration and comics book characters feeding a carnal appetite church never did.
“As black people we exist metaphorically and literally as the underside, the underclass. We are the unconscious of the entire Western world. If this is true, then where do we go? Where are our dreams? Where is our pain? Where do we heal?”
— Ntozake Shange, Moon-Marked and Touched by the Sun: Plays by African American Women
Leon G. Damas (1912–1978) was the first poet to “live Négritude”, according to the Senegalese poet, politician and cultural theorist Léopold Sédar Senghor. Cosmopolitan and always in transit, his writing is a chorus of melodies and imagery imbued with angst and melancholy and strongly influenced by jazz and blues. Punctuated by images of the landscapes of Guyana and the voice of the artist, the film exemplifies the poetic documentary form to which Maldoror frequently returned.