Clementine Ewokolo Burnley

Father, you didn’t trust the film-rating board 
 
 
so you watched each cassette before we did. 
MGM’s warm-up act was a lion 
and the first time it roared, I applauded.
I recall the thrill when Roger Moore came on
to smite Vodoun with wry wit and guns.
Although the actor Yaphet Kotto
who played both villains was Cameroonian
we backed the Martini-sipping hero. 
Betamax players lost out to VHS 
although they were better quality.
Ad jingles drill their way through my ears.
Do you choose Mac or PC, BluRay or DVD?
What really matters is how the story’s told.
Father, you tried to study what we were sold.


*

Watchmen roll up their raffia palm mats
 
 
at first light. They stow away 
Shelltox canisters, gathering outside 
eye-catching iron gates, pat each other’s 
shoulders as if to say we’re still here. 
 
White-painted folding doors swing 
wide-open. Inside the house 
we too, are just beginning.
A fresh green insecticide coil’s ready 
 
to be placed onto its metal stand but
last night’s grey ash arranged itself 
into a perfect spiral pattern 
on the rust-pocked enamel plate.
 
It could be a giant African land-snail’s shell
or the Nsibidi symbol for a meeting.
I’m reluctant to disturb this scene. 
Everything here awaits the insect hour.


*

People come and go throughout the morning
 
 
They bring us meals in floral-patterned flasks
ask if our pikin-dem know this type of food.
We sit comfortably barelegged
listening to Dolly Parton singing Jolene
on the radio, and pretending to eat. 
We agree that the night passed well. 
When asked to look closely at their faces 
sometimes I know who they are.
They’re relieved I can still make them out. 
Wuna be new blood, which is to say that 
soon, delicately haired zebra mosquitoes 
will come to collect their new-man tax
just as, at manned barriers the gendarmes
siphon cash and gifts from passing cars.


*

Daughters, we don’t know where we got this name 
 
 
apart from Obasi, your grandfather’s grandfather,
the first Burnley that we know of, sailed
on the Chilmark with Joseph Merrick 
 
in 1858, when merchant navies linked missions 
in Britain, the Caribbean and West Africa. 
Your grandfather Robert was a proud man
 
and the grandson of a recaptive who ended up on Fernando 
Po instead of the barracoon. The Burnleys,
Fullers and Michaels were founding 
 
families, each headed by a patriarch, in their time 
they ran things. They said ‘we’ and ‘us’ more than
‘me’ and ‘I’. They lived within sight of a single
 
austere church and the Mission Head resided 
in Brookmount, a cliffside chateau which loomed
over other houses like a plantation boss.


*

You act lek you born pon-street, the wire mother says
 
 
You come inna house and back-chat me   
calling her mummy. That is just a word.
Outside’s good, but home’s food.  
It’s my rubber teat you fatten on. 
Once your belly’s drum-tight she the one you run at.
It’s her dry terry cloth you suck beaucoup.
She’s boring as dust without one good drop
to keep you strong but if its softness you want
I can stuff my throat with straw and feathers.
I’ve no feet to chase you or arms to hold you
or tail to wrap around you like 
a woodpecker’s tongue wraps around its brain.
A bare cage can’t fight a velvet cushion.
I can’t take you to a mother shop.
 

———————
Wire mothers: In the 1950s Harry Harlow investigated infant-caregiver attachment bonds through experiments on baby rhesus monkeys. The monkey babies pre-ferred a cloth dummy with no milk bottle over a wire dummy with a milk bottle. 
 

GULF OF GUINEA
 
Gulf of Guinea
13 Mi no call you, you no kam
14 Father, you didn’t trust the film-rating board
15 Mamie, you said every woman
17 Our first skies are always white
18 Watchmen roll up their raffia palm mats
19 People come and go throughout the morning
20 Even if the insects have forgotten
21 Mamie, you were a leap year baby
22 Mamie’s line begins with a city Fulani girl
23 If only Djara could swim
24 All that’s left of the Caribbean in my hometown
25 Man-dem mouth
26 Po’ no bi cuss
27 Mamie, the streets of your childhood
28 In the 1800s freed Caribbeans
29 Great-grandfather Obasi was carried along an unknown route
30 A Family of Sea Monkeys™
31 Alfred Saker’s Monument
32 Aunty Maria
34 Mamie you said on the day of my birth
36 Mamie you loved to drive through your constituency
37 Mamie sometimes I admired the square-cut neckline
38 Mamie, some folks think the abambaya’s
39 Daughters, we don’t know where we got this name
40 Daughters, your grandfather’s father was marked
41 Father, you said we were the REAL Victorians
42 There are people called ‘recaptives’
44 My sister Anne and I set aside the time
45 The lash on our living-room wall, being a keepsake
46 Some fixed number of people will be saved
47 Spoiling Babies
48 Some Notes on Discipline
53 Mamie, you said, Boys just want to fool you
Victoria
54 I picture my father in the kitchen
55 Flights
56 For the first time that I can remember
57 Father, I recall long-distance trips to the video library
58 Once, during an attempted military coup
59 Mamie fan-trains her stone-fruit trees
60 My great-great-granduncle
61 Eine Indianer fühlt kein Schmerz
62 The Va-Kpé are driven from
63 Lepers come from the mainland
65 Aunty-Grandma Mary showers in the cradle of morning
66 Mamie, you’re in the beehive shape
67 Kam-no-go
68 I see my mother standing in the half-light
69 Sunday rice, bitter leaves
70 Father’s writing is impossible
 
 
OVERSEAS, MBENGUÉ
 
Glasgow
73 In the days when all my things fitted into one suitcase
74 I recall four punks farting and burping
75 Cathy from County Kerry and Luis from Ecuador
76 First winter, on passing a Baptist chapel
77 My room-mate takes her phone calls
78 Hugh, Iain, Karen, Alan and I are freshers
Paris
79 Afterwards Leda
London
80 Only one of us needs an interview to travel
Lombardy
81 In the 1990s I worked in Italy
82 In Padova for his Erasmus year
83 The night air, thick with lavender
84 My neighbour’s eyes glint
85 The dark brogues seem to weigh down her feet
86 I meet my neighbour standing inside our closed gate
87 My neighbour’s window overlooks our back yard
88 My neighbour’s been in a good mood lately
89 They’ve slept together
90 Is crawling to the bathroom
Argyll and Bute
91 ‘Things look good at first glance…’
92 Real talk between the poet and her keloid scars
94 Coupling with The Wretched of the Earth
95 daylight /
96 Coupling with George Santayana and Mungo Park
97 We were friends as children, before
98 I order the same meal
Deutschland
99 I’m at a busy intersection
100 In 99.8 per cent of cases people charged with resisting arrest
102 Die neunzigern waren Baseballschlägerjahren
102 On some days every sight, sound or smell
103 The Reinheitsgebot guarantees the quality
103 A roughly hewn section of the Berlin Wall
Tiree
104 Being looked at by a lamb, unaffected
105 The spider doesn’t teach
106 two, here
107 Woodsmoke taints
108 The summer of 2023
108 The Price
109 ‘Simon–Milner Declaration’ of 10 July 1919 Coupling
110 I’m one of seven
110 Today
111 Mamie, you were full of contradictions
Munich
112 I imagine my mother-in-law, Oma Gertrud
113 My mother-in-law, Oma Gertrud
The Slate Islands
115 We say, na love mek we fall bush
116 We cross over the separating line of water
117 Small Signs
118 You act lek you born pon-street, the wire mother says
118 The daughter of the wire mother speaks
119 The scent of early, ripe soft fruit
Inverness-shire
120 On the train to Blair Atholl
121 I offer to the women at my train table
Jura
122 Cnoc an t-Sabhail
Tiree
123 The whale skeleton
124 Tiree, December