My life story, the story of my people, is like that of a flower whose petals— life, lifelines, collective experiences, past and present, have been strewn down many paths. In my case, my people coming from West Africa (Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia), Europe (The UK, France), the Caribbean(Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, The Dominican Republic, St. Martin, The US, Virgin Islands).
The beginning of my life's journey was announced upon my entrance into the world with a loud cry in the village of English Harbour, on the small island, Antigua, in the Caribbean.
Dried out by drought, beaten down by hurricanes—my people rose from dust and rubble to walk and run again, carrying hope in our/their hearts, and suitcases with their belongings and petals of our/their life story, to scatter on another Caribbean island.
We wore the uniforms of hotel bellhops, doormen, maids, and the
hardhats of builders in this tourists’ paradise, and were branded “job snatchers,”
“aliens,” “Garrots*”—names that took a generation to shake.
Tired of cramped island quarters, I sought new adventure as a student in America (University of Connecticut and Kent State University) which led me to Liberia, West Africa. Feeling rooted in Liberia, and dreaming it would be the last journey, a place for settling, I got married and brought three children into the world. But the ground trembled with quakes of dissatisfaction, stories of inequality between the indigenous and repatriated freed slaves, ethnic divisions, and soon— a bloody explosion.
After the Liberian Civil War, which started in 1989, we found ourselves in England walking a refugee road, along with roofless Somalis, and Irish Catholic families. But fortunately, we were cocooned by Caribbean family and culture.
And one year later, our bags are packed again,
carrying our past and awaiting a new future, on the way to Switzerland
where a new language and culture were steep walls to clamber over.
I have sown seeds of friendship in each land. My heart has grown big enough to hold many homes. Anchored in Caribbean culture, I reside on the borders of many nations.
Residing on the Borders
of Belonging
We live on the fringe within nations,
on the edge of cultures,
hearts and minds transplanted.
We belong everywhere and nowhere,
a foot in doors, never quite inside.
We cannot lay claim
to a place with certainty,
being a part of it, yet an alien
to those who cannot see beyond
their own eyes.
Going back generations
our people were never of one place,
and we continue to cross continents and oceans
for the sake of love, liberty, livelihood.
Ancestral spirits scattered around the world,
we live on the borders of belonging.
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Weeding
( Elementary school, early 60s, US Virgin Islands)
We assemble in rows by class
in the sunny school yard,
wait for an announcement to be made.
We tease, poke fun, pull silly faces
as soon as the nuns turn their backs.
The ticker-tape of anticipation
flickers on the edge of mental surfaces.
But smiles turn to scowls when the unmasking begins.
Non-residents, “Aliens” are ordered to step aside,
are exposed as the weeds between flowers.
A divide is born, walls go up.
The lens through which
we see the world now tinted.
© Althea Romeo-Mark
Gina (Come Lately)
She is the only one
who wasn’t there
when her classmates
lost their “milk teeth,”
wasn’t there when
new sets grew back.
Heads turned when
words spun off her tongue,
though Caribbean English,
struck a different tune,
had an unfamiliar tone.
Feeling a cornered rat
in their midst
she stuck her tongue out
at the nearest boy
whose eyes were glued
to her freckled face.
But not wanting to remain the alien,
in their midst, she reined in her fear,
put away her facial weapon,
and did not pull her lower eyelids down.
Accompanied by the sound of long baaayings,
it was the call for battle
among the little ones
in her former island home.
© Althea Romeo-Mark
Lost Love
(for Liberia on
its Independence Day 26, July)
I have left you, was forced to leave you,
`cause you pushed me away.
Had I remained, I might be speaking
from a shallow, leaf-draped grave
somewhere in a forest in the company of the dead
who did not wish to flee, could not flee your side.
There are those who survived the bipolar rage
that boiled in your blood and corrupted bones.
They subsisted on cunning, prayers and small miracles.
This conflict was not of your making.
The clashing voices within tore you asunder.
And you fell apart, unable to pacify warring schisms—
old souls rejecting the tainted, new souls
subjugating the old.
Scarred by your fury, many do not wish to replant
their loyalty
only to be felled like unwanted timber.
Many who live in your shadow still reel from the fear
that became their life.
Some spin senseless tales on how to make you better,
on how to cure your ills.
And there are homegrown carpetbaggers
playing chess with your future,
ready to flee at the first signs of a firestorm.
Perhaps I will visit, skirt around your tantrums,
but I have been burned and will not stay.
I chose life over deadly love.
I am in the arms of another
who brings calm to my spirit.
I will not throw this away.
© Althea Romeo-Mark
Discounted
The silk nightgown she smells,
cautiously caresses,
clings to dry calloused palms.
Jerking away,
she flees
the lingerie department.
Discounts beyond her reach,
her touch, her hands form fists
in frayed pockets.
Sadness rakes her face
as she races down the escalator
to basement bargains.
Crowded bins,
perspiration smells,
last year’s rejects,
brand imitations,
polyester tossed about
are familiar.
Rummaging through
scattered cast-offs
a soft silk memory
gloves her hands.
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Nyam*
Once again, I was a child
who, alone at a table,
had been told I could not leave
until I had cleaned
my plate.
My soul cried, stomach churned,
but only I could consume new words,
in German and Swiss-German,
bitter on my tongue.
New languages,
like hated spinach
and Brussel
sprouts,
would make me
strong,
everyone said.
And crawling time
witnessed me shuddering,
witnessed the clearing
of the challenged-filled plate.
I have learned that new languages
like hated vegetables
are good for me,
are essential to stability,
are the stepping stones
in seeking a secure place
within a new society.
Nyam!
© Althea Mark-Romeo
(Nyam-Antiguan-Barbudan creole which means-eat)
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Second-hand
Homelands
There are always lines
we must stand in
at airports and ports,
borders and check-points,
at charity shops and schools,
lines that separate us from others
like sheep and goats.
Laws divide and shame us—
the immigrant, migrant, refugees.
Our will are the legs we stand on
as we suffer in snaking queues,
dare to demonstrate
our desire to improve our lot.
The Headlines of daily papers across our globe
demonstrate the stories of sacrifices
we make to seek passage
across oceans, seas and borders.
The deadly outcomes
fall on deaf ears
fed on the fulfillment of dreams.
What matters, after arrival,
are stories our children will hear.
They are stories that will crush the spirit
or build backbones of steel.
Second-hand homelands,
when not illusions, are our havens.
They are the hand-me-downs homelands,
too big, too tight or itchy,
that we gladly grasp.
They can be ill-fitting,
suffocating, alien things.
And recipients, for long,
have no say in the matter of fitting in.
© Althea Romeo-Mark
Born in Antigua, West Indies, Althea Romeo Mark is an educator and writer who grew up in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. She has lived and taught in the Virgin Islands, USA, Liberia, England, and Switzerland since 1991. She writes poetry and short stories and has been published in Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Colombia, England, Germany, India, Italy, Kenya, Liberia, Norway, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, U.K, USA, and the Virgin Islands. Her last poetry collection, The Nakedness of New, was published in 2018. She has participated in International Poetry Festivals in Romania, Kenya, and in Colombia and Literary Festival in St. Martin, St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and Antigua and Barbuda.
You write so powerfully, Althea, words that burn images in my brain. Vee
ReplyDeleteThanks for creating these - for sharing these. Uprooting and relocating certainly takes courage. With your intellectual gift and your writing gift though, it is easier to be at home anywhere in the world and to realize the one country of it all and the one family that we are at the root of it all. Wonderful though to have original songs to sing wherever the poet finds herself and to memories, sweet as well as sad, to translate unto delicious art as well.
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