West Oakland to West Africa Partner Introduction

 Hi my name is Wanda Sabir. I do a lot of things: teach writing at a community college, work as a legal advocate with incarcerated women, write for a newspaper, host a radio show, travel to Africa whenever I can (smile). 

I was just in Ghana last summer where I traveled the country, from Aburi to Cape Coast to Takrodi and Kumasi, Tamale and further north. Wanted to go to Wa but there was a bit of fighting there. I met a king, visited the national forest, the alligator park and several sacred sites where African ancestors were captured and sold. At one site, where the women have the beautifully painted huts I could see Burkina Faso in the distance. We traveled to the kente village where we learned to weave cloth and made adinkra cloth. That was fun. I also attended an African Women Buddhist conference. That was different-didn’t know there were so many Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō chanters in Ghana.

I wished I could have visited Abijan, Lome, Porto Nome, and Lagos since I was so close, but I only had four weeks. I stayed at the University of Ghana at Legon in the guest housing my final week there. It was pleasant and affordable. My favorite outside the north was at El Mina with One Africa, Seesta Imakhus.

Next time, I am going to start in Wa, go over to Burkina Faso and then go back to Kumasi.  I want to spend more time at Nana Abass’s place too. He is a traditional healer. I didn’t get to the butterfly sanctuary. I love butterflies. Ghana is the land of the ancestors—butterflies are everywhere. I saw a lot of butterflies in Madagascar too. The Malagasy love the children and the elders and honor their dead.

The butterflies made me feel really welcome, that and the way everyone was always in ceremony, preparation for the next life—the big funerals on Saturdays, people dressed in black and red and the funeral bouquets and the fun caskets. Reminded me of New Orleans and Haiti and Bahia Brazil where black folks take funeral rites seriously. So do folks in Zimbabwe—especially Great Zimbabwe, Congo and Burkina Faso, oh, Ethiopia too.

My poem: Buried Placenta is a stream of consciousness poem. Hope you like it. My last line is: “I come from a place where everything is always everything and time is nothing –reality the laughter of a child.”

I look forward to reading your poem.  Thanks in advance.

Peace and Blessings,

Wanda

My poem

Buried Placenta
By Wanda Sabir

I come from a place without form . . . tossed on waves too high to reach, I decide to drown in baptismal waters on altars lit by ancestors

She follows me cross country . . . cross town . . . cross oceans to settle in a place where discomfort is normed, depravation expected, civility absent, wonder its saving grace, this place where we do not belong, yet stay.
I come from a place where drums carve tunnels into freedom . . . machetes ready to chop limbs and hands too close, too close to chains dismembered – refashioned into jewelry we parley for favors and fortune.

I come from a place where floors have seams snakes slither through into toilets where they wait for willing butts to pierce.

I come from a place so close to plantation pain that Grandmamá Josephine strings her daughter from a rafter and beats her with leather straps. . . . It is a post traumatic slavery relic . . . a nightmare she relives, her girl an imposter she beats until she awakens, no until her brother shakes her and she stutters into the present ashamed.

She does not ask forgiveness.

I come from a place where rockets were tested after the Russians made it to the moon first.
Pennies were my mother’s inheritance as NASA took her family’s land and they relocated to New Orleans where brick and mortar awaited them—a checkered casket with their names on it.

I come from a place where kinfolk know each other and bloodlines traverse uncommon lines and those familiar too – we are one people.

I come from a place where no one is immunized, historic contagions people the Mississippi swamps red clay, white chalk. 

I come from a place where illegitimate becomes legitimate on palates and tongues too sweet for anything else. . . . I come from a place where indigo blues swing low like chariots carrying me home. . . home Charity Hospital ward where I was yanked from between thighs shaking with fear – forceps creasing my skull.

I come from histories too bleak to remember, to majestic to forget, too wondrous to contain in a single life.  I come from a people too big for small minds, yet they try, try to contain us and are shocked into alternative realities – shot into orbits still spinning and spinning – dizziness indicative of this state of utter intoxication and disequilibrium.

I come from Angola . . . Congo . . . Dahomey . . . Yorubaland – places where spirit lives in everything, the earth Oludamare’s temple. 

I come from a place where everything is always everything and time is nothing –reality the laughter of a child.