Nomad – Diaspora in search of a homeland

A book review by Fabian Adekunle Badejo

“for unto us a daughter is born & she shall be

called Diaspora.” Diaspora Speaks: A Performance, Nomad, p. 51.

From birth to rebirth, from an adolescence when she “learned the language of hate” to adulthood when “she moves from/madness to love/through poetry,” from foggy light to greying sunlight; from the sulphuric ashes of Montserrat to the coral soil of Barbados, full of cane, Yvonne Weekes’ Nomad is a journey of and from the diaspora in search of a (new) homeland.

The journey is one of always “coming, coming, home” to borrow the title of George Lamming’s seminal collection of essays, where home is a geography of nostalgia, a place where the rancid smell of sulphur issuing from the Soufrière Hills volcano forces “one lone woman” to flee with a suitcase full of books, plastic bags with non-perishable goods, and a child in tow, hoping to be able to begin to dream again in alien lands.

Nomads are usually not homeless; they are homeland-less. They build new homes in strange lands, where they are foreigners to their host communities. And they always maintain, at least, a spiritual connection to the homeland they left behind.

POETIC TROPE

Home is a persistent poetic trope in Caribbean literature. From Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un Retour au Pais Natal to Lasana Sekou’s Born Here and Nativity; from Kamau Brathwaite to Kei Miller, from Edwidge Danticat and Rafael Nino Féliz to Yvonne Weekes, home is a never-ending journey from self to community, a portmanteau of memories carried all over the world.

In Nomad, home and homeland become one and the same when she speaks of Barbados in “I Fell in Love with You”:

“I wind my way up Joy Road and Horse Hill

and fall in love to build new memories, MaMa,

against those granite slabs that shaped

My new homeland.”

Her interlocutor in this poem, MaMa, is the archetypical grandmother or “Big Mama,” a repository of collective history, a savant who serves as a bridge between the diaspora and Weekes’ Caribbean homeland. She is at once a spiritual guide as a nurturing force, an anchor in times of self-doubt. MaMa is the home that never really left home. She reminds us that though our ancestral bodies were yanked away from the Motherland, broken like branches of a deep-rooted baobab tree, our spirits never broke from the Motherland and thus have never been broken.

But Nomad is not about a deracinated writer seeking rootedness in a hostile environment where at an early age in England she felt “the thorns of segregation” and witnessed the batons of hate that shoved her “brothers” into “police custody, prison, cemetery”. This nomad is not an aimless wanderer, trying to mint memories out of pain, out of the volcanic ashes of Soufrière. And even though she is told: “You can’t place no X here/You don’t belong to this land!” her emphatic response has a ring of the bravado of an immigrant who is not really accepted by her host country: “I belong to neither Rush nor Coral/Volcano or Double Decker Bus.” It is an uncompromising declaration of the independence of her existence.

However, that will not be all. The “X” is not only to mark the ballot paper. It symbolises the diasporan as someone without identity, without a name, without a home. Strengthened in her belief that God says, “It is good” for her to “build new trees and feel Atlantic breezes/experience sparkling fresh narratives/and feel the spirit of shimmering sand” she is now able to face her son and tell him: “We will plant roots on this coral earth.”

IT MATTERS NOT

It matters not whether her navel string was buried in Barbados’ canefields or in Montserrat’s “sulphuric soils” or that she is not recognised as belonging there . It matters not if the people tell her she is not Bajan, she claims the land as hers. In “The Land is Mine,” she ends the poem with this categorical statement:

“remember one thing.

The land is MINE

No loss

No law

No lava

No lovers

Can change that.”

In other words, as we would say in St Martin, she may not be “Born Here”, but she can still lay claim to the land because she was “Born to be Here”. Nothing, therefore, can deprive her of her God-given heritage as a Caribbean person. This is important in light of intra-regional migration today where our Caribbean brothers and sisters are viewed and treated as “foreigners” whereas European and American immigrants are either “expatriates” or “tourists”.

The unrelenting COVID-19 pandemic, with the excruciating toll it took on the economies of the region, made several Caribbean governments seek “Digital Nomads” as a means of replenishing their rapidly depleting coffers. Anew reading of Yvonne Weekes’ Nomad would reveal that home – in all its manifestations – is more than just a geographic location: it is where the spirit finds comfort, not as a refugee but as a belonger.

The opening poem of the book, “First Journey,” outlines the major themes of “home” and “homeland,” of diaspora and dislocation, that reverberate throughout the volume, ending dramatically and delightfully with the last poem, “Diaspora Speaks: A Performance,” where Weekes exhibits her abundant theatrical talent. The four main characters/voices in this “performance” piece are the Nomad/narrator, who develops into Diaspora, born at dawn in a London ghetto “among bleaching/ Ibos and Yorubas. next to train station full of/ ku klux klan” Kwaku Ananse the spider and MaMa, with Bob Marley’s song, Running Away, as soundtrack.

The two poems should be read back-to-back to understand the journey from birth in the diaspora to homecoming in the Caribbean homeland, which is inextricably bound to the African Motherland. It is at the end of this journey, with Diaspora reunited spiritually with MaMa, and Ananse the Spider whispering in her ears that she finally finds peace here and now!

Nomad, published by House of Nehesi Publishers (HNP), is available on Amazon and SPDbooks.org.

Fabian Adekunle Badejo is a journalist, author, and literary critic. The former Nigerian diplomat writes out of St. Martin, Caribbean.