Ishion Hutchinson

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and School of Instructions: a Poem, a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and a Donald Windham–Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, Hutchinson is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. 

Ishion Hutchinson (Princeton University - Lewis Center for the Arts - USA) participates in the Versopolis USA mobility project, a collaborative initiative between Versopolis and the Formal Consortium of U.S. Universities and Institutions Dedicated to Poetry.

Rough Water: A Senegal Diary

Rough water at a distance. Dark blue but not too dark.  It  looks  frigid.  That  this  water  could  be  anything but warm had never crossed my mind. And down on the shore, I recoil, startled, when the first waves touch my toes. I think of tears gone stale as the waves thin out and pool languidly around my ankles. A feeling of  grief grows and grows inside. This is ancestral water. My first time touching the Atlantic from the coast of West Africa. I walk calmly in, jeans and all, until the water is up to my waist.

Then a wave explodes in my face, the force knocking me back into the surf and leaving me drenched.  A  second,  stronger  wave sucks me into the sea; another spits me back on to the sand. I land with such an impact that my mouth falls open, and all that cold-as-tears Atlantic rushes down my throat. Another wave drags me down into the deep. I struggle to get to shore, but the water holds me back, pulls me under, and that is when I cry, “Jesus.” But a wave punches me to shore again. I scramble away from the tide, breathing rapidly to  calm  my  heaving  chest.  I sit for a while on the sand, staring into the distance at the rough water. My breath evens out. I stand and  with  a  sigh  turn  left  and  begin  to  walk  along  the  shoreline, staying away from the foaming waves. I walk for about a mile, my wet clothes feeling heavier as I go, before I can trust walking into the  wake  of  the  waves,  ignoring  the  cold  of  the  water  gnawing  at my ankles. Flecks of it like spittle fly into my face. Some time later I come up to an area of hundreds of black rocks, most of them long and flat, but here and there are a few large, round boulders. I climb to the top of  one,  slick  with  green  algae  and  litter  at  its  bottom. An exhaustion I have never felt before comes over me, and suddenly I begin to shake uncontrollably, my teeth chattering. I take my shirt and jeans off and sit holding my ankles. My eyes burn, whether from my own tears or from the salt of the sea I can’t tell. I can’t tell either what, or why, words begin to tumble from my gnashing teeth. They might be not words but a keening, repeated over and over until the rattling  in  my  body  slows  and  finally  stops.  I  open  my  eyes:  dark rough  water.  I  slide  down  the  boulder  and  pick  up  a  little  plastic bottle from the litter and wade into the water up to my chest. The waves toss me about as I hold the bottle down in the ocean, filling it to the brim.

Hours later that evening, I drink half the bottle while sitting in the half-darkened room of my villa. I don’t know why, the same way I don’t know what caused me to take the bottle into the raging Atlantic. The remaining half, I tell myself, is the veritable jar of tears I will take across the sea, back home with me.

The port of Dakar. I arrive early for the 10:00 a.m. ferry to Île de Gorée, but at the ticket window I’m told that the next boat will not depart until midday. I sit on one of the blue benches next to an old woman  in  the  waiting  area.  She is dressed in a green-and-orange skirt with slashes of dark red stripes in the front. She strings colorful beads on a long thread. Every time a bead is strung, she clicks her tongue. She works fast, the belly of the thread distending from the weight of the  beads  as  they  pile  on.  I  begin  to  count  the  beads, watching  her hands so close that after a while I believe I can hear the  silent  abacus  music  of  beads  touching.  I  am  so  absorbed  in her work that I jump at  the  sound  of  a  ferry  horn,  forgetting  for a  moment  where  I  am or where it is that I am going. People rise and I rise, too, causing an emaciated black-and-white kitten I hadn’t noticed under my seat to scamper along the wall of the ticket office. It then darts back between the feet of the crowd rushing to queue for the boat. An old man, wearing a white kufi cap and dressed in a long white gown, kicks the kitten clear out of the way. Purity and such. We  inch  slowly  up  the  plank  of  the  boat;  the  mild  morning cool is now almost gone. Yet when I look up at the sky I see some dark clouds, same as the last three mornings since I have been here.There will be no rain; I will see Gorée in scorching heat. I will see Gorée,  I  think  as  we  inch  farther  up  the  plank. To go to Gorée, I carry a tremendous singing.

Bougainvillea bursts out of every crevice and corner of the island, all the way up to the slave fort. Their paper-thin ruby blos-soms are the first thing I touch, plucking a few from a wall near the dock as soon  as I disembark from the ferry. I keep them in my palm the entire long day I spend walking back and forth from the dock to the slave fort. In that merciless heat, the petals stick to my palms like  flayed  scabs  of  skin.  Inside  the  slave  fort  I  consider  releasing them through the narrow frame of the Door of No Return into the sea,  but  instead  I  jam  my  hands  in  my  pockets,  afraid.  I  stare at the  water  calmly  lapping  the  ledge  and  splashing  over  the  sill onto  the  dark  dirt  of  the  slave  fort.  Here  is  a  door  with  no  door; here I am here and yet no return. Outside I blink to adjust my eyes to the sun, not because inside the fort is void of light—plenty of light streams through the Door of No Return—but because shad-ows appear in dense jumbles wherever they fall. Reknotting around my neck an old scarf of my grandmother’s I have brought with me, I  stroll  to  the  dock.  At  the  dock  I  turn  around  and  stroll  back  to the slave fort. I do this a few times, but only once more I have the courage to go back inside of the slave fort.

There is a crowd inside.  People  mill  about  in  small  batches, talking  in  hushed  tones.  I  realize  I  can’t  make  out  a  single  accent much  less  a  single  language  that  I  can  speak  as  I  strain  to  hear what’s  been  said.  Should  I  say  something,  add  my  voice  to  the babble? But to whom do I speak? To no one here, I think. As that thought  crosses  my  mind,  I  see  someone,  a  young  boy  in  a  blue shirt,  who  feigns  diving  from  off  the  ledge  through  the  Door  of No  Return  into  the  sea.  I  jerk  toward  him,  but  he  walks  away, laughing into the shadows and leaving me alone in front of the door. Here  is  a  door  with  no  door.  I  am  here. Then  as  if  arranged  by  a set manager, a huge container ship glides slowly past, mere distance from the Door of No Return. Behind me I hear oohs and aahs and other cries as if at something amazing. Not until the voices leave can I turn around and exit. I walk to the dock and back up to the slave fort a few more times. On one of these circuits the heat forces me to seek shade under a cluster of almond trees by the shore adjacent to the dock. The container ship is gone, the water glitters in its ancient repose as if it has never been disturbed.

I arrive on a Friday at the beach in Popenguine, a small village about forty-five minutes by car outside Dakar. The  beach  is  three  miles of  rough  pink,  reddish,  and  white  sand.  A cliff dominates the eastern corner and offers enough shade for me to lie down and read and write while keeping the sea in full view. I have been naked since I arrived on the beach three hours ago. Except once when a group of three or four boys passed in the far distance, the beach stays empty. Not  since  I  was  a  child  in  Port  Antonio  have  I  been  fully  naked on a beach. It calls to the boy in me, this beach: it awakens in me something I recognize as that gleam of alienated majesty Emerson talks  about  somewhere,  that  luminous thing that is love. It is past noon now. The sun is at its fiercest, but occasionally a light breeze off  the  sea  ruffles  the  pages  of  my  notebook.  I  can  smell  salt  on the air when it blows, and when it does, I play in my mind which of  the  water’s  three  gradations  of  blue  the  breeze  blows  from,  the cerulean (first), the cobalt (second), or the indigo (third)? Another hour passes. The beach remains empty, not a single pirogue at sea. When I stand, the sun cleanses me of my shadow.

I explore, bringing back shells and stones to my station under the cliff, making little piles of them that become overrun by red ants. A sound rumbles overhead behind me, and I turn, expecting to see a small plane, perhaps a drone, but there is nothing but the cliff and sky. Some  time passes before I hear the rumble again. I get up to look more closely at the cliff and see that under the belly of the very  top  is  a  jagged  hole  the  size  of  two  basketball  hoops.  Breeze threading through the hole makes that groan-like rumble. A breeze blows and I hear it, not as loud as before, but distinct and constant. Strange that I didn’t hear it earlier in all the hours I had been sitting almost directly under the cliff. Now that hollow roar blends with the incessant shush and whoosh of waves.

I wade in the cerulean part of the water, up to my waist, and stare out at the vast indigo:  Beyond that, what?  Gorée  lies  some-where  not  far  off;  therefore,  nearby  are  the  currents  that  the  slave ships  navigated  with  relative  ease  to  the  Caribbean.  How to even grasp the fact that there, right there, the currents of centuries of African pain still move? There are no markers on the sea to indicate those routes; I am reduced to the frail logic of intuition, to wonder as I gaze in another direction of the indigo, thinking this time now of my grandmother’s house, my childhood home, above the Carib-bean  Sea.  I  turn  my  back  to  the  indigo  and  wade  to  shore,  where I  crouch  in  the  surf,  feeling  the  splash  of  waves  in  my  buttocks; the sun drums down on my back and water hits my chest and face. Thoughts sieve through my mind at each splash, too fast for me to make sense of, except for one: I am here, in a now. There has been no other time than now. Suddenly an overwhelming desire to climb the cliff comes over me.

Except for a patch of grass and a single thorn tree, the top of the cliff is bare of vegetation. The crumbly red dirt of the surface is spotted with white manna-like blotches like the sand below. The soil reminds me of Stokes Hall, a red dirt district in St. Thomas not too far from where my mother grew up. Like many of the districts in  St. Thomas,  Stokes  Hall  is  named  after  a  former  sugar  planta-tion owner, the ruin of whose great house still sits on a hill there. I know Stokes Hall  only  from  car windows.  As  a  kid  I  would  drive through  it  to get to my high school, Happy Grove, situated on the border  between  St. Thomas  and  Portland.  Mornings  and  evenings the red dirt on the stretch of main road would cloud behind the car, and if I was in the back of a pickup truck, as was sometimes the case, the dirt would lightly powder my khaki uniform, my hair, and my face, so light the dust would disappear in an instant. I loved the sight of that billowing red dust each school day, and looking down now at the red dirt of  the cliff in Popenguine between my toes, I think how much that red dirt of Stokes Hall, banks of which you could see on the side of the road for several miles, defined that period of my life. Yet, but for the faintest patina that fell on me those school days, I have never touched the red dirt of home. I pat my palms on the ground, patting over and over and leaving my handprints every-where  on  the  cliff.  Perhaps  I  am  trying  to  find  the  location  above the  hole  in  the  cliff  where  the  breeze  passes  through  and  leaves  a dry rumble. I put my ear to the ground and hear silence. Standing, I take up a handful of dirt and ball my hand into a fist, rubbing the brittle, warm texture with my fingers as it trails through them into the breeze. When the dirt is all gone, I smell my palm; then I lick the remaining red marks away.

The day ends with this miracle:  a meeting with Ayi Kwei Armah. It is extraordinary how that happened, a sort of epiphanic encoun-ter  that  explanation  flattens.  When  I  was  going  to  Popenguine,  a friend  from  Dakar  mentioned  that  a  famous  old  Ghanaian  writer whom I should meet  lives  near  the  beach  there.  So  excited  I  was about the prospect of visiting another of Senegal’s sea-town villages that I didn’t register the name of the old Ghanaian writer, nor did I  bother  to  have  it  clarified.  I  was  open  to  the  meeting,  whoever the  writer  happened  to  be;  all  I  wished  for  was  to  get  to  the  sea. Through a friend of my friend who lives in Popenguine, a meeting was arranged. I met my friend’s friend, herself a writer, at her place first thing when I arrived early in Popenguine. She told me that after I had spent some time at the beach to walk back to her place and then together we would go over to the house of the old Ghanaian writer.  I  am  sure  she  said  his  name,  but  again,  somehow,  it  didn’t ring.  What  rang  was  the  sea,  which  I  could  see  from  her  house, purplish blue from afar. I agreed with the plan and left for the sea.

On my walk to the beach through the main road of the village, I remember passing a man who was dressed in a faded lilac jump-suit,  a  perfect  halo  of  white  hair  framing  his  small,  dark  face. The jumpsuit,  I thought when I passed him, looked like an astronaut’s outfit. He nodded greetings and went his way. The stay at the water and  the  cliff,  abiding  in  their  healing,  kept  me  overtime,  and  so  I was late in rushing back to the village to meet up with my friend’s friend to go to the old Ghanaian writer’s house. But even as I rushed back,  I  stopped  at  an  artisan’s  shop  at  the  side  of  the  road,  an  old corrugated-zinc  shack  with  masks  made  of  refuse—iron,  bottle stoppers,  carton  boxes—hanging  on  the  side  walls  of  the  shack.  I called for the owner. A man, fiftyish, emerged from the inside. He said  that  the  artist  who  owns  the  shop,  Mussa,  was  presently  at home. Mussa’s house was a short walk up the dusty and craggy hill behind the shack.

Late to meet the old Ghanaian writer, I went in search of Mussa instead, climbing the hill and arriving at Mussa’s yard, which resem-bled his art shack: litter everywhere, but because  of the paintings and masks hanging from the little house and the trees, the yard, like the shack,  took  on  the  quasi-sacred  feeling  I  recognized  from  the yards of obeah men or witch doctors from home.

Mussa was sleeping in a low, rugged hammock in front of the house.  Cooking  utensils  were  strewn  around  him;  wisps  of  smoke rose  from  a  fire  recently  gone  out.  A  puppy  was  tied  on  a  string next  to  Mussa.  I  had  to  call  several  times  to  wake  him;  when he  did  wake,  he  literally  unfolded  his  limbs  out  of  the  hammock, so the man who had seemed so small lying down stood as tall as a palm tree in front of me, with the biggest smile on his face. Mussa spoke some English and invited me into the house, a one-room box structure that had a dirty mattress in a corner and scrap material all over the floor, the stuff Mussa turned into art. He told me he worked in this room by a candle at night.

“Only at nights?” I asked. “

Only at nights,” Mussa said.

I wondered why and if his art can only be made by the light of a candle. But there wasn’t enough language in common between us  to  discuss  it.  Mussa  showed  me  the  mask  he  was  making  the night before. It was laden with rusty keys and coins and bent nails in the mouth holes.“

Beautiful,” I said.

Mussa touched his chest and said thanks in English.

We left the room and walked down to Mussa’s art shack.  He opened the door and windows and showed me around. Besides sev-eral masks, there were many painted canvases on the walls, some of which were embellished with Mussa’s signature use of metal scraps and  other  materials.  One  canvas  was  particularly  arresting.  It  was painted a stark pink orange, evocative of the Lompoul desert, Mussa explained to me, where he was from. Stitched to the middle of the desert was a raft-like structure made from cowrie shells. Mussa told me to rub my fingers on the shells. I did and I was surprised to feel not a smooth hardness but  the  rubbery  elasticity  of  keloid  scars, which  I  was  about  to  say to Mussa when my friend’s friend showed up in a panic at the shop’s entrance: she had gone searching for me at  the  beach  and  got  worried  when  I  was  nowhere  to  be  found. We  were  two  hours  late  to  meet  with  the  old  Ghanaian  writer. Apologizing to Mussa and promising to return for the raft piece, we left the shop.

As we climbed a small hill to the writer’s house, she told me a heartbreaking story. That  morning  one  of  her  friends,  an  aspiring writer from Ghana, had taken his own life. It was a heavy thing to hear  amid  the  bougainvillea  in  the  sunlight.  His  death,  sadly,  was one  in  a  recent  series  of  suicides  committed  by  African  artists  all over the continent. “And all so young,” she said. I said, “I am sorry to hear that,” unsure of what else to say. I thought of a young Kenyan photographer I had met in Berlin in the summer of 2013 who, not long after he went back to Kenya, took his own life. We walked on in deep silence, each thinking of loss, and it is in silence we arrived at the old writer’s  yard.  The  main  house  was  a  rambling  ranch-style  building in front of which sat an empty concrete pool, several feet long and deep and made in the shape of an Egyptian ankh. It was a commanding sight, and standing above it at the entrance to the house was the cloud-hair man in the lilac suit from several hours ago! I apologized  to him for keeping “island time,” and he waved me off with a smile and showed us into a large, airy, bright room, lined with low shelves  of books along the walls. Books were also laid out for browsing on a table-tennis table in the center of the room.

I chose some books from the dozen or so stacks, which had about four or five books per pile.  Issued  by  the  same  publishing house, the books had green laminate covers and black texts printed on bright white pages, which were bound in a way that resembled xeroxed  reproductions. They  were  in  several  languages,  the  ones  I held  were  in  English,  French,  and  Arabic.  I  started  to  notice  that quite a lot of the books bore the name Ayi Kwei Armah. I picked up more, and they, too, had the name Ayi Kwei Armah. I looked at the old man in the lilac suit across the table, and that was when it finally struck me: he was Ayi Kwei Armah. Yet foolishly I said, “Are you  Mr.  Armah? Am I in Mr. Armah’s house?”

Armah nodded, as surprised as I was.  I  walked  over  and  took his hands: the myth made flesh, the hands of the very first African writer  I ever read, at Happy Grove, and the hands of the man who deepened my love of literature, whose writing haunted me in those early days of becoming a reader. After reading The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, I  refused  to  touch  the  railings  of  stairs  and  door-knobs  for  months,  so  powerfully,  and  lastingly,  Armah  conveyed human  disgust.  The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born was my first African book; the first time I lived with African characters that were not National Geographic loincloth-clad hunter-gatherer forest dwell-ers. The book had opened in me, in those very young years of reading, the sense or knowledge that one of the worst crimes brought about in the aftermath of colonialism was the state of apathy. It infected everything, it existed on every scale, subjecting lives to carry on with disgust as if it were a seminatural condition, commonplace in Africa and the African diaspora. Reading that book as a boy was an awak-ening. I said as much to him while I shook his hands.

And so, in a village by the sea, I met the old man of my early glimmering of self-consciousness, and it was truly moving.

Naturally, the conversation was about the man himself. His coming to Senegal (“snared by a beautiful woman”), and how before that he had decided, when very young, to develop his knowledge of Africa, to, in fact, become African, he said, by traveling throughout the con-tinent and residing long-term in different countries. That peripatetic life has made him fluent in several African languages.

The knowledge, of Africa, his knowledge and great passion, began in Egypt.  The  books  lining  the  walls  were  mostly  about Egypt,  ranging  from  its  language  to  its  culture  and  history.  “No country in Africa,” he said, “studies in their institutions the knowl-edge of Egypt. They don’t see that Egypt is the source knowledge of all of Africa.” He spoke sadly and slowly. I could see the young man he was in the old man he had become, the singular determination to possess something difficult and far larger than could be grasped in one lifetime:  that was the drive, to submit to that impossibility and write a way into it.

He had lived many lives in that personal search. Now in his twilight years, his restlessness has taken on another form. His home in Popenguine was a kind of informal cultural center, a place where schoolchildren from the village visited to do, he said, “play workshops” in which they learn about Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was here, too, that he had founded his own printing house. Alongside publishing multi-genre books on Egypt, including Egyptian-themed children’s books, the press reissues out-of-print Egyptology books, thick as phone books, in a multilingual format of seven or more languages, including African languages in which only a handful of published works exist. The  labor  seemed  extensive  and  demanding. Even so, there was something arcane about it given that countless web pages exist, some with language translation hyperlinks, to the books he has printed on glossy, colorful pages.  If he knew this, he seemed unbothered.  “Success,”  not  even  in  the  sense  of  widespread  reach, was not what he was after. It was hard to say what that was, but he returned  again  and  again  to  the  point  that  African  people  should have easy access to the literature on Egypt. “It is our African legacy,” he said. His work in Popenguine, and before Popenguine, is its own extension of that legacy.

I sat in the low-slung canvas chair, looking at him.  “I  am  in Ayi Kwei Armah’s house” still ran through my head. There he was before me, the head of cloud, the lilac jumpsuit (like an astronaut’s uniform),  the  affable  expression  that  remained  present  even  when he voiced his disappointments at things he did that didn’t come to fruition. “It is so large an issue,” he said, “to do service to the cradle of knowledge of an entire continent and the world.” When he said this, I looked around the room, at the books on the table and those on the walls, wondering how many people will see a bit of the “ser-vice” he has done. I hadn’t spoken, not much beyond the occasional “yes” to some of the things he said. Then, drawing his chair closer to mine, he said, “Now, tell me about your life and your work.”

My mouth went dry. Had we been alone, I am sure I would have wept. I didn’t know what to say. Then I started to speak to him about home, especially, to my surprise, the rivers of Port Antonio.

Essay written by Ishion Hutchinson.