and even if she was rich she wouldn’t cheat, she’s going to earn her first class degree and like Waris will bust a gut to get it, she’s not going to be ejected into the big bad world with a poor degree and no master plan, last term she met third year students about to graduate who looked terrified when she asked them about their next steps
a Master’s in Journalism beckons, in London, where she fits in and can live rent free with Mum
she’s already a regular feature writer for the student newspaper, Nu Vox, and her column, Why is My Professor Not Black?, inspired by a student conference she attended in her first term, generated more online comments than any other that month, only half of them totally ignorant, of course, written anonymously by the inbred, pea-brained, racist, cowardly, fugly and utterly friendless trolls of this planet
the point is, the article boosted her rep and she’s become a personality on campus, someone asked for her opinion by the Media Society and student radio
she’s going to try and place articles in professional newspapers and über-blogs next year, and she’s going to assume the editorship of Nu Vox in her third year, when she’s eligible
she’s going to get herself elected President of the Media Society
she’s already thinking about her campaign strategy
woe betide any pipsqueak usurpers who get in her way
she knows it won’t be easy, she’s ready for the fight
Yazz reflects on the rest of the squad
Courtney’s a really nice person, formerly naïve and uncomplicated, who’s grown so much since she first arrived at uni and is now more worldly-wise through her membership of the squad, who aren’t your typical students in the east of England, that is:
a badass humanitarian whose mother is a lesbian luvvie and whose father is a gay ‘intellectual’
a super-rich (cheat) who’s politically connected to the old Egyptian elite
a Muslim Somali woman who wears a hijab and is a mixed martial artist
Waris is the deepest of them all, because her family has such a painful history, even though she hates it when people feel sorry for her
Waris’s life has been the most unfair and it’s forced her to prematurely maturate
just as life’s obstacles have forced her, Yazz, to prematurely maturate, too
and so it begins
The Last Amazon of Dahomey
the play.
Dominique
1
Dominique came across Nzinga at Victoria station in the rush hour
as she was being knocked down by the steamrollering effect of London’s ruthless commuters determined to catch their trains at all costs
her bag fell open and everything fell out: passport, A–Z, Rough Guide to London, hemp purse, tampons, Zenith E camera, Palmer’s hand cream, evil eye charm, ivory-handled hunting knife
Nzinga was profusely grateful when a passing Dominique approached to help, the pair of them scrambling about on the station floor gathering up her belongings
when that was done, and Nzinga was once more upright and composed, Dominique found herself in front of an extraordinary vision
the woman was statuesque, her skin glowed, her robes flowed, her features were sculptural, lips fulsome, thin ropes of dreadlocks fell freely down to her hips, silver amulets and bright beads sewn into them
Dominique had never seen anyone like her before, offered to buy her coffee, confident she’d say yes because lesbians, and she suspected this one was, usually did
they sat opposite each other in the station café as Nzinga sipped on a glass of hot water with a slice of lemon in it, the only hot drink she allowed to pass her lips, she said, I don’t abuse my body
meanwhile
Dominique, drinking a cup of granulated coffee into which she’d dissolved two sugars and was dunking a succession of digestive biscuits (a packet of Maltesers at the side for dessert), felt guilty about the rubbish she was unthinkingly putting into her body – abusing it, yes, abusing it
she’d never met an African-American before and Nzinga’s accent evoked the sensory delights of warm cornbread, sticky ribs, gumbo, jambalaya, collard greens, cracklin’, fried cabbage, peanut brittle – and other foods she’s read about in novels by African-American women
Nzinga was visiting England for the first time since leaving as a small child, on her way back from a pilgrimage to Ghana where she’d spent two weeks, it was her first time in the Motherland, visiting Elmina Castle where captured Africans had been incarcerated before being shipped to the Americas as slaves
the guide led them into a dungeon, shut the door
in the hot, suffocating darkness he graphically described how up to a thousand people were crammed into a space meant for two hundred, with no facilities or sanitation and little food or water, for up to three months
in that moment all the painful history of four hundred years of slavery entered my body in a way it hadn’t before and I broke down and sobbed, Dominique, I sobbed and realized more than ever that the white man has a lot to answer for
Dominique stopped herself replying that the African man had also sold Africans into slavery so it was a lot more complex than that
Nzinga was a builder of timber houses on ‘wimmin’s lands’ in the ‘Dis-United States of America’ where she’d lived since she was five and her mother, tiring of Nzinga’s father who flitted between various women in England and the Caribbean, fell for a handsome ex-Forces man via correspondence
she was only twenty-two when she stupidly moved Nzinga and her brother, Andy, from their flat in Luton into what turned out to be a mobile home in a trailer park in Texas
where she and her brother slept on the floor by the kitchenette, while her mother and the man shared the pull-down double bed and had loud sex a few feet away from them
he drank hooch from the minute he woke up to just before he fell into a drunken and drugged stupor at night, picking up odd jobs here and there
her mother found work in a chicken factory, was idiotically convinced she could cure him of his addictions and make a life for her children with him
her futile attempts to curtail his addictions resulted in being beaten up so often she gave up trying to change him and fell into the drug life herself
what began badly became worse as Nzinga found herself being badly raised by two junkies whose priority was not her and her brother
eventually the inevitable happened when she reached puberty, there’d been earlier signs, inappropriate touching and comments she’d been too young to decipher and later, too vulnerable to ward off
she had her virginity stolen while her mother and brother were out shopping and she’d stayed in to do her homework
the next morning she managed to tell a teacher at school after she’d burst into tears, a man, as it happens, who’d always told her she was clever child – practically the only good man she’s ever known
a social worker was assigned, she and her brother were fostered out to a family
who cared for them but did not love them
not deeply, not unconditionally
Andy went into the army at sixteen and turned his back on the sister who’d turned into a bull-dyke, as he called her when he discovered her in bed with her girlfriend
luckily, I really was bright and worked hard to get into the recently desegregated University of Texas at Austin, instead of the local community college
upon graduation, I set off to live in a women’s commune to get away from people like my brother and the beast