Two poems on moving home and being displaced which, ever since I first heard them have become my own. Perhaps because they are about moving to England or perhaps because they are so universal.
Grace Nichols, Wherever I Hang
I leave me people, me land, me home
For reasons I not too sure
I forsake de sun
And de humming-bird splendour
Had big rats in de floorboard
So I pick up me new-world-self
And come to this place call England
At first I feeling like I in a dream -
De misty greyness
I touching the walls to see if they real
They solid to de seam
And de people pouring from de underground system
Like beans
And when I look up to de sky
I see Lord Nelson high – too high to lie.
And is so I sending home photos of myself
Among de pigeons and de snow
And is so I warding off de cold
And is so, little by little
I begin to change my calypso ways
Never visiting nobody
Before giving them clear warning
And waiting me turn in queue
Now, after all this time
I get accustom to de English life
But I still miss back-home side
To tell you de truth
I don’t know really where I belaang
Yes, divided to de ocean
Divided to de bone
Wherever I hang me knickers – that’s my home.
Jackie Kay, Old Tongue
When I was eight, I was forced south.
Not long after, when I opened
my mouth, a strange thing happened.
I lost my Scottish accent.
Words fell off my tongue:
Eedyit, dreich, wabbit, crabbit
Strummer, teuchter, heidbanger,
So you are, so am ur, see you, see ma ma,
Shut yer geggie or I’ll gie you the malkie!
My own vowels start to stretch like my bones
And I turn my back on Scotland.
Words disappeared like the dead of the night,
New words marched in: ghastly, awful,
Quite dreadful, scones said like stones.
Pokey hats into ice-cream cones.
Oh where did all my words go –
my old words, my lost words?
Did you ever feel sad when you lost a word,
did you ever try to call it back
Like calling in the sea?
If I could have found my words wandering,
I swear I would have taken them in,
Swallowed them whole, knocked them back.
Out in the English soil, my old words
buried themselves. It made my mother’s blood boil
I cried one day with the wrong sound in my mouth;
I wanted them back; I wanted my old accent back,
my old tongue. My dour soor Scottish tongue.
Sing-songy. I wanted to gie it laldie.
