Ripples and Jagged Edges

by Iyamidé Hazeley

This is Iyamidé Hazeley's first published collection of poetry. The back page describes the author as a writer from Sierra Leone who lives in London with her daughter, to whom the book is dedicated. The collection consists of two sections, Dereliction, including a number of poems relating to life in the UK, and Homecoming, including poems relating to life in some African countries. The poems, varied in subject and mood, are often politically radical and are written in a blank verse style.

Cover Illustration by Errol Lloyd

Genres: Poetry

46 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Born [in 1957] of Serra Leonean parentage in London, she spent her formative years in West Africa. She has a BA Honours degree in Social Science (1979) and in 1986 received an MA from London University's Institute of Education. She has been a teacher, designer and painter and has given lectures and workshops on creative writing to adults and children, in addition to writing poetry, fiction and articles. She received a Minority Rights Group/Minority Arts Advisory Service (MAAS) award for poetry in 1983 and in 1986 was a joint winter of the Greater London Council Black Experience filmscript competition. She was co-founder of Zora Press, a Black women's cooperative, whose book was her own collection of poems Ripples and Jagged Edges (1987).

(from Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby)

Reviews

[Zanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a beautiful edition published by the small press co-founded by the author. It is apparently out of print, so I have taken the time to transcribe a number of pieces here.

The tones and topics of the collection are many. One of its most salient qualities is a forceful, affirmative will:

Love Song

In your eyes the mirror to my love
in your voice a gentle serenade
in your thoughts a tender caress
in your tongue the sweetness of passion
in your breath the essence of sweetness
in your arms the embrace of my spirit
in your kiss the promise of a future
with you all roads lead to happiness
I shall walk each in turn

Yet she also reveals a vulnerability that seems forbidden outside the intimacy of poetry

Pride

I'm sitting here
eating spaghetti
writing you this letter
trying to read yesterday's news
and find a way to say
sorry
without swallowing my pride
Oh, and
that mark on the paper
it's not a tear stain
it's tomato sauce.

Poems like the amusing 'Brushing', about groping and the incisive 'Political Union', about sexism in Black Power movements (Sister, make coffee for the movement/Sister, make babies for the struggle) make feminist protest situated in the UK context, while to critique a sexism located elsewhere, she goes into character:

Cry of a Woman Without Child

Still, I remember
the jeers
the scorn heaped on this head.
Those whose whispers ceased
when my shadow fell across their paths
then there were those
whose biting was with voices raised
betraying their schemes and aspirations,
insults.
"What does he want with you
who cannot bless this house?"
They laughed.
A humourless, bitter laugh
like that of one on the verge of conquest.

Finally, it happened, my husband,
your people lured you away.
"That one, she is unnatural."

So he took another,
younger, docile, fawning, eager, pleasing.

My newly arrived mate
flaunted her fecundity
year in, year out
then late at night
the babe would cry out
to a mother
whose heels scratch across
some concrete floor
across town,
another would be wakened
by the tongues of fire
lapping up his tears.
Where is this the motherhood?

I am not a misfit
not deformed
I am whole of spirit
and in my love
only I have not issued
a stranger from my loins.
I am not chattel to be bartered
replaced, part-exchanged
not an incubator
nor mere intermediary
in delivery of your heir.
But you made me a spectator in your life
because I bore you no child
I look on powerless

Both Sierra Leonean and British, Black and female, Iyamide Hazeley draws on her multiplicity of standpoints not only to critique multiple strands of patriarchy creating unstable senses of place in border-crossing poems like this

Lungi Crossing

Early in the morning
after sixteen years away
with still one leg of the journey
remaining,
I arrived home.

The air, the water, the sky
all were tinged
with the blue
of early morning
darkness.

Slowly,
the ferry's motion
through the water,
nudged the sun
into the sky.

I leant one foot
and one elbow
against the rails,
watched as the children
and grown people
milled about
squeezing past cars
parked cheek by jowl
on the deck.

There we all were.
Those coming
to visit ageing parents
those who came to meet
those coming to visit
those wearing the affluence
of tourists
those bringing home their dead
and those simply
coming home.

While it seems that the author places herself in the final category here, there is something of the outsider about her view here, something solitary and disconnected, hinted at by her 'one foot, one elbow'. The same ambiguity about belonging infuses this piece:

Monument

Cotton tree -
nature standing
in the city centre
the body cast in wood
sturdy, immense -
Cotton tree -
bristling mass
of green foliage
spreads its shadow
across Freetown.

Freetown -
confusion scattered
corrugated tin walls
mansions and card-box houses.
Beyond the hills
see the sun
spread itself out
to the four corners
of the horizon

Here
I lose my breath to the landscape
and feel myself held gently
between the index and thumb
of a cool evening breeze
pulling the strings
that should keep me here.

In London, she writes angrily about the built environment she has to live in in 'To the Town Planner', while in 'Calabar', she writes about the same subject (presumably in the Nigerian city of the title) as an observer. This poem is one of the more contemplative, contrasting with the many that move into battle cries. Her incisive poem When you have Emptied our Calabashes is not in this collection, but its intensity is echoed in such pieces as this:

For all those in Voluntary and Involuntary Exile from the Continent of Africa

Clouds bursting their bowels over my bared head
in mockery of my impotence
the skies spitting their icy phlegm that sticks
fast like piercing, crystal talons
onto my face
my eyes squinting already their protection.
My back, one only
of millions that cracked
under the sting of the whip
my limbs drawn on the rack of torture
centuries long
wrenched
from the navel of the earth
and strewn to the four poles
dispersed by capital to capital
my spirit diminishing to return, in turn
to be imbibed as the impetus of the struggle.

As I stand astride the new day
with one foot still in my past
inhaling the violent stench of my executioner
and victory peeps squint-eyed over the horizon
I am enraged;
I want to shake the light foundations of the cirrus.

These very clouds, though they puke so heartily at me
are yet a premonition
of the convulsing innards of the earth
when the blood of liberation will pour
over the streams, rocks, hills
and the land will be a sodden kaleidoscope
nurturing the struggle
germinating, erupting
through the barrel of a gun
and my bones will beat the drum that tolls
the crumbling death of imperialism.

When I first read this poem, I was disturbed by 'blood of liberation... barrel of a gun' which seemed to close the emotion of disgust provoked by the opening with a vision of nature, sick from the start, expiring in a violent death, but I must have just got briefly scared silly for my white life, how could I miss the language of regeneration here? It's as if the land (Africa?) rises in rage to shake off imperialism, through the channels of life (germination, blood (as bell hooks points out in Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, dead bodies do not bleed). The word 'kaleidoscope' suggests a beautiful jumble of colours. The grace and power of the enigmatic line 'I want to shake the light foundations of the cirrus' is Hazeley's hallmark.

Women of Courage

There will be a morning song
for those who clean the dust
from the children's bruises
the blood from the wounds of bullets
those who wipe the sleep
from the eyes of the weary
and whose labour shields
the frail bodies of the old
those whose pain is multiplied
by the pleas of their young
scarred by the precision
of their inquisitors
who refuse to retreat in battle
and who are dying with the sum of this knowledge
There will be a future.