Brief History

1960

The night the flag of the British empire came down in my country, the cry of a mottled wolf was heard in the wild. In a monastery near the saw stone doves flapping their cherubic wings in the dark and panicked, but it was the white cenotaphs of Christian missionaries. In a coastal town that abuts the lagoon and the “Point of No Return” a priest, a returned slave, prayed in groans and translated scriptures. In a long house with a warren of rooms, a sculptor tore a page from a book of maps in her dream and made a paper ship she named , a gift, she whispered to her daughter in that dream, a gift from the ghosts, for they too are citizens. That night, street sweepers, some of whom were shepherd poets, leaned their mouths close to the shrubs and star apple trees of their villages, and chanted as they swept, believing that the earth had ears and could be made tender by miracle speech. That night, a young playwright dreamt and saw the swaying dance of tall trees in a dark forest. In a tower with a colonial balustrade, young soldiers slept and rehearsed in their dreams the future deaths they would bring. Among them future dictators. They believed cruelty was their destiny. All the families had sons they would give to the war, so they prayed for daughters. A country made for ruins. There was no country. In a groove of spruce, a widow, before her child was lowered into the grave in the dark, closed his eyelids in the coffin, said, “Hurry on now. Go meet the King.” It was a dream. In a deeper dream, in a rotunda of plums, voices were heard among Tupelos, the laughter of spirit children. A Garment maker, my grandfather, muttered in his sleep, “Oh God, what a century, what a century.” A black hawk lifted above a white cliff and disappeared into the blue wine-jar of heaven. It was a dream. There was no heaven. This is the history of the night my mother was born