A black diamond

Earlene Horne (1949-1998), a thoroughly loving and revolutionary woman from Diamond Village, used to scribble poems and verse. Some of it was done almost absent mindedly in the midst of a boring flow of chatter – or as she named it “persistent bombardment of their mumbling”. At other times, her verse lifted up topics that made her spirit animated. So sad, I have been able to put hands on no more than 10 or so of her pieces, and even these are not in any one place.{{more}}

Here, I reproduce two of her statements as a black woman. They were most likely written in the 1980’s. In “Children of Africa,” she empathizes with the African homeland and speaks a word of personal consolation and commitment.

CHILDREN OF AFRICA

1. Africa, you watch your children being taken from you/I know you did not give them up so easy/But they are gone/They are being baited away/With fancy words that insult/They have travelled a long journey/You can count them lost.

2. Africa, you see your children every day/I know you wonder if they were your children/Yes, they are, were/They have been disfigured/Their hair curly curly and some straight like arrow/Their eyes purple, their lips and nails red like kayan pepper/Their skin bleached.

3. Africa, you are grieving/I know you are hurt by the loss of your children/But I am here/I am still black, black/Same as when I was born, I only grow bigger/If I was not strong they would have taken me too/But my blackness overshadows them.

Do you notice the parallel “opposites” in the first stanza and the third e.g. “But they are gone” as against “But I am here”?

In this second statement to which she gave the title “ME”, Comrade Earlene faces down Europe’s mental enslavement programme with her confident African heritage, her spirit, as well as her modern day black revolutionary heroes, more female than male.

ME

1. They try hard to kill me the African princess/To give birth to me as a slave descendent/But what stands out most in me is the/ Pride of a great granddaughter of an/African King and Queen.

2. They stifled my language with their boisterous/And persistent bombardment of their mumbling/But my skin and my spirit still/ Speak my foreparents’ accent with pride and dignity.

3. They pose as a symbol of success/For me to see them as role models/Me, not me, my heroes and heroines are people/Like Elma, Nzinga, Nanny and Walter/Who dedicated their lives to light the path to progress.

Each stanza opens with what “They” come with. Each stanza ends with resources and entitlements in “Me” on the ramparts and in the trenches which “they” cannot penetrate.

I remember partly a verse which Earlene Horne penned when city police in Canada carried out a body search in public on a black woman. My own verse response was incensed and damning. Earlene wrote a more clinical piece, identifying the woman (Audrey might have been her name) as a scapegoat. Audrey was a scapegoat and substitute not just for the drug merchants in high office; she was for that period what others suffered to protect colonial butchery. George McIntosh was a scapegoat for colonial class warefare in 1935, etc.

As we engage in light-hearted self loathing these days when we jubilee jump up in celebration of 60 years of a very foreign queen as head of our state of SVG, writings like Earlene Horne’s help us to see straight. The gyrations of Ronald Sanders and the extravaganzas of the Rene Baptiste committee hide a historic crime. The present British monarchy, as late as the world conference against Racism in South Africa, refused to apologise and accept responsibility for the transatlantic trade in Africans which it authorized and legislated for 300 years.

Queen Elizabeth’s jubilee reign “they pose as a symbol of success” “Not (for) me,” says Earlene (and Oscar) “My heroes are people like Elma (Francois).”

With Earlene Horne, a black diamond, let us reassure Africa

Africa, you are grieving

I know you are hurt…

But I am here.