Malcolm X’s mother

This week, Sunday Guardian’s Bookshelf spotlights another gem by Peepal Tree Press Ocean Stirrings, by Merle Collins. Publishers note. ( Jeremy Poynting) “Ocean Stirrings brings the mother of the militant African American leader, Malcolm X, to life. Author Merle Collins does this by inventing the novel’s central character, Oseyan, who shares details of Louise Langdon Norton Little’s life.

Out of scraps of history, Merle Collins creates not just a vividly individual voice but a life that is also archetypally Caribbean in the experience of migration and Oseyan’s painful discovery that her father was a white man who raped her mother, who dies before Oseyan can remember her. “This is a time at the turn of the 20th century when white families who gave their last names to the people they enslaved still lived in the neighbouring villages in rural Grenada.

“Oseyan lives with a mix of shame about the circumstances of her birth and congratulation that she has inherited some of the “reprobate’s” (the father she never meets) white skin so that she can “pass” in the USA where she migrates as a young woman.

“There, she becomes deeply involved in Marcus Garvey’s movement for racial justice and is driven mad by the sheer weariness of fighting racism and the pain of discovering that her husband, comrade in the struggle, is a misogynist at home.”

“Collins powerfully reminds us of the nature of Black lives only a couple of generations ago, episodes that don’t have to tell us that those same forces of white supremacy remain at work in American politics.

“Ocean Stirrings is richly varied in its methods of presentation: of the family oriented Grenadian world where voices are collective, and speech is still bilingual between French and English derived Creoles; of the passage across the Atlantic told in letters to Ma; the narrative of marriage, childrearing and racial struggle in the USA told through an increasingly isolated voice; and the years of being cruelly incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital in the USA, where Oseyan knows she’s far saner than a racist society outside, where her consciousness is portrayed through poems and memories of poems learnt by heart from the Royal Readers.”

Extract from Ocean Stirrings:

The anniversary reproduced exclusively in The Sunday Guardian with permission from Peepal Tree Press:

“Sometimes, Oseyan could hear Auntie Gerda and Ma talking quietly, and something about the way they talked would tell her it was about her mother, but they always stopped when they knew she was nearby. Did her mother really die when she was just a baby? If her mother died when she was four years old, she should remember, but she remembered nothing. Sometimes she imagined that her mother had sailed off somewhere to catch herself after the reprobate did his do, and that one day she would just reappear on the La Digue hillside and claim her daughter– not that Oseyan wanted to leave her grandmother! But nobody said anything that she could really make sense of.

She thought she heard Auntie Gerda tell Ma something about Dr Lang, who was the doctor at the time, signing some paper. She wondered if Dr Lang had anything to do with the black Langdon name, because his people used to own a lot of land in La Digue. But it had other white people in Grenada with the full Langdon name, so perhaps not him. But he was white La Digue people, so who know? Perhaps one day, when she got big and important, she could ask the high-up doctor if he knew her mother. Was that the doctor they were talking about, the one Ma said was in the surgery in La Baye sometimes? Anyway, the bakes and saltfish really nice, so when she and Ma and Amèlie were done eating, Oseyan say, “I really like the bakes and saltfish, Ma.” “I could see that. You licking you finger like food going out of style. Drink you cocoa tea. And don’t be late for school. Leave the sweeping. I will do it this morning.”

And suddenly, ignoring Amèlie who sat there looking superior, Oseyan was on her feet and throwing her arms as far around her grandmother as they could go, which was not very far. Her head only reached Ma’s waist, although they said she was tall, and Ma had a biggish bottom that she was proud of, even though she tall and thin with the long face she had given to most of the family, and definitely to Faith. She had the bottom that she said was a gift from her people. And Ma always said, as if she was disapproving, that Oseyan didn’t have much bottom, and Oseyan couldn’t help thinking that it was probably the reprobate’s fault.

Ma said, “Okay, doudou darling. Okay, sweetness. […] Time to go. I have to go in the shop so I will walk down the hill with you. You have your bag? Your slate in the bag? Your slate and your exercise? You too big for slate now, but I know you still like it. Wash all-you face and let’s go.” This was a special day. Oseyan walked down the hill smiling. Ma had given her bakes and saltfish for her special baptism day on this 12th day of February.”

End of Extract

Ocean Stirrings by Merle Collins, Grenadian poet and writer was released by Peepal Tree Press on September 21, 2023.

IRA MATHUR is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023. (www.irasroom.org) Email irasroom@gmail.com