Mauritania

Skeletal soil, turgid hematite – this land of iron

Sires the toughest men, or else the hardiest

Women, patient-eyed, ruled by one criterion:

To live. They all are aloes, the truest

Found anywhere on earth, a people like baobabs

Like cactus, gypsum-grown in their stalwart roots.

Their stoic laughter, one with the breeze, dabs

Sweat off the day. Common error calls them coots

Until their hubbub reins the night. They are men,

Makers, fishermen of sea and the Senegal river.

They are the people, the sandstone women

Singing shunted songs with Time the weaver –

They are strands of rare value in the fabric

Africa claims. I sing of them, people of dance,

Whose music retains the stuff and rubric

Of north-winds and easterlies, of deep romance.

By some strange code, the camera is suspect.

The tourist held in doubt. If he is of colour,

Deemed dangerous, watched in every aspect.

Even now, rewriting history and ancient lore.

Sometimes, on the radio, speaking known tongues

Voices float in, proclaiming freedom from forced fealty

And in those moments, unbidden, come bright songs

Like muscled blackbirds, shattering the cruelty

Of pigment predestined bondage. They were thrice freed

And in a trice yoked again, their hope accumulates

Accustomed to that deferred summer of their breed

Waiting here and in the Foggara, planting dates

In daylight, growing dreams at night, seeking

Wider architectures amidst the ruins of Arab industry.

They farm freedom in acres of their weakening

Chains, find faith to rise with the dawning century

So that Mauritania, aboriginal, a million times robbed

Can sprout with eucalyptus. The law was made

A double ass here, while backs still throbbed

A mock parliament decreed, and slavers were paid –

Compensated for villainy. Three centuries of wrong

Found no redress – no flowers of the mint

No token forty acres. But the Negro, he is strong;

And she bears her children with faces set as flint.

In Nouakchott, the Haratin bears a scar as old

As the Marib dam in Yemen. Time transmutes

Adam’s abdication of green to greed for gold –

Equally hurtful – equally rank with seed for disputes

So that memory suffers seizures with the script

Written in blood, of infants where a river

Carries on the crimson communion of child and conscript

Down, deep down, into Senegal’s waiting fever

A fever nothing bitter breaks, boiling with blood

And pogrom-history, a fever nursed by greed,

By ethnic land-grab, spilling black exiles abroad

South into savannah and bone-deep vengeful creed.

Nouakchott teeters on the edge of waiting retribution,

Seismic, somnolent, but there. Surrounded by the poetry

Of justice, songs of change into that transition

Beyond bland letters of law and the paltry

Remedies of pale jurisprudence. Mauritania waits

For oracles of natural justice and liberation

From shackles forged in fear, at hunger’s gates,

For surcease from blood as legal libation.

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