Out of Africa
Aug 24 2009


We are all Africans, they tell us.
And I feel the pull
of the dark continent.
Of fine-boned children, smiling shyly.
The cacophony of tongues.
And dusky-skinned women,
from caramel to coffee
dark cocoa, to plum.

Somewhere deep in my DNA
I crave the desert sun
the grassland
the jungle.
The Great Rift Valley
ancient, dusty
where my forbears walked upright
gathered and hunted
huddled by fires at night.
And in the great rift blackness
looked up at billions of stars,
wondering.

My pale caucasian body
turns dark in the sun.
I sink into the heat
drifting back millennia,
igniting the primordial urge
to return,
to the native land
the common ancestor,
who came out of Africa
and colonized the planet.

They will beam at the rich white tourist,
defer to his odd habits,
serve him for hard money.
And laugh among themselves
at how funny he smells
his burnt complexion
his exotic clothes.

You cannot go home again
they tell us.
Especially men like me,
born in a land of lakes and snow.
Where I will remain
for one more winter,
at home in this place
yet somehow an exile as well —
unsettled,
still wandering.
As if blood and belonging
were inescapable.
As if we were all one tribe,
destined to return.



I guess if I wasn't sensitive about sounding pretentious and sentimental -- sounding like a Hallmark card, in other words -- I'd say this poem was about the essential unity of man, the narcissism of small differences.

But I think what makes it work (and I can't be sure it does, of course) is the inversion, the confounding of expectations. For example, it's the African who is the colonizer, not the European. It's the white man who feels singled out and ridiculed, his clothes which are "exotic". It's the privileged North American who desires to ingratiate himself, not the other way around. I also like the implied irony that begins the poem -- the "dark continent". When that designation was originally applied to Africa, it assumed European superiority -- both technological and moral. But the darkness, as I use it, is self-mocking, and refers to our ignorance, not any backwardness inherent in Africa. What I hope I avoided was not only romanticizing and exoticizing and patronizing Africa, but making a caricature of that vast and varied continent .

There is also the provocative idea of destiny, of biologic determinism, of "blood and belonging" (which I orignally wrote as "blood and memory"): that we are not necessarily the free willed creatures we presume ourselves to be; but rather that we are subject to inexplicable urges and animal drives, and sometimes find ourselves powerless instruments of our own biology.