by Rose Rushe
READER, today I beg patience with an exception to the series curated from ‘Dream of a City’ anthology. The reason is that today’s work, ‘Why Did You Go?’, is a winner of the Irish Times’ Africa-themed Writing Competition to mark Africa Day, nationwide on various May dates.
The writer/ poet is one of my Dublin cousins, Mary O’Connor. She worked in Ethiopia for years as a midwife and has held a post entirely other this longtime with BreastCheck.
Winners in primary, secondary and adult categories for poem or short story were chosen by the Irish Times’ literary desk and Ireland Aid. Joint winner in the adult category was a short story by Monica Corish, who is a Hennessy finalist and professional writer of note
My cousin is shy and telling only me in the family. But with respect to how proud I am, Heaney’s words come to mind: ‘Ah, but she had the walk of an African queen’. No hiding under bushels.
WHY DID YOU GO?
“Why did you go?” the young man asked me.
Because he hadn’t seen Bob Geldof’s photo with Mother Teresa
Which ‐ like Horslips and older music‐ updated
The traditional Christian imperative and our famine memory
Into a contemporary tune, creating Aid groupies of a generation,
I simply said “Because I was feeding healthy Irish babies by day,
Watching the others dying of starvation on TV every night and
Had no ties I went.”
I didn’t tell him why I repeatedly returned.
How the TV woman roaming the desert with starving children segued into
The Addis Ababa office worker in her high heeled pencil skirt and then into
A twentieth century Mary led by Joseph to market on their donkey.
How the road from the capital to Chaffa Robit
Ribboned its wide eyed way round the mountains and my heart.
How most adults were Naomi Campbells ‐
The women modelling torn, navy, serge dresses or hand spun cotton decorated with dust,
The tall, straight shouldered men shoes of recycled rubber.
I didn’t explain my awe at sudden sunsets,
Roadside greetings more mannerly than nuns in convent parlours,
Warmth of sun and people,
Culture old as mountains, and burnished as starved skin stretched taut from cheekbone to jaw. How simple life was ‐ sunrise to sunset: male and female: food and water:
Live and work: sing and love.
How treasured every gifted hour of life.
Perhaps I should have explained
That the bonny twins who left the feeding centre, fed and typhoid free ‐
Proud in their donated Dunnes Stores dresses –
Returned three months later and died of anaemic heart failure because
There was no worm medicine at home:
That although I was proud to be Irish, and the yellow, happy tarpaulin,
The thyroid tablets, the cholera combating infusions, the plastic plates were
Traced to Band Aid and the protein biscuits to Jacobs,
That is all they were – Band Aid and biscuits:
That, like the ribbony road, the women
Who beat the oil drum and sang in thanksgiving harmony,
The giggly children who scraped my white skin looking for the expected dark underneath,
The Ramadan‐tired men, who carried and walked to build clinics for their sick
Or shouldered their labouring women over the mountains for help,
Had also encircled my heart:
Or that every bone in my well‐fed body, each drum of my ears,
Each toe splayed delightedly in its flip flop,
Eyes, tongue, skin ‐ knew they were home.
Cradled in community, embraced in a mindful warmth,
Dazed by dignity, the essentials became clear.
I found there what I wanted to preserve when I re‐entered
My other, technocratic, individualistic, future‐focused home.
I had shared Dinkinesh/ Lucy’s land – her timeline in the Addis Ababa museum told me‐
And seen her diamonds in unpolluted skies.
Societal structures; complex and multi‐layered relationships;
Age old lying‐in to establish a mother’s milk;
Family negotiations preceding marriage and divorce;
Rules for care of the first, second and third wives of the wealthy;
Children who could not yet read but traced the lineage to their great great grandfather;
Herbs, plants, trees and antidotes ‐ I had studied disciplines named and unnamed.
As we floundered without the props of daily Northern life ‐ red faced, dirty, long nailed, Suffering withdrawal symptoms from TV, chocolate, fashion, magazines, the Premier League and
Re‐learned to live in harmony with shade and streams, stones and different stories,
Our bodies and souls re‐found original simplicity.
Some say Africa enters the body and lodges there malaria‐like.
No. It plays a single drumbeat, sets the rhythm for our hearts and
Hauntingly bids us home.
I don’t know if I answered the young man truthfully
Or if I followed my traditional and modern heroes with wanderlust
Or to run away, brain washed by media or by pity.
I know that when I returned – again and again – I only answered to my own heart.
By Mary O’Connor
Blackrock, Dublin, May 2015
