Societally branded a half-caste b*****d you always were however and forever will be my beloved child

Self-explanatory.

By Stanley Collymore

 

You weren’t planned it’s true and your mother as is well known

to you was white and your father Black; your mum was also

an engaged woman. However, her personal status wasn’t

self-evident initially as she never told me any of this

and I knowingly through fear of losing her chose

not to ask or check it out even though I did

suspect from occasional and inexplicable

acts of her personal behaviour that

obligatorily she was linked, to

put it mildly, to someone

else matrimonially.

 

But even so I willingly dismissed that as being of no

consequence to me as this suspected other man

involved, I told myself, was a complete

mystery to me and, furthermore,

I earnestly wished to keep

it that way as I hadn’t

met him, didn’t know who he was, had similarly

and firmly embedded it in my receptive mind

and thus staunchly convinced myself that

it was also highly likely that whoever

he might be he was likewise

and absolutely in the

dark about me.

 

So why, I deliberately persuaded myself, should I

then in those given circumstances unnecessarily

or even unreasonably either for his sake or

my own intentionally open up a can of

worms or, mixing metaphors, a

Pandora’s Box of uncertainties

that could either seriously

or, at its worst, irreparably undermine or

even cause inevitable harm to the then

existing status quo of what he and

I, put bluntly, were genuinely

unmindful of, pretended

didn’t exist or simply

and categorically

didn’t want

to know.

 

And against that delusional backdrop I purposely and at the

same time self-centredly, I now quite willingly admit,

chose not to stop the pleasurably sexual and deeply

emotional relationship I was having with the

woman that totally unplanned, both on

her part as well as my own, became your mum;

telling and thoroughly convincing myself as

every like-minded person who has ever

been profoundly smitten by love will

do, that I too in the case of your

mother was heads over heels

in love with her anyway

and consequently what

we were consciously

doing didn’t only

feel good but

was equally

perfectly

okay.

 

Nineteen years old both of us and at a time when the

legal age to independently get married without

having parental consent was twenty one we

very soon realized that while my family

generally and both of my parents

specifically had no objections

to us doing so if of our own

free volition it was what

we actually wanted to do and

similarly like the two of us �" your mum and me �"

were diametrically opposed to your pregnant

mother killing her foetus, in other words

you her unborn daughter, by having

an abortion, the same humane and

distinctly moral attitudes were

markedly lacking however

when it came to most of

your mum’s family members as well as

several of her closest friends in the

nursing profession that she like

me had happily taken on as

her preferred career, and

who individually, as

well as collectively

now relentlessly

pressurized her

to abort her

pregnancy.

 

Principally among these callous disparagers and adamant

naysayers was your own maternal grandfather who not

only explicitly voiced his racist objections about me

and your mum’s continuing relationship, cruelly

claiming that it was destined to go nowhere

if he had anything to do with it, but also

rigidly insisted and doubly made sure that as far

as he was concerned any anticipated marriage

between your mother and me would quite

relentlessly be thwarted by him, and

furthermore for the time being was

definitely out of the question as

he would uncompromisingly

and legally prohibit it by

refusing his necessary

parental permission.

And that’s exactly

what happened!

 

Meanwhile, as a strict condition of easing your mum’s

utterly compromised but all the same still accepted

athough clearly stressfully tolerated presence

within her own family she was told that

she would have to agree to visibly

disguise her pregnancy for as

long as she possibly could to presumably, of course, stop

herself in her present condition from occasioning her

family assumed and predictable societal disgrace

if her unfortunate condition became generally

known within the community, thereafter to

sensibly and secretly decamp to a home

for unmarried mothers far away from

the vicinity of her own community

and ruefully remain there until

inauspiciously she had given birth to

what her critics: not only those on

the outside but equally too in her family and

most ironically and rather risibly as well

inside that unmarried mothers’ home

pitilessly perceived as and nastily

denigrated - whenever they

condescended to make any

reference to you �" as

your n****r-loving

mum’s b*****d

and unwanted

half-caste

baby.

 

I was promptly notified of your entry into our world and

allowed by the very empathetic and Black matron of

the North Riding maternity hospital where your

mum gave birth to you. to joyously see you

the day after you were born and most

thankfully on an unimpeded basis

afterwards permitted to carry

on doing so during your

mum’s stay there. But

this arrangement

came to an abrupt end however on the transfer back to

the unmarried mothers’ home where your mother

and you would stay until arrangements had

been finalized and you were taken into

care: a strict prerequisite for your

mum being fully accepted back

into the bosom of her family

once you were finally out

of the way. Meanwhile, I was permitted just the

one visit, as this transition rapidly moved to

its fruition, by the female warden at this

unmarried mothers’ institution whose

unhelpful and bigoted opinions on

Black-White relationships and

all offspring stemming from

them she condescendingly

somewhat superciliously,

singularly, and most

offensively made

unambiguously

evident to me.

 

I wanted to adopt you and with my parents and entire family

wholly supportive of me in this specific design of mine

I made a formal request to do so that was summarily

turned down; for although there was not a crumb

of doubt in anyone’s mind that I was indeed

your biological father, devotedly loved

you and additionally had from the

very beginning voluntarily and

wholeheartedly accepted full responsibility for all

my several paternal obligations, even being the

one who in mutual collaboration with your

mum had given you your Christian and

also my Surname proudly placed on

your birth certificate when at the

local registry office I proudly

registered your birth. But clearly alas none of this

didn’t matter one iota, nor the fact that all of my

relatives both saw and totally regarded you as

family as they welcomingly looked forward

to formally inducting you into our familial

ranks, thanks to those whose decision it

was to make in relation to my adoption

application and who in their outright

delusional, white supremacist and

sick frame of mind unbelievably

reasoned that having you grow

up in care organized by white

and economically motivated

strangers was much better

than having you entrusted

to the tender and loving

care of your own Black

and biological family.

 

Thinking that they had a better nature to which I could

logically appeal and in that sense throwing caution

to the wind in my earnest and optimistic zeal to

win them over, I pleaded vainly with them to

rescind their most unhelpful decision or at

least to allow me the humane chance of,

unconstrained, having a close paternal

relationship with my own daughter. But alas this private

request was similarly dismissed with the pathetically

lame and wholly unconvincing explanation that it

was “in the child’s best interest” for her not to

be confused; and moreover growing up with

and surrounded exclusively by whites, as

she was, the entire basis of her cultural

orientation as well as her unassailably

having in her mind a preset British

European and a white Caucasian

cultural identification would in

their opinion, they resolutely

construed, be sorely diluted

and even acutely damaged

by the pointless injection

into my daughter’s life

of a far-reaching and

primarily unknown

Black component.

 

To all intents and purposes then they’d not only won but

had equally taken observable satisfaction both in their

victory, as well as them rubbing salt into my gaping

wound; but, even so, I was steadfastly determined

not to be arbitrarily or soul-destroyingly undone

by these ferally-disposed, racially entrenched,

delusional and white supremacist mindset

Caucasians. And that while in their eyes

what human rights I may have had

in relation to you my daughter was the uninfringeable

lawful compulsion of maintenance payments to you,

which incidentally from the very beginning I had

wholeheartedly, consistently, would steadfastly

keep on doing and all this most willingly too;

I studiously pledged to myself that having

remorselessly been shut out of your life

in the way I was that in spite of how

long it took, and if necessarily too

totally into your adulthood, you

would ultimately know from

me that I had not forsaken

you and that now as then

I shall eternally carry

on being your loyal

and profoundly

adoring Dad!

 

© Stanley V. Collymore

3 November 2015.

 

 

Author’s Comments:

The absolutely brilliant, exceedingly principled, thoroughly well-informed, thrillingly entertaining, spellbindingly communicative; a comprehensively superb human being and the most unforgettable, regrettably late and profoundly missed British historian, writer and renowned Africanist Professor Basil Davidson in his universally acclaimed, and quite deservingly so, Africa documentary series captivatingly, meticulously and impeccably truthfully outlined the history of human habitation across the British Isles and most specifically so, and from the perspective of this commentary of mine, our island home Britain prior and subsequent to its detachment from mainland Europe; and doing so thankfully without an intimation of the customary, conceitedly embellished, fabricated and downright lying versions of British, and other histories too, arrogantly and demonstrably portrayed and so characteristic of the writings of many other white Caucasian, and particularly, British historians and most especially so where Africa and its Diaspora are concerned - as it simply wasn’t Professor Davidson’s style or inclination.

 

I don’t need to add anything either in terms of providing confirmatory information in relation to what Professor Davidson has written or for that matter in respect of any supposed elucidation of any of his works; for how dare one, even with the best of intentions in mind, seek to or could seriously think that something that was already brilliantly outstanding in every respect, a par above excellence and, furthermore, constituted the explicit genius of Professor Davidson needed improvement of any kind?

 

Personally, I wouldn’t dream of ever embarking on such a task since it would be a monumental and unrewarding quest and quite literally be tantamount to trying to teach one’s granny how to suck eggs. But for the express benefit of the legions of ill-informed, downright ignorant, patently stupid or brain-dead, self-absorbed, risibly delusional, intellectually challenged and the largely white Caucasian populace of the British Isles with their fanciful and deeply ingrained notions of what for them the word indigenous absurdly means and additionally who the first inhabitants of the British Isles were and where they actually came from; who subsequently followed them there; how long they stayed independently and culturally apart from or otherwise chose for whatever reason(s) to merge with other communities; when all of this happened and what meaningful contributions or otherwise this continuum of migration to Britain and its outlying islands over several millennia to the present day made to what the United Kingdom is today, that you our supposed “indigenous” white breed in 2015 advisedly should acquaint yourselves with the instructive writings, films, historical documentaries and the other excellent and detailed works of Professor Basil Davidson.

 

That detailed and vital introduction was to slam on the head and dispel the manufactured and preposterous myth that Britain always was and as such uncompromisingly, methodically and non-deviatingly must promptly revert to being the rightful bastion of all-white exclusivity that it previously was. Far be it from me to tell you morons out there who revel in this nonsensical kind of stuff how to get your personal kicks. But I’ve news for you, and frankly must tell you all that you’re incontestably barmy, for Britain, except in your vividly unrealistic imaginations, was never such a place. And barring a hypothetical or possibly even an actual ethnic cleansing holocaust of the sort which those of your sick mindset like to fantasize about and that would be globally resisted and vigorously defeated, such a scenario is unlikely ever to happen. But what the hell? If you pillocks like living in your fanciful virtual reality world entirely divorced from the actual realities of daily life and it’s how you essentially manage to get your rocks off �" then dream on is all I have to say in response to you.

 

This poem I’ve calculatedly written is factually based on an actual occurrence which, at the time and previously, wasn’t by any means a unique situation. Since for most of the 20^th Century this is precisely how the offspring of Black-White relationships were treated. And prior to the 1960s it was distinctly commonplace for a white mother in a relationship with a Black man, whether she was married to him or not and how stable or otherwise that personal relationship was, who became pregnant to have her baby statutorily and minus all consultation with the couple involved taken away from her, placed into care or else be exclusively palmed out to white foster parents, never loving Black families while the child’s mother was medically sectioned, no matter how absolutely unwarrantedly in every conceivable respect: medically as well as conscionably, that action was. But, of course, to absolutely sick white minds that white woman had to have had something psychologically wrong with her to have voluntarily gotten involved with a Black man in the first place; and thus this hapless mother was invariably and usually permanently confined to a “lunatic” hospital, while everything humanly possible and additionally compounded by zealous official backing was studiously and psychologically done by all these persons and agencies involved to calculatingly and socially engineer that child to reject its black identity and instead absorb for the sake of “whitening” itself, mentally and in terms of its own later procreation �" the intentional breeding out of its blackness in other words �" involuntarily submit to the identical practices as were carried out with Aborigine children in “civilized” Australia.

 

Ironically, the hospital where the child in this poem was conceived and was established in 1847 on the outskirts of the City of York as a lunatic asylum and over the decades had mushroomed not only into a huge but also a comprehensively sustainable mental hospital lavishly fitted out with everything from its own farm, enormous and perfectly well-manicured grounds, cricket playing field and pavilion, streamlined walkways, laundry facility, commercial shop, church and even a former burial ground and had itself been the longstanding “home” to some of those aforementioned white women who’d been medically sectioned there, was also the place where the parents of this child first met and both worked as psychiatric nurses. I honestly wish that I could say the rearing and youthful upbringing of this child was a satisfactory one; but it wasn’t. And predictably in those given circumstances most of what happened to her clearly wasn’t her fault. However, she did eventually turn her life around, found someone that loved her for who and what she is and reciprocally fell in love with him. They eventually got married, have been living together contentedly for years now and have a family of their own. All of which she has pleasurably and gratefully been able to share with her biological father who never gave up on her, and with whom just after her 21^st birthday mutual contact between them was again made.