Somewhere near to three years old in the hot dust of another country, a strange woman comes to me.
She is not like my mother but she calls herself Mama.
My family tell me that she is my grandmother.
This does not sit well with my infant self,
I inform them quite certainly that my only granny is across the seas in her big house of roast dinners and gardening and apple picking.
That was the time when I adored her.
And I vaguely remember haribos on a bed that wasn't my own
And streets that didn't know quiet.
Loud ladies who turned their attention to me
And sellers in the roads dancing between cars and waving their goods at my mother's inherently wealthy white skin.
And there were rural parts,
Sometimes the women didn't wear tops but that didn't matter as much as people think it does
And I separated the rocks from rice with this black imposter who insisted she was my grandmother.
My parents say she would place them before me to find and present them proudly-
She wasn't so much an imposter as a stranger.
And there was a shower
Not in the village but an urban area,
Where someone left a bar of soap
That my feet were too eager to meet,
Things spiralled out of control and I was heels over head, forehead becoming closely acquainted with tiles
Dented.
And marked.
To this day that skin stain remains on my forehead but I forget where.
Time gives way to more accidents and mistakes
I wouldn't say that my visit was a mistake or a waste,
Though I only remember dubious seconds of blurry scenes and the split between reality and imagination isn't always too clean,
But it wasn't a waste.
It was the first, but more importantly, the last time I ever met
That black stranger who called herself my grandmother.