appeared in the deepening sky, she felt a tug at her arm,

it was Kehinde, come to lead her from that place

which gave life, took life, and she knew with a mother’s love

that the sea would not bring her son back.

EPILOGUE

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1995

LARA

CORCOVADO, Christ the Redeemer, holds flirty Rio

in its outstretched arm-span, beneficent padre, 700 metres

up canopied mountain. I hike the forested incline

to awe at its monolithic pleated hem, marvel at Rio,

lushly subdued, panoramically shimmering beneath me.

I feel its blank stone eyes follow me in this sexing city

of beached homens with corrugated stomachs, g-string

bonitas with football-hard buttocks, hoovered cellulite.

With my camel-hump rucksack and grunge-green shorts

I feel like a poor relation in this glamorous metropolis,

yet the favela shacks, masses of tumbledown boxes,

are homes for the disempowered, make picturesque hills

from afar for the muitos cruzeiros who stroll the laundered

beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana at sundown.

Escaping Rio, the bus to Bahia spirals mountain precipices,

vertiginous facades lubricated by gushing springs which spurt

out of nowhere. Come dawn we speed past dehydrated

horizons spiked with cacti like three-pronged forks.

My swollen feet tingle as we decelerate into Salvador,

where I hope the past will close in on me.

SALVADOR grips its Yoruba mother like a shawl,

threadbare, tattered at the ends, yet refusing to yield

to wind, fly back over the Atlantico to home.

Bahianas in white sizzle acarajé from stools, as if no sea

no history separates them from the traders of Lagos.

Resting in a high-panelled room in Terreiro de Jesus,

I hear the wheels of the barrow boys on its cobbles,

imagine carriages clobbering its enslaved streets.

Yoruba words sign buildings, pepper Portuguese,

its deities re-located in Candomblé; when bloco bands

converge drumming on Praça da Se, I feel the blood

of war pass into my soul, thrilling me. Rastas and hippies

carve orixas in doorways, busk, sell artefacts on mats.

Entering the Afro-Brasileiro museum I secretly hope

for a clue, a photograph of a great-grandfather or mother,

whom I will somehow instantly, miraculously recognise.

‘Any da Costas still around?’ I ask the attendant.

‘Of course. Hundreds. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands.’

I leave the city of passion for the port of Belem,

not knowing what to look for anymore.

I CROSS the state line into Amazon country at 4 A.M.,

turfed out of my seat to show proof of a yellow fever jab.

Belem is a pasty-faced city that sells hammocks.

I buy one. Take the first boat out down the Amazon,

to reflect, to dream. I string my stripy bedfellow

on deck, intimately close to others, returnees, mostly.

I shower in brown river water, stuff banana sarnies,

avoid a blocked-up loo, and for the next fortnight

I watch the jungle fill me up as the boat slices

through melted chocolate, its engine, my heart, synchronised.

We move on into solitude. My thoughts become free