Irma Upex-Huggins

Red Winds Irma Upex-Huggins

Red Winds is an account of Irma Upex-Huggins' time with the VSO in Tanzania, living and working in an environment of extreme poverty, and it charts her journey through the country and through illness and recovery from a serious accident. Red Winds is a combination of poetry and prose, letters from Africa.

Irma was born in Antigua in the West Indies, finished school in Nevis and came to live in England. But as a black woman now coming from England to Tanzania she has a sense of dislocation, 'an uncomfortable sense of my 'not-belonging' when I feel that my 'Africanness' is still wandering in the Diaspora', when asked 'Kabila Gani?', meaning what is your Tribe, her reply is 'Sina'- I have none. She is marked as an Outsider by her lack of Swahili, and even by her hair, worn in a style of Maasai men.

Irma is called 'Mzungu', 'different', and she writes as an Outsider of the land and the people, mostly the people. Not having a common language, she watches people closely and with compassion of their lives and their deaths. Irma is a great storyteller and her poetry has a wonderful clarity. Irma has left her own river and finds, in this new river of Africa, 'fullness and beauty'.