Nigerian Literature, Arts and Society: Essays, Reviews, Thoughts

Open Cities

2011-07-01T02:11:00.000-07:00

Open Cities

These roads are umbilical to no body, bearing

But words scattered like paper in wind, seeming

Sterile. My eyes follow your lines that run and run

The road that runs and runs – this onwards, open story

My glance is a peep of light through a pinhole, laying

No claims, a voyeur to less than suffered. There walks

New York’s Atlas with stethoscope and duffel coat, Bresson

-captive, laden with the sérieux of an elegant, cultured weighting

Story told in stasis, a wasteland of words, how should I empathise

With an Eliot-ness ages dead? With Hagar’s Mason Dead long dead?

Book bound, unbound, ornamental this for which I cannot eulogize

Meritless the nothing new of which I yet must speak.

2011-04-27T13:55:00.000-07:00

Making It Again

There’s no mistake in a child’s clear paper world, all errings

Are erasable: She shreds a year and mutters; it’s just numbers

Same as I bleed the blue from yesterday’s witnessing clouds

Putting distemper in memory, leaving tryst-grounds in chaos

Empty playgrounds are lures when love is done, its

Bud of grace quarter eaten by the price we pay surely

A slammed door - another’s name – wanderlusting . . .

Absence becomes the now place where the other lives alone

I invoke my fever in the creaking of swings, thinking

Of Christ. But she’s gone to the devil and He, creation

By creation, undoes the deed of our Father’s amen

Leaving us as children, a mistaken affair erased.

Recognizing Manism: Understanding Ahmed Maiwada’s “Musdoki”.

2010-06-16T01:12:00.003-07:00

A critical essay
by
Richard Ugbede Ali

“It is instructive that the first sexual encounter between Musdoki and Rita is a rape, and that it is not he who does the raping. Feminism as a philosophy revolves around the female’s possession of a vagina, that trump card that men do not have and the entire history of Feminist philosophy and the feminization movement is the securing by women of the exclusive use of their vaginas and enforcing the recognition of this exclusivity by men. The vagina is the philosophy’s real estate and its value depends on its being made selectively available to men, to other women, or being made unavailable completely.”

‘Masculinism’ is the correct term for the contrary of ‘Feminism’, but, unlike the latter, it has not achieved the ubiquity of a bromide yet and considering the sheer number of syllables it has, this writer will simply stick to ‘Manism’ – as a type, in literature, and society, he wishes to evaluate. The occasion for this is the publication of Nigerian poet Ahmed Maiwada’s first novel, titled ‘Musdoki’. ‘Musdoki’ is a 212 page coming of age novel revolving around Musa Maidoki, aka Musdoki, who we first meet as a teenager who has failed his examinations and who we leave, at the last page, as a lawyer in his thirties. It is divided into four chapters each comprising three, fourteen, seven and three ‘verses’ respectively, no doubt that jargon being used as a bow to the author’s first being a poet. Promptly noticed and immediately pondersome is the author’s note on page four which reads; “This story shall be misunderstood”, more would be realized about this later. Suffice now to speak briefly on the content of his chapters.

Chapter one presents us with Musdoki, a football loving lad from Zaria emirate who, having failed his school cert examinations has moved to Birnin Kebbi to make it up, living with his elder brother with who we gather he has a testy relationship. In this chapter he meets the shadow character and villain of the novel, Rita, at a bus park and Maiwada swiftly establishes the conflicts between them. Musdoki has a young northern Nigerian’s superstitions and Rita from the start embodies an element of unreality or supra-reality. Musdoki at the very first and for a long time after speculates whether or not she is a ‘djinn’ – a malevolent, superhuman, but not necessarily evil spirit. Rita, a ‘half-caste’, determines to marry and settle down with Musdoki and she tempts him severally in this chapter with his dreams and with her body. Chapter two starts five years after Musdoki unceremoniously rids himself of Rita at Birnin Kebbi by the method of an ineffectual escape. By now he has grown more sophisticated and is making his first journey away from northern Nigeria, to Lagos where he is to attend the Nigerian Law School and take the Bar qualification examinations. Of course, he runs into Rita, only this time she is called ‘Christine’ – a Francophile who attaches herself to him with the dedication of jealousy all through his stay in Lagos. One of his earliest ‘bargains’ with Christine is to allow him time to pass his Bar exams and this is symmetric with an earlier ‘bargain’ he had struck with Rita at Birnin Kebbi – to let him pass his school cert before deciding one way or another on their relationship. The rest of this chapter shows what happens as he reneges on this ‘bargain’ and how Christine, amidst metaphysical machinations that give the novel its feel of magical realism, tries to enforce her ‘bargain’. All this is done amidst the stunning backdrop of Lagos in the early 1990’s portrayed with a loving and knowing realism. Notable in this chapter is Musdoki’s flight from Lagos amidst the political tensions and anti-‘Hausa’ riots following the annulment of the 1993 elections by a northern Nigerian military dictator, Musdoki’s escaping death by the whiskers severally and Ahmed Maiwada’s success in painting a true-to-reality picture of the fractionizing tendency within northern Nigeria. When Musdoki is abandoned by his fellow northerners with whom he has tiptoed out of the snapping jaws of a southern Nigerian death on their discovery that Musdoki is not a Muslim, this writer as a northerner, and as any Nigerian, feels how well Maiwada mines the complexity of identity in northern Nigeria and finds for it against the simplicity of stereotype. Chapter three finds our Musdoki as a successful young barrister in Lagos and it revolves around the “loss of his yahoo”, a euphemism for the disappearance of his penis, an event which occurs on a Lagos afternoon. We are also introduced to Maiwada’s last important character, Iyabo, the Yoruba girl with the inimitable manner of English pronunciation who becomes Musdoki’s ally in the matter of the recovery of his potency and who, in time, becomes his wife - after which she is untidily killed by Ahmed Maiwada. Whether this chapter succeeds or not, it does contain some of the most hilarious actions in the plot, matching those in the brief first chapter. Rita/Christine, who, though suspected of the curious disappearance in the last chapter, does not make a physical appearance, shows up in Chapter four in a last bid attempt to enforce her claim on Musdoki – this time, in desperation possibly, by causing his death. Ahmed Maiwada here seeks to resolve the conflict begun in Birnin Kebbi between his Feminist and Manist archetypes; Chapter four is a Rita/Christine versus Musdoki showdown.

Feminism, described simply, is a philosophy that recognizes differences between men and women based on an inequity of rights and consequent realities, this resulting from their physical differences, and which has its objective as the reversal of this inequity by achieving complete equality between the sexes – and then some. I have added the phrase ‘and then some’ as being logical, for if any philosophy is to succeed it must go beyond accommodation and acceptance, it must thrive. In this case, a reversal of gender roles is the silken grail of Feminism. Partisans of this philosophy have used all tools at their disposal, ranging from propaganda literature to affirmative action on to gender discrimination, in order to achieve this. Perhaps a measure of their increasing efficacy is the oft heard concern over what some men have called in several ways ‘the feminization of men’ and ‘the masculinization of women’ - the increasing number of male wimps and female supermen respectively. It would seem, bromide or no bromide, that the Feminists are pushing their agenda to the fore, they are, increasingly, getting exactly what they have stated they want – and then some. It is in this respect that we consider Ahmed Maiwada’s principal female character(s) as Feminist in a bid to clearly locate his own contra-Feminism, his own Manism.

Maiwada’s antihero, Musdoki’s foil, is the green-eyed girl Rita who becomes Christine and then becomes Rita again. Is she a Feminist? Consider her first appearance; “I had real company – a midget girl at my left side with tan skin, flashing dazzling cornrows at me in a familiar smile. Her lips were full, forged with red-hot steel. . .frozen matter packed my veins, sparked by her black, four-inch fingernails. . . ; her diminutive size amplified by the tight fitting lime T-shirt and brown jeans she wore” {page 7}. Quite correctly, Musdoki suspects she is not female, or even human – and he immediately begins a surreptitious search for hooves as opposed to feet, a clear marker of the aljanu {djinns}. She shocks Musdoki, the male archetype, with her almost absolute self possession, from cornrows to black fingernails to the tight-fitting lime green T-shirt. She, a ‘half-caste’, has run away from her father who she is tormenting for ‘killing her {British} mother’, again establishing the rallying us-against-them theme of Feminist philosophy. Rita, contrary to gender roles in northern Nigeria or anywhere for that matter, attaches herself to Musdoki and he is unable to get rid of her – she courts him assiduously. Pages later, Rita says; “You see? So, what do you say? Do we run away together? We could start our own home” (page 20), offering to steal the money they need – Rita wants Musdoki and nothing is going to stand in her way to getting him. Again, a reversal of gender roles. Musdoki stands against her from the start, even when she tempts him with a football playing career in the UK if he gives in and becomes hers; Musdoki piques her by not taking sexual notice of her, introducing the important element of sexuality being a deal at worst struck between men and women at some unspecific point between them. Musdoki wonders; “What did she want from me, anyway, whoever or whatever she might be?” and after another bid to insulate himself from this attacking Feminist by locking her up in a room, this is what ensues;
“Rita did not speak to me. With fury in her sleepy eyes {sic}, she grabbed my arm instead. Then she dragged me back to the bedroom, turned off the light, shut the door and pushed me on the bed.
‘Tonight,’ she asserted, ‘you must die from this something in me that you’ve been running from.’ She wrapped her frail arms around me as tight as she could and said, ‘I’ll offer Thanksgiving next Sunday if you’re dead by morning.’”
It is instructive that the first sexual encounter between Musdoki and Rita is a rape, and that it is not he who does the raping. Feminism as a philosophy revolves around the female’s possession of a vagina, that trump card that men do not have and the entire history of Feminist philosophy and the feminization movement is the securing by women of the exclusive use of their vaginas and enforcing the recognition of this exclusivity by men. The vagina is the philosophy’s real estate and its value depends on its being made selectively available to men, to other women, or being made unavailable completely. Yet, in spite of his rape, Maiwada’s Musdoki still gets rid of Rita unceremoniously the very next day and by this act concretizes the contra-Feminism of Ahmed Maiwada. This contra-Feminism presents that men are not particularly interested in women’s vaginas any more than that it is a physical sexual fact which no woman chooses to have or not to have, that, consequently, men will not recognize female power if it is based on something they had no choice in possessing and, finally, that in the absence of complementarity, men can do without women quite as well.

Rita returns five years later as the character Christine, this time in Lagos where Musdoki is a law student. She makes her entry from the very first and he notices her in the phrase; “When she spoke it was neither good nor bad, but French” (page 36). We begin to suspect that Christine is really Rita when from their first meeting she takes off to steering Musdoki’s destiny away from practicing law upon his graduation, she says; “I have a better option for you: you can work in an embassy or at a foreign mission if you wish” (page 37) and further amidst cultural innuendoes “Why are you quiet? You don’t like the options? You seem like one who cannot take an independent step. Look I’m going to settle into a similar job soon. You’ll see how comfortable you will become. I promise you” {page 37}. She offers an escape from the country, just as Rita had, “I have the connections to plug you in. We’ll pick the country of our choice, like France. . .listen, you and I can live in Europe and settle down together” (page 38) and quite logically Musdoki muses, “My mind went back five years as she reminded me of Rita, of whom I thought Christine should hear, hoping to warn her. . .” and further like Rita, Christine extracts a promise of sorts from Musdoki only this time her metaphysical-morphism is confirmed – Mudoki is bleeding from a cut from a kitchen knife and she promptly cuts her own thumb and joins it to his in that ageless blood ritual well known to Africans, and she says;
“Suck mine. . .Prove that you are not afraid of adventure. . .Go on and prove me wrong!” She succeeds in sharing her blood with him, then Musdoki; “I heard her guffaw at the door, saying: ‘Congratulations!’” (page 40)

There is little doubt that Rita/Christine are Feminist archetypes and that they have an agenda, to mold Musdoki’s fate in a certain way, to do everything to control his choice by narrowing his ‘options’ and that such a trifling matter as gender roles are absolutely unimportant in their achieving this. This, set against Musdoki’s stance, is the central conflict of the novel. And what is Musdoki’s stance? We must consider his responses. To Rita in Birnin Kebbi, replying her offer to elope, he says no; “My family’s injured pride. I am afraid it will continue to haunt me no matter what success I hit in life, that I failed my exams. . .Rita, I like the whole idea. But why don’t we talk about this some other time, maybe; next year when I’d have redeemed the broken pride?” establishing his stance quite early as being a partisan of traditional male gender roles which revolve simply around one word: ‘self-determination’. Musdoki wants the world and his future on his own terms, not on any one else’s terms and not in the least way on Rita terms. Where the possibilities are not on his terms, one suspects, it would have to be on terms that he actively participates in crafting. Musdoki is unafraid to say no, whether the bait is a football career in the United Kingdom or French expatriate life. Consider again Christine; “Let us say I am in a position to know things beyond my knowledge (sic). I have the power to know things that ordinary people like you won’t. And it makes me feel special. I have that in addition to money. All those are the things I’ve been battling with you to accept, offered on a platter of gold. Do you know how many people will do anything for half the opportunity you are refusing to take?” (page 53) and her piqued “That is your favourite word, isn’t it? ‘No’. . .Why? What is it that you don’t like. . ?”(page 67): We can assess Musdoki’s praxis by his response to her offer of a job at an ultraliberal magazine, with global fame and a Nobel Prize being the bait this time, he states; “Inspiration without responsibility is what you call that kind of writing. . .One can be inspired only to a certain level. I am no different from the others. But after the inspiration, I wake up to my responsibility and tamper with the inspiration wherever it conflicts with my responsibility to the society” (page 78) and “I don’t see myself writing about absolute freedom when I don’t believe any such thing does or should exist” (page 79).

In considering what ‘Manism’ is or is not, I hasten to remind that while Manism is contra-Feminist, it is not anti-Feminist. In understanding this, let us think, using a historical model, that both the Reformation and the Counter Reformation were aspects of Catholicism as a fact and a faith; no matter how opposed each may have seemed, both were twins of the same parent, germs of the same tree. Each successful philosophy significantly overturns the social system before it until it reaches its peak and begins to decline at which point another ideological wave grafted in its belly tides in, modifies what it wills and dashes what is left of the former to the rocks – such is the story of human intellectual dynamism, responsible for what Darwin has called ‘natural selection’. Darwin is important, to be stressed; all men and women alive today are alive because they have the best adapted brains, exactly alike in all respects, arrived at at the end of a process of evolution. We are the triumphs of Brain and Ego. It is the opinion of this writer that Feminism as a social theory has come about as far as it can go and an indication of this is the distinct presence of such an ideological strain as Manism, as extracted from Ahmed Maiwada’s ‘Mudoki’. The current gay-rights debate really is Feminism in its last throes. Manism is rooted simply in gender self-determination. It accepts gender differences as facts; it rejects gender discrimination as being a practice peculiar to the male gender. But, the chief thing about Manism is that it recognizes the place of the Ego above and beyond all. Gender differences are accepted because no one chooses to either be male or female, definitely not the males or females in question; the Ego in men and women is recognized for it represents a conscious interpretation, a conscious act, for the reason that it is definitive. Cogito, ergo sum. Cartesian thought, which is the context of Philosophy, achieves its most perfect clarity in Manism for Manism sees human history as the long story of conscious choices made by Egos and the Ego is, of course, omnipotent.

This neatly explains why even in the most ‘backward’ of cultures, there have been dominant women, such as Queens Amina and Idia, both well used by our Feminist dramatists; they were dominant not because they did not have vaginas or to the contrary, that they had penises, but because they had cultured an affecting Ego for themselves. In consequence of this, these women led men quite in the same way certain men lead other men and in context, have led many women. Manism extends the basis of the male-female debate, reaching it to its lowest common denominator which, contrary to the popular thought of the last fifteen decades is not a basic gender difference but a basic mental equality.

Ahmed Maiwada’s fiction points this writer to the end of Feminism as we know it and the rise of its successor. It is, perhaps, the star above the Jewish Prophet’s crib. This is the thematic subscript beneath Maiwada’s novel, the subscript that could be easily missed and hence ‘misunderstood’, and in spite of the novel’s numerous instances where any critic could put the author embarrassingly to task, a job I have little doubt other critics will do, I think it is important to highlight this understanding.

Further, the rise of Manism is not just in the realm of fiction for social corroboration of this fact is increasingly coming to light. A recent TIME magazine story chronicled the rising number of women who give up their demanding corporate careers in order to bear children and take care of them, while their husbands work to pay the bills, household activities being shared on some agreed upon basis. This was Feminist anathema as lately as the mid 1980’s. But this, in essence, is Manism; that you are female, I am male, you need me, I need you, let us intelligently agree on the terms of our engagement, let us be complementary and see how far we can make this work. This writer has also noticed a rising number of men quite willing to stay at home and look after their children while their wives pursue degrees or jobs – even if in a majority of these cases, these men have jobs at which they can and do work from home. I personally know a number of African men who look after their kids while their wives undergo MA’s and PhD’s. We have also found corroboration of the existence of the germ of Manism in Feminist prose, in Alice Walker’s no less. This writer has little doubt that Ms. Walker would deny his reading of her book ‘Temple of My Familiar’. In one of the central character Lizzy’s trans-physical ‘travels’ within a fluid Time, she recounts an original state of affairs where men and women were separate ‘communities’ who came together for what was needed and stayed apart when that was done. Though, in that instance, Ms. Walker could not help infusing her personal sense of the tragic and of an aging Feminist’s blame-the-men-and-get-the-labyrisis recourse, we see clearly that History in its circularity is coming around yet again and in its nature, it will be recognized by only a few. Men are men, women are women, there is no intellectual disability suffered by either of them, they both have competent Egos, they are separate, insular, but possibly complementary.

As for Maiwada and his ‘Musdoki’, how does the story end? Well, it goes on first. I have said earlier and will restate that I am in this brief essay uninterested in a detailed criticism of other aspects of Maiwada’s fictive successes and failures, this being the task of other critics or a subsequent essay. I will not comment, therefore on the doubtful efficacy of Maiwada’s writing in the chapter dealing with Musdoki’s emasculation, but I shall speak on the relatedness of this to the theme and the philosophy of Manism. In the novel, the now successful Barrister Musdoki loses his penis in a course of sometimes bizarre, sometimes hilarious situations and we find that Rita/Christine is behind this as well. This concretizes the idea; the scorned woman tries to emasculate the insensitive lover or, on another level, seeks to destroy completely the man who refuses to be female, that is, to ‘be’ on her own terms, done in this case, by removing his obvious ‘maleness’. Yet, being male, and being a Manist, is tied intricately to possessing a penis, just as being female, and being Feminist, is tied intricately to possessing a vagina. The ones in between these two are truly the unfortunates, for there is no philosophical groove in which to fit them. The good news, at least for Musdoki, is that he does eventually recover his penis, and his Manism.

In the last chapter, he, on his way to Kaduna from Lagos, picks up a hitchhiker who is, of course, Rita/Christine and this time she tries to physically kill him. Yet, for this agenda, she does not succeed. Musdoki’s near-death is followed by Rita/Christine’s confession of all her machinations and of her failure at them and she reaches the rock-bottom truth about her self, that if their relationship is continued with her persisting in forcing her terms, what would be left for her would be self-immolation, a course which she is about to choose. The dialogue that ends the novel is;
RITA: I can only live for you and nothing else. But you are hedging, as always.
to which Maiwada scripts Musdoki saying;
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, patting her frail and smooth arm. “Today is the day when all walls shall fall, including my own walls of resistance.”

In this way, a tenable complementarity is established between the two antagonists.

Manism demands that men and women be seen at their basics and that physical differences un-chosen by either should not be this basic. It places the basis at the pedestal of intellectual equality and conscious self determination. While it is a contra-Feminist philosophy, it is not anti-Feminist; it may be considered post-Feminist. As with all philosophy, only time will tell whether or not it shall endure. But, at this point, we must not stint from commending Ahmed Maiwada for writing what is sure to be an important book, the sort requiring serious and detailed critical study on many levels. And what is more, it may just be at the start of both a new philosophy of writing and of life.

Dadin Kowa Village
Jos, Nigeria.
May 2010.

Richard Ali is editor of the literary magazine www.sentinelnigeria.org and Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors, Plateau State chapter. Contact: richardalijos@gmail.com .

What the River Brings You

2010-02-23T05:33:00.000-08:00

What the River Brings You

By the time the river reaches you it will bring tidings

Fragments of me along with the richening alluvial

Of other dreams leached as if by some subtle sieve

From the quarters of my cusp, my land, my pride

You swim within the tufted turbans of emirs, amidst the stretched

Arms of Igala fertility cults; when you drink, each drop holds a tang

Of tears of rocks forced to fall on native men at the foot of tin mines.

Everything the river brings you is a cosmic concentric dream – like love

Stranger I may be, I rest my arms on you and say the sacred words;

For my soul is rooted here – for the river precedes me.

AGAINST VIRULENCE; A SCHEMA FOR RE-EDUCATION

2010-02-14T13:51:00.000-08:00

Petulance is a somewhat admirable quality for persons under the age of twenty-five; it may even be seen as an affecting trait, that desire for childhood. But something fatal happens around that age which makes the presence of this marker of self thoroughly ghastly. B. M. Dzukogi’s “Northern literature: Emerging teen Authors and Juvenile Writing” {Weekly Trust, January 9th 2010}, following my article “On Northern Nigerian Writing and Related Issues” published in Leadership Newspaper on December 25th 2009, provides a curious circumstance worthy of examination in this light. Indeed, clearly shown is the difficult underside of Writing – that of being a looking glass which a writer turns often and unknowingly on himself, revealing a sight that can possibly madden him, depending on whether the stuff he is made of can withstand the sudden presence of the context that causes folie de grandeur.

In order to contextualize, I will restate the triune aims of my article. The first was to indicate that hubris, leading to crimes against the sentence, sense, and Literature, are routinely committed by writers of northern Nigerian extraction. The second; to indicate the presence of a sickening social constraint to kowtow {ranka ya dade}, what the effect of this illness is, and how my milieu of northern Nigerian writers must avoid it. Thirdly, linking both was a brief thesis of what I called the “sense of self” or the philosophy of writing, and its related concept which was formulated as a “chaos of perception.” Dzukogi’s cited response to this article rests on three issues; my incompetence to write about the subject solely on account of my age vis-à-vis his. Secondly, my success at not doing what I did not set out to do, to wit, mentioning the name of every northern writer and every locale of writing in Northern Nigeria in a brief three thousand word essay. The third issue which he raises in shabbily crafted innuendoes, founts from what he believes to be my subjectivity, an attempt that has amongst other things turned our Great Man into a web archivist, or a newspaper store clerk. It is not in my nature to tarry with the plumage of birds, but before I go to the meat of this matter, let me dispense a few pearls to our pseudo-French absolutist;

My youth has been of the most important value to me, for I am convinced that older men often have a lot to learn from the experiences of younger men, and that the tragedy of the last millennium, its multi-dynamic wars not the least of this, has arisen partly from a cultured disregard for the intuitive wisdom of youth. Secondly, I unreservedly apologize to B. M. Dzukogi for succeeding at what I set out to do, which was an essay to situate the broad scope of my primary literary space, a task I set upon myself, having waited for the old men and ‘others’ to do it and finding only silence or self-obfuscation. Thirdly, and in the kindest voice I can manage, I tell him that ‘subjectivity’ is a lame rhetorical excuse and it is quite saddening that he relies on this – like all rhetoric, it fails to address the issues at stake. Rhetoric, such as his, are not effective fire-extinguishers. We have had one famous mad man who piped as his city burned to the ground, must we have another one a millennium later? And such a one who claims that doing this as a virtue?

The grouse of B. M. Dzukogi, in this barreling and blaring of his primacy, seems to be my sentence; “For example, in Minna, where the oracle seems to be B. M. Dzukogi who has been hailed with every epithet from “ascetic” to “the philosopher” yet when we read his actual works we ask – Is this the Dzukogi fellow?” – and to this he responds; “So where was this pupil when my first poetry collection, Midnight Lamp, got a shortlist in 1996 during Odia’s era? ” The reeducation of B. M. Dzukogi must begin here, for he misses the rudimentary structure; that his vaunted importance and primacy, which he affirms in the excerpt above, is relegated to thirty nine words in a three thousand word essay. And yet he goes on and on about this, with no less than twenty references to my youth, as if it were a crime, before giving this gem of a coup. Hear him; “But let us take it that it is from Richard: as the national treasurer of ANA for which Richard is the current secretary at Plateau level {a position I held 16 years ago in Niger}, am I not a leader? Pose. No, I am their leader, their teacher, I am their natural leader.” And yet Dzukogi goes still on, not realizing his bum is far high in the wind, twice in two paragraphs. Firstly, collections of poems do not “get” shortlists, “make” being the correct verb. And secondly, more piteously, he does not see how he winds the twine around his own neck. He does not see how he furthers a joke that he has thrust himself in the center of, a joke of which he, B. M. Dzukogi, a fringe reference, has come to see himself as the point of. On the basis of this ego-trip, he has turned a fleeting archetypification in my essay into the grounds for as vicious an attack on my person as he has done. It is for this mischief, further, that I leave the pedestal of public discourse to now re-educate him, personally.

Having set out this context, the reeducation of my willing student, the same as the dissection of my willing specimen, will proceed. Kindly sit at your desk, sir, with your palms on the table. Look sharp and don’t let me remind you when to lie on the theatre table.

FIRST: Northern Nigeria suffers from an evolving problem which we must term as a “deepening mediocrity”. You have justified my thesis with your response, which has raised no issues other than to create exculpatory suspicions of senility on your part. I first suspected this from the dearth of Arewa-born experts/mentors across many fields in Academe, from law to politics to engineering, unto the presence of a no more than a few virtuosos in the fields of commerce. Count the northern Nigerians who are making any impact globally, count them on your fingers and you will see that I am right. And how is it that all we have, as a locale in the Nigerian superstructure, is a few aging stars? It is because we seem to think we can sit in our own secluded savannah and feel at least we are masters there, to be backslapped with umbrella MA’s and Ph.D’s by our own clubs, conveniently forgetting that a whole world of rainforest education, of sand and ice deserts, of oceans and dreams exist just beyond our noses. And my thoughts on realizing this while I was an undergraduate, admittedly less than a decade ago, heightened my interest in Writing. For I felt then that Literature would be the means to raise the perception of my Age beyond the preconsigns of a Local Champion Complex. And that is why I write. That is why I fine my writing even if it may take me five years to write a novel, for I feel strongly that there is no point pushing out dross, and to be possibly applauded for doing so. I believe that every novel must be important, that each poem must be a socially uplifting statement – in content, in form, in context.

That article, for which you have claimed the bliss of self-obfuscation, is my statement on what I see to be my primary literary milieu. It was an attempt to indicate the causes of the mediocre state into which we have fallen, and for each of those causes isolated, I suggested a drug. And what have you done in this rant you have written in response to my thirty nine words? I have at least added to my Time by contributing the best of my opinion. And what have you done with your essay, or in the five years before that, more than massaging your own stomach?

I have come to suspect that older people are often too set in their ways to do the unconventional {which is exactly how Literature demands we see and act!} and that is why my essay was written to the young. Having read your response to my essay entirely and your own thirty nine words specifically, even the most addled would see the impossibility to use you and your work as manure for the future of Arewa writing.

SECOND: Much has been made about Helon Habila and my non-inclusion of him in my essay. You have furthered this by mentioning a long list of names I did not mention as well, including his. I admit not including Helon Habila on the grounds of a difficulty that I have now resolved enough to comment on. For while he is a northerner, he is the anti-archetype of what I wrote on, of what you have set yourself up as. From a young age, at the University of Jos, he took to reading books of truly great literature {I know this for I share the same library he used}. He read Marquez, Poe and Achebe and all the greats he could find, making them his mentors and they in turn rewarded him with a gift for the finessing of his craft. He looked up to the gods and that aspiration is why he is where he is now. He did exactly what I am advising young northern writers to do now. He did not look up to you, else like you, he would today be unable to carry off a simple discourse with a twenty-something year old boy. Contrary to you today, Mr. ANA National Treasurer, Helon Habila is with Jude Dibia perhaps the finest pair of literary stylists there is in this country at present. That is what I want northern Nigerian writing to become, a field of possible Helon Habila’s. Not, of you. For amongst the many disciples that you in the hubris of your natural leadership, your soon to be divine-right-of-kingship, claim – do you, B. M. Dzukogi, see a single Helon Habila amongst them?

On a related issue, I shall not add my name to a list of young northern writers in an essay written by me. Neither shall I catalogue what books I have read nor how much which writers have influenced me. I think that would be silly. Let other critics, whether they be younger than I or not, when the time comes to do so, do so or not.

THIRDLY: The lesson of the lady from Riga, a childhood verse that I naturally in response to you now, find appropriate. This lady took a ride on a Tiger one day and she returned at sundown – with her body in its belly. I ask, “What is the moral?” You answer, “The moral is to not ride on tigers, Sir!” I say, “WRONG!”

The moral is to be wary of the support of power, for power is as colorful and as enslaving as it is transient. In ending your rant, you quoted the usual glow words, “particularly commending Dr. Muazu Babangida Aliyu for his wisdom, foresight and blessing as well as support to host prophets in the land” – but the trouble is that you quote it in the manner of a court jester and I do not think Dr. Agada, whose quote it is, or Dr. Aliyu, who is being saluted, would find this salutary. I have never had issues with writers working with the state, but the writers must first know EXACTLY what it is they want, what it is that they will not compromise. In the peculiar Nigerian context, money for patronage must be raised, more often than not from the state {for it is our money} – yet, while ‘thank you’s’ are in order, we must not create a context where we lose our credibility, where we can be roughshod ridden over. I ask; when was the last time the State took any writer seriously? When was the last time a writer was jailed for a provocative book? When was the last time an article caused a furore? Do you remember? Not in a long time, my dear older man, not in a long long time. And the reason for this is that you, lying on the slab now, are symptomiac of the ineffectuality of Nigerian Literature! That is what I have found out, the discovery for which I set out on a journey about a decade ago at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria!

Like the lady from Riga who sat on a Tiger not knowing at what point to get off or even how, you are now the same WITH the tiger! And yet you dare tell me that you are, dare call yourself, a writer! Of what use else is a writer if he is of no use to the society, if he does not improve the quality of his times, if he cannot sire greater sons! None. None. None. And this last, in one syllable, is your entire utility to me now.

The recent and still ongoing debacle on censorship in Kano is the effect of your “generation” of ranka ya dade stymied writers’ leaders – it is the effect of an empty hubris, it is the effect of a self scuttling collaboration. It is not all disputes that should be settled amicably! I have said it before in my essay on the Kano Censorship saga, I say it here again. And you, B. M. Dzukogi, lying beneath my knife on a theatre table, are the sad archetype of that sort of leadership.

FOURTHLY: On the form of the essay. Living in a locale where words lose their meaning for no cause other than indolence, especially on the part of writers, it is necessary to say a few words on this form.

The contemporary essay is often one written in prose, of middling length, about personal observations of any issue that is of interest to the writer, published possibly in a transient medium such as a newspaper. This definition is my contribution to literature; I do not advocate it, nor do I claim it should be adopted by any other person.

Now, when observations are personal, no argument may be made on behalf of the public concerning the subject of the essay or even the argument employed. Similarly, the Essay is a reaction against the Thesis; it is heads-to-tails different from it. It is, in fact, its symmetric opposite. Features of the thesis such as the citing of authorities and all else are dispensed with in the essay. Not even the much vaunted “textual criticism” is necessary in the essay! This does not however preclude the inclusion of these external features at the pleasure of the essay writer. For the essay is a personal reflection and there are no constraints to the individual in writing one. And my article, “On Northern Nigerian Writing and Related Issues” is an essay. I have made no pretense of it being a thesis, neither have I said it was a review.

Now, in its nature, when an essay is written, the only option the aggrieved public or any member of it has is to write a response and this response is termed a “Contrarian Note”. It is a point by point rebuttal of the issues set out in the first ‘displeasing’ essay. Your response to my essay must be assumed to be a Contrarian Note – so the now embarrassing question arises; which of the issues I raised, set out for your benefit in lesson one above, have you responded to? For you are a much advertised older man, and you should know that essays and contrarian notes must go further than the exploration of ego or the exposition of meticulous research. I set out to write an essay, I have written it. You set out to write a contrarian note, have you, sir, written it?

Further, there is a question of coherence. When writing an essay or a contrarian note, coherence is of the primal importance. It is safest to write what exactly the issues you wish to address are in a chronology, then weave them all together into a logical framework. Evident from your confusion as to whether you were replying my essay, attacking E. E. Sule, seeking to discredit Gimba Kakanda, or simply listing out all the writers you know in Northern Nigeria to come save you from Little Richard Ali, it becomes my responsibility to lay the charge of incoherence against you. I charge you, B. M. Dzukogi, writer of the article “Northern literature: Emerging teen Authors and Juvenile Writing” {Weekly Trust, January 9th 2010}, with Incoherence.

Finally, when writing an essay, do not do so while under the influence of alcohol or in the atmosphere of marijuana. Nor should you allow yourself to be prodded into writing one by imps. The effect of these influences is the creation of yet another pseudo-genus of writing which is based on stuff no more concrete than bombast. And bombast is a close cousin to the bar-room boast. And both are hardly fitting for a “natural leader of men”, let alone for a writer.

FIFTHLY: In your all too obvious bid to create an antagonism between me and all the writers you have mentioned, on account that I did not mention their names in my article, you took your liberties too far. You give me a quote – “I think the influence of Abubakar Gimba is overly exaggerated.” I have gone through the entire essay and can find no phrase like this. My words were; “However, with the exception of Abubakar Gimba’s contributions in prose, which while noteworthy are hardly stratospheric, there have been no important novels in English from northern Nigeria since Yari and Sule’s contributions in the mid ‘70’s. Neither has the poetry or drama been exceptional. And the question is – why?” I stand by those words. I shall not call Abubakar Gimba’s novels stratospheric if I do not think they are, and I certainly would not do so because you or a vaguely defined ‘everybody’ thinks so! Abubakar Gimba, who is an intelligent man from my University, who read my first prose MS, would be smart by being wary of you. I have not claimed to be any body’s natural leader, you have. But I do know that leaders should not tell fibs!

But this last admonition will not save you from the eye of the Public:

I, Richard Ali, publicly ask you, B. M. Dzukogi, to INDICATE WHERE IN MY ESSAY the quote you have given me was taken from. If you cannot do this, I DEMAND A PUBLIC APOLOGY. And if you cannot do this last, you will be unfit from now on to mention my name until such a time you are young enough to do so. That is all on that.

Your lessons are complete. You may go home now.

I will now return briefly to my own constituency, the young writers from Arewa;

My friends, if you have read my previous essay, and if you have settled for the meat of my words and not been content to chew its peacocks’ plumes, that would be all well. If you have read that article, and the reeducation of B. M. Dzukogi above, and digested the meat of my words as well, that would be even better. And there would be nothing more for me to say to you.

In the manner of a rehash, I shall end this article in the same words I ended the last one;

“The challenge for the younger writers from the north is an exhilarating one for it is still early enough for something distinctive and radical to be done across the genres of English. By this I mean something not less paradigmatic than what the Latin Americans, led by Garcia Marquez, Jorge Amado and Vargas llosa, did to “world Literature” in the 70’s. But we must first sit on our mats, holding our beads in our hands and mentally reach a place where we can banish the cloys of personal hubris, and the pressure to kowtow, from our psyches. And at this same place we must ask and answer personally the question of why we write and settle privately and conclusively the issues relating to our sense of our selves, triumphing over Siamese evil twins of a fostered chaos of perception.

And when this is done we shall be able to stand up from the floor and mount our horses. And when we thunder down the fields of Literature, we shall do so in the aura of a global applause deafening far beyond the stampeding hooves of our own vitality.”

Thank you.

Richard Ugbede Ali, writer of poetry and prose, is the Editor-in-Chief of the new Sentinel Nigeria Magazine. richardalijos@gmail.com

Watching A Girl

2010-02-14T07:51:00.000-08:00

Watching A Girl

I remember a girl who used to giggle

Ribbons in her hair, a seesaw world

Of delight when I pushed her happy

On the swing of childhood’s privacies

Dusk comes between times, leaves a relic

Of waves having ridden, receded, been rid of

Pleasures to be paid for, love to be known

And that growing too knowing to reenter again

Eight years a’ gone and I see Joanna again

And now she’s still swinging, now she still giggles

Only less demurely than in my memory.

A Letter To Jossites by Gimba Kakanda

2010-02-10T05:43:00.000-08:00

A Letter To Jossites

Gimba Kakanda

Dear brothers and sisters,

My eyes are sunken in grief as I gather the heart to write this letter. However, do let my condolences descend in the blood-bathed cushions of The Governor, and the mischievous elders of your religions and tribes borne in the cosmology of cannibalism; I’ve since ceased to call you religionists, for none of you, Muslims and Christians are fit to be in the book of theology.

True, I do not know the religions that hold your life in spiritual revolution. I did know until the electric bursts of your continuous grudges against one another become my shame. Too many strokes of wonder set me a-thinking; first, I believe that none of you shall be granted the shade of The Lord; second, my kinship with Jos inaugurates my thought as keen observer of the chilly land. Many things, my dear siblings, disqualify all of you as Muslims and Christians in the scope of philanthropy.

First, to the Muslims: I’m one of you, a meek lad that is popular among the mosquegoers of Nassarawa-Gwong where the last crisis popped its first spark. I’ve lived with you, your thoughts and their contents, much as I do the Muslims of Ungwan Rimi, Rikkos, Bauchi Road, Konar Shagari, Farin Gada, Yan-Trailer, Naraguta, Katako, Gangare and Dilimi. I know your fears; I can even touch them, and the clouds of perception that crawl over your domains. Second, to the Christians: your districts are mine, for the larger proportion of my friends come from your fringe. Many of the churchgoers whose shoes are known and could even be named by the Sunday soils of Jos are my beloved, and my fraternal embrace of your life is sublimity unequalled. I love Jos, the wintriness of ‘ember months that are once the womb of our endless festivities to mark the bye-byes of every year in clubs Zero-Eleven, D’makumba unrepelled by the wands of religions, tribes, sects and regions. And the smiling throngs that march on from Ungwan Rukuba, Eto-Baba, Congo-Russia, Dogon Dutse, Dutse Uku, Busa Buji, Laranto and even Barkin ladi, Ibrahim Taiwo, Millionaires’ Quarters, Bukuru, Kuru, Vom…. I love Jos, the caftan-wearing Christians and Coat-wearing Muslims therein; they are just too beautiful!

And here, away from Jos, my mind could not be blinded as I settle to expose our sins which are too weighty to be easily forgiven by Prophets Jesus and Muhammad. Truth has taught that all of you would not be forgiven by history, for a simple slide into the origin with an anthropologist’s faith tells the mockery that is our folly; John is a Christian because his parents are, and Abdullahi? He too is a Muslim because of his parents. I bask in the beam of Islam ‘inherited’ from my parentage. Funny, what if John was born by Hajiya Amina, a Muslim mother, and Abdullahi by Deaconess Maureen? What if…? This ignored mockery illumines the descent of tribes too. I do not see a reason why a faith or tribe that came not from us could stir me to repel my brother or sister.

Religion, from the cistern of history, is not a creation of God. A cult it is, organized by man to live in the directorate of The Lord, attuned to revelations of chosen Prophets. The only thing in religion that is divine are spiritualism and bowing subservience to the commands of The Lord collated in The Good Books which if permitted to sink into our soul unadulterated must inspire the thoughts of philanthropy. Misrepresentation of religion obeyed is pure agnosticism of the absurd! The day you dine the entrails of religion shall mark the moment of your sanity. And, the thought of your grumbles over one another provoked my peace to think, blasphemously: ‘What if the Arab Muslims never happened to Nigeria?’ And to the Christians, I say: ‘What if the English Christians never happened to our life in the name of missionary?’ We were traditionalists living in the cosmology of our ancestry before their invasion. Though time has authenticated the joy of their religions our belief in them remains unauthentic! None of us seems to be laden with the teachings of theology. That deficiency turns us lunatics. Yes, we are all living in inverted faiths, but there are many flames that hedge us for destruction. These, darling siblings, shall be my dart here.

The first demons that I shall stone are the inventors of injustice, liquor-sunken ushers of tribalism who out of idiocy ink the map of indigeneship that stretches to religious repulsions. My dear Governor Jonah David Jang, I salute your conscience for wading through these gory hours alive. I shall begin with you because the cardinal of every body can only be charted by the head. You inherited a tensed land despoiled by the past administrations of lunacy, and instead of having the sores of Jos bandaged, your strides were shoed in ambiguity. Even though your wisdom must have applauded your policies, the other tribes believed that you, a pastor, empowered your tribe, the Berom nation, quite irreligiously as though the non-Berom-speaking dwellers of the fallen city have no genes of intelligence. Aside reconstruction of our Royal Father, The Gbong Gwong’s Chaplin in a controversial situation, news hover that you imposed tax on non-indigenes whom you tagged settlers, and thereon begins the demonstration of the ideal ‘settlers’ who are largely of Hausa/Fulani tribe. This tension is an offsping of distrust. My neigbours wept that the world of Hausa/Fulani is an orb of Islam, and hence your political myopia transforms your anti-tribal dichotomy into religious riddance! ‘Have you no sense (sorry, Your Excellency,)’ they said, to have wakened such fatal policy in the ambience of tension? They cried that what on earth attacked your wisdom when you growled that only the hard-earned currencies of the settlers would reconstruct Jos city? Such is unwise leadership, for the Hausa/Fulani indigenes of Jos nay settlers who could not trace their ancestry again, have lost their properties in the recurrent crises of tribes and religions that deluded the once sublime heaven of relaxation. Where on earth did you expect the impoverished ‘war victims’ to fetch money for such taxes when their losses were never compensated, and watching them tottering to begin life anew? How could you be thus merciless? Your Excellency, these mindsets are the lives of my neigbours, tweaking me to borrow a seer’s life in analysing the explosive situation of old haven of bliss that was the swoon of the expatriates. But for the inhospitable species, the Berom-speaking Jossites aren’t malicious, and having a considerable population of Muslims, they accept one another in merriments. I know a lot of Berom-Muslims who head their Christian-dominated clan. You too know them, but your political hallucinations of having a Hausa/Fulani-and-Muslim-free state would not pour the ice of togetherness in your sentiments.

Now, to the Muslims, I studied your reactions to the politics of Plateau state, and the wands of marginalization that are your dividends. And if I’m to trace your missteps, my first hiss shall be for your most (un)religious leaders many of whom are dangerously uneducated to lead the queue of peace. Education strapped on violent theories is gunpowder in the neighbourhood of oven. True, an emblematic Jos youth is too busy to provoke another person. The youth settles for business in Katako Market (the moguls once reigned in the bombed Ultra-Modern Market), or drawn to the world of commercial vehicles, craftsmanship, petty trading and quest for education- western or Islamic. They do not rely on their parents to sprout livelihood hence the evils of idleness are deficient in the neighbourhood. What, seen in my romance with Jos, wrecked the Muslims is the daily fears of attack by the so-called indigenes and silly mis-education of the younger Muslims; these fears have thickened so hard that they become the sermons that mark many gatherings of the Muslims. And yes, everyone must be torn in that position watching that you’re never welcomed in your home. Blindly, the shield of invasion is discussed privately by the elderly Muslims whose hopes hover over the future of their ignorant children who are then cautioned against the frowning strangers. To the Muslims, the only shield is to be ready for the land owners’ raid at all time, and in the interludes, you teach your inheritors the art of survival in Jos, an art that interpret the degree of hatreds against the unfortunate owners of the land. This though I could not reproach for if I too were torn in such life I shall be wary of their closeness, and would accept their smiles as veiled frowns. My heart is filled with the wand of this repulsion seen only by the keenest watchers.

And to you, my Christian and Berom brothers and sisters, I don’t even know where to begin the tale of my grief. Any time I pace unto your psychology my thought gets ambushed by obfuscation, because the easiness with which your elders in politics steer your emotions to repel your other siblings embarrasses my trust on your hospitality. The stretches of land that mother earth bears for our occupation are God’s gift to humanity, and no man is lordly enough to manufacture a plot. The Lord Who owns the earth extended his artifacts to us, to be dwelled upon, and not to be owned by any mortal. Who’s a man, mere lump of sperm, to call The Lord’s handwork his? It’s the chaos of modernity and the explosive bedlam of population that trudge ownership into the constitution of humankind, and this too is wisely thought to stabilize our greed. History says that we were migratory tribes, and this in mind, challenges me to challenge you to have ruminations through your historicized origin. We are what The Lord destined, for us! I think your uproar was over religious egotism… and your desecration of The Lord’s assertion for brother-keep-brother command denies you a yard in the shade of divinity! Yes, you are not parading along the lanes of Christendom. You see, you are not even Christians! Christianity that came through the Son of Mary isn’t a cult of cannibalisms. There are many thinkers that attached your silliness to consumption of Burukutu; I’m not one of them though I believe that the brew too stimulates sanity out of its boundary. Now, out of riddles, an ideal Plateau Man- Berom or Non-Berom- is a lively person, craving stimulation of entertainment to appease his soul. He’s a quasi-hedonist. This is why I did not believe that he could be drunk into lunacy that peaks to whence he wishes to kill his sibling whom the Lord creates to a world that speaks one of His languages. An ideal Plateau man, like many Nigerian Muslims, detest the tonality that rings through the homilies of Muslim clerics, many of whom are decked in mischief spewing the assumed forgeries in Christianity. The worst intoxicant ever is word. And my fear, after these rambles, is that your elders have given you enough bottles of words that spun you in hateful passion unto your jovial neighbours of many years. How could you, ambassadors of peace, allow your intoxicated leaders whose nutrition is politics, to blind you thus? Their aim is selfish quest for domination of the space where they would loot our treasury. You should’ve known this… Haba! My Berom-friend Chollom and I discussed their tricks the last time I was at his modest place in Congo-Russia. He’s an epitome of an ideal man who engages in his biblical studies perturbed by the atmosphere of delinquency that engulfs the neighbourhood. He agrees that Christianity is a universal brotherhood of man, just as he appraised Islam.

Darling siblings; my heart is loaded with the coals of the endless fires that consume your beautiful life. Your restlessness is one thing that Nigeria shall suffer until her wielders begin to think and act straight. The same restlessness dwells in the brain of our other siblings in far away Niger Delta. The same restlessness dwells in Kaduna, Maiduguri, Bauchi, Port-Harcourt, Zaria, Kano…all over Nigeria! Every one is restless. We are restlessly restless, truncated by deep wounds of illiteracy and unemployment which are often the catalysts of every crisis in the land. And this restlessness is a progeny of idleness. The idleness that unemployment, poverty, government-imposed forlornness, thieving of public money…and many more evils that bad leadership entails. Even the white-man who longs for luxury like butterflies has said that an idle mind is a devil’s workshop. And your restless endurance of this pillaged nation of ours forces you to violence, at least to be occupied by an activity, loot in the womb of the crisis, kill fellow countryman intoxicated by ‘words’, burn the most imposing edifices because they mean nothing to an hopelessly restless man, burn this, burn that, burn all, for the land too is burnt by leadership! We are a burnt nation! True, I expect nothing from illiterate population, unemployed population, utterly divided by deceptive politics. Of all the crests of my anger the prickliest is the fact that you could not fetch a simple wisdom to boo those ‘God-damned’ politicians that ignite troubles among us in the guise of tribal advocacy. Ask yourself, where are they when you have to be embarrassed over debts in Mama Gyang’s? Where are they when all you could do is to measure, sorry, waste your time and life in a Burukutu joint? Where are they when your Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba or Ibo landlords listen to your plea for extension of time when rent is due? Where are their children when yours could not afford the substandard education offered by the nation? Their wives too, where are they when yours brood over ridges of Irish potatoes, and gather languor in market squares? Where are they? I know your answers because it’s the same anthem all over the nation: Zurich, Paris, London, Harvard, Dubai…while you’ve never even been privileged to have a whiff of Heathrow Airport let alone afford a pilgrim ticket to Israel where you could uncage your travails for divine pacification atop Mount Sinai.

My dearest siblings wake up from the swoon of religious misrepresentation before The Lord evokes tsunami over our puerile quests for the land that He stretched for our collective dwellings. How could you react if Jos turns Haiti in a blink, and the land contorted beyond habitation, and you have to relocate to Kano, Bauchi, Katsina or Sokoto for life anew? You see, we have to think beyond the coverlets of our polluted brains!

Aside the politicians are the religious clerics in the motorcade of our destruction. Many of these bearded or Three Piece-adorned talkers that fronted the queues of our religions have malnourished knowledge of religious history, theology and jurisprudence; all they champion is boastful exaggeration of faiths, and barbaric clamours of religious supremacy. We have to think beyond the coverlets of our brain! You see, if peace must sail in our conscience, we have to rebuke our Mullahs whenever they chant anti-Christian slogans in the mosque, and similarly do same to the eloquent pastors when they hum anti-Islamic grammars in the church. There is a colourful difference between religious fanaticism and fundamentalism; the former is practised by misled mischief-makers, the latter by souls that truly beckon divine fortification. Until we know this, our repulsion shall linger. One lesson that history teaches is, fundamental (I mean, non-fanatical) adherence to The Good Books is the pathway to a sane society. But for the lunacy of some fanatics, there wouldn’t be a commotion of any hue in say Vatican or Mecca. And if, provoked into atheism by the pollutions of fanatics, you get to do comparative analysis of theism and secularism you must be mortified to realize that the directorate of God and the empire of humans share nothing in common. Compare, for instance, the daily bedlam in Detroit, and that in say Vatican City or Medina; the latter cities are enclaves of serenity but for the myopias of a handful of fanatics!

Again and again my darling siblings, I would wish this letter become a writ of our beautiful Jos, and be duplicated for the other siblings in Langtang, Wase, Shendam, Quangpan, Mangu, and even to the towns and States beyond. And to our Governor, Jonah David Jang and their accomplices and colleagues in Islam and Christianity, let’s clasp hands to shame their intention and tie them in the sanatorium of history. We would never free any lunatic to disband us. Neigbourliness and togetherness are matrimonies of the souls, and your attempt to disband the people shall earn you the hottest portion in the hell, just next to Satan Himself!

Peace, my bereaved brothers and sisters; a prayer that we can think beyond the coverlet of our brains, at once.

Your Brother

Gimba Kakanda

JosANA/Richard Ali pictures from ANA Convention 2009 @ Minna, Niger State

2009-11-04T02:50:00.000-08:00

The Association of Nigerian Authors held its International Convention last week, from the 29th of October to the 1st of November at Shiroro Hotel, Niger State. The picture above is a view of Central Minna.

Hospitable Nigerlite hostesses, Ruthsie and Gracie.

Richard Ali {the short black fine guy. LOL!} with Awaal Gata, Adbulaziz Fagge and enfant terrible, Gimba Kakanda

JosANA members, Asmau Aliyu and Suleiman Sani

JosANA ex chairman, Allen Abduljabbar Omale, performing on the last night

Richard Ali with the poet Gimba Kakanda

Dr. Victor Dugga, Associate Professor of Drama and JosANA member who won the Drama Prize

Dr. Victor Dugga receiving his prize certificate

Victor Dugga, "baby" Dugga and Richard Ali {Secretary JosANA}

Performance artist, Minat, her daughter, Richard Ali, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, David Onotu and a girl

A young artiste doing the fulani dance!

Cross section of the Hall during the AGM

Cross section of the UK Bello Theatre on Lecture Night. In blue is Dr. Jerry Agada, a day before he became ANA President

Centre is Y. S. Dangana, playright, who contested against Dr. Agada to lead ANA

Richard Ali with young journalist Abdulaziz Ahmed FAgge {Leadership Newspaper}

Odia Ofeimun making a point.

Richard Ali with the Lit. Editor of New Nigerian, Sumaila Umaisha

Chike Ofili, laughing. Asmau and Sani looking on.

Barrister Redzie Jugo, JosANA member, at the Convention

ABU Zaria thespians on stage

A G Dagga Tolar, poet, new Chairman, ANA Lagos

Richard Ali with Ayo the Drummer Boy {ANA Abuja} who came with the ace journalist, Jim Pressman.

JosANA members David Onotu and Suleiman Sani

Gracie

Richard Ali with Dr. Ismael Bala {BUK, Kano}

Panel of Discussants

Alhaji Labo Yari

Medinat, Rahamat, Adbuljabbar and Iman Omale

Dignitaries listening to Governor Muazu Babangida Aliyu

Habeeb Anako, Richard Ali and Ebenpreye {ANA Bayelsa}

Lady Writers

Mimi yar Kebbi with Richard Ali

The Servant Leader, Governor. Babangida ALiyu of Niger State

Barrister. Ahmed Maiwada

Zulu {ANA Enugu} with girlfriend.

My friend, Zulu

JosANA VC, Matthew Mzega

Richard Ali

ANA EXCO 2007/2009

Dr, Dul Johnson, ace producer in black.

Richard Ali, Secretary JosANA, addressing the AGM

Odili Ujubuonu with companion

Alhaji Abubakar Gimba

Sani and Asmau, keeping in touch with the folks back home in Jos

ANA 2007/2009 EXCO after dissolution

Denja Abdullahi, ANA ex General Secretary

Journalists

Thespians on Stage

Dr. Temitope Olaifa

ANA new President, Dr. Jerry Agada

A suya spot in Shiroro, Minna.

JosANA Slam Pictures

2009-09-25T02:12:00.000-07:00

Denudation: Remembering Dr. Bala Mohammed {1944-1981}

2009-07-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

Denudation: Remembering Dr. Bala Mohammed Bauchi {1944-1981}

So pray for a deluge, that this blighted expanse
Would burst forth into a lusty bloom;
Pray that far from being a wasted effusion
Rapids of tears may turn the turbine of cause.

Pray for A Deluge: David Odinaka Nwamadi

Twenty eight years ago, a government residential building stood blazing in the hot Kano sun. The smoke-filled air was one of three black billows seen from the sky. Within the house, the 35 year old owner lay burning amidst a ton of papers and scant furniture; in another room another man, equally macheted, burned. Who was this first man; and why? His name was Dr. Bala Mohammed Bauchi and he was Political Adviser to Alhaji Abubakar Rimi, the state governor, erstwhile political science don at the Bayero University and before that an ace broadcaster on the Voice of Nigeria. He was also an ideologue of the People’s Redemption Party {PRP} and a socialist. Exhuming the past is a sort of undressing and understanding the why of Dr. Mohammed’s death and the subsequent years is a denudation of the Nigerian story, that we may see it more clearly.

The current political apathy and fractionizing tendency of the Nigerian people, so well understood and celebrated misinterpreted by journalists like Karl Maier is a part of an ongoing dynamic; an organic. It is not an unalterable social trait, like the color of eyes or the ridging of fingerprints are physical ones. If apathy is an evil, and if it must be cured then the root strain of it, found in Dr. Mohammed’s assassination need be isolated and cauterized. For every political event is an expression, is significant and like beads can be told.

Dr. Bala Mohammed was an archetype of that sociopolitical genus known in this country as the Radical Leftists; and he was the first of them to be assassinated at the height of Nigeria’s Second republic, on the 10th of July 1981. The man who emerges from the memorial service held a fortnight after his death at the BUK Preliminary Studies School was a Bauchi born scion of the neo-Malikist Uthman dan Fodio jihad which established a caliphate over the northern central Sudan; he was, by birth, conservative. Yet, in the sixteen years before his murder he had established himself first on the radio waves and then in academe as the most lucid of the Nigerian leftist theorists. And, indeed, he died precisely because he was an ideologue of the socialist PRP party. Yet, his murderers sought to justify themselves as acting in honor of Alhaji Ado Bayero, the Emir of Kano, in defense of “traditional institutions”. Against one of its own? Rather ironic.

His intellectual credentials were attested to by his colleague and fellow postgraduate peer at Howard University, Dr. Asikpo Essien Ibok, who said – “I am really sad today to talk about Bala because he is dead. If I speak about Comrade Bala as a political militant, I am speaking about him as a revolutionary intellectual. That is to say Bala was not only a teacher, but a theoretician-cum-practitioner. He postulated many theories and put them to practice. His concern was with theories of liberation. Who did he want to liberate? His people; from ignorance, illiteracy, nepotism, corruption, bad government, everything.“ Dr. Mohammed’s then student, Alhassan na’Ayuba Zakaria said, “Dr. Bala Mohammed is all the teachers you can remember put in one person. He is a Socrates, a Plato, an Aristotle, put together. Dr. Bala Mohammed represents in no uncertain terms some of the qualities of Moses of the Israelites, when they were under the tyranny of the Pharaohs; the qualities of Jesus leading the disciples under Jewish persecution and qualities of the Holy Prophet Mohammed, before Islam conquered Mecca in 632 AD.” From the words of his students and contemporaries, Bala Mohammed was one of the last of the true intellectuals; “Bala argues with capitalist social theories to justify socialist theories.” The men who mourned him ranged from Drs. Y.B. Usman and Mahmud Tukur to Alhaji Abubakar Rimi, Adenike Adejobi, Tunde Obadina, Mudi Sipikin to Wole Soyinka who wrote – “The master plan, long decried, long forewarned, is implacably unfolding. We do not know whose turn it will be tomorrow – yours or mine. But we must be prepared. Our deaths must bring no regrets as long as our cause remains to sanctify our brief existence. We will not mourn our brother, Bala Mohammed; let our acts simply perpetuate his memory and honor him for eternity.”

How did such a man find himself macheted in a burning house on July 10th 1981? And how does any country allow such a man, who made the 1978 “Who’s Who in American Universities” list, to be killed during a democratic government? Further, two coup d’état’s succeeded in the 1980’s, the Buhari and Babangida coups; what was the dynamic of these coups? For every political action is a consequence of a peoples underlying, unspoken, zeitgeist. And nations are the expression of accretive human forces, and each cause is defined by the accentuation of interests held in common.

The destruction of the Sokoto Caliphate by the British was followed, for their own interests, by its reformation into a civil service and it, like its counterparts in southern Nigeria performed tax collection services. The Emirs, who never fully controlled their territories anyway, lost even more credibility amongst the socially conscious elements for the people of Northern Nigeria saw them clearly as British agents and obeyed in matters of tax for the reason sole that the British and their courts were feared. The internal decadence of the Fulani feudalists, expressed in their inability to completely suppress the baHaushe elites as well as the expedient abandonment of the canons of the Fodio philosophers, Uthman, Bello and Abdullahi, explains the fin-de-siècle fear they had of Rabeh’s counter-reformist reforms in the Sudan, a fear that of course disappeared with the arrival of the British and the French. The Emirs would rather be British clerks than lose privilege to Rabeh; moral authority over the Hausawa could be sacrificed for the backing of a powerful European patron. The loss of effective power, which danFodio and his direct descendants guaranteed, was redressed by two wars; the Second and Nigeria’s Civil War.

The forces that killed Bala Mohammed knew themselves to be despised by the talakawa and indeed the non-Fulani elements that were already regrouping at the start of World War II in various northern towns; the fear of the feudalists was the same one feared from Rabeh earlier, that of an anti-caliphate uprising that would obliterate their privilege. After the war, the Jamiyar Mutanen Arewa {which became the Northern People’s Congress} was formed by returnee soldiers and the few educated northerners. With the ascension of the blue-blooded Ahmadu Bello, the caliphate elements saw that they could continue their parasitism in the coming democracy and they lost no time in doing this upon his assumption of the Premiership. By systematic infiltration of public office. Sardauna Bello was a skilled administrator and an altruistic dictator who unstintingly held the progress and unity of the piebald Northern Region dear; but he could not, nor had he any desire to, police the fellow scions of unearned patronage who were formed by the same system as he. Yet, his power was political and democratic and he showed this severally, most notably in the public humiliation, deposition and banishment of the corrupt Emir Sanusi of Kano to Azare in Bauchi. He kept the north together the same way the Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa kept the country together, as anyone who must run a multiethnic state does, by political compromise and appeasement. But then came the second war.

The impact of the Civil war and the trauma that followed it, with Bala Mohammed’s death, are instructive if the current stupidity equation of Nigeria is to be understood. Here we have popularly elected politicians assassinated for reasons no more cogent than tribal dominist ones; dominist, clear from the barbaric manner of the killing of the Bauchi born Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa; tribal, clear from the selective pattern of the killings. In one swoop, the mechanism of balance, Ahmadu Bello , was removed, leaving the opposed forces of both patronage and progress in Northern Nigeria in disarray. And the Army, not political organizations like Jamiyar Mutanen Arewa, became the arena for a struggle of interests. Had Jack Gowon not showed up on January 14th 1966, it might have been a different story; in those crucial days and months later, he was to assume the role of Ahmadu Bello, a human mechanism of balance. Had Ironsi done what he should, the trauma that followed would have been less, even unnecessary. Our writers, from Okri to Okpewho to Soyinka have expressed the trauma so well that there is no need to rehash the pervasive despair of the ‘70’s here. In the aftermath of that war the forces that killed Bala Mohammed realized they could guarantee continued patronage by dominating the Army on the one hand and undermining the talakawa on the other by keeping them out of schools. They had achieved the dubiously sophisticated genius of ruining the educational infrastructure of their class enemies. Yet, at this time, other men like Bala Mohammed, Y.B. Usman and Mahmud Tukur felt that a common oppression was the lot of many Nigerians and this same oppression could unite them all; that thus, socialism, would be a news basis to realize all other aborted pan-Nigerianisms. Bala, who was a lucid thinker gifted at simplifying the most complex relationships so the petty trader could grasp it, decided on a post-graduate study in Political Science at Howard University so he could attack oppression by education, this time in Academe, as he had earlier as a broadcaster on Voice of Nigeria, Lagos.

The trouble with parasitism is that it cannot, by definition, be creative. And though the parasites of patronage across Nigeria especially the traditional consevatia found a successful platform for the1979 general elections in the National Party of Nigeria {NPN}, they could not create a Sardauna Bello or Tafawa Balewa or Saadu Zungur, the first two who animated the NPC and who, with the third, animated the Jamiyar Mutanen Arewa before it. So the country again became starkly polarized between the representatives of patronage {NPN}, and the representatives of progress {opposition parties} in which Bala Mohammed found himself on being appointed political adviser to the Kano State PRP governor, Abubakar Rimi in November 1980. And nine months was enough engagement to get him killed. Apart from the corruption flowing from a lack of ideals and hence fiscal restraint, Dr. Bala Mohammed communicated clearly to the common people in simple language what he saw; that the NPN and its puppeteers had no ideas and thus no policies except a vague, pitiable and eventually dangerous nostalgia for a dead Sardauna’s days. And so he had to die.

The milieu of Dr. Bala Mohammed’s death was one intrinsically related to Cold War politics and being a socialist from post colonial Africa who studied Political Science in the United State’s gave him a unique awareness of economic oppression and its dynamics. The national space of his politics was that of a rising fascism; bereft of ideas, the NPN could only but maintain by force its intellectual vacuity, a stick and stick approach to those already beaten. Evidence of this fascism were; the deportation of Shugaba Darman, a Nigerian citizen; massacre of peasants at Bakolori, Sokoto; harassment of PRP supporters at Ningi, Bauchi; the killings of citizens in Keghara Dere, Rivers; the impeachment of Governor Balarabe Musa of Kaduna. Wole Soyinka, expressing popular progressive views wrote an open letter “You Are Not The State” to the Police IG Sunday Adewusi in which he declaimed a “a virulent outbreak of the rash called folie de grandeur. . . .familiar historic delusions”; Professor Soyinka decried attempts to turn Nigeria into a police state, of a sort quite different from Spain and Italy, one where police bullets sometimes “fly off” in the direction of civilians! And so, Bala Mohammed, who could explain the why of all this simply and lucidly, died.

Fatedly, for there are no mistakes in any nations political expression, two stern faced Majors-General showed up in answer to the prayers of Wole Soyinka, Y.B. Usman, Umar Santuraki, Tunde Obadina, Darman, Rimi and other Radical Leftist. The Buhari regime was a progressive one; it paid its respects to Bala Mohammed’s death by avoiding the political mistake of misjudging the desperation of threatened privilege. They did this by imposing their wills on and locking up the venal politicians and their feudalist supporters, including this writer’s uncle; thus seeking to cauterize them. This imposed sanity, unlike Rawlings in Ghana, was eclipsed in 1985 by the finest agents the killers of Dr. Bala Mohammed had; General Ibrahim Babangida and Dr. Jibril Aminu. The intellectual spirit looming behind that regime was Dr. Jibril Aminu and he it was who ensured eight years of venality; eight years that bequeathed Sani Abacha, then Obasanjo and Yar’Adua – all agents of patronage with the exception of Abacha who was a misunderstood dictator quite in a class of his own. If there is a God, he was not listening to the cries of the oppressed, nor to Dr. Asikpo Essien Ibok who prayed Bala Mohammed’s soul not rest in peace; to the first we see a logic defying resilience, to the second the reality of amnesia.

But I remember Dr. Bala Mohammed Bauchi, now. I remember him in this denudation, I who am aware of the subsequent careers of Rimi and the other Radical Leftists turned tepid, turned collaborators in a double murder. And why do I remember him? Because I mourn the dying of the Nigerian quality now in catalepsies, since a needless Civil war, a commonality that has received no expression since the morning of July 10th 1981. I remember because though sophistry of thought pervades all strata of the country, though arrogance mark the leadership and dissembling keeps my countrymen’s thrall – there was the self sacrificial choice of one man, Bala Mohammed Bauchi, and a “once upon a time”. In that last, “once upon a time”, lies hope that the three decade dormant expression of my country will stir again and raise another, less forcedly tragic, Bala Mohammed; and hope that the steel and concrete sealed despair of my nations trauma will burst into a life-flower of patriotism and progress.

And since I am denuding time and remembering the past, I shall recall lastly a couplet from a poem the Hausa poet and PRP activist Mudi Sipikin read at the memorial service of my mentor Dr. Bala Mohammed, who was killed for a noble cause, the ideal of a just, democratic Nigeria he cherished – for Dr. Bala Mohammed was a patriot;

“Patriotism is a badge of honor/
Derived from solid truth without any falsehood.”

Ali is Secretary, ANA Plateau State chapter and former Editor, Sardauna Magazine. richardalijos@yahoo.com

Looking Out the Window

2009-01-02T03:56:00.000-08:00

LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW

Far away from Kaduna, the smell of roasting cashews, surfing the morning air, assails the clean-shaven boy featherly. Framed by the barred windows, he looks beyond the walls of the house, far above the trees, and though his eyes at their farthest never leave the pleasant green spread of palm trees and cashew trees, he feels an uneasy wave in his stomach. With his palms to the wall holding up the curtain he wonders about Falmata and familiar places, about the reasons that have led him here.

“Shall I get you some water to bath?”From his thoughts, he turns only lightly to smile kindly at the gap toothed Igbo boy. “Yes, Nnamdi. Thank you.” He is unaware of the accent in his speech which Nnamdi muses about, as he makes his way down the stairs, fascinatedly. Back in the room, looking out the window, our boy is in another space, in another time. He has effeminately arched brows, thin lips, his complexion is a dark chocolate brown – he would be beautiful were he not thinking. But the concentration of his thoughts takes the expressive from his eyes; his face becomes curiously plain, like a sheet of paper when a pen is hanging over it.

The night of drinking and talk, that last time. He had arrived early, as Falmata expected him, to see to the final arrangements. Within the hour, by 7:30 p.m., their friends started arriving the Hanwa GRA apartment which for the last time would host Falmata’s salon. The music played, Afrobeat and neo-soul; Fela Kuti and his son, Badu and Whitney from the 90’s, Alicia Keys. Fifteen guests – the usual habitués being Ahmed, Emman, Elnath, Tirnom, Hauwa Dogo, Ibrahim Tagwai, then there was the priest called Beckett and Waziri, the sufi mystic. Ahmed and Emman, with big boned Tirnom, were at a corner tending the raised spits on which a fifth share of a ram he had marinaded in spice since the day before lay roasting – a fragrant offering to what, he couldn’t say. Maybe to youth. Some of the others were drinking; Guinness or orange juice according to their morals, Hauwa Dogo and Ibrahim were dancing, surrounded by Elnath with two of the girls,cheering. He looked at them all; there had been stars in his eyes.

“It’s going well, isn’t it?”
“Yes, my love, it is.”
“For the last time.”
“Beauty does not fade,” he’d said, “ . . .yes, for the last time.”
Maybe she said “Yes.” Falmata had moved away to a table where the Jesuit and the Sufi were and he’d heard laughter, hers, sweetly, as she dragged them both to dance. The priest obliged her. It was Fela Kuti; Sorrow, Tears and Blood. His Falmata, dancing with stars in the sky above her. Falmata, who had studied English Literature, Fulani, dark as he was, dancing; she, the second half of his soul poem. A month before today.

The boy looking out the window sighs, unaware that for a while a little girl had been watching him, had watched him three long minutes because she wanted to say good morning to the new teacher - and she had turned away sadly. His thoughts had returned nearer where he was, to the market he had been at the day before – the Udenu market where he had gone to buy coffee. He remembered the many thin, emaciated faces beckoning him to be cheated and the smell of rot – unable to say if the rot was not a living human one. Dirty market, fat women and children with sunken eyes. Then the boy with the wheelbarrow brushing past him but not fast enough for him not to see the butchered remains – the head and tail of a horse. He had almost collapsed, throwing up and gripping at a wall for support, immediately withdrawing his hand at the thought that horses were killed within those walls. And eaten. “I am all right,” he said, but not one of the spectrae hadnoticed him. His thoughts had been of his pony, Wutsia, stabled at Jos – in this land, amongst these people, Wutsia would be butchered and eaten. The nauseaus boy, Almasi George, had run away out of the market then.

Emman and Ahmed had done the steaks marvelously; all had been eating and drinking and talking a long while already. It was about 10 p.m. Mostly, they had talked. They had talked as they always had over the years, about dreams and their introspections because that was the forte of those still young, for whom beauty was a token granted. He talked. Falmata, who did not drink, sat by him in the makeshift bar – an open Guinness before him and their friends clustered all around in a rough semi circle. He read one of his poems. Dispersion stood just out the gates of her house waiting to bear each of them away. They talked, soon, about their country, the integrative forces and of Civil Wars in the 60’s and of militants in the southern delta.

“If they send me to the south, I will abscond. I will not serve,” Musa had blurted out. He wore a rust colored tee-shirt and neutral colored trousers, his glasses hooding just under his clear eyes. He was speaking of the Volunteer Teachers Corps to which every male university graduate who refused military service was called up for a year.Almasi had smiled,
“You can’t do that, Musa.”
“It’s true, I will abscond. Why should I do anything for the country? What has the country done for me?”
But Falmata had stated then in her breezy way, “But you, Musa, are a noted misanthrope. Nobody has ever done anything for you!” and this was met by laughter. Even Musa smiled, removing his glasses. He had studied Political Economy and hoped to lecture.
“Your only option is to go for military service.”
“And be killed in the Niger Delta? Allah ya kiyaye!”
“No one will have you anyway, you’re too skinny.”
“Haha!”
“Bloody country. Why can’t they leave me alone?”
“I agree with Elnath. To be left alone, here with you people. I would rather be here.”
“But we cannot be young forever,” the priest, Beckett, said, and his words shrouded the night with silence; they sat drinking their despairs, they, the best and the brightest in the heart of a Nigerian dystopia. Yet, every one of them loved the idea that was Nigeria – only they did not wish to see the underside of that ideal, the patches sewn there; they were afraid what the cardinals south and west and east would show them. For it would be a violation – same as losing one’s virginity, the ideal shattering in the face of the real or the forced face of old maids, an ideal held unto in spite of the real – both ways were rapes, and there wasn’t a third way. But the elegant boy with his arm around his girlfriend was not afraid.
“I will go wherever I am sent. I think I must know the complexity of the country and not take it for granted. If I am sent, to the East or West, even to the Delta, I will go. They are, after all, Nigeria.”
A month before.

And that had led him here, to this window through which the smell of cashews could be perceived each morning, where the inhabitants ate horses and rend the air at night with gunshots celebrating another poisoning, where a slashed at sun tipped into a murky sea. All around him, ideas swirled, for when we stand beside windows things go into us and things go out of us; it is, all ways, a journeying away and to. He thought of the girl who waited for him in Jos, and of his beloved pony and the diaspora into which his cusp had been swept – he wondered if he could make it back from knowing the dynamic of existence and meaning in his country and his heart despaired. For the underside of Falmata’s salon was those faces he had seen at the market, and those faces were vicious.

But the little girl had returned more determined this time.“Good morning sir!” she said, in her little girl voice, from right behind him. Almasi turned on her and smiled.
“Good morning, little one, how are you?”
“Fine,” she replied, clutching her purple and green Barney toothbrush.
“So what’s your name?”
“Kambili. I am six years old!” she added proudly.
“That’s wonderful,” he said, unsure now how to proceed, “my name is Almasi George.”
“Is it true that you will be staying to teach us at the school?” she asked.
But he glanced through the glass again before answering, catching the point where green met blue, but this time he did not sigh. He looked back calmly at the clear, earnest, future eyes peering up at him.“Yes,” he said.He put Kambili’s palm in his and together they walked away from the glass, unaware now that he had let go of the curtain which fell gracefully, covering the window behind him and with it a viewful of many things.

Against The Evil State: My Response to Rabo Abdulkarim

2008-11-12T09:35:00.000-08:00

Richard Ali {c}

AGAINST THE EVIL STATE: MY RESPONSE TO RABO

Last week, during the ANA National Convention held at Gusau, Zamfara State, I had the opportunity of interacting with the Kano State Censorship Board’s DG, Alhaji Rabo Abdulkarim. We met at a forum within the convention where he set out to justify his widely publicised agenda to censor all authors in Kano. Five persons spoke before I did, including the poet-intellectual Odia Ofeimun and the academic, al-Bishak from the Nassarawa State University. I believe that forum has given me the necessary knowledge, hence the conviction, to publicly stand by my views expressed then and now in this article.

The entire thrust of Rabo’s justification of censorship in Kano is religious precedent – that somehow, in the works of Kano writers, immorality has been promoted and that this is contrary to Islam which is the dominant religion in the State, hence the need for his censorship. The actual, surely negligible, percentage of such anti-moral, religion-insensitive work does not interest me. The issue is that Rabo and the Kano State Government evidently see themselves in the office of the ulama, priests and imams to whom are entrusted the preservation of religious precept and its moral component. Among other things, Director General Rabo Abdulkarim sought to point out that “even in religion”, censorship existed with aspects of religious text being suppressed on the instructions of God Himself. So he, Rabo, was merely the latest in a long line of “censors” who trace their lineage to God Himself! THIS IS VERY VERY DANGEROUS - the sociologic mindset underlying it is the same kernel that sprouts the Evil State. The second half of the 19^th Century saw such a kernel, that errant strain of social philosophy called Fascism, and its kinfolk; Socialism and Communism. The tragic of the 20^th Century, including two world wars, is its rightful bloom. Now, in 21^st Century Nigeria, such a sinister preamble faces us.

When the State arrogates to itself the moral suasion of Religion, seeking to enforce this arrogation by instruments of legal suasion such as the Kano State Censorship Law, the State has simply affirmed Mussolini’s text - “the keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.” This would no doubt be well and good if such a State were foundationally a fascist State. The Kano State government and its minions, however, were all elected under the 1999 Nigerian Constitution which declares that the country can only be governed “democratically”, meaning by the Rule of Law in government/power relations and respecting Fundamental Human Rights in practice. The State’s arrogation of Religion is clearly the first step in the creation of the Evil State in which “individual and groups” will be relative – contrary to rudimentary democracy. In a democracy, thus in Nigeria, “individuals and groups” must be FREE – freedom of thought, action, even the freedom to life contra-defines Fascism, they are the gene characteristic of Democracy.

In our long, trying history, the Nigerian artist and writer, from Uthman dan Fodio right down to Ken Saro-Wiwa have embodied that irreducible freedom, paying the price, social regeneration or death, over the centuries – this is the TRUTH. In attacking the writers of Kano and Nigeria, the State, in Kano through its minions and in Abuja through its acquiescence have launched an attack AGAINST FREEDOM – that also, is TRUTH.

Now that we know definitively the State’s underlying agenda, how have we as artists and writers responded; - to the threat that the same Democracy we and ours have spent blood to enthrone is now being imperilled; that the representative institutions which we have created to protect our freedom are morphing now into appurtenances of the Evil State? How have we responded?

Before I go on, I would like to say in any society, the quantum of stupidity is often the kinetic force that determines the dice face of its people’s destiny.

The Nigerian intelligentsia, when they have not been smirking partisans of the fictitious and alternately chauvinist “North-South” divide have responded to this attack in the manner the northern academic, al-Bishak, did at Gusau. After a circuitous proem, he finally decided to say that if there is a “law” setting up the Kano State Censors Board, Rabo would “never stop” what he is doing. What he said really was that, in the extant case, Rabo should continue threatening freedom while writers should continue complaining of it. What he said involves the admittance of Rabo and the Evil State into the social equation of Nigeria and I assure you there is nothing “intellectual” about a “head-in-the-sand intellect”, the prefix outrages its twin! Al-Bishak’s comments are merely those typifying the response of a considerable percentage of our thinkers and writers here in the North, and it is not any more his fault for exemplifying that mindset than it is mine for attacking it.

What I say is – bar the gates and secure the fastness, do not let Grendel in! Do not, my dear writers and Intellectuals, pretend you do not know what Rabo is about; do not pretend not to know that in this incursion at Kano, the very future of Nigeria, our Nigeria, is at stake. Do not pretend that Rabo can possibly be allowed to “do what he is doing” when what he is doing is scorching the fields where our grains grow, burning the granaries! Do not pretend you do not know that an illegal law MUST not be obeyed, must be fought in the courts and if the courts become corrupt, they still MUST not be obeyed. Do not pretend to not know this and much more!

But, if you choose to so pretend, take off the garb of Intellectual, don that of Quisling and in doing so lose all my respect and friendship - even if that means I stand alone amidst my true few friends.

That is that about the Evil State and my response to Rabo Abdulkarim and his bent masters, the Kano State Government and the Nigerian State. I have also spoken to the Intellectuals who helm Nigerian literature. I wish now to speak to my true friends, the writers of Kano and Nigeria; to the future of Nigeria I say, listen to me please.

The mistake we make too often is to circumscribe ourselves to the walls of the Nigerian middleclass to which by birth or education most of us belong, forgetting we have a duty to through our work interact with Society as a whole. This must stop. We must begin to see ourselves as a part of an organic whole. If the State has turned evil and if the Intelligentsia have turned quislings, we must return to our selves, to the People to whom we belong. If we have remained away from them, we must now rediscover our bonds with them because attacking our freedom and dominating us is just the first step towards the complete subjugation of the People. In attacking our freedom to write, they undermine our right to our thoughts. And when these are successfully stymied, from then onwards, the Evil State will at birth give each child a life’s parcel of ignorance.

Now, especially as we are under attack, we must break down these exclusive glass walls and fraternise our ideas with the lower-classes, lifting them up to where we are, thus increasing our number and guaranteeing that the They who wish to automate the Evil State will know in advance that we are superior in number and resolve. We must shatter the walls and start speaking to the talakawa of Northern Nigeria in their own language. It is for our own good and in our best interest that we realise this, for when Ignorance becomes public policy, we, stamped into the lower-classes, will become nameless faces in a neo-commune. And it will be much harder for us who have gained so much. That is all I have to say to you.

I will end this article by imploring that we must stand against this Evil State in the making and not seek to compromise with it as the our leaders seem self destructively bent on doing, pretending to forget that one negotiates only with equal. And to my courageous comrades in Kano who will go by the names, “Abdul”, “Sa’adatu”, “Yusuf”, “Ibrahim” and “Talatu”, I say – WE WILL WRITE, WE WILL KEEP WRITING AND WE WILL TRIUMHP!

Ali, former Editor, Sardauna Magazine, poet, holds an LL.B {Civil Law} from the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.

JosANA hits TV bigtime!

2008-10-20T01:13:00.001-07:00

JosANA hits TV bigtime!

An account of JosANA’s 2 day Kaduna Cultural Exchange Visit 2008

Yes, it’s true; I am now an international celebrity. {There have been paparazzi on my tail all day!}.

JosANA, Nigeria’s most vibrant intellectual hub was hosted by NTA Kaduna and the Association for Nigerian Authors {ANA}, Kaduna Chapter during her recently concluded two-day Cultural Exchange visit to the Crocodile City. The Cultural Exchange, part of the activities of JosANA, is in line with the Federal Governments’ READ program and involves JosANA holding interstate readings in collaboration with other state chapters of the ANA.

Kaduna, the liberal state, was our first port of call.

The journey for me began at 3 pm when ANA Vice Chairman Matthew Mzega and I drove out from Jos in his grey VW Passat, using the Southern Route. We passed through the towns of Forest, Gidan Waya, Kagoro, Zonkwa, and Kachia before arriving Kada City by 8 pm on Wednesday the 15th. We met the Zonal Director of NTA Kaduna, Mallam Abdulkarim Muhammad Abdullahi, who received us cheerily then instructed the station’s Asst. Director of Programs, Mr. Preye to lead us to our lodgings where Chairman Bose Tsevende and some of our members were already billeted. We lodged at the Catholic Social Centre along Independence Way. We met the chairman together with the BBC African Performance 2007 Playwright Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, the Jos City novelist Alpha Emeka and his sidekick, the poet David Onotu who came down from Katsina.

The next morning, we had an early breakfast and by 8:45 am the trusty Assistant Director of Programs had arrived with a bus to convey the JosANA A’ list to Gamji Park, the venue of the reading where an NTA AM Express camera crew was already waiting. The VeeCee and I tailed the bus. Gamji Park proved to be a terrific setting - what with the ostriches, tortoises and of course the crocodiles {called ‘kada’} that give Kaduna City its name. The park is well maintained by the State Government and a posse of gardeners were seen pushing lawn mowers across the grass. The river Kaduna also formed a spectacular backdrop.

Shooting began with David Onotu reading his poem “Niger Area” and there could have been no better background than Lord Frederick Lugard’s Lokoja Bridge, which had been moved to Gamji Park as a permanent exhibition. The extant bridge, like the nation the British Captain sired in 1914 seemed to indicate the certain Manifest Destiny of Nigeria, in spite of one century of the volatile socio-political combustion.

Other work were read and filmed at a recreational hut facing the unhurriedly flowing river where once in a while a fisherman floating on a calabash could be seen, adding a fascinating rusticity to the view. Richard Ali coordinated presentations across the genres by Bose Tsevende, Matthew Mzega, David Onotu, Alpha Emeka and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim as well as a song {crocodile croakey voices – mine mostly! – were never better heard I assure you!} extolling Nigerian Unity and showing appreciation to NTA Kaduna and ANA Kaduna for graciously hosting us. The song was composed by Matthew Mzega. Then JosANA Chairman, Bose Tsevende, had another interview, this time together with the indomitable Friday John Abba, Chairman of ANA Kaduna who came along with his VeeCee, Steve Adinoyi. Elnathan John, Esq, who has just come out with his first collection of short stories title “Dreams etcetera” was also there and he gave this writer an autographed copy! JosANA fraternized with her sister chapter and books by Jos writers were formally presented to ANA Kaduna and vice versa. It was about 1:30 pm when we left for the official courtesy visit to the NTA Kaduna.

We met in the stations’ Conference Room with the Kaduna station’s top management in attendance. Chairman Tsevende informed the Zonal Director of JosANA’s activities and the reasons for visiting Kaduna on her first ever Cultural Exchange Visit, stressing the shared histories of Kaduna and Jos and the integrative intellectual undercurrents that have helped to shape the identity of both cities. She also spoke on the absence of a reading culture in Nigeria, stating sadly that the little reading that goes on is usually of tepid, intellectually uninspiring literature churned out by book factories abroad. The desire to redress this aridity informed JosANA’s Cultural Exchange activities, said the Chairman.

The Zonal Director highly commended JosANA for its original and innovative approach to the reading culture problem in Nigeria and in a memorable response stressed the necessity for Nigerian unity and the critical role of writers in the reaffirming of that autochthonic unity. He also mentioned the civil strife that has in the last decade torn apart Jos and Kaduna among other Nigerian towns in a cheerless roll call and how important it was for writers as the crème of the intelligentsia to rise above the innately disintegrative postures and machinations of the wrong sort of ‘politician’. He then thanked JosANA for visiting and looked forward to further collaboration with JosANA. Hajia Adamu also informed us that a mini library was being set up in Kaduna and JosANA was only too happy to promise it fair contribution of books to this laudable initiative.

The co – host, Friday John Abba of ANA Kaduna, then thanked the Zonal Director for helping to host the “mountain dwellers” who had come down to their fathers in the savannah to “learn one of two things!” To this wisecrack, Mallam Adbulkarim quipped that perhaps it was the mountain dwellers who had brought the light down to Kaduna with their innovative programs? {He was correct!} Arrangements were made for production collaborations between NTA Kaduna and our brother writers at ANA Kaduna.

It was on this note that we left the “Kada City” with fond memories of the liberality of its intelligentsia and the warmth of its people, from the AM Express crew to the ANA Kaduna Chairman unto the Zonal Director himself.

I arrived Jos together with JosANA VeeCee, Matthew Mzega at about 6:30 pm on Thursday the 16th and the one thing on my mind {apart from how nice it felt to be on TV} was how fortunate I was to be a part for the regeneration of Nigeria currently being spearheaded by JosANA, ANA Kaduna and spirited people like Mallam Abdulkarim Muhammad Abdullahi of NTA Kaduna. I was reassured that Sardauna Bello’s dream of Nigerian unity which I share is still doable because even in these trying times for my country, there are still those who believe in her future and who are willing to stand up and be counted in the cause of its consummation.

Richard Ugbede Ali, poet, is the secretary of JosANA.

The Legacy of Bolewa

2008-09-15T09:51:00.000-07:00

Below is the first draft of my first novel. It is a story about identity in Nigeria, two lovers caught beween Christianity and Islam, between the cultural identities of Northern Nigeria and Central Nigeria and also between the contrary political forces {integrative and disintegrative} of their parents. It is a novel about seeking out higher ground in order to resolve contradictions. Do enjoy, comments are welcome!

A week after his fiancée left him, Faruk Ibrahim’s Toyota torqued a steady seventy on the dusty tracks of Nigeria’s northeast highway. It was about five months after General Hassan Abba’s coup d’etat and twenty-two years to the day he first fled the little town of Bolewa where he was born – Bolewa, to which he was now headed. The savannah sun bared its vexation on the white Corolla and not for the first time Faruk wondered why he had not fixed the broken air conditioner, for even with both windows wound down, he sweated like a man afraid. That morning, years ago, Faruk Ibrahim was only vaguely aware that the maelstrom of contrary winds swirled increasingly desperately around him.

In the coming months, it was all to come to a head, unimpeded, like a sudden dust storm billowing from the Sahara.

The toilsome journey wound on and on, passing towns no larger than suburbs of Jos City in the central Nigerian plateau from where he was coming. The car’s sedate speed did not compensate the sweltering air and he thought not for the last time that he should have fixed the car’s broken air conditioning. The roads weren’t always good either and sometimes they ceased altogether, becoming long patches of dry, powdery, russet-brown dust.

On both sides of the road was savannah seeming perennially dry, seeming to defy the sun’s fury by stubbornly refusing not to burst into flame. Yet, in the heat, some nomads were about with herds of white cattle, cattle more plentiful than men in Nigeria’s frontier Northeast State. Each time he passed a herdsman and his charge, Faruk hooted his horn in response to the others ecstatic hallooing and raised his hand through the window in salute to this close relative of the American cowboy. The American west is the Nigerian northeast and he wondered what tales of rugged living each hardy heritor could tell of his life. Unconsciously, he thought how many untold stories there are in Nigeria and how all one needed do was scratch the surface a bit and look inwards.

For company, he and the cattlehands had numberless cattle egrets, bubulus ibis, sentinel of the herdsman and watcher of the doings of men, even of his mother and father and their lives before him. He fought a losing battle with his thoughts, which always returned to Rahila and the city of cool climes he had left behind that morning.

“See, Faruk, ba na son ka kuma. We have to call it off, it cannot work anymore, please,” Rahila Pam had said.

“Ba ki so na? You do not love me, or you are quitting me – which is it, Rahila, which?”

“It doesn’t matter. Let me go!”

“It does matter, and you know it! Both things are not the same.”

Miles Davis 1959 Kind of Blue played from Bose speakers. The finesse of the recording now and again kept his mind off the insufferable heat. Somehow, and Rahila Pam had always wondered how, listening to jazz kept him alert to the road like at no other time. Faruk tapped his thumb on the steering wheel in time to Coltrane’s riffs and felt faintly lightheaded from experiencing the culture of a promising past each time Miles Davis’s trumpet said an undying flourish. Jazz awakened something foundational in him absent all the other times when the burden of living amidst the pell-mell pull of life drowned the music of nature from his ears.

He caught himself looking through the driving mirror in time to remember that on this particular stretch of road he was all alone and had been so for quite a while, an hour now, since he had passed a lorry laden with assorted farm produce and rustic farmers hanging on to the tailboards of the old Bedford, laughing and singing rural songs in their own peace. He had hooted his horn at them and they saluted noisily as he passed them. Minutes later when he stopped to check his tires, they also stopped to ask what was wrong and when they found there was nothing they could do, they commended his knowledge of the Kanuri language to which he said he was Kanuri and was presented a prize of bananas and oranges by Wabekwa, an aged untired man who was their king of farmers. Then Faruk was off again, leaving them far behind.

He caught himself looking at the driving mirror again.

Faruk had a thin face. Clear white eyes, which added calm kindness to a somewhat inscrutable face, offset the dark chocolate of his complexion. He had happy, even lips, and when he whistled his lips were sexy. His hair, like his father’s, was wavy, as had been those of his Kanuri and Fulani forbears. His eyebrows were slender and fine, however, and not the typical hawk’s perch. He wore a thin handlebar moustache and had spent much of his twenty-four years enduring the teasing of friends who swore he could never grow a beard. He was tall and lithe, like a Kenyan runner. The effect of these little details was a wholesome beauty that was concealed and enchanted all the same. When he smiled, which was the easiest thing in the world for him, a positive animation livened his features and he could will anything he desired then.

He wore a red polo shirt over white chinos and black sandals of cured snakeskin. Beside him was an already lukewarm bottle of water and in a cooler behind him were the rest of the dozen pack of bottled water he bought at Jalingo earlier in the journey. Beside the cooler was a battered suitcase of brown leather, a suitcase that had crossed continents and been the habitué of countless car trunks, indeed a suitcase that told much of his life story for he had gotten it for his fifteenth birthday. He whistled along with the modal jazz playing from the speakers of his well used, ever-faithful Toyota and gradually he lost himself again in the confusion of his thoughts.

After the last fight with Rahila a week before, he had decided to take a breather from the North-Central State where they lived. He wished to travel away from the differences and choices that tried relentlessly to determine his life and his joys. But he did not know how or where to go. So he visited Yagana Hussena, his late mother Habiba Ummi al-Qassim’s closest friend until she died when he was fourteen.

Prior to his meeting Rahila Pam, Faruk’s mother’s insanity and death had been a private trauma he had overcome, reconciled to the past. It’s related, I know, Faruk had thought, my mother and Rahila; Rahila’s complex with identity. I have to get away.

Rahila made him think of Ummi al-Qassim and wonder why, questioning in his mind the comfortable veneer of acceptance, seeking reasons. Faruk had become intrigued with finding out why Ummi al-Qassim had lost her mind. Insanity did not begin when a person started howling or losing track of things and time, the memory of faces, just like pain did not start at the moment of a beloved ones death but long before that, lingering on long after the fact.

On entering the shaded porch of Yagana’s house, which was filled with potted plants giving off an ozonic trace of well-being, she said -

"My God, what troubles you? Your face is as long as a Kaaba door!"

She was standing at the far side of the porch mulching compost with gloved hands unto the roots of a promising rose bush. She led him to sit on the cloth sofa and shouted for the maid to not let her son starve or thirst in her house. She was an old woman, about sixty, and her gray hair peeked out in neat cornrows from under her Dubaijin headscarf. Her skin was pale, as had been his mother’s; she had the kindest face he had ever seen.

Hussena, his yaya, always adopted the undying spirit of a young girl with him and now she smiled at him with the coquette of a lover. She called him Habib, her love. She called him that perhaps because it was also his mother’s name - Habiba. Habiba Ummi al-Qassim had been Yagana Hussena’s dearest friend, a sister of the blood.

Faruk took his seat beside her and told her of Rahila. She kept nodding, did not interrupt him save to bid him eat some of the food and drink that had been silently placed on a stool beside him. While she listened, Faruk noticed it seemed as if a film had appeared over her eyes, as if his words reminded her of something else.

The old woman’s complete silence was not so much because she was listening to him as because his words unearthed memories long entombed by the silt of many years. He looked up ever so often and only the alert questioning glint in her eyes made him continue his narrative. Of all cosmic jokes God played on the denizens of His world, deja vu was the most unnerving, the most improbable. It was exactly deja vu that coursed through Yagana Hussena’s mind as Faruk sat there on her porch, telling her the problems of his love and how dim the prospects of his joy without his love were.

Decades before, Hussena had listened to his mothers words - words striking in their similarity to Faruk’s and those words, these words, had so clearly been a cause of much suffering. It was impossible for her to draw a conclusion other than that another tragedy was in the offing.

She knew skill and tact would be needed to ward it off, as one might gently nudge a meteor off the path of the earth and catastrophe, and that the task had fallen to her. So be it! Colonel Dibarama, Faruk’s father, could not save the boy from the enigma of identity that even then reached out to grab Faruk and carry him unknowing to the depths of hell, a hell that had consumed his mother already. No, Hussena thought, I did not do enough forty years ago, Allah forbid that I do not exhaust myself this time around, what is life if one holds back from living because of life? So be it!

She wondered about General Hassan Abba and where he figured in this new complexity. Hassan was definitely aware, he was always aware. Her own Hassan who had tried to make the most of it, her soldier-boy who had punched up a ray of light at a time when twin dusks of the Arab and Usman Waziri stifled her dawn like an unrepudiable promise. And even though Hassan’s actions then had not been able to ward off the fatal confrontation - for how can one ward off a woe that one does not know - it had provided a leeway through which Habiba had escaped with this boy and lived for a decade, encumbered but alive and hopeful in time.

Now Hassan Abba was Head of State.

In the end, everything just begins.

But Yagana Hussena realized, even though it was imperative that he knew, telling Faruk what had happened in Bolewa when she was still a girl would do him no good. It was only in personal rediscovery that he would find the strength he needed to make the right decision, strength absent decades earlier and for which Hussena had never fully forgiven herself.

Just then, her pet macaw, Haruna, started chirruping "strength strength, haw-haw, strength!" and Faruk saw her smile one of her fine smiles and she looked up at him just as he finished speaking.

"Haruna has a habit of reading my mind. Did you hear him? He just said 'strength', just what you need."

"How do you mean, Yaya?"

"I mean that you should not fight on a field not of your own choosing. In knowing the field, lies strength”, she said.

"You mean a strategy?"

"Yes, in a way. Strategy is knowledge, foreknowledge precisely. Come, I have some of your mother’s things, I think its time you had them" she said, standing and grasping his arm lightly, leading him into the familiar house past the living room to her own quarters, which were neat as ever, where she bade him sit on her brown ottoman.

The room had large windows and its walls of fresh lemonade green, with the white carpeting and the gold green Oriental rug, suffused airiness much in the same way the potted plants gave rarity to the porch. He fiddled around with a paperweight, uncertain why she wished to give him his mother’s diaries just after he had told her about his own troubles with Rahila Pam. What had that to do with foreknowledge? The elderly woman straightened up and placed herself beside him on the ottoman, putting a large brown envelope in his hands. She stroked his face and told him what he had to do.

The next day Faruk went to the National Directorate of Employment and almost like something planned, he was informed that there was a placement for a social studies teacher in the Northeast, if he was interested. It was a six-month spot while the substantive teacher was on sabbatical.

Fine. Where?

Federal Government College, Bolewa.

Laughter bubbled up within him for at that moment he remembered what Yaya Hussena had always said, that something coming was on its way all ways. So, she had been right after all. Of course, he would go to Bolewa.

And here he was on the dry dusty roads of the Northeast.

His father had been surprised at Faruk’s decision especially on hearing the teaching appointment was in Bolewa. The Colonel believed he had instilled enough strength in his son for the younger man to make his decisions.

But Bolewa? Things must be getting dangerous here for the young man, but, again, Bolewa?

Who knows, the Colonel thought, it might all work out for good. The machinery of his brains began to assimilate the angles beneath the board. Everything was a chess game for Ibrahim Dibarama,

The music stopped but Faruk did not play it again or place another disc in the tray.

He drove on, his thoughts still far away in Jos.

“It cannot work, Faruk. It’s all broken down. I cannot marry you, I am sorry.”

Rahila, with her head bowed in tears, had tried to remove the ring, Faruk was angry and he held her hand.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked.

But she did not answer.

“Here’s your ring.”

Rahila had turned away from him and looked out through the window. He then grasped her by the forearm and turned her slowly so she could face him. He wanted to play a game they used to play but his voice had grown husky.

“What are you?” he cried.

She had looked up at him then.

“I am the mountains; you are?”

“The breeze,” he interjected.

“We cannot be.”

“I am the sun,” he tried again.

“But you are not.”

“You are rain.”

“I am not. Not anymore.”

That was the moment the waters broke between them. His heart raged because he was afraid.

She tried again, “Faruk, I am sorry, I hate to be, but I am, now. You are from the North; I am from Central Nigeria, we are separated by a whole complication of history and conditioning. I thought it was possible, but I cannot, we cannot, be indifferent to our distinct identities. I am my mother’s child; you are your father’s son. We neither of us can undo that.”

Faruk had looked at her again, her bowed head. He was silent awhile, standing inches from her. Then he bent forward a bit and pressed his lips on her cheek feeling her shudder, he closed his eyes. Rahila’s eyes were closed also. Both were in pain.

“You are breaking my heart,” he said.

Then he turned way, leaving her amid the contradictory swirl of her emotions and the memory of her dying joy.

A week before.

Thirty minutes later on the Northeast Highway, Faruk Ibrahim came to a junction. Straight ahead was Maiduguri, 200 km away. He took the road that led to Nguirama and then on to Maidunama and Bolewa.

He still had 300 kilometers before he could present himself to the native land from which he had been for so long sequestered, to say to the oracle of his mother, I am your son, tell me of our history.

Re: North's vicious circle of Poverty

2008-08-26T08:44:00.001-07:00

Re: North's vicious circle of Poverty

Ibrahim A. Waziri

In the 26/07/08 edition of Weekly Trust Newspaper is the cover story with the above title, which discussed the poverty phenomenon in Northern Nigeria in the light of the much attention the issue has garnered in recent times, especially when the Central Bank of Nigeria’s governor, Professor Charles Soludo drew attention to it - though reiterating what he once said a year past - at a lecture organised by the Northern Development Initiative in Kaduna, some weeks ago, asking the federal government to declare the situation in the North, a national crisis.

Many people differ on the different causes and solutions to the problem as it affects the region and the country in general. While some of us are quick to identify with positions as that of Mallam Salihu Lukman, a development Economist interviewed in the same edition of the paper, which squarely blamed it on the leadership of Northern Nigeria, that cannot, among other things, fully account for the 17 Trillion Naira it collected from the federal coffers between 1999 to 2007, in the light of efforts at poverty alleviation. Others, as our brothers across the Niger, will rather blame the religion and culture of Northerners as the main culprit, with the justification that the Northern leaders are not any worse than the Southern leaders and yet the Southerners are better up, so the explanation must be in the values, religion and culture of Northerners, or at a stretched imagination, laziness – as seen in certain statement issued by Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and reported by The Punch of31/07/08.This perception is further strengthened by the content an interview conducted by the Weekly’s reporter, Ja’afar Ja’afar and published in the same edition, under a title that says it all, ‘I was given N50, 000 capital, but I married with it’, and described Mallam Garba, the interviewed, as “a real-life stereotype of a Hausa man.”, who cares not about, “what to eat or what to wear” and is “very indifferent, unambitious and a man with a simplistic outlook to life.”

This piece intends to scrutinise the two positions advanced, in the hope of providing insight into the nature of the processes that led the North to this sorry state economically.

Here it is important to understand the fact that there is a wide gap of difference between, culture, religion, values on one side, and in this context, from world view, which typifies the behaviour of an average Northerner like Mallam Garba. The truth of the matter is religion or culture has little to do with human taste, instinct and desire to survive on a certain standard. It only governs choices on how to achieve a standard. This is why we see a lot of Northerners who are not like Mallam Garba in style, despite them sharing same religion, culture and values with him.

A close examination will reveal that the mechanism of progress that made the Hausa the most vibrant and enterprising nation in the whole of West Africa, at a time of the past, is still here. It is also not laziness as, today; nobody comes from any region to farm for them the food they survive on daily. It is like those seeking for an answer to why the Northern Nigeria is in its state now despite the fact of its elite holding power in the composition of the present Nigerian nation-state for over 40 years, should try some reading in classical power and relational politics and its implication on groups’ socio-economic development. In this, one will see that the North is where it is today only in respect to the popular saying that one cannot eat their cake and still have it as it is with all other natural phenomena.

The seemingly correct explanation is the Northern elite, who are responsible for expanding the paradigm and worldview of average Northernerssituating them at par with their counter parts across the world, got power, in the composition of Nigerian nation, in the late 1950s and in order to keep to it they chose the option of eliminating the middle class among them, because the likely thing to happen is the middle class, if allowed, might grow in economy, influence and strength enough to wrench power from the upper class. This is what happened when Gowon in the early 70s and Shagari in the late 70s, allowed their own to grow strong in the military. They just did away with them in 1975 and 1984 respectively and clung to power making sure they did not make the same mistake their predecessors made. They continued the practice of axing their own economically, intellectually and otherwise.

On the other side, the other regions, with especial example of Awo of the South West, were not faced with anything of political control of Nigeria and as such they continued to strengthen their middle class as the upper class realized the need to empower their own as a comprehensive defence against the onslaught of Northern upper class elite. The middle class served as an armoury to the upper class. They continued the battle for them until the early nineties when IBB annulled the popular June 12 election.

Then came the climaxes, the June 12 was ethnicised and regionalised,the South West had a good number of media outfits and middle class individuals with the right education and economic resources to sustain the fight while in the North of early nineties, very few among the middle class could do well in countering the others in the intellectual fight at the level of resources. At the end of the day, after the demise of Abacha, the Northern elite were confronted with no option than to dash power to the South West in 1999. They have won the fight.

When Obasanjo realized his bearing and started targeting these Northern elites it still remained that they had none to defend them save the few middle class created during Abacha regime under the Buhari PTF. Many young Northerners then have merited contracts and madea couple of millions. They were the ones who established focused media houses, maintained Newspaper columns, and started getting back at Obasanjo and his policies.

And of course, the era of Obasanjo was the era of South West participating in national politics. Even though they already have a vibrant middle class, and sound economic structure that benefited from the regime's economic considerations at the centre, it is evident that they also suffered from what the North earlier on suffered from as their elite started a war of control of the region's social and cultural resources. This war recorded many casualties as even people like Bola Ige had to take exit, brutally killed. Also the control politics did not allow their governors to work in unison with progress of the region. In fact they were rated among the worst in performance.

On his part, Obasanjo had to seek for his loyalist outside his own region because trusting and elevating his regional men in the centre may lead to excessive ambition which in turn may result in a palace coup akin to what happened to his predecessors like Gowon and Shagari and their people whom they trusted with the leadership of the military.

This is about the story of Northerners in Nigeria and what came up in their economic development. It is also the reason why there was no time when Northerners talked much about their economy more than the time of Obasanjo’s leadership.Being it they left the leadership position of the country and the upper class were being attacked by Obasanjo mercilessly. Of course, it was also then that the leadershipin the North achieved most, more than the many years it clung to power at the centre.

This is why some of us think the North can have meaningful economic development only if power is made to stay away from its elite for several years while others think, Northerners may have learnt their lessons and will now work assiduously to develop the region.

The whole of this truth is particularly important to stress here given the pronouncements of the governor of Niger State, Alhaji Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu, who tried to attribute the present economic predicament of the North, as widely reported by Newspapers around the country, to an obscure international conspiracy.

If indeed there was a conspiracy it was a Northern Political Class Conspiracy which lost itself in the game of control politics over time.

As it is now the solution to the problem is not one of a short term as the generation of youths without the relevant skills necessary for survival in formal economy now as the ones to be produced in the recent future are very much in the league of the 86% - quoted percentage of the poor - among us. So an affirmative action, with the intent of taking care of our distant future, which appeals to laws and legislations, is the only options. The solution, though good, is not totally in the much taunted, revitalisation of the Agricultural Sector in the North, for Anambra State that is among the highest in the country’s economic index is not an agricultural haven or oil reservoir. After all the Agricultural Sector, if revitalised, may end up serving the economic need of others if there is no enough skilled manpower with right national and international market strategies among the Northerners. Here it is particularly important for the government to invest hugely in human capital development as Northerners need to have more of a world class exposure in various disciplines both academic and entrepreneurial, necesary for survival in the capitalist world.

We certainly, also, cannot continue in the pretentions of creating welfare states. No how can a government continue to afford a free education for all as the Bauchi State House of Assembly is recently heard to be saying it would put Qur’anic Schools and its Almajirai in the state’s budget. This is not practicable as even the formal Western Type of schools that are government owned are not maintained adequately. In fact the example of Kano State which tried to do that as reported in the same edition of Weekly Trust is not encouraging.

So instead of us to continue sailing the dream boat, legislations must be made and enforced that will compel parents to bear more the responsibilities of the children they produce – since religiously it is their duty - as they sometimes recklessly and indiscriminately marry without regard to religious injunctions in keeping and maintaining a family. Thus they send the children out to others cities, hawking and scavenging as Almajirai, in the Qur’anic Schools they could always find in their own villages. It is these Almajirai , growing in the streets with a very bad taste of what life is, with wrong upbringing, wrong heroes, wrong worldview and wrong skills of survival in the 21st century world, that form the bulk of the poor people in Northern Nigeria.

Also such legislations must lead to the creation of agencies, as in other Muslim African countries, like Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, which will be saddled with the responsibilities of accessing the economic and mental worth of anybody who intends to marry or add another wife as many among us are tilted toward abusing the privilege associated with polygamy by placing satisfaction that comes from their being with many wives above their responsibilities of seeing to the maintenance of the family. They plan to produce as many children as they can without planning to give them the best as the religion requires of them.As such we end up with many children that cannot be catered for adequately by their parents, growing in the streets with a terrible taste of what life is, with no abilities to think and save themselves or even those around them in the context of the challenges daily living presents.

It is my humble opinion that family is the barometer of all communities, and keeping political correctness aside,we will need to understand governance as meaning making attempts to make subjects of a defined community disciplined and responsible in all of their dealings and this starts with the channels and processes of procreation in the community. Failure to address issues at this level signals the triumph of anarchy as it is seen in the threat we are facing from the monsters of poverty in Northern Nigeria due to,largely, among other things, our neglect of legal provisions in the formation of family units in both religion and our secular living.

Ibrahim A. Waziri is a Web Application Software Developer at Iya Abubakar Computer Center, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He can be reached at, iawaziri@yahoo.com, 234- 080- 35167963

potrait of the playwright as a young man

2008-08-25T03:28:00.000-07:00

A war, with its attendant human suffering, must, when that evil is unavoidable, be made to fragment more than buildings: it must shatter the foundations of thought and re-create. Only in this way does every individual share in the cataclysm and understand the purpose of sacrifice.

Wole Soyinka (1934 - )
Nigerian novelist, playwright, poet, and lecturer.
The Man Died

Wole Soyinka, born in 1934, Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, and lecturer, whose writings draw on African tradition and mythology while employing Western literary forms. In 1986 Soyinka became the first African writer and the first black writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2007. © 1993-2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Combustive Synergy at JosANA

2008-08-25T03:20:00.000-07:00

Combustive Synergy at JosANA

It would seem that the workings of JosANA, Nigeria’s finest literary hotpsot, are quite similar to those of an internal combustion engine – possessing the ability burn the fuel of histories-in-the-making efficiently, running on the steam of dependably intelligent criticism and of course, producing lines of prose and poetry - that most regenerative of exhausts. It is a synergy of many parts.

The meeting {Saturday 23rd Aug.} began late, at about 1:30 pm, on account of the seasonal rains which saw most of our members arriving in windbreakers and cardigans. The usual salutes were exchanged and we settled to the business of the day. Our long absent member, Patricia Ikejiofor, broke the grounds with her reading of a poem "Sweet Bitter Pill", a poem written in quatrains on the theme of death. By far the finest quatrain read –

As the clock ticks tick-tock rhythmically
You masterminded your art, masked in cruelly
Pitter patter ticking of the ticker
The unwelcome guest even in the house of the vicar

Richard Ali set the critique in motion by admiring the use of irregularly placed rhymes which gave a fine musicality to the lines – then he went on to point out instances where a different order of words and the deletion of an entire stanza would, in his opinion, yield an even finer poem. Silas Nnamonu, retired educationist, however pointed out that at one point the poem joined the specific to the general and while this was not wrong, stanza 3 presents death as an interactive, on-going action – it was his opinion that this finicky movements did not work too well. He also noted, very importantly, concerning the poets use of the word "vicissitude" in relation to death that "death is an end-all, not a vicissitude." Sir Nnamonu also questioned the ending of the poem which was superfluously declaratory. Our Chairperson, Bose Tsevende, however came to the defense of Patricia’s ending, saying each poet has the right to a sort of complimentary close. Sir Nnamonu however repartee’d that it wasn’t a question of whether the poet was right or wrong to use a declaratory close – the question was, does it work? Allen Omale, our ex-Chairman, who was at the meeting in company of his wife Rahmah and child Iman, complimented Sir Nnamonu’s contributions to JosANA especially concerning the artistic amenability of language viz sense. Allen affirmed that while poetic freedom existed to be claimed, traditions are also there to be followed. He then added his criticism of the poem – in his opinion, there were too many "un-poetic words" bogging down the poem and he suggested improvement which Mrs. Patricia graciously accepted to consider.

Next came David Onotu, who read another poem, "Mr President Sire" – it was a poem typical of his style, long and interesting to the ears. Yet, unlike his previous work, the poem became the centre of a critical whirlpool. First, Allen Omale said that some long poems are enjoyable, like the Canterbury Tales and Osundare’s Waiting Laughters, while others are not and that what distincts poetry from prose is the use of metaphor and simile to pass across the message. These poetic underpinnings were however absent in David Onotu’s poem. Richard Ali threw in his own salvo, saying the poem possessed an "ambiguous coherence" – that in the long winding trial of it, the reader/audience, is forced to re-discover themes to encompass the entire work which would otherwise be mutually exclusive recitals. Mr. Ali did not believe that such audience-relative "meaning" portended good writing. Alpah Emeka, Jos City novelist, came to the criticism of the work by saying he found the words as being sound social commentary with a fine flow, and that there were different approaches to poetry. Richard Ali returned, saying "an outraged social conscience is not what makes poetry out of prose!". If poetry is the medium of writing a didactic, let it be poetry, not prose, however densely sensitive, masking as poetry. Sir Nnamonu for his part wondered about the title and varying comments were made on the floor concerning the import of the title. Sir Nnamonu asked whether it was meant to be satirical and someone said whether satirical or not, the idea of the title did not run through the poem. On David’s saying the title was sort of satirical, Allen Omale took him up – when you satirize, you praise and in your praising, you really mock, he said. Yet, there was not a jot of praise amongst the litany that comprised "Mr. President Sire." Steve Rwang Pam, for his part, had the conviction that if the poem were cut by half of its length and tightened, there would be more "poetic juice" in it. And thus, with egos and tempers ruffled, ended the critique of JosANA’s most controversial poem yet.

Next, Bose Tsevende, seizing her Chair prerogative, read an absolutely stunning poem titled "The Voice of the Night" –

I heard the voice of the night
It is not silent anymore
The night talked to me
About imminent breaks,
Nations breaking into war
Homes breaking into fragments
Hearts breaking, cannot be mended.

Aunty B’s poem was read to rave criticism. It was a sensitive analysis of the night, a paean to the unseen and eternally knowing, to the hidden, the vile, the enchantedly profane. Allen Omale – I enjoyed it. Silas Nnamonu – I feared it, I feared the message. Allen also said – Aunty B keeps "bringing in the poetic into her poems" and that the subtle way in which she weaves that poetic into her craft is what sets her out as a poet to be reckoned with. He then compared Mrs Tsevende’s poem to David Onotu’s reading, further buttressing his earlier opinions. Sir Nnamonu wondered about the underlying pessimism he sensed in the poem, a sense of something about to collapse, an appeal – it would seem that the poet has appropriated the definite voice of Sibyl. Sir Nnamonu wondered what might be done to avert the doom foretold? Alpha Emeka complimented Aunty B on her exposition of appropriate and unusual themes. Abubakar Adam, who won the 2007 BBC African Performance Playwrighting Competition, said that apart from the beauty of her language, it was also accessible to everyone. We all look forward to Mrs. Tsevende’s upcoming second collection of poems from which "The Voice of the Night" is taken.

In a meeting already rich in the unusual, a poem entitled "The Chiefdom is Suffering from a Shortage of Guinea Corn" was read by Timi Kpakiama, one of our newer members from the Niger Delta. In a correct showing of the avant-gardism that JosANA has been noted for, the poem is based on translation of traditional Ijaw folklore. It naturally brought the house to the boilers. Allen Omale, while restating his unfamiliarity with Ijaw poetry, however wondered about the length of the title, he’d never seen anything quite like it before. Eric Biame wondered if it came from the translation process? Another debate, as to whether the poem was "original" or not, began. David Onotu was Timi’s supporter viz the unusual length of the title. The poem itself was however an interesting one, with the use of oblique personifications referring perhaps to the Delta vis-à-vis Nigeria.

Aborigines dwelling by Lokoja and the Chad
Were nature’s barometers taming and tending
The garden of God; they were Adams ‘heritors
Before we came, bearing dispersion with us
Richard Ali read a badly received poem, "The Kwararafa Sun." Meant to be an epic of Nigerian identity, Mr. Ali just did not pull it off. Allen said it was meant to be an epic but it had been disappointingly overwhelmed by prose and he suggested a re-write. Bose Tsevende however compared the poem to the work of Okello Oculli. David Onotu said it was unusual for Ali to write long poems and maybe being out of his elemental precise poetry, he had blundered? Alpha Emeka said he was sure the poem read was a "first draft". Graciously bowing to the critical fire of the house, Richard Ali pleaded the wayward talent with which he wrestles and promised to rework the poem so that it would read more like what was envisaged in his mind.

Following this, Alpha Emeka and Abubakar Adam took turns to read excerpts from their published and upcoming novels – "Carnival" and "Sons of Silence" respectively. Abubakar’s first novel, "The Quest for Nina" is due out in the United States in a couple of months with a Nigerian edition expected by April 2009. Abubakar’s excerpt started with "Mother started to die when father and his friend started to whisper in the corners . . . . " and in the two thousand words that followed that phrase, Mr. Adam was able to paint a surreal graph of family dysfunction, captured in insightful, evocatively eloquent prose. Compared to his debut, which this writer has read, Abubakar’s best work is still yet to come and it would not be in his acclaimed dramaturgy, but in the realm of prose. Bose Tsevende remarked that it was a sweet story and she loved his technique of giving, in short sentences, deep insights into characters – something reminiscent of Dickens.

The meeting came to an end with the reading of three poems by our Vice President, Matthew Mzega, one of them titled, in a meeting already rich with highly descriptive titles – "The Smallest Pepper"! It was well received. Matthew, an economist by training, is fast carving a niche for himself, his poetry maturing in strides – as is his sponge-like acceptance of criticism that has no doubt fueled his genius. .Finally, Jos City crooner and JosANA PRO, Steve Rwang-Pam brought the house down with powerful renditions of country music – something beautiful and old that had the words "flowers of gold don’t grow in gardens of stone" in it as well as a fantastic Billy Ray Cyrus piece called "My Achey Breakey Heart."
Talk of synergy and combustion!

Richard Ali is Secretary General of JosANA. Inquiries may be made via rugbali@gmail.com or 08062392145

A Dark Ghazal

2008-07-24T02:28:00.000-07:00

Infernal pointsman destroying space-time
Shattering science in a million frissons of glass
This is the end of the fury – the mad scribbling
The chill of waiting to pen perfect roses

Whirlwinds rage on, but I am innocent of dust
My imperfect lines throb as if they still live
The market still pulses with life

I tell you
Fortitude and solitude are one
The same with wine and women and art
Cold mistresses teasing flames in temples
Parched with thinking, longing
And forgetting

So
Life shatters into a million frissons
And I step out into the light
Killing the man in the mirror.

A Dark Ghazal

JosANA gives me a Headache!

2008-07-16T03:29:00.000-07:00

JosANA gives me a Headache!

At the end of each meeting of Jos ANA, I have a headache. Every single time. Being an true blue African, I sought scientific inquiry into this curious state of affairs. My herbalist friend, after the obligatory sacrifices, told me that the headache was caused by “osmosis” – he explained that in high pressure situations, especially where mental energy is being focused, like at JosANA meetings, the brain cells are bombarded with electrons of intellection and a side effect of the ensuing friction is the pulsations of the temple called headache. So you see, I am a happy man. My ailment is scientifically recognized. And, yes, following the last ANA meeting on Saturday 12th July, I had a headache.

I arrived late but did not miss much as the usual “hello, hello” salutes were still going on at 1:09 pm. Bose Tsevende was already there together with Alpha and Michael Emeka, David Onotu. Kanchana Ugbabe was also there, having been absent from JosANA for quite a while. In no time the verandah was full with old and new members, especially our members who fall in-between – those who show up once in a while. We had four new members.

The meeting proper began on a poetic note with our member, Emma Kenine, reading her piece, “In Blue She Comes”. The meeting could not have started on a better note because the poem was just perfect – Emma’s poem had that control of sound, imagery and soul that elite poem have which sets them above reproach. The word “blue” was the anvil on which the poem riposted, much like Federico Garcia Lorca’s “a la cinquo de la tarde” from his most famous poem. David Onotu pointed out that Emma Kenine’s poem also shared similarity of style with a Langston Hughes poem that played on connotations of “red”.

Following Emma’s reading, Abubakar Adam took to the center stage with a reading of “Because You Are a Poet” - a verse offering to Aunty B Tsevende who’s 2007 Poems is titled “You Are a Poet”. In that poem, Abubakar successfully married with simile the motions of dance {Mrs. Tsevende lectures dance} to the “dance” motions of lines of verse. The underlying idea was that Aunty B was a poet while he, Abubakar, was not. However, the Jos City barrister, Redzie Jugo, added a last line to Abubakar’s reading by saying “My guy, you are being too modest!” and urged Abubakar to modify the last line accordingly. Another lawyer, Mahan, said that eulogies are associative and Abubakar ought not to dissociate his innate poetic in his panegyric on Aunty B, thus agreeing with Redzie’s submission. I guess Abubakar ought to have said in stock legalese – “As my Lord pleases!”

Next to read and still in the thrall of poesy was David Onotu and his “Hills of Green”, a highly involved and perceptive poem about the Jos plateau. In his trademark style of man-in-the-arena oratury, David succeeded in weaving a complex tapestry of the Plateau, mother of us all – its ambience, its people, the tensions, the places, the drama of everyday life, our hopes and dreams and the particulars of our collective hubris. There was silence, simply, and then there was applause. No further affirmation can greet an upcoming poetaster than the un-begrudged applause of his no mean contemporaries. Steve Rwang Pam was highly touched by this poem and Redzie said there ought to be collaboration with Aunty B to stage it in the Theatre. Richard Ali said indeed it demanded a screenplay. Our member, Patience Egwurube, who is a writer of screenplays nodded her head in concurrence. Bose Tsevende asked Steve Rwang Pam to look into the possibility to having the poem as a jingle of Radio and the Country music crooner said he’d be delighted to do that. Steve also said that David’s poem was the sort of art that was the material for further works of art.

In what is becoming Michael Emeka’s forte, prose, he read an excerpt from his upcoming novel titled “The Tide”. Michael’s ear for prose is perhaps as perceptive as David Onotu’s ear for poetry – such was his presence of mind as he told a tale of a young man walking heedlessly into the whirlpool of petroleum smuggling as opposed to going to Aba to apprentice himself as an auto spare parts dealer. He was able to capture with his prose the drama of the rivalries between parents and in highly effective interior monologues, he captured the mind of his central character. An A1 awareness of description kept the entire excerpt together, stringing his audience along. Prof. Kanchana Ugbabe commented on the psyche of the piece and on Michael’s use of language. She also wondered how the novel would end? Redzie Jugo noted it was a fantastic excerpt only that the beginning seemed too long and detailed. Richard Ali agreed with Redzie and suggested that the opening paragraphs, which describe a journey to a petroleum dump, should be cut by about a third. Steve Rwang Pam said it was a “well spiced” reading and Mahan said that everyone could identify with the story, commending the contemporaneity of Michael’s subject. The truth is, it would be impossible for me to convey in reported prose the reactions to “The Tide.”

Steve Rwang Pam read his second poem this year, an interesting one called “Looking Back”. It was verse steeped in nostalgia for simpler, less complicated times and it set off some debate in the house.

When warmth was for the skin
And allergies were not known
Where goldfinches twit and nightingales sustain
The resonance of divine symphony

Steve said the allusion in the poem was Biblical, that he imagined Adam reciting the poem. Among other things, Richard Ali said if that was so then perhaps the title should be “Adam Looking Back?” but this suggestion was shot down variously and died midair. JosANA is perhaps one of the few places in the country where artists find material for their work even in religion. Indeed, only at the last meeting, Mrs. Tsevende had read a poem full of religious allusions.
Next, Alpha Emeka read his entry for the 2008 Commonwealth Short Story Competition, a 501 word entry titled “A Season of Blessing.” It was one of those existentialist stories – a man leaves the stifling fumes and strictures of the city for the remembered tranquility and ozonic air of the countryside only to find that the monsterface of urbanity had replicated itself there just as well. Among the comments was that though there was a word limit for the CSSC, Alpha could have added the nuance of moral/personal degradation side by side with environmental degradation. But even without that, no one doubts that the next Commonwealth Short Story Prize will be won by a member of JosANA. { If Molara Wood doesn’t, of course!}

Richard Ali, who chaired the meeting, shared out info-fliers about the upcoming Cavalcade literary journal being published by the Abuja Writers Forum – the most serious writer’s body in the Nigerian capital.

On firmer ground now, having left poetry behind, Abubakar read a short story titled “Night Call”. “Night Call” is the story of a young man who falls into the trap of a femme fatale courtesy an inauspicious telephone conversation. At the end of the story, the man is set to hang for a murder he did not commit – of the siren’s husband. I am a lover of the bette noir movies and this story would have had Roman Polanski screaming for his scriptwriter and cameraman! Along the line, in prison, a guard befriends the hapless young man and they form a plan to entrap Farida la femme via a taped confession. BUT, the tape runs out just before her confession! To understand the story, let me recommend my second favorites bette noire – pick out “The Man Who Wasn’t There” when next you are at the Video Club. Following Abubakar’s reading, Richard, who had been silent all the while, bemoaned the fact that writers up north and in JosANA were content to come read their poems bi-weekly and get applause – but a literary reputation is gotten by being in the larger public arena. He said the way to force your work into that arena is to get them published in journals and anthologies, like Cavalcade, African Writing and Sentinel Poetry. Helon Habila had given Jos writers the same advice during his 2007 book tour. And really, I bet you my last Bic biro, some of the stuff routinely read and praised during our meetings, the stuff I write about in my digest – were you to actually read them or hear them being read, it would blow your mind away. Jos City is at the heart of the Nigerian cultural renaissance and JosANA is the natural leader of that reappraisal.

Kanchana Ugbabe, professor of Creative Writing, lent a word in agreement with Richard’s exhortation. She came in with recent printouts from the New Yorker – Chimamanda Adichie’s “The Headstrong Historian” and something from Uwem Akpan, the Jesuit priest who is currently the homeboy of Nigerian letters. Her point was that young writers ought to send their work out, to local newspapers and journals as well as to International ones because there really are only two answers to any question. A literary reputation rests on the acclaim that heralds a writer who has made himself synonymous with more “yes” answers than “no.”

Bose Tsevende was in her natural element rendering two poems with intros in Yoruba language. The Jos literary movement is a sort of levitation – comprising the most talented writers who, standing on the shoulders of giants, have a vantage and voice that is distinctly theirs. Bose Tsevende’s poems have even become finer following her 2007 poems and her next collection sure would be a hot pick.

PHIL: {Struggles for a while and then gives up} No use!
RATTY: Say, what do we have for breakfast?
PHIL: Breakfast? Breakfast in the evening?
RATTY: Well, I thought it was morning . . . the moon.
PHIL: There is no moon Ratty! How can there be a moon in the morning?
RATTY: Its not morning Phil. Look! We are still here . . .it’s evening.
PHIL: Have we ever moved? We were here in the morning. . .
RATTY: And afternoon . . .and in the evening.
PHIL: We were here yesterday.
RATTY: We were here all the yesterdays.

YES! The first play read this year at JosANA was Paul Ugbede’s “Two Characters Undefined”. In this powerfully existentialist {the spirit of Sartre was strong} drama that is at once reminiscent of Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party”, Paul, Jos City’s most talented young playwright, skillfully took on the entire superstructure of civilization through the perceptions of Phil and Ratty – maybe they are madmen, maybe they are aspects of the same mind? David Onotu, who voiced Ratty, compared it to Samuel Becketts classic “Waiting for Godot.” Paul Ugbede’s talents have also been recognized abroad. He was at the University of Lancaster courtesy the British Council a while back and recently, he got a 2000 pound scholarship to study at the Bath Spa University. {He joins Uche Peter Umez who won one of the scholarships for short story.} The play was very well received by the floor and Mahan said it reminded him of a Hausa joke about two drunks disputing on whether it was a sun or moon in the sky one night – they resolved to ask a third man {who is even more drunken} who assured them that he was merely a visitor to the neighborhood and so could not say whether it was sun or moon!
One thing is for sure, Paul Ugbede is IN the arena!

We returned to poetry with the reading of new member, Derek Idjai’s “Tribute to Fela”. Next came Richard Ali and he read two poems – “Ovonramven” and “When I Die.” The prize winning Esther Chinke, who came in with her sister, Ruth also read. Esther’s poem was titled “Blood on our Street” and it was a haunting verse collage of the 2001 internecine conflict on the plateau. Her line “Laughter fled with the rains” is perhaps the most haunting opening line ever read at JosANA.

The meeting came to an end with Redzie Jugo’s reading of his poem “Useless Use.” An extremely controversial, and thus successful, poem involving the skilful conjuring of sense and wordplay, Barrister Jugo’s poem kept JosANA members disputing long after the meeting ended.
And yes, I did get a headache after the meeting! But thanks to science, I know it is well with my mind.

Richard Ugbede Ali is Secretary General of JosANA and inquiries may be sent to rugbali@gmail.com

Josana Boku Boku Tori

2008-06-27T03:03:00.000-07:00

The chairmanship of Bose Ayeni-Tsevende got off to a rip-roaring start on Saturday 14th June at the Nigerian Film Institute grounds where JosANA holds forth. We had new members coming in, old members showing up and consistent members being their usual writerly selves. One couldn’t really ask for more – except that I have got this overwhelming desire to try typing this email-digest in pidgin. I don’t know where it comes from but I shall indulge this very middleclass craving!

The meeting start sharp to one o’clock when Bose Tsevende arrive with Micheal Emeka, Alpha Emeka and David Onotu inside her motor. Them meet Richard Ali as him dey enter gate so as e come dey, all of them join for front of Institute. Them come dey halla each other, dey talk “how you dey?” and general palaver. Aunty B look fine like omoge for her jeans but she come vex small as Richard been tease am, dey call am chairman. But na play play vex sha. Finally all of us come start dey carry chair from inside hall go the balcony because the breeze just dey cool for balcony and you know say writer brain sometimes e dey hot pass oven. Sha, after we don flex our muscle dey carry chairs na him David Onotu been localize one bag of cooked groundnut wey them buy for road. We sit down dey chop the groundnut dey wait for members as we still continue our palaver. Small small the balcony come dey full, five, six, seven, twelve and so on and so forth.

We just wan start the meeting proper na him one woman come come ask for Professor Ugbabe. But Kanchana Ugbabe no come that day. The woman name na Mrs. Joseph and she be nurse for Quan Pan Local Government Area of Plateau State. As we come find out say she ma na writer she be, we come welcome am proper proper give am seat to siddon. She been come with the book wey she write, the name of the book na “Jiji” and na about the myth and legend for lower plateau areas, all these them Langtang, Quan Pan side. We no even finish that salutation when one caucasian omoge wey be our old member come arrive, her name na Carmen McCain and she dey do masters for Wisconsin {America funny name} University – she come Naija come do research for Hausa film industry, all the way from George Bush country! Allahu akbar, Kannywood don go international! Nothing dey happen!

The meeting proper start with Stephanie Onyejekwe and she read one short story wey sweet well well. I don forget the name of the story but I know say “grave” dey inside sha. Anyway, the story sweet well well. The story na about all these yeye people wey dey kill their fellow man pickin because religion. Na so two neighbor, one Christian and one Muslim come take kpai themselves oh – hmm, but as them people come bury them, na for the same graveyard them throway them for ground! You see! Anyhow, Richard been like the story especially as the thing short well well jus dey like miniskirt, everything correct, but him talk say them get some redundancy {scatter scatter grammer} wey dey inside, for example where she talk say “in a pool of their own blood” – him talk say that “their” no dey necessary because if them kpai themselves, the blood na their own! “In a pool of blood”, even though the thing sound like cliché, for better. Abubakar Adam wey win BBC African Performance for 2007 ma join, come point out one place wey Stephanie write say dem bury those yeye people for “empty grave” – to, him talk say for all him experience {dey go burial oh, no be say as undertaker} him never hear where them bury person for grave wey no empty. Na so Alpha Emeka come nack him own on top, him talk say him believe say the short tory still fit to be expanded, say make she add more characters and scenarios, say that go make am short tory wey go sweet belle even pass as e dey now. David Onotu first gree with him palle, Alpha, then him come add say him feel say the inciting incident for the story {na water dem fight on top oh} dey too small, say people no dey fight like that on top water. But then Abubakar come talk say no, say our own Jos crisis here wey we do for 2001, no be woman na him them say insult Muslim man wey dey pray, abi na Muslim man wey spit ablution water on top woman – yet see as them kpai people! Abubakar say the water na valid inciting incident and in fact, na correct metaphor sef as to say them dey fight on top wetin God give for free, him commend Stephanie writing well well. Bose Tsevede plus her comments come correct Stephanie pronunciation of “sword”, say na “sord” e be – hmm, from now on, I go call am “sord”, me ma I don benefit from JosANA, abi how you see am? Stephanie been respond small to the boku comments wey she get from floor.

Next na him Alpha Emeka read small from him second book “Aunty Florence” wey him write in collaboration with Aunty B Tsevende. The part wey him read na one marriage situation wey two ayonge’ omoge call Kiki and Florence dey talk, whether to marry man wey get money or to marry man wey go take them away from the village wey them dey. Na serious matter oh! As always now, we all of us clap for am well well when him finish. Richard, that surutu boy, na him first start criticism. Him talk say the excerpt sweet him belle well well and him hail Alpha but him come point out say for one part Alpha read say a clay pot been “shatter to pieces” – Richard talk say “to pieces” dey redundant one kind like that because say if something shatter, na to pieces now. Writerman no need to talk everything before we sabi, abi how you see am? David Onotu been praise the “consistent atmosphere” for the piece as per say Alpha describe village well well as if him na village boy! The white omoge, Carmen McCain, come commend the use of short precise sentences for the excerpt to denote action and na him everybody come say aha, the thing sef jus dey like Chinua Achebe him Arrow of God. That na perhaps why e sweet like so.

Anyway, the next person wey read na David Onotu, the one wey Richard dey call terrible pickin, and him na poem e read – Eve of Iska. The poem na offering to the immortal shrine of our papa of Arewa wey die not long ago, Pa Cyprian Ekwensi. The poem na one long, rambling verse written with the perceptive eye of a person wey poetry dey him blood. Oh boy, see poem! The thing just dey flow dey go like okro soup dey go down big man throat and the powerful allusion plus simile and metaphor wey that boy use – e just dey like correct stockfish for inside the okro soup. I tell you, I just siddon inside the tip of my chair and I fall down sef but nobody see me because everybody dey listen seriously like say na rapture. {David Onotu is by far the most stunning of the up and coming Nigerian poets, seamlessly borrowing the innate ear for rhythm that marks out Osundare at his best with a social perception as keen as Langston Hughes’s.} Abubakar talk say when him hear David read him poems, im dey become aware of how “feeble” im attempt at writing poems be. Bose Tsevende say wistfully about youth and how important e dey to write each poem for him own time because time go come when you no go fit write am again. I gree with that talk oh, hmm, nothing dey make me fear pass to think say when I die God go call all my incomplete and unwritten poems to prosecute me on Judgment Day – I dey fear that fate well well. Alpha Emeka commend Onotu synthesis of sense and rhythm.

We been talk something but I don forget. Carmen and Richard Ugbede Ali been talk something about Chimamanda Adichie and Chinua Achebe. She say she agree in part for some of the things wey him talk about Chi Chi for him article “On Miss Adichie’s Sensibility”. Kai, I don forget.

Abubakar Adam come read one chapter from him novel wey him still dey write. Abubakar first novel, “The Quest for Nina” suppose commot for United States of A publisher by late August. The movement wey him read na about Bala wey hate cockroach with all him life and them come think say him father, ma, na cockroach he be. Him reading come explode critical tory for floor. Richard talk say for the excerpt Abubakar been digress too much come dey talk about the different kind cockroach wey dey {international species} so tey the thing come become lecture. And Richard no like lecture for inside novel at all at all. Alpha come talk say, this cockroach sef, na character of the character? We come dey wonder how long the novel go be if this him long cockroach digression go fit into the whole without looking like hand wey whitlow dey worry am. Sha, Abubakar talk say him still dey write the book so make we keep out ear for amber until him finish – them we go understand properly. I dey wait.

Richard come read from him own novel in progress wey him dey edit and reedit. The name of the novel na “The Legacy of Bolewa” and him read from inside chapter four. Everybody like him reading and writing but “but” dey. Alpha talk say him must to dey careful with “the superfluity of flowery description” so that the novel no go come dey sweet so tey reader go just lost the meaning of the story – you know, like siren wey dey sing for sailorman them for Niger-Delta so them go dey follow him voice until them drown. Richard gree say even him ma dey fear that fate, say na part of why him dey try re edit be that – so that the poetry for him language no go overwhelm the prose of him novel. Bose Tsevende talk say Ricahrd dey more interested in “beings” and not “things” and that na why him dey follow follow the nuance of him character thinking. Redzie talk say the descriptions for the excerpt dey apt but make Richard try to work in “interjections for turbulence”, so reader no go dey choked on the beauty of language. Another tori come break – Abubakar say something about dialog. Richard come talk say him done dey tire for wetin him call “the tyranny of showing”, him say critic this days too dey concentrate for dialog so writers dey write dialog against them will and sometimes against their sense sef. Him talk say critics dey like dragon wey go spit fire on top any prose wey no get “dialog”, that is, the “component of showing”. Redzie been talk say him ma notice the obsession with dialog but still sha that dialog dey dey necessary to show idiosyncrasies of characters. Redzie again talk say good prose suppose dey more concerned with “the skillful handling of the story” in opposition to the skillful handling of dialog. Abubakar talk say balance must to dey between description and action. The caucasian omoge, Carmen, na she talk say the thing come down to the style of the writer – Richard been retort say critics dey anti style and them go write bad reviews. Alpha come talk about him Radiophonics radio play and how him been work in dialog during his draft, him say dialog dey very important, because e dey show the contour of characters. The tori long small sha.

Next na our two pickin for the house, Oreoluwa and Adelaja na them read. Both of them na the pickins of Dr. Agboola and them been come with their mama, Paulette, because their papa don travel. Laja been re-read the poem wey him been read for ANA last week but him come add second stanza. We been encourage am with clap well well but somehow, the second stanza wey him add spoil the poem. The second stanza kuma try to force rhyme “poor/sore” so that the meaning come lost in the process. The boy try well well, him na just 10 years old. But men, na him younger sister, Oreoluwa, na her poem scatter head pass – sophisticated, and she na 7 going to 8 years she be. The title of her poem na “Jewelry Flower” and subtle double rhyme been dey the first line – in short, na fantastic poem, the girl collect plenty clap oh!

Jos city barrister, Redzie Jugo read him poem “O Chief”.

Na then na him Michael Emeka come read one short tory titled “Voices” about taximan Ndu and how him dey try get fuel for him motor during scarcity and about how soldier man dem no fit take people do rofo fofo is them dey unite. Comments been follow – Richard talk say instead of to say “petroleum product”, e for better of him dey more specific if na diesel or petrol. Abubakar been pick out some redundancies while Redzie feel say the short tory for fit end before when e actually actually end. Everybody agree say Michael don get draft of masterpiece for him hand. Bose Tsevende {Chairman} talk say writers of this generation suppose dey address the kind things wey people dey grapple with each day – like Michael do. Finally finally, the house dey unanimous say the title, “Voices”, no do the short tory justice. We been all suggest make him change am to “No More” and him ma talk say yes, he like the new title pass the old one.

The meeting finally break up with Mrs. Joseph reading a poem from inside her novel “Jiji” and then Stephanie read poem called “White Devils.”

I don tire, but I don try nack una small of JosANA plenty plenty tory.

NB: It is quite exhilarating to write in pidgin though sometimes it breaks down when you try to find a pidgin equivalent for an English turn of phrase. I remember back when Nigerian writers were fascinated with the quest for mediums for their work with the high texts of that movement being KSW’s “Sozaboy” and Adaora Ulasi’s “Many Thing You No Understand.” Whatever happened to that? Nigerian letters, it would seem, is a rich graveyard of fads.

Richard Ugbede Ali is Secretary Genarl of Josana and inquiries may be made to rugbali@gmail.com or 08062392145.

Questions on Artistic Responsibility – Chimamanda Adichie’s Imperfect Sun

2008-06-21T07:01:00.000-07:00

The emails below recently caused furore in the academic and intellectual circles of Nigeria and I have posted them below in a bid to sample even more opinions on artistic freedom and the responsibility for its use. The context is, of course, primarily Nigerian. But I hope the questions raised are not merely the preoccupations of a Nigerian writer.

On Miss Adichie’s Sensibility

I am currently reading Miss Chimamanda Adichie's second book, "Half
of a Yellow Sun" and I am now just at page 170. In the last fifty
pages I have read her description of the death of Sardauna Bello in
1966 and my principal reaction, after disgust {at her ends] and
distaste {for her bad taste}, is anger. The sort of anger that a few
years ago would have set me off on a 5000-word criticism – yet, such
hagiography is hardly the worthy work of a critic or a critical
reader. That is what anger does. It makes us do unworthy things. But
now I am calm and not angry as I type out this email. In this calm, I
type as I think. Why is it that Miss Adichie finds it in her to
describe – mind you, not the death of Sardauna Bello, but that he
died bleating like a goat in a Rex Lawson song? Why? She repeats it
ad nauseum on page 130 of the Harper Collins edition of that book, a
book I only got after a year of "we no get am, try Modern Bookshop".
Why did she do it? And because I am thinking, I realize it is because
she can. I cherish the artistic freedom above all the HR's so I
understand how she did it. It is because I, in each cell of my body,
affirm she should be able to write anything she wants. But this
writing – this nauseating description I find so disagreeable, is it
sensible - for Miss Adichie to have written it? She is an artist and
inspiration is the reception of special sensitivity, perceiving the
commonplace differently. That is where our writing comes from.
Considering this, do we, should we, not be mindful of the
sensitivity, cultural sensitivity, of others? Is Miss Adichie trying
to set herself up as a martyr? Why? Has she been sensible or
sensitive?

Sardauna Bello's death, his murder, his assassination, the eclipse of
his sun – there was a context to it and I have so far appreciated
Miss Adichie's attempt to write a balanced if at times enervating
novel about the sixties, a trying time for Nigeria. But I will go to
that context later. I return to sensibility and sensitivity. Am I
insensibly questioning her sensibility – do I seek to curtail her
freedom by questioning its use? Let me carry out a test. If a German
were to write a book setting out in glory terms the history of the
Third Reich, for the purpose of "memory", and in it he describes the
details of the holocaust in stark, gory detail using the simile that
the tragic equanimity in the faces of Jews just outside the gas
chambers was like the harmony of the first movement of Tchaikovsky's
Swan Lake – what would be the reaction? Outrage! If I or a Fulani
friend of mine were to describe the 1945 or 1966 killing of Igbo's in
Northern Nigeria in the terms that the wail of Igbo women as they
were being raped and disemboweled, the scream of their husbands and
sons, sounded like the sweet music of Dan Maraya's violin – what
would be the reaction? Why, outrage! Yet, here Miss Adichie has
described the death of Sardauna Bello, the son of a sultan and an
almost mythic leader of a still conservative northern Nigeria,
describing his murder by a man he knew personally and trusted, by a
man who had eaten at his table, repeating that that same Sardauna
died bleating like a goat in a Rex Lawson song – what should be the
reaction? But no, I am calm. I am typing calm. Has this test been
unreasonable or insensible or insensitive? The outrage I am spending
typing this email, is it in the first place, unjustified? I also am
an artist and I ask if a people are not entitled to their religious,
political, cultural, all else, sensibilities and its respect – must
the freedom of art be used to bait those sensitivities as you would a
bear with dogs? Miss Adichie, is that simile necessary to your plot,
a must-be-there flourish of your style?

I am going back to the real terms, past and present, context of the
1960's including Sardauna Bello's death. Oftentimes, I hear the
ha'tuppeny demagogues the Nigerian middleclass routinely throws up
relentlessly say that the "North" has ruined Nigeria, you do not need
to prod for them to lay back an reel out their fingers; the war
criminal Gowon, squandermania Shagari, grim dicatator Buhari, wily
minded Nobel laureate compromising IBB, the Ken Saro Wiwa killing
Abacha and soon, perhaps, "the Olusegun Obasanjo foisting
Abdulsalam". But amnesia makes none of them say that of all these
Chief Executives, only Shagari won an election, the rest of them are
soldiers.

But how did soldiers get to be Chief Executives of Nigeria, who
opened the sluices for them to come in? The same men who killed
Sardauna Bello and PM Balewa and Chief Okotie Eboh. The same men who
killed duly elected Nigerian politicians. The same men who murdered
Colonel Pam. THEY opened the sluices! Yet, Miss Adichie has described
the death of an elected premier of a region comprising at least half
of Nigeria's 1966 population with the distasteful, odious simile she
has used. In denigrating the Sardauna, she elevates his murderer: in
rejecting teething politics, she accepts shinbone dictatorship. It is
as simple and horrific as that. My grandfather and the grandfathers
of my friends voted for that man, I took my degree in the university
he built, I and many young people in this country revere him for what
he set out to achieve and what he did achieve – now, is Miss
Adichie's description not baiting? What else is it?

Okay, I follow her. Creative naiveté! Of all the intellectual, talk
less behavioral, crimes which I find most odious, creative naiveté is
by far the most disgusting, the one that sets my hair on fire.
Because it rests on "I did not know . . . " when the most
unreasonable reasonable man OUGHT to know! To this email, Miss
Adichie's response would be either "I did not mean to hurt your Arewa
sensibility, I was merely trying to write a novel with the end of
blaming the British. . . . ." or she could say "I don't give a shit,
I wrote my novel and that's that!" Both possible responses fount from
creative naiveté, the first because she should have taken reasonable
care and the second, because she is a proudly Nigerian writer and the
consequent truth that both sides of the yellow sun, "north" and
south, read her novels. Creative naiveté.

Another example, I want to say why another cause of anger amongst the
youth of my "north". A friend from Nnewi, a true friend who protected
me from my mischief in primary school and who has kept in touch over
the years, has told me on more than one occasion that Nzoegwu and his
murderous crew were stymied, "hijacked in motion", that their ends
were visionary and they indeed were patriots. Nzoegwu, Ifeajuna –
they were educated men, in fact, I discount their altruism. Now, tell
me a single revolution, from Moses to Alexander to Tewodros II to
Marx unto Lenin to Castro, that has not been stymied either by
reactionary forces on the ground or by the force itself, Time? Tell
me a single one. Yet, they, for their brilliant altruism and quarter
baked communism, killed amongst the finest officials and officers in
the North and West. Did you not know the end, Mr. Nzoegwu and Mr.
Ifeajuna, did you not know how it would end, that in blowing up
Sardauna Bello's house in Kaduna, you were opening the gates for a
three and a half decade long soccer game for camouflage wearing black
bats? Ah, I see, I understand, you claim the privilege of creative
naiveté! "We did not KNOW." Miss Adichie, you who were born in '77,
you who know how it ended, do you now see the interlinked matrix of
your pedigree, the correct understanding of your simile, why I am
outraged, why I could be very angry as I type this email? I detest
bumblers. The most atrocious things in history have always begun with
a bumbler, a unit of quirk – Hitler, or syphilis.

My head hurts, I think I am tired. I really wish Miss Adichie would
be more sensitive and sensible in her future writing. She is a
Nigerian writer and we all, in the north and south, are damn proud of
her - for the acclaim and recognition she has garnered
internationally because it inspires us to keep trying to tell the
little Nigerian story each of us has, it validates the little Nigeria
we carry around with us and makes possible the future Nigeria we
dream each night about. Her debut novel was first referred to me by
an ex-girlfriend Hadiza, who is from Bauchi – Hadiza bought 5 copies
of the Kachifo edition when it became available, just to give away,
she loved Miss Adichie's Kambili and Jaja, "Kambili is such a fine
name!" she would say, and maybe her husband would let her name her
child Kambili. But I know for a fact, that she is from Tafawa Balewa
and if Miss Adichie were to use the sort of tasteless simile she has
used for Sardauna Bello to describe the PM's killing in the
subsequent pages of Half of a Yellow Sun, Hadiza would be as
disturbed as I am now.

Miss Adichie might consider the Sardauna mis-reference as a small,
little thing, one page in over four hundred pages. But that is what a
bumble is, a tiny little auspicious quirk. Look at the news from a
few days ago, the Danish embassy bombing in Pakistan – see what a
little quirk does? I get angry sometimes. There are people who
rationalize things, who understand and quite easily discount the
quirks of others; most times, I am that way. But there is a tiny
minority, as tiny really as the inciting incident, a cartoon or
paranoia or a paragraph in a historical fiction, who can be counted
on to creatively use their outrage and tempers to do atrocious
things, the bombing of embassies or the burning of books. I love
people trying to make a living each day, artists burning their brains
to create, I respect innocence and genius too much to kill or burn
books. But I am not everyone.

Nigeria is a beautiful quilt - a hundred and forty million pixels,
two hundred and fifty patches of varying sizes, colors, textures, and
sensitivities. I think it is possible to tell our stories and to
impress each our histories, without losing, without discarding or
downplaying the importance and sensitivity of each other piece of
fabric. We are a quilt in the making. As your people say, "let both
the eagle and the hawk perch, if any says no to the other, may it not
be well for him" – egbe belu, ugo belu.

Now my anger is gone. I will finish the book.

Re: On Miss Adichie's Sensibility

I wish to make further comments on the comments posted viz my post.
However, I will only comment on those posted as at Fri Jun 6, 2008
7:02 pm. If there are any other opinions expressed viz this strand,
I shall respond to them when I am through with HYS, I have just
under 150 pages and will expedite my pace in view of the sampler
I've gotten. Now –

Dear Oga Ike.
I quote you –
"The passage he'schosen, where the cries of the murdered Sardauna
are equated to the bleating of a goat, is the one part of the
book where Adichie is hardest on her own
people, the Igbo. That passage recounts that some Igbos
celebrated the
Sarduana's death, partying to the tune of the Rex Lawson song.
In the
endless competition between our ethnic nationalities over who has
hurt who the most, Adichie in writing that passage . . . "

I hope in breaking your long line, I have not hurt your meaning. My
question to you is – does Miss Adichie's "balancing" the odious
simile on page 130 by "being hard on her people" compensate for the
insensitivity of that misuse? That really is the simple question.
However, for you to have brought it up, you have answered that
question and your answer is "yes". On that score, we are different.
I do not compensate insensitivity and I think no one, in creative
fiction should – what I do is to state or not to state. Compensation
breeds atrophy, whether it is in fiction or in "sharing the national
cake." And for good measure, regarding that passage – I am NOT
compensated!

Then you go on about "ethnic nationalities" competing. This is part
of the problem, the competition between "ethnic nationalities", what
ethnic nationalities? What is competing with what? Ethnic – is it
Igbo words fighting duels with Hausa words? Or is it the Igbo way of
paying "bride price" competing with the Fulani "sharro" ordeal? Or
is it the Igbo concept of having an "obi" versus the Hausa concept
of having a "zaure"? Ethnic. No sir, ethnicities do not compete, do
not duel! It is political interest that duels, that competes;
economic interests are at odds, power play, plays for power – yes.
But not the ethnico-cultural components of superstructures. Is
there, has there ever been any point in time when ethnic components
have clashed? Look at the conquistadors and the indigenous people in
South America – was it ethnicity, or "civilization" that was
competing or clashing? Or was it economics and politics? To assume
that Nigerian history is one of "competing ethnic nationalities" is
to prove a Unified Filed Theory with a false equation ab initio. I
do not think such time wasting conceit is more forgivable because it
has become ingrained.

And I particularly dislike this mis-adaptation of Joseph Nye and
Bernard Lewis.

Then you go on "justifications given by apologists of the 1966
pogrom is that Igbos were openly rejoicing in the North when the
Sarduna was killed". I tell you, any apologists for the 1966 killing
of Igbo's in Nigeria or any other killings in any country, is a
fool. What apology? People were killed and you are writing and
reading apologies? People were killed, on both sides, two parties
fought a war and you are justifying – what In the name of anything
is there to justify? Who are you justifying or apologizing to – the
dead? Tell me, as a human being, was it not atrocious that the
Sardauna was killed – was it not atrocious that Igbos were rejoicing
in Kano on that day, was not the subsequent retaliatory killings
atrocious?

If we must write historical fiction, let us either be as close to
history and its nuances as possible, or let us so caricature history
that no one would take it seriously. Or let us disclaim history, as
Helon Habila did in the authorial note at the back of his first
novel, and simply write fiction without context. I know there are
scholars who question even the appropriateness of the novel format
when writing about serious history. What in Gods name is more
serious than a civil war? Miss Adichie has not indicated in any way
that her novel was meant to be a burlesque pantomime and I do not
think you should assume so on her behalf.

You go on, I quote "Is Rugbali reading the book Adichie has written
or another book which he thinks she might have written?" I find this
question insulting. When you, Ike, read a book – do you read the
words or what you think is on the page?

You comment on Ama Ede's post, saying some main Igbo characters were
not disposed to Ojukwu. Correct. So, what is Miss Adichie's point of
writing HYS – was it to upset everyone, or to write a screed the
sort only silly academic critics in the West would praise?

Oga Austyn,
To your amazement. You say "Of all the gory scenes and atrocities
committed on both sides, as Miss Adichie graphically portrayed in
Half of a Yellow Sun, without being partisan, it is simply laughable
to me, a non-hero worshipper, that Ali should single out the
reference to how the Sardauna died as the centre point of his
outrage against a book he has not even finished reading!"

Let me test your "amazement". Do you not find it equally "amazing"
that in my 1,000-word post, you only single out my outrage over the
Sardauna's killing? Did I not mention related issues to the
Sardauna's killing including why my part of the north would be
outraged by that sloppy portrayal? Are you not equally amazed by
your own "singling out"? My point is this – we are outraged by
particulars, hardly ever by genera. I read that page and I was upset
by it, I could not go on reading without sending out that post
because not letting it out of me would have colored the rest of the
book.

You go on "When we fly into a fit of outrage upon perceived
insensitivity to our personal sensibilities, do we not sometimes do
so out of the fear of demystification of our supposed heroes? Do we
not often refuse to query our age-long beliefs and norms out of the
fear of new discoveries? Has Ali read Helon Habila's account of the
savageries committed against the ibos in Measuring Time, during the
same period Miss Adichie wrote about? Has he also read R.A
Masagbor's "like rats" in SOLEMN CHANTS? and many other eye-
witnesses accounts?" –

I say: Fine point! If only Miss Adichie had set out on demystifying!
If she had set out on demystifying my "supposed hero" she could have
set out in her prose say perhaps how he was pilfering state funds to
build himself a pyramid in Eqypt, or something like that. How on
earth does her restating with such bad taste that he died bleating
like a goat in a Rex Lawson song demystify the Sardauna? I am
afraid, yes, but not of demystification – I am afraid of the foster
child of disgust arising from her insensitivity. And insensibility.
And there is nothing "personal" about our collective history. You
mention Helon Habila's second novel, I ask you, is there any page in
that book where a description of the war went past the use of
necessary adjectives into the realm of denigrating individual
Igbo's, talk less a Premier, with a simile similar to the one I
refuse to repeat? What I think is that if such a page exists, I
would have heard thunder asking for Mr Habila's head.

Sardauna Bello did the best he could do for his people just as
Awolowo and Zik did the best they could do for their people. They
were men of their times and let us not denigrate them, else we
should not complain of what came after them.

To your use of "ibos", I have been cautioned severally that the
correct word is "Igbo's". But perhaps that was a keyboard error.

My position, thus far, has been well stated by Ama Ede, he says "HYS
is good writing no doubt, nevertheless perhaps the problem is that
authorial position on certain sensitive historical matters are
ambivalent, equivocating. No clear self-positioning on something so
sensitive. That is the problem."

I sincerely hope that at the end of the 400 plus page book, Miss
Adichie would have redeemed this malady in her writing.

I have as yet, made no comments on HYS as a book, that I will do in
good time. What I have done is to comment on an offensive little bit
of HYS.

I hope to finish the novel sometime next week and I will surely keep
my opinion on HYS posted on this board.

Have a fine weekend everyone!

R.Ali

Half of a Yellow Sun -my opinion, related issues

I have been made aware that my previous post on Chimamanda Adichie's
Half of a Yellow Sun has put me in the untenable position of having my
literary objectivity distrusted on account of the passion of opinion
viz Sardauna Bello's murder. I shall comment on this questioned
subjectivity later in this post. Nevertheless, I wish to set out,
first, my opinion on the book – I finished reading it 2 hours ago –
and then I shall move on to related issues.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a very interesting and remarkably
well-researched book. That is my opinion. The only accusation I make
against it is the one of insensitivity and a related insensibility
regarding page 130 where she relates the death of Sardauna Bello. I
have stated my opinion of that flaw and highlighted its significance
even if the second has been lost in the reactions to the first. It is
my opinion that she could have related the same thing without using
that simile. I think HYS is an important book.

Now, a girl, Olohi used to be in charge of fashion a few years ago
when I was Editor of Sardauna Magazine and my memory of her comes down
to two phrases – "Style is personal" and "Your style is up to you."
Agreeing entirely with her, I should not make any comments concerning
the style of Miss Adichie's book published two years ago. But au
contraire, I choose to comment on her style in spite of that futility.
Only in doing so would my idea of the character of her novel come out.

I think it was wrong for me to describe HYS as being "soulless", it
was the wrong word; a phrase is more appropriate, HYS has a "scattered
soul". It does beg the question whether a soul can be scattered and
whether it still would be a soul if it has that scattered quality yet
I feel this distinction is necessary. The characters in HYS are
clearly more delineated than they were in Purple Hibiscus yet it would
seem that in delineating them she has gone so far as to plasticise
them, giving the novel a stage production feel of stock characters.
The literary authorial style is ambivalent, describing event after
event related only because they occur to the same set of people. It
seems surrealist and I, personally, think that surrealism – Dali and
his contemporaries- is Fraud and not Art. I get the distinct feeling
that Miss Adichie is not in this book. I get even, the queasy feeling
that while I am reading it, she is sitting under an udala tree
laughing and saying "They are going to puzzle over this one!" Deux ex
machina is contrived by a playwright but sometimes, the playgoers also
realize it and they can discount or not discount that trick depending
on whether it works for the play or not. Miss Adichie assures me {in
the extra interview-QandA behind the Harper Collins edition} that this
style was deliberate and it somehow comes from her reading of Harvest
of Thorns by Shimmer Chindoya and the intro of a Giovanni Verga novel.

Now, is this style appropriate for the subject of Half of a Yellow
Sun? I don't know, but I am determined to find out.

Christopher Okonkwo in his post has said `In any case, HYS is
categorically a "historical novel"' and I agree with him, sort of.
When writing creative fiction, especially historical fiction, a writer
is faced with his context – whether he wants to be purely historicist
or whether he wants to be creative. There really is no middle way
between the two until Miss Adichie's novel and her novel within a
novel – a historicist novel within a pseudo historicist one. The
historicist one is character Ugwu's novel "The World Was Silent When
We Died" and the pseudo historicist one is the one that has Olanna and
Kainene and ends with Susan Buchan's pictures from Biafra. This
stylistic choice, even before going to the characters themselves,
mires the novel in the ambivalence that seems to me frightfully close
to indifference.

When a novel relies solely on its received historical context {what
each reader/critic knows about it], aspersions are cast as to the
talent or sincerity of the writer. It is the same thing as saying to a
child, "This is Magic Beans, it turns into gold at night. But only
good people as we both can see it. Anybody who cannot see it is not a
good person." HYS context is the sixties and Biafra. Let us compare
HYS with its contemporaries. Sefi Atta's context is Nigeria between
the 1970's and 1995, the erosion of constitutional rights in that
period – take away that historical context and you still have a
powerful story of Enitan and Sheri and their relationships with women
and men. Helon Habila's Waiting for An Angel is set in Abacha's
dictatorship but if you remove that context, you still have an
engaging story of Lomba and the other characters living interrelated
lives. But take away Biafra from HYS and what we have is sibling
rivalry {Olanna and Kainene} in its stark triteness – pretty sister
versus "ugly" sister, "kiss ass" sister versus "don't give a damn"
sister. And as a creative writing, I do not think that that theme is
remarkable in any way. And neither has it been handled in a remarkable
way.

But then, why should I want to remove the context from a novel – don't
mind me, only for critical purposes. Let us replace the context. The
bloody stillbirth of Biafra and what I think Madeibo calls "the
Nigerian revolution" that predated it are very sensitive issues,
remain sensitive issues today. It remains sensitive because is we stop
snipping little pieces of it we would still see that the great rend
made to our politics by the murderers in January 1966 is still here
with us. Every single goddamn coup, every silly dictator sporting a
grim face, gap tooth or dark goggles traces his antecedence to that
coup. Nigeria's progress has been held back for no reason greater than
the ineptitude of the military regimes since independence. Nigeria's
progress has been held back because of the events of the sixties which
for the backdrop to HYS.

Let me digress into Constitutional Law, what each of those military
regimes did was to simply modify Aguiyi-Ironsi's constitution
suspension Decree which had remained part of our body of laws, not a
single junta promulgated a new decree to take power, they simply
"suspended and modified". Even with the current state of international
jus cogens, you cannot try anyone in the Nigerian judiciary, from
Gowon to Abacha for taking over power in Nigeria via a coup – the
persons primarily culpable are Nzoegwu and his pals and I think all of
them are dead now. Today, there are many of us who are unhappy with
Nigeria as it is. The point of this digression is to show how germane
and sensitive the stuff Miss Adichie is playing around with is to the
collective sensibility of Nigerians. Yet, for this, she has willfully
chosen a leisurely style, one based on "balancing" atrocities so we
remember!

Am I wrong to say that what she has succeeded in doing is to poke at
an old national wound without having any medicine for it – and that
for memory, "just so you remember you were wounded before?"

If I think of it, her entire authorial and narrative perspective is
VERY offensive. But I refuse to think of it because I am afraid that
if I do, I will be "subjective."

I wish to make comments concerning my objectivity-subjectivity in the
post titled "On Miss Adichie's Sensibility" posted here on Krazi.

TYAbiola has doubted my ability to be objective in giving an opinion
on HYS because of my posts regarding the simile HYS repeats viz the
assassination of the Northern region premier and in his words, the
objectivity of my criticism might be doubted on account of the "too
much passion, too much subjectivity, too much pre-conceived opinion"
that I bring to the topic. Well, if I did not have passion, why would
I comment in the first place? I hardly think that anyone can read
literature, especially historical fiction without passion. Yet, does
passion, the expression of it, equal "subjectivity" and a
"preconceived opinion"? "Preconceived" at what point? What makes this
aspersion doubly interesting to me is not so much that it has been
stated by Mr. Abiola as that is merely being re-stated by him – I have
heard it before said by other persons. Methinks such an aspersion
comes either from my opining, or, the nature of my opining. If it were
the first then it would be a moot intellectual point. And critics
perhaps hundreds of years ago would have come out to say "Every
opinion should be distrusted because it is subjective" – I am not
aware of our predecessors having with this phrase knocked off the
basis of discourse. So, it must be the second – the nature of my
opining. At this point, I would like to say my next point is exploring
a general symptom in Nigerian letters and has long left the particular
prognosis of Mr. Abiola.

When I hear on the Beebs that some scholars in the west are
re-appraising Edward Said's "Orientalism" and its theme of
preconceived stereotypes of the East in the West, I find myself
thinking of the "Northernism" {sic} in Nigerian letters, preconceived
stereotypes of the "north" of the Niger by intellectuals by that
river's south. It has become ingrained that anything written, which
has its centerpiece as a northern Nigerian figure or nuance, such as
the Sardauna or the issue of Sharia or even a different perception of
the paper cut notions of what makes a page in a book like HYS
insensitive or insensible is viewed by the southern intelligentsi with
that curious "they have started again" which smacks of preconceived
prejudice. I have wondered often the innate assumptions of superior
"objectivity" so easily wielded by my southern countrymen, an
assumption so latent that Ike feels Miss Adichie's {to me} denigration
of Sardauna Bello should be borne by the offended me because she has
been equally "hard on her own people" or Oga Austyn's even more
remarkable assumption "The northern elite has a choice to either
understand it in the context in which it is written, or throw it to
the Almajeris with a covering note. Mischief is also a function of
sensibilities, political or religious"! In simpler English, what Oga
Austyn's quote means is that in not "understanding" the "context" {of
Miss Adichie's simile}, I {assuming I am part of that "northern
elite"} would effectively be being mischievous! I would like to know,
please, Oga Austyn, if I have misunderstood your phrase. These
comments, these posturing, these perspectives have become ingrained –
I do not think any of these three fine people are any more aware of it
that they are the inner working of their digestive systems.

Oya, I am interested now and it is Oga Austyn's quote, the last one,
that interests me. Am I being mischievous by not understanding Miss
Adichie's "balanced" context? And if I accuse Miss Adichie and Austyn
himself of being indifferent, creatively or really, to my own context
nko? Is my reactionary context a "preconceived" notion while Miss
Adichie's radically "balanced" one is not?

My problem is not so much with HYS as with that odious simile on page
130 – I cannot understand why Miss Adichie had to repeat it.

And a story {novel} is very important business; do you remember what
the bard says about the primacy of the story and the storyteller – I
think it was in Anthills of the Savannah. He said when a storyteller
looks around and sees no one in his age group; he will transform
chicken pox spots to wounds he suffered when "our men beat their men"!
I take Achebe very seriously and in the same breath that he eulogizes
the story, he advises that we tell our stories and keep our stories,
if others tell them, true. The man at the center of this post,
Sardauna Bello, once said "Tell us the truth about others; tell others
the truth about us." Not just us, as persons, but Us, as history.

I am a Nigerian writer and will proudly stand on that pedestal against
any person in the West, I would stand with any of my countrymen on
that pedestal anywhere. Yet, within my country, I speak for a part of
the country that has largely not spoken for itself and against the
rude assumptions consequent upon that incapacity to speak, I make a
stand. Yes, damnit, it is related to the Civil War – the same thing
Miss Adichie is playing around with. Over the last two decades, longer
for some, attempts have been made by many writers of southern
extraction in their writings to foist the North {excluding the defacto
West} with a guilt that it does not feel for that war or
alternatively, for the intervening dictatorships. This aspersion of
guilt is never attempted with the Yoruba in the southwest – on what do
these attempts lie? On the denigration, little by little, of our
memory of that war – in the Lagos-Ibadan press, on page 130 of Miss
Adichie's second novel.

That is my personal context and unlike many in the north, who are
content to remain in Zaria and Kaduna and Abuja, I am not so content –
I demand to engage with the south with my historical context in tow.

I like testing. Let me test something again. June 12th is around the
corner, please, those of you who can still buy more than one newspaper
a day, do note the media coverage/editorials of that watershed in
Nigerian history. Most of what you will read will be about Basorun
Abiola and how his mandate was snatched from him by the "north"
{meaning the little dictator erstwhile friend of the Basorun's} and
such other cant. Yet, and we were all here, none of us were born
yesterday – two people were murdered by the Nigerian state in the
aftermath of Sani Abacha's death. They were Basorun Abiola and General
Yar'adua. You wont hear the latter's name in the southern press. Yet,
in real terms, how did the Basorun get to win the 1993 election? On
whose machinery did he ride – certainly not on his own! But Yar'adua
is conveniently forgotten in the creative coverage of the June 12th
and he more than anyone else, more than all the silly pundits and
NGO's, is linked to the death to that mandate. Go on, observe the
papers over the next week or so and say if I am wrong.

Why do I bring this up? Because that is my context! My context is of
my historical and cultural sensibilities being eroded by others whose
historical and cultural sensibilities are no more authentic, are at
best complementary, to mine.

I really think this email has gone on for too long, let me recap.
Chimamanda's novel is, as I said, "interesting" and "well researched".
But page 130, which I have a problem with, projects a certain
mis-perception of historical fact that is a part of an ongoing
discontextualization of comprehensive Nigerian history. Perhaps it is
not her fault, she writes what is conditioned in her.

But do not accuse me of subjectivity because I point her error out.

Thank you.

Changing Chairs at JosANA

2008-06-02T01:47:00.000-07:00

“For the reason that your friends are moving on up in their lives, do you feel less sad that they are moving away?” That question precisely, in its convoluted syntax and import, confronts JosANA. We are faced with the loss {not in the sense of death though} of our Chairman, Allen AbdulJabbar Omale, who has most unexpectedly been poached away by the smart alecs of ANA Abuja following his taking up an administrative appointment with the Nigerian College of Education Commission {N.C.E.C.} Abuja. The meeting held on Saturday 31st May 2008 at the Nigerian Film Institute, Jos was the last at which Allen Omale would preside as Chairman.

The meeting started with the arrival of Bose Tsevende who drove in with Alpha Emeka, Michael Emeka and David Onotu. They met Richard Ali just outside the gates and together they set up the chairs for the meeting. Redzie Jugo subsequently showed up. Chairman Allen was late in coming and Richard Ali assumed the chair of the meeting. Person by person, the balcony filled up with our members including Prof. Kanchana Ugbabe who had not been attending meetings as regularly as she used to and her student Stephanie Onyejekwe, poet, who just picked up a B.A. in English from the University of Jos. Banter and news about the fortnight were exchanged. Richard Ali confirmed that five of his poems were published in the well-approved African Writing 4 journal which until very recently was edited by Afam Akeh. Everyone congratulated him and Redzie Jugo asked, via a “motion”, that such information as how to send in submissions to journals such as AW ought to be relayed to the members of JosANA. Ali, who is Secretary General, agreed and said he would spread the word on that. At this point, Dr. Agboola arrived with his two kids, ‘Laja and Opeoluwa, aged ten and eight respectively. We really are catching them young at JosANA!

Adam Abubakar read an interesting poem - the typical situation writers find themselves in where they express their hearts to a woman in the form of verse and yet claim to have no words to say! It was a fine poem and Redzie Jugo made comments about a clash of imagery in the second stanza. Bose Tsevende and Alpha Emeka also suggested modifications. Abubakar eventually read the poem again and Richard Ali said the trouble with the stanza was that too many similes followed each other and the use of “fumes” in comparison to love tended to jar. Abubakar, BBC 2007 African Performance Playwright, took the comments in good faith. Dr. Agboola then took the floor and read a poem title “Iwa”. “Iwa” connotes “character”, “manners”, “grace” in Yoruba language and the striking thing about the poem was its blend of Yoruba and English. Its first stanza was a Yoruba proverb and it really came to life being read in the baritone of the dreadlocked poetaster. The House loved the poem and took the poet on on the Yoruba. Unwittingly, that poem set the theme of “performing” poetry as opposed to merely reading it. This theme kept recurring through the meeting like a hidden hand at cards. While Dr. Jide Agboola was reading, Chairman Allen Omale {as he then was} came in with his delectable wife, Rahmah. The House broke into applause. But it was strained applause, not because we were sad but because the exertion of our hands was for a fellow collaborator who was moving on and away.

Chairman Omale acknowledged the felicitation of his lieutenants, cronies and troops, each of us highly effective operatives, skilled in the operational arts of contemporary Nigerian writing and intellection. Like General Lee taking leave of his troops at Appomattox, the sadness was mutual but had to be borne like the soldiers we are. We went into the practical matter of the succession. The Vice Chairman, Matthew Mzegha, had declined the Chairmanship because he expected to be transferred from the Nigerian Television College, Jos in the near future. Richard Ali’s stay in Jos was not determinate so he could not take up the Chairmanship for what would amount to an interim period. It was decided that a Chairman be picked from the floor, someone who would guarantee the continuity necessary to consolidate the gains made by Allen Omale. Though we have always been aware of it, we became increasingly more aware of the immense role Allen Omale’s energy and dedication has played in reconsolidating JosANA. Allen Omale mentioned that Bose Tsevende had also declined the post.

However, the House, speaker after speaker, re-nominated Mrs. Ayeni-Tsevende. Everyone, from Redzie Jugo to Richard Ali to Kanchana Ugbabe to Michael Emeka affirmed their belief that she could do the job of chairman. Alpha Emeka however mentioned that the Chairmanship must not be forced on Mrs. Tsevende if she did not wish it. Aunty B, as she is fondly called, was then asked why she was declining. Her reasons were that she was new to JosANA and was not really an administrative person.

Concerning being “new”, the House replied that literary associations were like Phoenix’s; they renew themselves, spend themselves, revive and flag. Indeed, most current members of JosANA are new and it would be recalled that we did have some serious fractious troubles a few years back. Only Redzie Jugo, Allen Omale and Steve Rwang Pam remain from that “old” JosANA. In this way, Aunty B. Tsevende’s first excusat was discounted. As to the second, Richard Ali promised that he personally, and the rest of the EXCO, would be with her all the way if she accepted the JosANA Chair. It was resolved that Aunty B should reconsider her refusal over the next fortnight {until the next meeting}. Baring further declination, it is expected that Bose Ayeni-Tsevende, professional dancer, internationally recognized choreographer and lecturer of Dance at the University of Jos will be the next Chairman {or is it Chairwoman or Chairperson – na which one dey politically correct now sef?} of Jos ANA.

Redzie Jugo said he was sad Allen Omale was leaving but was happy since JosANA would get some “Abuja” checks {possibly Ghana-must-go’s} through him. The laughter following this crack led the House to a more important matter – literature. Matthew Mzegha informed us that Nigeria’s top breakfast TV Show - A.M. Express - had requested that JosANA feature in one of their upcoming editions. The House was so happy about this that grins broke across every face. It really was gratifying that JosANA is increasingly being taken seriously by the media as being one of the most active Association of Nigerian Authors chapters in Nigeria. Allen Omale commended Richard Ali on the work he had been doing viz publicity. But of course, only reality can be publicized, so the commendation went back to Chairman Allen and the members of JosANA.

Next, Stephanie Onyejekwe, the freshest B.A. in the House, read her poem “Africa’s Maid” which was written for Aunty Bose Tsevende. It was a fantastic poem and as is typical of Stephanie’s finer poems, it was full of allusions well blended with exquisite diction. However, it prompted the show of the erstwhile hidden hand. Stephanie read the poem. But it was a poem that demanded to be performed. Allen said that the delivery is what gives life to a poem and he mentioned the Abuja Poetry Performance’s he had witnessed in the past. The Vice Chairman, Matthew Mzegha, who works for the NTA, hammered on the primacy of “performance”, saying basically that a listless performance made for ambivalent reception of an erstwhile extraordinary poem. Allen advised Stephanie to read her poems into a tape recorder so she could improve her presentation.

It was then that our first time member, the ten year old ‘Laja Agboola wowed us with his poem, “a sort of short rhyme” he called it. It went –

“Here comes a hungry man looking for some bread
If you have a piece of bread, don’t wait till he’s dead”.

- do you doubt now that the boy is a worthy son of his father and bonafide member of JosANA?

Dr. Agboola brought up the issue of artistic synergy. He noted JosANA comprised playwrights, poets, choreographers and very talented storywriters, arguing that there ought to be greater collaboration between all artists for the holistic expression of our take on Nigerian literature. Almost on cue, Jos City playwright extraordinaire, Paul Ugbede, joined us. The thing really is that when a writer writes, it takes a most perceptive reader to hear the text as it exists in the writers’ head. Considering that the average reader {while not in the least insulting the discernment of our literati} is not so sophisticated, a synergy between artists to provide a complete performance would go a long way in impressing our work in the minds of posterity.

Matthew Mzegha read a poem “Water is Life” which exalted the primacy of water much in the manner of Akeem Lasisi to whom Allen Omale rightly compared the Vice Chairman. It really was a fantastic poem except for the little-big issue of the title, which Redzie Jugo rightly said was cliché-ish. Mathew Mzegha’s poetry has been improving steadily over the last year and his effort was roundly praised. He told us that he had performed the poem with props, complete with beard and animal skins, for a TV program recently. Once again, “performance” slipped into our deliberations.

Redzie Jugo read an engaging short story title “Mirage” in what is becoming his characteristically punchy style. It was a tale of Dutch courage, a girl, father and son with cross-purpose expectations of each other, inopportune time, and a desire for marriage that goes fantastically wrong. Mirage. And all this in 601 words. Truly remarkable. Next David Onotu read “Season of Rain”, dedicated to his friend Michael Emeka who was present at the reading. I don’t know if Niyi Osundare has had anything to do with Jos City. I wonder because he has a protégé here! The tame lyricism of Onotu’s poetry begs comparison to Osundare’s “Waiting Laughters”. Richard Ali compared it to TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land” for its diction and the curiosity the poet sustained throughout the long poem.

There really is a Fourth Generation extant in Nigerian letters and many of its components are found bi-weekly at JosANA. One feels as if one is in the cusp of something auspicious and from my study of the Third {1990’s} Generation, it was the same with them. While we do not have dictatorships to rail against and be made martyrs by, we have our contemporary re-explanations of the world. This re-explanation is necessary because increasingly, appearances, in international politics and social interaction are not what they seem. Where are all those Lagos-Ibadan publishers? Come up north and catch the next wave of cosmopolitan, definitive Nigerian literature.

Richard Ali read next, but neither of his readings were his work, he chose to pay respect to his elders. The first was an Ifa divination for the outgoing Chairman, he took the liberty {hoping the purists don’t ask for his head} of reading five odu’s for Allen Omale at this most auspicious juncture of his life. He then presented the hand copied sacred verses to Mr. Omale. Next, he read from Olatoun Williams’s 1992 “The Triumvirate”. He read two paragraphs, a short story in its right, from that book titled “The Wild Rose Garden”. JosANA listened enthralled as he read and applause, for Ms. Williams, followed. Ali said what struck him was the sheer beauty of the lines –

“If sanity is provisional, the line separating mental health from lunacy is not the great distance we think it is. Not the gulf from which we feel ourselves spiritually removed. And if indeed it is an abyss, then we all float on its vast cerebral surface – from which access to the brink of a mad world is rapid.

If madness is incomprehensible, how can we hope to understand it? How can we hope to save the madman who may have traversed the nightmare journey of a life, punctuated by glimmers of light, thereupon reaching the frontiers of a uniform world – where the days number one, and the sun shines through moon rays and bathes in an acid-golden haze? The heady perfume of madness within which the man is drowning, cannot be restrained, drop by drop, its scent emanates from the private and passionate jungle of his senses.”

Where is Olatoun Williams now?

The meeting wound to a close with the reading of Alpha Emeka’s short story “The Celebration of Ugba” written for Allen Omale and Aunty B’s reading a passionate paean to the pen and all penners in a voice that was powerful and reminiscent of Toni Morrison. The poem was performed as only a natural habitué of the theatre can. Finally, Adam Abubakar read an excerpt from his debut novel due out in the United States by August. The novel is titled “The Quest For Nina” and he brought to bear his skill from writing drama and screenplays, creating a compelling, subtly powerful chapter.

At JosANA, we celebrate our own – our own that is leaving, our own that remains with us. And we are not sad, for we are wiser, we are happy.

Richard Ugbede Ali is Secretary General of Jos ANA. Enquiries may be made to 08062392145 or emailed to rugbali@gmail.com.

The Fluorescence of JosANA

2008-05-08T00:52:00.000-07:00

The Fluorescence of JosANA

For some reason, the word “ferment” has always fascinated me with its ambivalent Marxist undertone. For a long time, I heard it used in speech by campus demagogues and find myself checking up its meaning again for this article. Oxfords assures me that it still means “a state of social or political excitement . . .” Very fittingly, this word can best describe Jos ANA as it is now, something heading for its full bloom, a crescendo.

The last meeting of JosANA was held on Saturday 3rd, April 2008 at the Nigerian Film Institute, Jos and it began at exactly 1 p.m. with the arrival of the Ag. Secretary General, Richard Ali. The Chairman had made it known he would be unavoidable late but that the meeting should go on without him. {So Ali was Chairman for the day!} Already in the hall waiting eagerly were three members – Esther Chinke, winner of the 2007 Uyi Efeovbokan/ANA Plateau Prize for Poetry, our youngest member, Hamaya Frama Abraham and a new member, Patience Eguwrube who is an actress, a television producer/scriptwriter and is currently working on a book, fiction but one that concerns the Railways, a trip across Nigeria by rail. Pragmatic fiction? The retired but untired educationist, Silas Nnamonu, came in next with yet another new member, Amaka Dike, who seemed rather shy but soon enough the intellection of the house warmed her up. Gradually the hall filled up.

Everyone had had a more or less very busy fortnight and they shared the highlights of the preceding two weeks with the house; basically meetings, deadlines and preparing for exams.

The first reading was by Hamaya Abraham, {our youngest member at a little under seventeen years old}, who read the prolog from her unpublished first novel, “A Chest Of Letters”. It was a most fascinating piece of prose, especially from one so young; it suggested kinship with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American classic, “The Celestial Railroad”. Mr. Jerome Dooga of the University of Jos claimed the honor of primus criticus {sic] and he first of all praised Hamaya for her effort – then he noted that she had trouble with her point of view which kept vacillating from an “omniscient” to a “third-person” voice and that, of course, is a critical no no. He suggested she try the “omniscient” narrative voice, as the “third person” did not seem to be working very well for her. Richard Ali, adding to Mr Dooga’s comments, said she had sometimes fallen into the error of breaking sentence syntax in a manner, which while might be acceptable in schoolgirl speech, did not work while writing of serious content, a novel no less. He also mentioned that while sometimes writing was didactic, it must not be “preachy {Dooga’s word}”; Ali said it is the novel, taken as a whole that should be didactic and not the authors voice within it. There were plenty of kind comments for Hamaya’s novel.

Next was read the first chapter of Michael Emeka’s draft novel, “The Divine Will”. The first chapter was the background of the story and an introduction of the major characters, a father and his son. The father was a ”soft spoken giant of a man who would only push back when he was forced to the wall” while the son “did not even need to be pushed a little” before unleashing the fury of a storm. The story is set in Eastern Nigeria, precisely in Abia State somewhere near Isialangwa. Michael Emeka’s reading was one of those that because of their sheer perfection, the admirable control of diction and story flow, there were no comments save those of praise. One can easily imagine that Chinua Achebe, if he were younger and still writing, would have approved of Michael’s work. Michael is the younger brother of noted Jos City novelist, Alpha Emeka.

During the reading of Michael’s work, the Chairman, Allen A. Omale, arrived with his pretty wife, Rahmah. The Chairman had attended the Achebe Colloquium held at Nsukka and he proceeded to give the gist of all that had happened. He also distributed the Nsukka program of events. He told us that Odia Ofeimun was there as well as other high priests of Nigerian writing. He told us about a certain Dr. Dennash from India whose paper advanced the thesis that the ruin of Okonkwo lay squarely with Nnoka, his father. It was in the desire not to be like Nnoka that the seed of Okonkwo’s tragedy is firmly planted. Considering that Nnoka has erstwhile been considered a ‘minor’ character in “Things Fall Apart”, this thesis was well received by the house. Strangely, the Jos based playwright, Paul Ugbede had advanced the very same thesis to this writer privately three weeks before. This reinterpretation of Nnoka’s role seems to be largely beholden on the psychoanalysis of Okonkwo and it is tribute much to the credit of our own bard, Chinua Achebe.

But Chinua Achebe was not around for his own colloquium.

The Chairman however informed us that ANA Lagos had come with a larger-than-life painting of the bard by which those aspiring to “bard-hood” {including our lucky Chairman!} could have their picture taken. The Chairman also showed us a clip he made of Nigerian writers during their pilgrimage to Chinua Achebe’s old house at the University of Nigeria Staff Quarters. Our lucky chairman also had his picture taken touching the brick of the house reverentially. Our own Professor of Creative Writing, Kanchana Ugbabe, presented a paper at Nsukka that was very well received. The Chairman however expressed sadness with the dilapidated state of infrastructure at the University of Nigeria and indeed the generally deplorable state of the roads in Southeastern Nigeria, Nsukka particularly. Mr. Nnamonu, whose village is just twenty kilometers from Nsukka, lamented this and wondered why things were still so bad in the Southeast so many decades after the Civil War. Some of those roads are federal roads and the University is a federal University. He said that in one country, no one area should be put at a disadvantage. JosANA members generally concurred and we hope that the FGN would do something about UNN, which is a national university and without which, together with Ibadan, Ife and Zaria, the history of Nigeria cannot be properly told.

Chimamanda Adichie’s family lived in the same house that Chinua Achebe lived in at Nssuka and it was wondered if they had slept in the same room. “Not at the same time,” Mr. Nanamonu wittily interjected. As we say up here, “da haka ne, da magana ya kare”. Were it otherwise, the issue {the genesis of her literary talent} would have been put to rest!

Another new member who came fully prepared was Babajide Agboola. He came with a poem and an excerpt from a play but was only able to read the poem. It was a poem about the sabotaging of the environment and it was the first poem read at JosANA on that theme for a very long time now. However, it came under critical fire from Mr. Dooga who commended the theme but nonetheless condemned the prosaic nature of the poem. Richard Ali said there was a little less poetry in the poem than the poem required. This unleashed another storm as a debate started, following Mr. Dooga’s assertion that there were ‘basics’ of poetry that cannot be deviated from. Patricia wanted to know whether these basics are those of technique or content. Though not unanimously, the house agreed that it was the basic of technique, a poem without a metaphor, or rhythm at least, cannot be a poem. The Dissenting Party held that if the content was profound and written in verse, it was poetry. Jide, whose reading had sparked the row, said “Art is best interpreted by the artist”, a platitude worthy of Oscar Wilde even when one {me} does not agree with it, especially in the context of that particular debate.

Somehow, the house got talking about short stories, how “short” {or longly short abi} they can be. Richard Ali came to this, corroborated by his British Council Radiophonics compadres, that indeed a short story could be as short as one line. He gave the example of Katherine Atkinson’s -

“It can’t be; I’m a virgin.”

- much to the enjoyment of the House.

The new member, Amaka Dike, who had by now overcome her shyness read an excerpt from her unpublished novel. The novel is also set in Southeastern Nigeria. It was a situation of Nwabuife and her suitors. Her use of language was so controlled that I can stake my last Bic Biro that she will be the next great Igbo female writer {watch out, Chimamanda!}. It was one of those reading that elicit only critical praise.

Richard Ali read two poems, “Lady Butterfly” and “Suite of Blue” and opened the floor to another round of critical appraisal. Steve Rwang Pam, the Country music crooner and radio personality, said the poem reminded him of another JosANA when he and Allen were still underdogs, that Ali’s poems reminded him of the things Allen used to write back then and which brought him {Allen] into the eye of philistinic storm. Most people loved the poems and Chairman Allen commented on Ali’s unusual use of simile. A new member and first timer, Ajih Gabriel, also a poet, asked Ali to explain the second stanza of “Suite of Blue” –

A lynched cat swings with dead eyes
Popping educated and too late knowing
The singularity of its day, I pass on
I pass on, leaving some of me behind.

Ali said that the dominant idea regarding cats is that of their ‘nine lives’; but “if I take a gun and shoot a cat, or take a rope and string it up, what happens? The cat dies. Imagine the cat who all the while thought it had nine lives. You grow old and things happen to you and you start wondering whether you are happy or not and what it mans to so be.” Mr. Nnamonu asked why Ali did not use or sparingly used commas and other sentence complements in his poems, to which Richard Ali replied that he heard a personal rhythm in the lines of his poems and that rhythm did not necessarily and indeed is more often than not outraged by the insertion of commas, full stops and the rest of that butting family.

Allen Omale, in a reminiscence brought about by Ali’s “Lady Butterfly”, read a poem from years back, before his marriage, “The Heart is an Organ of Fire”. It was a fine poem, love, but not profane love. It was deeply moving and well received. Allen Omale said sadly that he knew he was incapable of writing such a poem now after all the years, so many things had happened. The house contributed variously to this statement about the spontaneity of poetry and how when you do not write a poem at its own sacred time, you cannot write it again.

Poe3 is the most sacred of all the arts and the poet is something of a prophet in the service of an awesome god, arbitrary in its power and resolute in its finality.

Barrister Redzie Jugo, disciple of Prof. Victor Dugga, the playwright, read a short story, “The Divorce.” It was a court situation with a judge, who disliked drunks and drinking, faced with the case of a man who has beaten his wife to pulp and she was petitioning for divorce. The man, drunk as a lord, interrupts the proceeding with “Mr. Judge, my name is Chuwang Pam and nor ‘Mr. Man’ and you know my name is Chuwang Pam because you, father, gave me that name.” It was just under 600 words and was as punchy as they come.

Barrister Jugo also recently won the top prize, a laptop computer, in a reality TV show called “Shine Plateau Youth” put together by the Youngstars Foundation in collaboration with the British Council.

The meeting ended after that and everyone got together to take a group picture.

Back to ‘ferment’. JosANA is in a state of intense ferment right now and anyone who has been around for a while knows that ‘revolution’ is the next thing; in the case of Nigeria, there is an intellectual revolution afoot comprising foot soldiers {pun intended} who are here on the ground and are increasingly making themselves relevant within the national space. The early Christians in their catacombs were in ferment. The flower of Christianity and its still ongoing revolution of international politics and history is the result of that.

Bow your necks and spread at the fluorescence of JosANA.

Richard Ugbede Ali is Ag. Secretary General of JosANA.

Poesondra: Stylistic Innovation at JosANA

2008-04-15T07:26:00.000-07:00

The last JosANA meeting on the 5th of April proved a memorable one.

Quite atypically, it started a behind schedule due to the lateness of our chairman and the little problem with our venue being locked. But of course, the informal workshop had already commenced in the corridor with the arrival of Mr. Nnamonu, the educationist, and Richard Ugbede Ali. In time, other members joined in and the Chairman arrived with his apologies.

The meeting proper began with Richard Ali’s report on the British Council sponsored Radiophonics program at Kano which he had attended with three other members of JosANA; Abubakar Adam, Redzie Jugo and Alpha ‘Meka. The house was very interested in hearing about the experience and asked questions regarding it. Questions were also put to Abubakar Adam and later to Redzie and Alpha when they arrived. Aunty B Tsevende, who had arrived with a crate of chilled soft drinks, asked about specifics of radio writing and discourse followed. Abubakar Adam replied that the trick was to keep the audience’s attention. Repeating the words of our facilitator, Mike Harris of the University of Sheffield, he said that when you’ve written a book, if the reader gets bored, he could close the book and maybe give you another chance later; with radio on the other hand, he simply reaches out and “OFF”, and that ends the whole thing. So, good radio writing must be like a drug, given in small doses, and spaced out with highly dramatic reversal points. Sound effects are also a very important aspect of radio writing.

Next was talk on the at hand Achebe Colloquium. The Chairman updated the house on how far the arrangements were going and generally, what the latest news was.

The activities held in honor of Prof. G. G. Darah’s 60th birthday anniversary had culminated the week before at Abraka and Mr. Dooga of the University of Jos, who attended, gave us a rundown of the whole event. He made everyone feel the heat of the intellection that had gone on there and yet, each person felt a bit sad that they had not been there in person to see the likes of Tanure Ojaide and other highly esteemed literary icons. Mr. Dooga showed us pictures taken at the event, which was well attended, and a clip of the “ovedje {sic}” dance. He also brought us up to speed on the intellectual pulse of the Niger Delta. It would seem that the same anger we up north feel for the Niger Delta intelligentsia who we see as having been railroaded by thugs like Ateke and Dokubo, is replicated with their own anger directed at particular northern academics. From the foregoing, there is the necessity for greater interaction between the north and the delta, especially amongst the academics; there are obvious differences, resource control et al, but they should not be insurmountable ones.

The Northern Writers Conference scheduled for Minna from the 4th to 6th of May was announced and all who wished to be delegates from JosANA were asked to get their names across to the Chairman.

Aunty B Tsevende would be touring the United States this week with a production of Queen Idia, which she has choreographed.

Richard Ugbede Ali read “Seesaw Selection”, the fruit of his one-week stay in Kano to the critical acclaim of the house which included Paul Ugbede, noted Jos based playwright.

But the high point of the meeting came with the rendition of piece by a new member, Ejiofor Okolo; he called his style “poesondra”, a fluid style incorporating the character of poetry, song and drama. Needless to say, it was an interesting performance, and a definitive experience. Ejiofor rendered his piece, really rendered it, with action, gesticulation and voice modulation. One was put to mind immediately of the griots of Mali and Senegal and our own Yoruba drummer boys from the 1970’s Lagos, with their little talking drums who seem to improvise their poetry as they moved along the streets. But then, you wonder, such deep poetry cannot have been improvised there and then, the complexity of meaning in them betrayed the true skill of a poet as gifted as any. We at JosANA have witnessed the birth of what may turn out to be a new thrust in Nigerian literature, which has been long dormant since Niyi Osundare swept up a storm with his highly lyrical “oral” poetry in the 80’s. If that movement acquires a stable form, its most visible representative would be Ejoifor Okolo, an Igbo griot and very importantly, a member of JosANA.

Following this, the meeting broke up once again into informal groups, some clustering around the Radiophonics people, others around Ejoifor and yet others around the chairman.

The next meeting is for Saturday 19th of April at the Nigerian Film Institue, Jos.

biyi bandele's things fall apart

2008-04-14T03:09:00.000-07:00

egbe belu, ugo belu

When this gem of a phrase first struck me a year ago, I asked a literary friend of mine what it meant and she told me that translated from the Ibo tongue, it meant "let the eagle perch, let the hawk perch also". The counterpart English aphorism would be "live and let live". Subsequently, I remembered having come across it in one of Chinua Achebe’s novels, either Things Fall Apart or Arrow of God.

The reason for this recall is that yesterday I happened to be at the Jos Repertory Theatre where I watched the thespians rehearse Biyi Bandele’s adaptation of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, perhaps the finest sociological novel Africa has produced. Its main character, Okonkwo, has engaged over the decades as the most tragic of humanist heroes and a fitting metaphor of Africa as a whole, both in terms of the tragic and the heroic.

It being 50 years since the book was first published, Nigeria is right held in celebrations of this golden milestone. Generally called the "Achebe Colloquium", amongst its details is the staging of this aforementioned adaptation by the Patrick Jude Oteh directed Jos Repertory Theatre on the 19th and 20th of April 2008 at the Cultural Center, Ibadan and Abeokuta respectively. The staging of the play is sponsored by the Ogun State Government and the Association for Nigerian Authors.

I watched the rehearsals in company of the ANA PRO, Alkasim Abdulkadir, the ANA Plateau Chairman, Allen Abduljabbar Omale, his wife and the up and coming Jos based writer, Barrister Redzie Jugo. By the end of the two-hour long production, the phrase "egbe belu, ugo belu" kept repeating itself in my mind. A complex but flawlessly controlled play told from the perspective of Obierika, Okonkwo’s friend, I found in it worthy obeisance to Achebe himself and to the emerging spirit in the Nigerian stage and literature.

Perhaps, being an Ibo phrase, it would lend itself to further construction? If the eagle perches and the hawk perches, it means that everyman comes into his own time, let no one hold the rest to ransom by snatching the trappings of forever. Perhaps we can say that no matter how long ugo {hawk} has slumbered, when it arises, its place is still there in the scheme of things, waiting to be claimed? Shall we not say that the generations of writers following in the trail blazed by Achebe and his contemporaries are coming into their own? Both Biyi Bandele’s generation who have adapted this novel and my generation, the players of Jos Repertory, who have brought it to life?

Among the most haunting passages in the drama adaptation, made if possible even more surreal than in the novel itself, is the point when Okonkwo finds that the cancer of the white man has spread so deep into the tribe that it cannot hold anymore, that the tribe, which gave him accolades through his life for his strength, had become attributed with the blemish of Nnoka his father, that of "effeminate" weakness. In Biyi Bandele’s adaptation, I still see Okonkwo looking to his fellows to follow his action and finding their backs turned to him, I see the deconstruction of truth work its way across his face and his heart, the superstructure of a broken tribe’s soul. I still see him, his face haunts me even now, taking off the cap of his title, the ozo, the toga, his machete once trusty now sterile, his life, placing all on the impotent earth of Umuofia. And Obierika’s ringing indictment, "That man was the greatest man in Umuofia; now he will be buried like a dog!"

Though I have been honored greatly to watch the rehearsals of the Jos Repertory, as it were, from the vantage of a private box, I am not merely a trifle sad that I shall not be in Ibadan to watch the premier from the public stands. I can only say that the shimmer of my sadness would be tempered only in the knowledge that my high regard for this production might draw even one more lover of literature to be there with his own eyes, to see and hear Nigerian progress for himself.

My musings end with the thought that every generation hears its own drummer, its own sound and it betrays or acquits itself by the sincerity of its dance to that thrumming. It has been our blight, this long period of time reversing itself. But we have overcome that blight, we have overcome the differences of an Igbo novelist adapted by a Yoruba playwright and played by a Northern Repertory because we realize that all these, all this, is uniquely and authentically Nigerian. We have come of age and have come to our own.

Egbe belu, Ugo belu.

A Review of Landscapes of Realities

2008-04-12T05:05:00.000-07:00

Poet Alert: Dr Yusuf Adamu

Not being a cricket, this piece should not be considered a work of cricketism; it is rather a sanarwa, news, a review, and an acclamation of a newly published poet. Once every few years a collection of poems comes along that so definitive it can only be reviewed on its own terms. Dr Yusuf Adamu has provided us with just such a collection with the publication of his 2008 Poems, Landscapes of Realities. This review is meant to offer lovers of verse everywhere a studied opinion of this latest offering from the generally considered literary-arid northern Nigeria.

The poet is a football aficionado and geographer, he lectures at the Department of Geography, Bayero University, Kano. This background proves important in considering his poems. His literary grounding is in the Hausa language where he has published three novels; Idan So Cuta Ne {If Love Is a Crime}, Ummul Khairi and Maza Gumabr Dutse. He is also a blogger of note; {http://www.africanpublicpoet.blogspot.com/}, {http://www.tagarduniniya.blogspot.com/}.

Landscapes of Realities is a very slim volume of fifty six pages comprising forty three poems written entirely in free verse. The poet has conveniently divided them into three thematic hubs; “Innocence”, “Places” and “Realities”, comprising five, seven and thirty-one poems respectively. The poems included in Landscapes were written during the years 1997 and 2000 and perhaps their being published in 2008 is an acknowledgement by the writer that the content and context of his poems have remained relevant over the last decade.

The arresting individual characteristic of each poem in Landscapes is leanness – an almost anorexic control of diction such that each poem renders a chosen reality starkly, without the confusion of ambiguous words or an obscurantist style. The collection, taken as a whole, betrays an acute social conscience that is prescient but not overly sentimental in its comment, exhortation and, more often, denunciation. The bareness of geography, where a hill is a hill and a plain is a plain, have been transposed successfully into the poems of Dr. Yusuf Adamu, where Nigerian realities – the motorcyclist, eclipsed dreams, the corruptions of power and time – are rendered in severe relief.

The five poems comprising “Innocence” – “The Child”, “Truth”, “Childhood Dreams”, “Almajiri” and “Happiness” adequately reflect the bare template of each Nigerian, before experience ups and happens to them. The innocence of childhood and truth, the beauty of a child’s dreams are captured in their fragile ephemeralty. This nostalgia is punctured by the poem “Almajiri”, about the agonizingly human fodder, child-scholar-beggars, that have become an embarrassing fixture in the cities of Northern Nigeria. The blight of Innocence, occurring in “Childhood Dreams” –
. . .they wake up growing
into a world full of malice
falsehood
diminishing glory and shame
. . .guilt replaces innocence
ancient dreams
barely materialized
-is given a context in the lines from “Almajiri” below –
he is very young an frail
the economy is biting hard
the Mallam cannot sustain him
. . .he must hunt for himself.

The second part of the collection, “Places”, comprising seven poems, are poetic descriptions of Kano City, Jos City, the Plateau, Kura falls, Wembley Stadium and the town of Sussex. They are simple poems. However, a poignant question is sneaked in which forms the prelude to the next part of Dr. Adamu’s poems, the poet asks –
Where shall we be
If there is no geography?

“Realities”, comprising thirty-one poems, provides a rich mine for critical exploration. The poet-persona in these poems is above the fray of the realities being described yet we can feel the organic, umbilical relationship between the two. “Realities” probes maternal mortality and poverty, germane issues in the North, with the poems “Child Birth” and “Malnourished Child”. “Fuel Scarcity” and “Motor Cyclist” critique the nature of government insensitivity vis a vis the devious and oftentimes, dangerous, “survival” activities of the Nigerian citizen. Beggary, another social problem in Northern Nigeria is given the treatment of clinical satire in “Professional Beggars”; “Career Beggars” on the other hand denounces the beggars for their ignorance, however, it doesn’t stop there, the poem ends –
their minds are enslaved
by false beliefs and ignorance
chained by laziness
their minds may never be free
until the society decides to set them free.

On the late General Mamman Vatsa, he says –
His sprit shall forever be
Nourishment for his memory never ceases
As the living drink from his lines
In the same spirit of the Ecclesiasticus, of paying respect to “great men and their fathers who begat them”, he honors the “Ancient Revolutionary”, Akhenaten {1338-1358 BC} and a “Brave Captian”, Sultan Attahiru of Sokoto who defeated by the British, was subsequently killed at Burmi, on his way to join forces with El-Kanemi or Rabih in the Sudan –
Maxim gun he hasn’t got
Can he remain on the throne?
. . .our glory has fallen and broken.

Perhaps in correcting the conservative and reactionary stereotype of Northern Nigeria, Dr Adamu has in a series of poems affirmed that the radical, revolutionary streak has been in the north long before the south knew of cause and anti-cause, I speak of men like Muhammad Rumfa, Shehu dan Fodio, Sa’ad Zungur, Aminu kano, Hamza Abubakar. In the poems “Strike”, “Rebellion”, “Smash Them” and “Speak Out”, he idolizes revolt in the face of malevolent power. Says he –
But if they are unjust
If they oppress you
Day and night
If they mismanage your funds
If they deny your rights

Then rebel
Fight in the open
And in the close
Do not fear their might
For God is not on their side.

However, even judging this collection by its standard, there are shortcomings. On the ground of “leanness”, there are poems laden with prosaic fat so much so that the poetry of the poem is lost. Examples of this are the poems “Problem” and “Kindness” which read too much like penny motivational tracts. Secondly, the poet’s style involves the breaking of sentence syntax and while this stylistic preference has in the main worked superbly, it has not so worked all though. An example of the jarring and unaesthetic effect of this is the line “His colleagues he betrayed” from “Driver’s View”, “For, truth they represent” from “Kayan Sarki” and the first stanza of the poem “Frankenstein”.

Another critical charge, this time of complacency may be laid against the poet. Instances abound where the non-printing of a single letter, “s” or “’s”, have discontextualised poems and hurt the flow of their line. One inevitably pauses at such a point. An example is the first stanza of the otherwise correct “The Sun”. On another limb, “The Poet Died” is rendered unwieldy for its sheer and abrupt vacillation between past and present, sample –
The power of the gun
He knew quite well
Yet it is the power
Of the written word
He believes in
I have no doubt that General Vatsa for whom this poem is in memoriam “believed”; but he cannot “believe” {L4 excerpt above} because that would imply living contemporaneity and Vatsa, we know, has been dead for decades.

These shortcomings can easily be overcome during the expected reprint of this Poems. They do not much hurt the beauty of the collection or derogate the sincerity of the poet behind the lines. Among the emerging voices in Nigerian poetry, Dr. Yusuf Adamu’s Landscapes of Realities would definitely find a niche for itself.

Kano Memoirs: Creative Writer’s Forum

2008-04-12T05:02:00.000-07:00

Among The Brothers

During my recent literary sojourn to Kano City in Northern Nigeria, I had the unanticipated pleasure of meeting the crème of that city’s young writers and thinkers. The accusation variously laid against the northern part of the country has been that, vis a vis the south, it has largely been unable to tell its story. Not on one occasion, in salons across the length of this country, the question, axiomatic, has been – the south has produced Wole Soyinka, Eastern Nigeria has produced Chinua Achebe, who, of that stature, has the north produced? I was well aware of that typecast even as I attended the Forum, as the meeting is called. I merely reminded myself that stereotypes must be held in abeyance until real evidence can prove its truth or falsity.

The writers of Kano meet monthly under the auspices of the ANA/EEL British Council Creative Writers Forum. It is a partnership between the local chapter of the Association of Nigerian Authors {ANA} and the English and European {French} Languages Department of the Bayero University, Kano with support from the British Council, Kano. The meetings are held on the last Wednesday of the month at the Council’s premises along Emir’s Palace Road, which is an exemplum of traditional arewa architecture with its thick mud walls and old style motifs printed on the exterior walls. Together with my friend, Abdulaziz Ahmad Abdulaziz, I entered the meeting hall at exactly 4:30 p.m. Were not for Abdulaziz’s foresightedness, we would have joined the others standing at the corners or on tables – the hall was full.

A young man was reading from a poem, his very words were –
Like a river cut away from its source
A day without sunshine, shrouded by envious clouds . .
- “a love poet”, I thought, “a poet in love” and wondered the fatal connexion betwixt the two. Muhammad Balarabe Sango who is the PRO of ANA/Kano State was chairing the meeting. He showed his courtesy by recognizing my work with ANA/Plateau State and inviting me to the dais where I declared myself delighted to be there. There were over sixty persons in the hall; six times more that Lenin said would have stopped the Bolsheviks coming to power in Russia. Indeed, the Muse of writing dwelled amongst the Kannawa.

About twenty writers read that day, the 26th of March 2008, mostly prose and poetry; Bakano 80, Muktar Ali Hikima, Terungwa Isaiah Itiav, Abdulaziz Ahmad Abdulaziz, Abdullahi Sufi, Muttaqa Yusha’u Abdulrauf and M.B. Sango amongst others. I read my short story “The Ravages of Dust.”

The health of a country’s letters can be ascertained by the themes its writers tackle, the literary is the thermometer of the social. The themes of the Kano writers are astonishingly varied, ranging from the everyday such as love within the society, love and lust between the sexes, the road as a vehicle to social harmony to the clearly metaphysical such as Ali Muktar Hikima’s “An Odd World” and Abdulaziz Fagge’s “The Untold”. Bakano 80, a writer, in answering a critical salvo from the floor viz the crime obsessed theme of his work replied that he felt crime had been marginalized in contemporary Nigerian prose, hence his desire to affect this discrimination in his work. Needless to say, I found Bakano’s reply highly perceptive and true.

However, while protean themes indicate literary virility, the general style of the Kano writers leaves much to be desired. Liberal construction, and inevitable the misconstruction, of grammar has taken its heavy toll on the work read during that meeting, perhaps indicative of the corpus itself. Without paying attention to the “personal” nature of a writers style and the miring myriad arguments on that, I venture to say grammar, as synthesized in that unit of sense, the sentence, is and must remain the building block of style. Grammar is organic and an at least rudimentary mastery of it is necessary in order to avail a writer the defense of “style” when accused of linguistic or grammatical miscarriage. The writers of Kano have either largely failed or been careless in their use of grammar and I do not think the defense of “style” avails them. The grammatical liberties taken in some of the work read, prose and poetry - the appropriateness of syntax, imagery, and diction – too many times, those liberties were over-taken.

The real workshop proved educative and insightful critiques were made. Among the gathered that day were Drs. Yusuf Adamu and Bala Garba of the Bayero University, Kano. The former lectures geography while the latter is from the English Department. I left the meeting with the appropriate words of Dr. Bala on my mind, he said, concerning creative writing – “it is not the creative we lack, it is the writing!” Dr Adamu stressed that one should not call oneself a writer before one becomes one and the fitting toga of a true writer can only be worn at the end of a long process of writing and rewriting, refining and editing, and critique.

I agree entirely with the dons. The trouble with up and coming Nigerian writing is the impatience to get the cattle to the market. But you only get a good price when the cow is fattened. And fattening a cow is not a day’s job. Yet, the abundant energy that brings about impatience is very important because it pointed out the reality, that those twenty writers that day were confident enough and willing to put their work on a pedestal, to be critiqued and to accept criticism. That is, of course, the beginning of improvement.

On leaving the meeting that day, I felt that the future was promising since even as far up north as Kano, there are writers passionate about writing. It would only be a matter of time before critical appraisal would nudge these fine young persons to even greater refinement of their language and ultimately, the good of Nigerian writing.

Buddha Child and A Dark Ghazal {Poems}

2008-03-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

Dreadlocked child sitting amidst
The fleeting cinema of urban feet
Child in Buddhic squat, palms between thighs
Folded correctly

Forlorn on a city pavement
They do not see you, mendicant child
But I do

And I know you too are on your way
Maybe you’ll be a rasta someday

Buddha Child

Infernal pointsman destroying space-time
Shattering science in a million frissons of glass
This is the end of the fury – the mad scribbling
The chill of waiting to pen perfect roses

Whirlwinds rage on, but I am innocent of dust
My imperfect lines throb as if they still live
The market still pulses with life

I tell you
Fortitude and solitude are one
The same with wine and women and art
Cold mistresses teasing flames in temples
Parched with thinking, longing
And forgetting

So
Life shatters into a million frissons
And I step out into the light
Killing the man in the mirror.

A Dark Ghazal

The Poetry of Bose Ayeni-Tsevende

2008-02-26T01:44:00.001-08:00

Seldom ever in the Nigerian literary space is there a more momentous event than the publication of verse by a female writer. This momentousness, however, does not fount from surprise - either of Nigerian women being poetic or there existing a feminine voice within Nigerian verse. It is rather wells from the long expectation which heralds’ newborns – Nigerian female writers have been largely barren of the child of poesy. It is into this circumstance that we must place Bose Ayeni-Tsevende’s December 2007 poems “You Are a Poet”, the offering of which informs this critical commentary.

Bose Ayeni-Tsevende is a professional dancer and choreographer with three decades of artistic experience and her talent was developed at the Ori-Olokun Theatre, Nigeria’s most revered theatre company resident in the University of Ife in southwestern Nigeria. She is also an academic at the Dept. of Theatre and Communication Arts at the University of Jos in central Nigeria and has presented scholarly papers locally and internationally promoting the effectiveness of dance as a tool for social and economic transformation. This anthology, her first, comprising forty-four poems of varying lengths all written in free verse is forwarded by Dr. Jeff Godwin Doki of the University of Jos and published by Baytower Publishing Company, Jos, Nigeria.

Ayeni-Tsevende has a very observant, socially sensitive eye, which makes her Poems a verse commentary on myriad themes. The most predominant of these themes are those of Love, Longing and Loss, all expressed by means of careful diction, control of sound {oral meter} and humor that lull and stun alternately through her medium of “oral” poetry, a style very much reminiscent of Niyi Osundare’s poems. Ayeni-Tsevende’s poems are rich in social allusion and the critique of these is carried out through her dual poetic personae - the gay and simple sensitivities of a young girl or the experienced sensibilities of an upper middleclass Nigerian woman.

The very first poem, “Bukuru Park”, introduces the earlier mentioned theme of longing with its first three stanzas beginning with the curious inquisitory “Did you notice. . ?”, seeking to call, from the details of the Park, the chirruping of its birds, ants marching in parade, the whistle of the wind, all these, seeking a way out of a lonely and complete solitude; the poem ends –
Let the hidden stars bear witness
In the presence of the rain that fell before
And the cloud gathering afresh
A witness also it shall be
To a soul looking for a soul to bond
In a lonely park. . .

The sensitivity, as if of tears, expressed in the first poem lingers on in the next two, “Baa Shiga” and “Man”. “Baa Shiga” is a phrase from the Hausa language spoken in Northern Nigeria meaning “No Entry!”. It is more often found in front of dwellings of women married under the traditional Muslim manner yet Bose Ayeni’s poem incorporates the imagery of a decrepit, declining mud hut {perhaps a euphemism for Nigeria} “smiling like an old woman whose scattered/teeth has seen better days”, yet, - hauntingly similar to Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher – before this spectacle of imminent and incipient ruin is borne the legend “Baa Shiga”.

Contemporary Nigeria has had its fair share of civil conflicts, fundamentally economic, but which more often than not take on the acquired, asphyxiating garb of religious or ethnic crisis. “The Second Day” is a commentary on one of such crises that engulfed the resort city of Jos in September 2001. The poem is that of a woman caught up in the conflict, –
A sudden rush of people
Like a run of locust[s]
Suddenly swelled the street
The direction of the running
It was difficult to determine
“I don’t know”
Was the answer I got
From all enquiries as to why the run
Till my colleague said

Let us run while we still can
- carefully highlighting the plight of women as doubly vulnerable groups when men and boys start running about with pistols and machetes. The poem, “The Second Coming”, an allusion to the end of days, ends with a touching love and longing –
. . . .fear gripped me
For my life [,] But love gripped me harder, I must
Find my children who went to school
The day before.

A very interesting part of this first collection of verse is the poets’ use of Pidgin English not merely as a reflection of linguistic color but as a medium of poetry in itself. The poems “London No Be By Force?” and “Help me Tell Tony Say” can be considered Bose Ayeni-Tsevende’s contribution to the “root” question of language in African Literature and Art, a question long dogged by controversy and debate. The two poems consider social mobility, an issue intrinsically implicit in Nigerian middleclass reality. The first poem tackles the indignities Nigerian professionals subject themselves to in order to emigrate {illegally} to the West {London} while the second, quite humorous, captures the pride of a woman who now drives a 4X4 Jeep on sighting the friend of an old lover who jilted her because he did not think much of her prospects. In “London Na by Force?”, she declares, “If I get chance, I go go, but/ London no be by force/E no reach the stage wey e be say/ I go gather my length/ Go lie down berekete for embassy.” On the humiliating jobs economic migrants do in the West, she asks –
The kind insult wey oyinbo man go dey fire
You
For here you go gree?
Na so all dem dem go dey shine for you
Like say you be leper wey wan
Climb their wife.

The love poems of Ayeni-Tsevende from this collection provide very interesting reading on the simplicity and passion of love, its sheer and overwhelming multisensority. Among the finest of her love poems are “And If You Leave Me”, “If You leave Me” {dedicated to A.O and Ben Okri}, “It’s Him” and that paean of lyrical finesse, “Never Again”. They are poems of a persona not afraid to love even as she despairs rejection, even as she despairs that the philter of love is but an ephemeral aphrodisiac, even as she is well aware the finicky attention span of a mans’ affections. Her use of the unrhymed “oral” style very fittingly metaphors the idiosyncrasies and vicissitudes of love and her love poems are the finest in “You Are A Poet”. Excepts –
{And If You Leave Me pg 18}
And if you should leave me
I will never sing again
No, not in the bath
I will wash
Only in the sand of dunes
I will not raise my face
And kiss the early morning sun
Ever again
{If You Leave Me pg 28}
If you leave me
I would know
That the stars, the moon and the sun
Connived to ruin my brilliance
And cover me in terrifying darkness
Because you reconnect me
With the colors of the rainbow
The finest of the love poems is “Never Again” –
Never again
Will I look
In the eyes of a man
No matter what promise
Is embedded therein
And lay my heart unclothed
Never
Ever again
Never again
Will I gaze
At the flashing smile
Of a man
Like the headlamps of a car
On a dark solitary road
Light up my entire world
Only to be switched off
And I
Groping in darkness
Of faded smile[s]
Never
Ever again.

The thrall of solitude and core-contained sadness that suffuse most of the poems assume a ghostly heaviness in the “Doyin” poems. “In The Rain” and “Sister Doyin’s Number” are no doubt reflections on the poets’ personal tragedy, the death of her sister Oladoyin Akuro. The first stanza of “In The Rain” is one of the finest beginnings of a dirge ever –
Like the nut
Well hidden in the shell
So I hide
The mountains of pain
In the closet of my heart
For that day in December
When my brother called
That the calabash has broken!
I do my crying
In the rain.
while the second poem pivots around a cellular phone number that would never get picked up by the departed ‘Doyin, embracing in its sad pirouette the anguish of the poet-persona, of Laitan and Alaba, Lara, Dimeji and Tope who are perhaps siblings of the deceased, members bound in familial love now facing the hollow resonance of loss.

The magnum opus of this collection is no doubt the thirty-page long “Dear Lola” which strikes a balance between the poetic “oral” styles of Osundare’s “Waiting Laughter’s” and Miriama Baa’s prose in “So Long a Letter”. Here, in this poem, written to a “Lola” in America, do we find a fusion of the young girl and the class-conscious woman – the two personae of the collection. It is an excursus into the manifestations of sensitivity, as opposed to sensibility, for here the poet lays herself bare, without even the pretensions of Art; she says –
It was a season
Of self discovery
A season of creativity
Orunmila created me
And I
Recreating myself.
She speaks of boys and girls and innocent love, she brings out succinctly the societal despondency that leads unto the “meaning” the Nigerian middleclass finds in flawed, feel-good Pentecostalism. She speaks of God and Faith and America. On the generation of children being lost to theatric but fiery Pentecostalism, she offers tongue in cheek advice –
If they step on your leg
Piercing your feet
With a stiletto shoe
All in praise worship
Do not complain
It could mean
You are not in the spirit.
She goes on, this time concerning how blinkered religion-inebriated men treat women -
They whip you in diverse forms
Don’t wear lipstick
You need to cover up
I mean completely
I am your head
God has placed you under my feet
The two are one
So, your salary is mine.[!]
Perhaps highlighting in black poetic humor the contradiction that underlies the noted resilience of the Nigerian people, Lola is advised that not all about the country is bad or dysfunctional –
You can buy fuel for your car now
The queues are gone
Even though the price. . . .
Never mind the price
The price has tripled
And tripled
But then
If you can buy the car
Then you can buy the fuel.

However, there are flaws in this collection of poems which cannot be overlooked especially the ones bordering on editorial laziness or incompetence. In the second stanza of the first poem, “Bukuru Park”, “march past” is rendered as “match past”; in the third poem, “Man”, “murky” is rendered as “murcky” and while all might have been forgivable as “mucky”, there is no reprieve as it is rendered. Another example is in “In The Rain”, in S2L2, where “stomach” is rendered “stomarch”, equally unforgivable. In “Dear Lola”, S4L7, “use” is used {no pun} for “used.”

Another sticking point, though poetry is meant to be rendered and not read, is the less than optimal use of speech marks. Some poems, like “Bukuru Park”, clearly in need of question marks at the end of stanzas’ one through three, are left without. Same with the last line of “Man”. Related to this is the poets fondness for washers like “the”, “a” and “so”. For example, in “Bukuru Park”, S2 reads –
Did you notice the [sic] march past
As the ants did a parade. . .
This reviewer is of the opinion that it would be better read and make better poetry as –
Did you see notice the march past,
Ants parading . . .?
Superfluity can also be noted in the second Pidgin English poem “Help Me tell Tony say”, specifically in S1L8 where “one another” is used instead of simply “ourself [sic]”. Also in S2L13 - “enter inside” overstresses because if you are “entering”, you can hardly go anywhere else but “inside”, you can’t “enter outside”; simply “enter {the love}” would be preferred. It is this reviewer’s belief that superfluity of any sort must be avoided in poetry and the only time when this avoidance may be sacrificed is for the sake of sound - auditory or stylistic “aesthetics”.

In spite of these flaws, the poems of “You Are A Poet” are well realized and there is optimism just over the nuance, that resilient, undying hope, that is the Nigerian zeitgeist and Ayeni-Tsevende’s realization of this zeitgeist and its thousand ingredients indicate her relevance to contemporary Nigerian literature. It is expected that her voice, the voice of a woman, looking through the twin happy-sad countenance of theatrical masks, will become increasingly relevant as her poetic pen matures.

Black History Month, Barrack Obama and Sundry Thoughts

2008-02-18T02:14:00.000-08:00

I have just read an article in Sunday’s Weekly Trust newspaper about Black History Month and have been turning it in my mind all through yesterday.

Two quotes stand out, one by Morgan Freeman and the other by Mel Watkins and what I find strange is that the two quotes are presented as being antipodes in the philosophy and utility of a Black History Month.

Morgan Freeman is quoted from 2005 saying the concept was ridiculous and that "I don’t want a Black History Month. Black History is American history," Mel Watkins is quoted, "Black History {Month} is necessary because African American History isn’t fully integrated into American History. The irony of it is that we still have a Black History Month to remind people that we have a history."

If these "opposing" quotes represent the general currents of black American thought then the fate of the blacks in America is even more vague than I thought and this especially so in all the noise about Kenyan-American {American-Kenyan? Black American?} Senator Barack Obama.

These guys are talking history within the context of the future. But history cannot be projected into the future. History is the syncretization and exegesis of the past and the present day sociopolitical realities of a superstructure. These guys {who can be said to represent Black Culture and Academia respectively} both want to be American! How in God’s name can they be American without getting a clear sounding of Africa? Every other immigrant stratum of American society, right down to the Hispanics {and even the soon-to-leave Vietnamese} have a sense of where they are coming from, of South America and Asia, they have clear memories of what they are up against and where they are coming from and why they are synthesizing into America. My reading of Black American thought is that Africa is only marginal in contemporary Black American thought and I have heard a lot of reasons to justify this indifference to historical foundation. These reasons range from African having "allowed" their kin to be sold as slaves, to Africa being a land of corrupt Dictators and poverty to simply Africa being an uncivilized place full of monkeys swinging from tree to tree. All these opinions, and many more absurd variations, have been communicated to me by Black Americans in debates over the last half-decade. Gone from Black American thought is the inclusive pan-Africanism of Langston Hughes and Azikiwe and Nkrumah, it doesn’t even remain as a metaphor. There is not even an interest in African history past or contemporary.

Pray, how can a people stumble along the misty paths of an American identity without a firm grounding of the identity they currently posses? How valuable can Black America’s being "fully integrated" into America be if they have disconnected themselves from Africa? Even my writer-in-exile predecessors in the Nigerian literary space have a clear sense of Nigeria and all its flaws. Yet, to the mind of the Black American, who more than anyone else needs Africa, Africa is merely a genetic heritage of a rainbow prism of hues from black to brown to orange and a native ear for rhythm and percussion.

And now they want a Black American president of the United States for myriad reasons as outlined by writers as varied and differentiated, spanning Toni Morrison to Ikhide Ikheloa, and for as many reasons.

I think what they need is historians.

In the same way I ask what Barrack Obama, if he is elected president, would do for Black Americans from the White House when Washington is simply the theatre of a thousand powerful lobbies, I shudder to ask what benefit supporting Obama {as I have} would have to the fortunes of my unhyphenated and never-to-be hyphenated Africa? In the same way that while in the White House, Obama will serve the synthesized interests of a thousand powerful lobbies and special interest groups up and above whatever the vague "Black American interest" is, he will pursue American interests far and above African interests from the White House. Just like Condi Rica and Colin Powel.

And I would simply prefer a Bill Clinton or George Bush not sending troops to Rwanda and Sudan than to have a "Black American" in the White House, without a sense of either adjective, do same.

Consequently, I announce that I wish Senator Obama the very best in the campaign but I am no longer with him. Stuck with my African necessity to affix myself someplace, even in a campaign that in no way affects me, I pitch my camp for the first time in my life with the Republican -John McCain- who has not played any sentimental {color marginalization or feminist} card, who has not even bothered to say anything about Africa. I think he can be lobbied to do the best he can for Africa.

Black America should go and do their history homework so that the next time a Barrack Obama comes along, he will have the force of history behind him.

The Ravages of Dust

2008-02-12T03:59:00.000-08:00

The first time he ever really looked at her was four years after they had first met. In that destined glance, he felt a buzz begin to course from the back of his head, zipping down the length of his spine. By then, she was already engaged to the Syrian. As if that was the matter. But no, it was about her eyes, little pools of black that seemed to draw in something unknowable from the deep vaults of his soul. Then, down to her lips, perfect, speaking. She was saying something to him but it did not seem to matter either, for all he saw was the luster of her eyes and the curve of her lips, their delicate ravage. For the first time, he had looked at her eyes and seen in them that thing that makes a man mad for a woman.
Zouraine! But it had to be!
Yet for all those years, he had seen her around since their jambite days at the Saad Zungur University. They had shared all their courses and even wound up in the same electives. Always she had been there, together with the other Hausawa bourgeoisie girls. Was it because he disdained them? For he did detest their lack of depth. If only they weren’t a pack of degenerate peacocks -female peacocks hah!. Vain and shorn of brains, he believed they typified the Fodio’s caliphates decay. His disdain had crystallized after a spectacular run in with Zulaila, the surliest in that pack of shrews. But, had she been one with them?

In the weeks that followed that fatal glance, Aminu’s mind swirled in turmoil. Everyday when he went to class for his lectures he saw her. Sometimes he said "hello" but most times, he said not a word. She. She was always there at the edge of his eyes, at the corner of his mind sitting amidst other married cushions, oblivious of the torment she caused him each time she spoke, each time she laughed, each time she did nothing.

And he wondered about Gogo, his mother; what would she say to see him so helpless, enamored by an indifferent girl who lived in the hut of another? Would she laugh at him, tease him with that knowing look in her eyes, and tell him tales of the poet Abu Nuwas? He himself remembered something he had read from Wilde, written in the prison at Reading Gaol.
He does not win who plays with sin
In the secret house of shame
In dreams, in waking, in thoughts.

He sat in his room in the hostel and wondered why he had sent that accursed email. It was all he could think of for it somehow suggested he was much sillier than he allowed himself reasonable leash. In those weeks of hurting emptiness, he wondered if there was anything wrong with his sending the email. Was the problem not that he detected a poorly concealed hostility in Zouraine? If only she had smiled or cursed - said something. It had been Hadiza he told finally of the feeling he refused to acknowledge that plagued him. But he did not tell her it was Zouraine that was on his mind for he was sure even Hadiza would certify him stark raving mad. What, a soon-to-be-married girl? Worse, she might have told someone. In addition, she never would have given him Zouraine’s email address. He looked over and over at the poem he had written, trying to see if he had been too forward or. . . what? No, he thought, I have not been. Tossing it on the bed he turned to sleep for even in dreams escape is found . . . but not always.

Who can ask
Where the dust settles
Or why?

The pool of her eyes, the pools of Damascus
Dark with luster, like sloes, I never did see
What it is in their depth that mired my soul

Light as the breeze, so sounds her voice
Summer butterflies are fair, but not as she
She who out shines Suleiman’s Sheban Queen

Serpentine grace, priestess of al- Qahirah
By the gateway to the Nile, naiad of Egypt
Plunder my heart; it is for you that I sing

Ah! kura, dust! She rides the chariot winds
Charming princes, poet hang your flute and violin
The dust is not for thee, your arms are but of bronze!

Alas! There is a lord who sprinkles the dust

Those eyes, that voice! To Damascus they go and remain
Though she be fair, she is not for thee my boy
For the prince of Syria claims her hand

Who can ask?
Why the dust unsettles
The poet and his verse?

Aminu Baba Ahmed

She reminded him of the Yemeni girl, Nabila, for whom he had had feelings for just as passionately and ultimately just as hopelessly. Nabila Farouk who had trampled the sapling that could not yet be called a heart, who had run off and married the younger brother of the Emir of Bolewa, laughing at him over her shoulders, her long jet black hair flailing gracefully in the wind. He had thought then that that torn thing had not grown. But what now? Its buds were bursting in bloom for the wrong sun and in the wrong season. He recalled one night when he had been with Nabila at their then yet special grove, long long before the Magaji came. He could not recall what it was that preceded their dialogue, or what was said after it, merely a full snippet of some large, vague episode of his recurring past.
"My arms are made of bronze?" he said, stretching them out in front of him; had it a question, a statement, what?
"They could be made of gold." the Arab girl had replied
"Could they?" he asked, his voice almost a whisper, now impassioned "But what the price?"
"Alchemy" Nabila replied, plucking up a red rose up to her nostrils, filling her lungs with its fragrance before tossing the rose on the grass. She had not looked up at him.

Alchemy, he wondered. What had she meant? Had he asked her? Or was it one of those taunting riddles that Nabila had always flung at him after moments of feeling and tender words and caresses. Was it chemistry? Surely, she knew there was chemistry, the body sort of chemistry. They had had very expressive feelings; she had merely been faithless. He had been naïve. "Arms made of bronze?" Had his words meant what he now thought they meant? But alchemy was also the quest of transmuting base metals such as bronze, into gold. Of transforming the decadent social morass that is man into the harmonious divine soul of the Creator’s creation. Love? Ah, could it be? Alchemy required the possession of the so-called "elixir of life", The Philosophers Stone. Zouraine!! He possessed no Philosophers Stone, so how could his arms of common bronze posses her waist of gold? But, had he really had that dialog with the Yemeni girl or had it been Gogo? Had Gogo been trying to tell him something to console him? It must have been Gogo all along! Zouraine. Even if she had not married the Syrian, she would not have desired him or noticed him just as Nabila had noticed him but could not desire him enough.
Ah, dear old Gogo. Was it not the fatalism of rejection?

The handsome young scholar arrived at Nguru, by the drying banks of the Chad, at about 10 a.m. Nothing had changed; the dry earth retained its light brown color and the Sahara still threatened, blowing with each gust of wind even more sand from dunes in Agades and Fez and Morocco. The garage touts, Gegere and Moli-Moli, were still there hailing and haranguing passengers with shouts of "Kano,Kano!" and "’Duguri,’Duguri!" With his satchel across the chest of his caftan and his suit-case firmly gripped in his right hand, he thread his way through the familiar narrow streets full of men in robes and women in veils, stopping to greet relatives and friends, towards the house where he had been born and had lived most of his life.
The old woman sat in the shaded balcony of the aged single story house looking far out to the fields menaced by the desert that lay not 100 km away. As soon as she heard the door behind her open and without a backward glance, she said to Surayya her teenage companion.
"Baba Ahmed is here"
Aminu walked up before his mother and bent himself half ways as was customary, taking care to see that she was okay and noting the wan smile on her lips while Surayya fussed over him. Surayya had changed much, not Gogo. Her lips, her bosom, her hips. . .she‘d turned into a fine young woman.

Aminu had his bath and changed into his jallabiya, and then he came up to sit with Gogo and tell her of school and what had been happening. She had seen many seasons. She just nodded and smiled, sometimes speaking a few words to the youngest and only surviving of her seven sons and he knew that she knew most of what he was telling her.

So he sat there on the balcony of his old home with the woman who had always loved him and the girl who was to love him, eating dates and sultanas and watching the sand-laden gusts of wind blowing across the denuded fields. The winds, he thought, have always been and perhaps the day might be when even this house would succumb to the winds and become ruins in the greater Sahara. Gogo, Nabila, Zouraine. Would anyone know then that such a one as his Gogo had lived here and watched the wisdom of the seasons go by? And witnessed the sands of time?
Then, so it would have to be with Zouraine; the ravage of dust.