i found it very affecting, and also was reminded of a similar great work, walcott's "The Spoiler's Return," which is equally an indictment, ironic, bitter; and at the same time, like all elegies, a claim for more than where we are now
ken
http://brittlepaper.com/2013/05/elegy-nation-soyinka-poem/
For Chinua Achebe at 70
Ah, Chinua, are you grapevine wired?
It sings: our nation is not dead, not clinically
Yet. Now this may come as a surprise to you,
It was to me. I thought the form I spied
Beneath the frosted glass of a fifty-carat catafalque
Was the face of our own dear land — 'own', 'dear',
Voluntary patriotese, you'll note — we try to please.
An anthem's sentiment upholds the myth.
Doctors IMF, World Bank and UNO refuse, it seems,
To issue a certificate of death – if debtors die
May creditors collect? We shall turn Parsees yet,
Lay this hulk in state upon the Tower of Silence,
Let vultures prove what we have seen, but fear to say –
For if Leviathan is dead, we are the maggots
Probing still her monstrous womb – one certainty
That mimics life after death. Is the world fooled?
Is this the price of hubris – to have dared
Sound Renaissance bugles for a continent?
Time was, our gazes roamed the land, godlike,
Pronounced it good, from Lagos to Lake Chad.
The hosts of interlopers would be exorcised,
Not throwing the baby out with the bathwater,
Enthroning ours as ours, bearing names
Lodged in marrow of the dead, attesting lineage.
Consecrated brooms would sweep our earth
Clean of usurpers' footprints. We marched
To drums of ancient skins, homoeopathic
Beat against the boom of pale-knuckled guns.
We vied with the regal rectitude of Overamwen –
No stranger breath – he swore – shall desecrate
This hour of communion with our gods! We
Died with the women of Aba, they who held
A bridgehead against white levy, armed with pestle,
Sash and spindle, and a potent nudity – eloquent
Abomination in the timeless rites of wrongs.
Grim cycle of embattled years. Again we died
With miners of Iva valley who undermined
More than mere seams of anthracite. All too soon,
Ma, we would augment, in mimic claims,
In our own right, the register of martyrs. Oh,
How we've exercised the right of righteous folly
In defence of alien rhetoric . . . what God has joined, etcetera.
For God, read white, read slaver surrogates.
We scaled the ranges of Obudu, prospected
Jos Plateau, pilgrims on rock-hills of Idanre.
Floated on pontoons from Bussa to silt beds
Of eternal Niger, reclaimed the mangrove swamps,
Startling mudskipper, manatee, and mermaids.
Did others claim the mantle of discoverers?
Let them lay patents on ancestral lands, lay claim
To paternity of night and day – ours
Were hands that always were, hands that pleat
The warp of sunbeam and the weft of dew,
Ours to create the seamless out of paradox.
In the mind's compost, meagre scrub yielded
Silos of grain. Walled cities to the north were
Sheaths of gold turbans, tuneflul as minarets.
The dust of Durbars, pyrotechnic horsemen
And sparkling lances, all one with the ring of anvils
From Ogun's land to Ikenga's. Rainbow beads, jigida
From Bida's furnaces vied across the sky with
Iyun glow and Ife bronzes, luscent on ivory arches
Of Benin. Legend lured Queen Amina to Moremi,
Old scars of strife redeemed in tapestries
Of myth, recreating birthpang, and rebirth. And, yes –
We would steal secrets from the gods. Let Sango's axe
Spark thunderstones on rooftops, we would swing
In hawser hammocks on electric pylons, pulse through cities
In radiant energies, surge from battery racks to bathe
Town and hamlet in alchemical light. Orisa-oko
Would heal with herbs and scalpel. Ogun's drill
Was poised to plumb the earth anew, spraying aloft
Reams of rare alloys. Futurists, were we not
Annunciators of the Millennium long before its advent?
In our now autumn days, behold our leaden feet
Fast welded to the starting block.
Vain griots! Still, we sang the hennaed lips and fingers
Of our gazelle womenfolk, fecund Muses tuned
To Senghorian cadences. We grew filament eyes
As heads of millet, as flakes of cotton responsive
To brittle breezes, wraith-like in the haze of Harmattan.
Green of the cornfields of Oyo, ochre of groundnut pyramids
Of Kano, indigo in the ancient dye-pots of Abeokuta
Bronzed in earth's tonalities as children of one deity –
We were the cattle nomads, silent threads through
Forestries and cities, coastland and savannah,
Wafting Maiduguri to the sea, ocean mist to sand dunes.
Alas for lost idylls. Like Levi jeans on youth and age,
The dreams are faded, potholed at joints and even
Milder points of stress. Ghosts are sole inheritors.
Silos fake rotundity – these are kwashi-okor blights
Upon the landscape, depleted at source. Even
The harvest seeds were long devoured. Empty hands Scrape the millennial soil at planting.
But Chinua, are you grapevine wired? Do you
Tune in, listen? There is old music in the air.
The word is out again, out from the closet.
Renaissance beats are thumbed in government lairs, In lobbies, caucuses, on promotion posters,
In parliaments. Academe's close behind. Renaissance
Haunts beer and suya bar, street and rostrum,
Inhaled as tobacco smoke, chewed as kola,
Clerics beatify the word, lawyers invoke it.
Never word more protean, poised to incarnate
In theses, conferences, investments. A historic lure
Romances the Diaspora. Gang-raped, the continent
Turns pregnant with the word – it's sworn, we shall be Born again, though we die in the attempt.
But then, our offsprings, Chinua, have they leisure
To play at love? To commune with Source, shaded
By coarse-grain village walls at noon? Crush wild mint
Between their fingers, let the agbayun coat
Their tongues, at war with the bitterness of kola?
Raid the hoards of gods and ancients,
Recite their lineage praise-names, clan histories?
Or have the rigours of survival bred a race
Of naked predators? Is sharing out of fashion?
Community a dirty word, service an obscenity?
Are ours the emerging children of Molucca
Born to burn at six, slaughter at seven,
Rinse their hand in the throat's death gurgle,
Secure in the arch-priest's absolution? Attuned
At noon to dissolution of the bond of dawn, deaf
To neighbour cries? Easy reddened are the wafers
Of communion – have we been here before?
Still, here you sit before the travelled world, gathered
To pay homage. Survived the kwashi-okor days.
You've fed on roots, barks and leaves
Your world contracted, ringed with iron
Fenced with the wringing hands of the world
As unctuous in neutrality as Pontius Pilate.
But you made flesh what is so often said –
Sweet are the uses of adversity – as even now
Your silent eloquence attests. The ancient pot-stills
Turned refineries. Neglected herbs, mystery silica
Powered transistors to accuse the world, screaming
We are not dead, but dying. And iron monsters
Rose furtively from forest bays, hammered
From the forges of Awka. Who can forget the errant
Ogbunikwe that rose skywards, plunged to blast
A fiery tunnel through encircling steel?
Absences surround your presence – he
The great town crier, Okigbo, and other griots
Silenced in infancy. The xylophones of justice
Chime much louder than the flutes of poets,
Their sirens lure the bravest to their doom.
But some survive, and survival breeds, it seems,
Unending debts. Time is our usurer, but earth remains
Sole signatory to life's covenant – and thus I ask:
Whose feet are these upon the storehouse loft?
Shod in studded boots or jewelled sandals,
Khaki crisp or silk embroidered – who are these?
Did time appoint these bailiffs? Behold
Enforcers out of time, shorn of memory but –
Crowned are the hollow skulls, signets on talons.
Their advent is the hour of locusts – behold
Cheeks in cornucopia from the silos' depletion
While the eyes of youth sink deeper in despair.
Death bestrides the streets, rage rides the sun
And hope is a sometime word that generations
Never learnt to spell.
Chinua, I think with you I dare
Be indelicate – we scrape our feet upon
The threshold of mortal proof, denying
The ancestors yet awhile our companionship –
May that day learn patience from afar! –
On the stage at Bard, behind the lectern,
Gazing across time to your staunch spirit
Wedded to a contraption we neither make nor mend
My irreverent thoughts were – There sits the nation,
All faculties intact, but wheelchair bound.
Your lesson of the will, alas, a creative valour
Marks the gulf between you and that land
We claim our own.
II
There are wonders in that land, Chinua
Are you wired? Tuned to images of cyber age?
Severed wrists will soon adorn our walls
And Conrad's Heart of Darkness be fulfilled.
The cairn of stones is building for the first
Butchery in a public square, a female scapegoat
Tethered for primordial rites that men devise
To keep their womenfolk obedient to the laws of man.
An encampment is on the move, biped
Amorphous tents, a sorcerer invasion choreographed
In castration shrouds, visors no less secretive
Than face-masks, twin to ancestral masquerades
Proclaimed infidel. They slink through streets
And markets – yes, it is our women on the move
Our mothers, wives and sisters, comrades-in-arms
Bereft of limbs and faces, haute couture decreed
By encyclicals of eunuch priests. Features
Mummified by laws of terror. Oh my compatriots,
Shaved bare-skull at initiation, convertites
Dipped body and soul in the waters of salvation
Are yours these zombies of the age, are these
The paracletes of the new millennium?
They'll murder heritage in its timeless crib,
Decree our, heroes, heroines out of memory
Obliterate the narratives of clans, names
That bind to roots, reach to heavens, our
Links to ancestral presences. The Born-Agains
Are on rampage, born against all that spells
Life and mystery, legend and innovation.
Imprecations rend the air, song is taboo,
The stride of sun-toned limbs racing wind a sin,
Flesh is vile, wine, the gift of earth, execrated.
These tyrants have usurped the will of God.
How did we fail to learn, that guns and boots
Are not essential to a coup d 'état?
Shall Ala die? Ahiajoku be anathematised? Does
Oya defile her streams, Ifa obstruct the paths
Of learning and councils of the wise? Praise the Lord And launch the bulldozer – they've razed
The statues of mbari to the ground, these
Christian Talibans. Their brothers in Offa
Murder Moremi in her shrine, shrieking Allah akbar.
Rivals else, behold their bonded zeal that sanctifies
Alien rape of our quiescent Muses, extolling theirs.
We who neither curse their gods nor desecrate
Their texts, their prayer mats or altars –
What shall we do, Chinua, with these hate clerics?
While we sleep, their fingers spread as brambles,
Deface our Book of Life. How teach them:
Some are born pagan, wedded to life's seamlessness
Tuned to the breath of things, magma and animus.
The waters of the Holy Gospel bounced against
This splinter of Olumo Rock, retreated
In despair, seeking more porous earth. How reveal
The sublimity of godhead that abhors
The murdering tyranny of Creed? Has gore
Proved godlove on Kaduna streets – ten thousand
Mutilations and three thousand dead of faith?
But the sun rose still the following dawn, indifferent.
Let all creeds be recast. If the gates of Paradise
Are locked behind the Pope's demise,
We wish him blessed occupancy of yonder realms
With all the Heavenly Host. Has the last Imam
Been here and gone? Then, Bon Voyage
Seek me out among the questers, creed-divorced,
In covenant only to that solvent that is earth.
How shall they be taught, Chinua, that Ajapa
Lives, but no longer borrows feathers from the birds
To survey earth? Myths are our wise cohabitants. Icarus .1.
Transcended wax, new trajectories lace the spheres.
The galaxy is boundless host to a new race
Of voyagers, seeking the once forbidden. Cinders
From Promethean dares, shards of Ajapa's shell,
Are constellations by which ships of space are steered.
The jealous gods are no more. Age by age
We inched towards the sun, then raced beyond
To drink the heady draught of space, returned to earth
Emboldened. The voices of new prophets are not voided
In the wilderness but fulfilled. Applause
Is the new music of the spheres – it's heard
In other lands, I am told. I have not heard it here.
But we survived, Chinua. And though survival reads
Unending debt – for time, alas decrees us
Witnesses, thus debtors – earth alone remains
Our creditor. Yet I fear the communion pots
Lie broken at the crossroads, kola nuts and cowries
Scattered by scavengers. Couriers turn coat,
Turned by profit, priest, predator and politician.
The masquerade's falsetto may reveal, not
Artifice but loss of voice, its gutturals camouflage
Death throes, not echoes of our spirit realms.
The strongest eagle, wing-span clipped, talons
Manicured in gilded thumbscrews may not hold
Nor bear the weight of sacrifice. Our caryatids
Are weary of cycles of endless debts. Incense
Of burnt offering, heavy with abominations
Hangs dose to altar, dissipates between Earth
And Sky. Shorn of new alibis, our intercessors
Falter at the door of judgement. What shall we say
To the years that drift past, accusing?
What shall we chant to their dew-bright notes –
Our new tuned buglers of the Renaissance?
Originally published in Guardian Nigeria
Ken, I cannot but agree with you in toto. What does Nigeria want to showcase as a good democratic nation? What pride do we take in the present administration? The basic infrastructures are not there. The roads are a nightmare. Insecurity is worse and poverty is written on the faces of 112 million Nigerians. Unemployment is rising as we turnout many graduates into a weak economy. Do Nigerian leaders want Obama to come and have a little dose of power cut while addressing the world? There was an occasion not too long ago when President Jonathan was addressing the public and all of a sudden light went off. Is that kind of experience you want President Obama to come and witness?President Obama has a taste for certain quality of leadership and Nigeria does not meet it, pure and simple. The value we put on Nigeria is the determinant factor of being snubbed or otherwise.American policy will not change because President Obama is an African American. This is not Nigeria where someone will act without a recourse to the interest of the country.Let President Jonathan tell us what interest Nigeria will derive from Obama's visit today? Does PDP want Obama's visit a proof of good governance for their 2015 political campaign?What should be our focus, in my own view is to put our house in order and all the good things will follow. Without asking people and world leaders to visit the country, they will be enthusiastic to come.We must leave Obama alone. We did not elect him as President of the US, the most powerful nation on earth. If American government wants him to visit Nigeria, he will come.Segun Ogungbemi.
Sent from my iPhone--these analyses of obama's snub of nigeria assume that not visiting nigeria constitutes a refusal, whereas his choice of countries is probably driven by factors that has nothing to do with nigeria's size, oil, or importance to africa.
we have some sophisticated political scientists on the list who could explain why a president will go to this country and not that. i don't quite understand his choices, but i imagine he'll follow bush's steps in senegal and make the obligatory stop at the "slave fort" in goree. why tanzania? economy and governance? s. africa? importance of trade?
i don't know any of it, but no doubt they want something that will place well at home, that are safe publicity bets. where would the publicity be for a nigerian visit? the president isn't world-famous; boko haram and killings up north don't look good. if he came, he'd have to make some references to it, i suppose?
these are show events for obama, not trade talks or military talks.
so i can't see this as a snub unless there were real reasons for his coming in the first place, reasons important for the u.s. public, not the african public.
ken
(addendum: bush's visit to goree was a complete nightmare for the people of that beautiful island, a minitown, who had to evacuate the island for bush's security. might one say that between his stupid symbolic visit, and the reality of the visit, he lived a "life in the bush of ghosts"?)
On 6/2/13 12:01 AM, Funmi Tofowomo Okelola wrote:
"Nigeria and her leadership may bury their head ostrich-like in the sand all they want, but the rest of the world have their own opinion of the country and her leaders; an opinion that is unflattering and sad to say the least. And until and unless we get our act together, kick out mediocre leaders, collectively abjure corruption, and embark on rigorous reconstruction of the country, the snub has just begun!"--Tunde Fagbenle
JUNE 2, 2013America's snubbing of Nigeria: BY TUNDE FAGBENLE
<mime-attachment.jpg>Tunde Fagbenle
As I read our own Ayo Olukotun (PUNCHcolumnist)'s column of last Friday with the above title, I chuckled. In it Ayo, a political science professor, was lamenting Nigeria's exclusion from America's President Obama's forthcoming African tour, with his wife Michelle, of countries including Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania between June 26 and July 3. The snub, Ayo infers, is America's "way of delivering a strong message to (Nigeria's) rulers on their slack anti-corruption policy and poor human rights record."
For me, what's new? This will not be Obama's first snub of Nigeria. In July 2009, Obama threw it more "in our face" by visiting next-door Ghana on his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa without casting as much as a glance in our direction. "Part of the reason that we're travelling to Ghana," Obama had said before leaving for Ghana, "is because you've got there a functioning democracy, a president who's serious about reducing corruption, and you've seen significant economic growth."
Translated, Nigeria then (in 2009) did not score highly on any of those criteria, and now (in 2013) has faired no better – so much for our President Jonathan's chest-beating, "marking-scheme," scorecard! What is happening to Governor Rotimi Amaechi in Rivers State is not exactly reflective of a "functioning democracy;" the presidential pardon granted ex-convict and former Bayelsa State Governor, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, is hardly the stuff serious anti-corruption governance is made of; worsening unemployment, heightened insecurity, and mass poverty snigger at any vaunted economic growth.
Nigeria and her leadership may bury their head ostrich-like in the sand all they want, but the rest of the world have their own opinion of the country and her leaders; an opinion that is unflattering and sad to say the least. And until and unless we get our act together, kick out mediocre leaders, collectively abjure corruption, and embark on rigorous reconstruction of the country, the snub has just begun!
If we need reminding of how Nigeria is perceived, below is an excerpt of this column of 10/01/2010.
America: Punishing Nigerians to get at our government
But America, to say the least, is pissed off with Nigeria. And no one demonstrates, even appropriate, this disgust more than Obama himself. Obama is angry with Nigeria. But it is an anger borne of love and disappointment. Way back in Obama's pre-presidency book, "Dreams From My Father," he lampooned Nigeria as a country that has disappointed the black race. "Look what tribalism has done to places like Nigeria and Liberia," he remarked to his aunts, Jane and Zeituni, in the book. He cannot get over how a land of such intellectual and moral giants like Achebe and Soyinka could be so hopelessly run and incessantly dominated by evil and visionless leaders.
I hazard a guess, America's hostile response to Nigeria is a direct consequence of what Obama feels about Nigeria and her long catalogue of unbelievable nonsense, from inept and roguish leadership, to senseless ethno-religious massacres of unimaginable proportions.
For those who could read "between the lines," Obama's shunning of Nigeria on his maiden presidential visit to Africa was a big statement of his administration's intention to put Nigeria in "her place" – a disappointing country of reducing international relevance.
And no one has put this in stronger perspective than Mr. Lyman, a former US Ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa, in his speech at the Achebe Colloquium at Brown University, USA, on December 11, 2009, now in wide circulation.
Mr. Lyman shocked the audience when he spoke about the need to consign Nigeria to her self-chosen place of irrelevance in global account. But Lyman prefaced his speech with an "allocutus" that he speaks from hurt for a country he loves: "I have a long connection to Nigeria," Lyman says. "Not only was I ambassador there, I have travelled to and from Nigeria for a number of years and have a deep and abiding vital emotional attachment to the Nigerian people, their magnificence, their courage, artistic brilliance, their irony, sense of humour in the face of challenges, etc."
Lyman believes that Nigeria is not being helped by any continued notion that she still holds some meaningful strategic relevance and goes on to deconstruct, one after another, factors that had given rise to such vaunted notion in the past, namely: that "it is a major oil producer, it is the most populous country in Africa, it has made major contributions to Africa in peacekeeping, and, of course, negatively, if Nigeria were to fall apart, the ripple effects would be tremendous, etc."
Then he goes on: "But I wonder if all this emphasis on Nigeria's importance creates a tendency to inflate Nigeria's opinion of its own invulnerability" even when she is bedeviled by "disgraceful lack of infrastructure, the growing problems of unemployment, the failure to deal with the underlying problems in the Niger Delta, (and) the failure to consolidate democracy."
And deconstruct Lyman did of each of those elements. Nigeria's size and population is meaningless unless she can harness entrepreneurial talent and economic capacity to make her a major economic and political force. Nigeria's oil would mean less to America and the rest of the world as more and more countries discover oil and make better use of it, and, more importantly, as the world 'moves on to alternative sources of energy.' According to him, Nigeria's contribution to the continent is becoming nothing but "history," especially with her presence or influence discounted in troubled places like Guinea, Dafur or even Somalia! There is nothing to say for Nigeria economically with an all but collapsed infrastructure in a country that does not generate more power than a mere district of South Africa does.
Then the punch was Lyman's quote of an Assistant Secretary of State that he had worked for who once retorted to charges against America on Nigeria: "You know, the biggest danger for your (Nigeria's) relationship with the United States is not our opposition but that we will find you irrelevant."
America, in taking the stand it took against Nigeria, is seeking ways to punish Nigeria's leadership, not her people. But, unfortunately, the people will suffer as much, if not more, than the leadership who though, worried about the security of their personal loot stashed abroad, has withdrawn their threat of an "ultimatum" and now begged for "dialogue" with America. (Note: On account of the attempt to blow off an American Delta Airline by a 23-year old Nigerian, America had hurriedly placed Nigeria on its watch list of 'countries harbouring terrorists or with sympathy, tendency or inclination for terrorism.' Our National Assembly responded by giving America a laughable "7-day ultimatum" to reverse herself and take Nigeria off the list.)
As a nation – were we one – our pride would be hurt – had we one. But we are a country in confusion and disarray, a country in the throes of unravelling, unable to locate her identity and finding herself incapable of undertaking the simple task of fashioning a way forward from the rot. Rather, choosing to leave "everything in the hands of God" who is "all-knowing and good" and who will "see Nigeria through."
I shake my head!
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-The Art of Living and Impermanence
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