Tuesday, December 31, 2013

USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Fully edited : To Abolaji Adekeye – re- Journey Of The Teenage God-Boy (Poem)


Ah magic realism!

Last night, as soon as I pushed the" post " button this thought hit me, directly from last week's Torah portion:

(Gutnick edition

 "God spoke to Moshe and Aharon, saying, "When Pharaoh speaks to you, saying,"Prove yourselves (as emissaries of a higher power) with a miracle", you shall say to Aharon, "Take your staff, and cast it in front of Pharaoh. It will become a snake."

Moshe and Aharon came to Pharaoh, and they did exactly as God had commanded. Aharon cast his staff in front of Pharaoh and in front of his servants, and it became a snake.

Pharaoh also summoned sages and magicians and they, the sorcerers of Egypt, did the same thing with their spells. Each one of them cast down his staff, and they became snakes. Aharon's staff (then reverted back from a snake to a staff and) swallowed their staffs

Pharaoh's heart became hardened and he did not listen to them, just as God had said."

(Exodus 7: 7-13 )

This episode is followed by The Ten Plagues

 And thus the difference between  all-powerful God  in Hebrew scripture and e.g. fantasy mortal man Tutuola or surrealistic Ben Okri or Tolkien or Gabriel Garcia Marquez playing god, as author, with or without magical realism

The scoundrel Sir Salman Rushdie's infamous Satanic has often been said to be clothed by "magic realism", in his case another extended act in the art of deception by words only. If my memory serves me right, I purchased the accursed book soon after it was published, at the specialist Oriental al Saqi bookshop at Westbourne Grove – along with some much holier stuff  on one of my numerous Stockholm –London  visits – eight in all in 1988 (and one Stockholm – Cologne ) to the wise man from Iran, Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh  and  was then wondering  why Rushdie should want to make the venerated Salman al-Farsi – he who advised that the Mujahedeen of Medina  to build trenches  in their battle against the combined forces  of the Meccans and the Jews  of Khaybar , why his namesake Salman  Rushdie  would want to incarnate in prose, Salman al-Farsi /Salman the Persian, one of Shia Islam's most venerated companions of Islam's most exalted  Prophet ( S.a.w), as  the villain of the piece. In retrospect we all now know that somehow such fictional magical realism was bound to ignite the holy ire of the Supreme leader and the most ardent Brethren in Iran. As the Englishman puts it, Imam Khomeini (r.a.) was hopping mad when he passed that fatwa – retributive justice, even if today Sir Salman can smirk and say, "Fat lot of good, that fatwa". Rushdie actually became a scoundrel after the fatwa and on Iran's list of internationally wanted criminals – wanted dead not alive.  He could have passed a fatwa on Saddam Hussein as well. I read his "verses" before the fatwa and had thought that he had only been experimenting with the English language, his version of a story about the battle between good and evil.

In Freetown the folks will soon be singing, "'appi new year me noh die oh"

At midnight, fireworks will fill the night sky over here in

We Sweden

 


On Tuesday, 31 December 2013 02:55:11 UTC+1, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:

Re-"outside of poetry and the poetic"

Me caught me-self thinking and pleading guilty to this short question & answer found in Spirit on the Water

"You ever seen a ghost? No
But you have heard of them"

 Forgetting about Brian Eno & David Byrne,  for a while, forgetting about  Amos Tutuola himself and his  "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" , forgetting  Professor Soyinka's  "Agemo phase"  as a dramatic flashback technique  etc,  and forgetting the supernatural in Camara Laye and even Carlos Castaneda who  like Eno and Bryne, is and was not African), forgetting science fiction, there's also what has been described as  magic realism attributed to e.g.  Ben Okri and his "The Famished Road" although he stoutly rejects the title and the temptation

The connoisseurs of African Literature can take a dip...dig deep...

I suspect that the missionary schools and missionary schooling must have had their own impact, since they introduced the concept of "The Holy Ghost" - as the third person of their Trinity – thus suggesting at least two categories - the Holy and all the things that missionaries deemed unholy, such as the "voodoo" drums which they lost no time in banning to begin with, along with a few other African cultural practices (such as the ancestral holy polygamy) which was also soon damned  and without further notice relegated to one of the many categories of "Heathen superstition" – "pagan practices" "pagan beliefs"... not even on par with European pantheism...

 Ignorance asking: Is it true that Roman Catholicism was more accommodating of African norms and culture than most of the other Christian missionaries?

 If Edward Wilmot Blyden would have been with us today and just about now, settling down to write his Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race – would he still arrive at the same conclusions?

Ah! That was a million dollar missionary question...

We Sweden



On Monday, 30 December 2013 14:31:19 UTC+1, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:

Compliments of the season Sir, and the coming season's greetings to us all!

Indeed Idoto's watery presence is one such.

As Prince Hamlet says to Horatio, "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Some of the cosmologists among us still interested in other people's cosmological ideas may be interested in Meher Baba's "God speaks" - the only book I've had time to read by him....

In these modern, post-enlightenment times, outside of poetry & the poetic, any mention of the supernatural is not only forbidden/ anathema, and pray who is anxious to be ridiculed and labelled either lunatic (crazy) or if such a one is African, to be labelled superstitious, primitive? I guess that's why some people may not talk too loudly about "spirit beings" or "Mami Wata" or watery presences, that area where the extra-sensory enters the realm of what's sometimes known as the mythological ( e.g. all the fictitious," the real" or the imaginary Carlos Castaneda stuff) Toyin Adepoju has already talked about the anonymity of those who authored the Upanishads – and indeed  there's Shruti and Smriti, the philosopher-seer-poets of what goes down as other people's scriptures, causing some to learn Sanskrit even as others take to hieroglyphics.

However, the Santeria for example are self-confident and don't bow down to evangelizing missionaries – they themselves have become missionaries - missionaries to other lost sheep of another house.

 Bearing in mind the property of water as a purifying agent,

1) I'm still wondering whether the Assemblies of God Pastor& Brethren, who gave me a full immersion baptism in that River in Umuahia, in 1981, considered it a holy river. (I have finally tracked down my long lost evangelical Igbo Brother Titus Akanabu  - he will surely be able to answer that question, hopefully on the phone one of these coming days...

2) What Professor Segun Ogungbemi asked here about President Goodluck Jonathan's prayers, on the banks of the Jordan River. (In fact, I just watched this programme on al-Jazeera in which someone (from the Jordan Valley) is in essential agreement with Professor Ogungbemi's "Dirty River" concept: in speaking about the Jordan River he says, "This River, so holy to Christianity, is now a garbage dump!"

3) That one of my bosses in Nigeria was a staunch follower of the leader of the Cross Rivers based Brotherhood of the Cross and Star (and here I'm being a little superstitious - I have never uttered the name of name of their leader which consists in a triple O)  - she made me to understand  that people were coming from as far away places as the then Soviet Union  to be cured of certain skin disease  by taking a healing dip  in the miraculous river waters, under his supervision...

Rivers State, Nigeria

Langston Hughes: The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Gary Bartz: I've known Rivers

Sacred Rivers

Yours sincerely,

We Sweden

 

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