For FRANCIS ABIOLA IRELE – "Olohun-Iyo", By Wole Soyinka
True, numbers diminish, but we are not thereby
Diminished. Memories rack, yet lift
Our spirits off the rack of remembrance. Be it
The echo of a harsh scrape, decades dimmed,
Of a street café chair, rue des Ecoles, puncturing
Peals of laughter, a head thrust sideways,
Quizzical in contestation – these hoarded trivia
Flit in and out of mind, unbidden, contesting
The tyranny of absence.
Earth revolves, nothing is resolved
The hours pass in spurts of sparse fulfillment.
We remain the thoughts we spin, and leave
Lingering over wine vapour, tobacco spirals
Around audacious faces – were we not
The Renaissance generation? Then, Gauloises,
Gitanes vied with filtered cigarillos – it was
That time when smoke-free lives were yet
Unborn. We littered Presence Africaine with stubs
And words of passion, moulders of identity.
Let no one grudge those you leave behind
These keepsakes. Some will speak Negritude,
Others Marxism and aspiring Communes. You were
The cosmopolitan, consummate, straddling proposition isles.
The Muses held you in thrall, deftly you skirted
Dogma traps. A lyric voice, suddenly in full flight
On a Donizetti aria – fittingly we named you
Olohun-iyo – but next breath became a midwife, fixated
On parturition of a new nursery of creativity.
Why this sudden 'Francis', I once charged, intrigued.
It swam against the tide of black awakening. Your reply,
A dismissive shrug – The name was stamped on me.
All family history – I merely restored my full identity.
Some enigma lurked, but his was right of reticence.
I simply canonized St. Francis of the Muses,
For saint indeed he was – of letters – bore the stigmata
Invisibly, the scars of honour, earned in defence
Of hallowed space for unfettered intellect.
Freed of those sudden flares of latent scars –
The triumphal march of neo-barbarians at our gates –
You join the absent throng of griots, preceptors,
Their arms wide open to enfold you. Enter.
Suave medium of their grand accord – Damas,
Depestre, Okigbo, Aime Cesaire, Walcott, Sedar Senghor –
You made their lives your own. From rubble of the Tower
Of Babel, smoothed paving stones to float an isthmus – Black
Continent to island beaded Caribbean. You spun
A rainbow of insights over the waters of Dispersal.
Death kicks us in the groin. We cry Foul
An off-shore umpire looks the other way. Our protests
Merely swell the ocean of separation. Blithe spirit, who
Wove bright sashes round the peaks of lyric,
Plunged, pearl diver, to the ocean beds of thought, brought
Parnassus to Idanre, Montparnasse to Olumo – elegance
Of mind the sustaining cord of an unending quest –
Alas, Aburo, that you must set off, too soon for vain desire –
For that famed Diaspora of No Return.
Wole SOYINKA is the first Black Nobel Laureate in Literature.
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