A CHOIR OF EGRETS
IMAGINATION AND FREEDOM
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
A choir of egrets
servers at the day's recessional
on aisles fading to the infinite
One of my favorite passages from Wole Soyinka.
In terms both terms both sombre and glorious, the lines evoke the flight of egrets in formation, depicting this image in terms of the splendour and solemnity of a religious ritual in which the egrets become both a choir and severs attending the priest at a Christian mass. The flight of the egrets towards the setting sun- the 'day's recessional', the day receding, withdrawing into night- is evoked in terms of the flight of the formation of egrets. This airborne formation expresses unending motion as the birds wing towards the setting sun. They evoke the picture of church aisles disappearing beyond sight into the distance and possibly fading into infinity.
This poem, being a part of A Shuttle in the Crypt, written during Wole Soyinka's imprisonment during the Nigerian Civil War demonstrates significant relationship of inspirational context with Dennis Brutus's
Cold
the clammy cement sucks our naked feet]
[overhead]
the still, frosty glitter of the stars
the Southern Cross
flowering low
(inexact quotation)
Remembering this poem always takes me to Virginia Ola's rendition of it in my first year at the University of Benin decades ago, as the force of the poem hit her as she stood at the podium teaching it, even though she must have read it many times before that day. Her petit physique seemed filled with aerodynamic vigour, seeming to follow Brutus into space as his mind soared from the confines of his imprisonment on earth into the unfettered freedom of space, as she exclaimed at the sheer audacity of the poet's will and imagination. Imprisoned on Robben Island for anti-apartheid activity in his native South Africa, Brutus registers his sensitivity to the cold of prison while also looking up to the sky, expanding himself into the depth of space, an expanse into which the shackles of imprisonment cannot follow him. His body is held captive but his mind is free.
Brutus recounts the experience that inspired the poem in 'From Protest to Prison in Sustar and Karim's Poetry and Protest : A Dennis Brutus Reader :
"The image of Robben Island in my mind was one of terror.
Remembering this poem always takes me to Virginia Ola's rendition of it in my first year at the University of Benin decades ago, as the force of the poem hit her as she stood at the podium teaching it, even though she must have read it many times before that day. Her petit physique seemed filled with aerodynamic vigour, seeming to follow Brutus into space as his mind soared from the confines of his imprisonment on earth into the unfettered freedom of space, as she exclaimed at the sheer audacity of the poet's will and imagination. Imprisoned on Robben Island for anti-apartheid activity in his native South Africa, Brutus registers his sensitivity to the cold of prison while also looking up to the sky, expanding himself into the depth of space, an expanse into which the shackles of imprisonment cannot follow him. His body is held captive but his mind is free.
Brutus recounts the experience that inspired the poem in 'From Protest to Prison in Sustar and Karim's Poetry and Protest : A Dennis Brutus Reader :
"The image of Robben Island in my mind was one of terror.
[On the way to Robben Island] we were put in cells at Colesberg, the small prison in the Northern Cape, and then hauled out again by sleepy-eyed and irritable warders...between three and four in the morning, and given our porridge which we ate with our hands, since there were no spoons issued. We were manacled again, placed in the truck, taken on to Paarl, and from Paarl to Cape Town docks to go to the island. And the experience I had at Colesberg, eating porridge under the stars of the Southern Cross in the sky, had a kind of consoling influence on me and still does. In times of desperation I look up at the stars, and if I can find them, somehow things are more endurable—I've recorded that experience in a poem about that event, though it was written some time ago, and fuses several perceptions, including a religious one."
How much do people notice the sheer freedom represented by the wonderful light, colour and depth of the sky?
Isaac Asimov tells a story, 'Nightfall', in which, on a particular planet, the stars appear only once in two thousand years. These appearances represent a cataclysmic experience for the watchers on the planet, who have no point of reference for these illuminations appearing suddenly in the night sky. The experience leads to temporary madness, widespread chaos and the destruction of the structure of civilization as it exists at the point of the emergence of these unholy fires, if I am not being too inaccurate in my memory of the story. The exact information on what causes these upheavals in civilization every two thousand years is unknown since all records are destroyed in the ensuing chaos caused by the blast into the human mind from celestial regions represented by the sudden appearance of the stars.
Vincent Van Gogh's iconic 'Starry Night'
The sky is one of the recurrent motifs in human thought and is particularly associated with freedom. The experience of Asimov's 'Nightfall' may be related to the possibility for an expansion of awareness of the possibilities of nature or dread at exposure to those possibilities. The story shows the appearance of dread.
The imminence of death and the hope of life are evoked in the story 'The White Line' from the Jewish Holocaust collected by Yaffa Eliach in Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust in which a woman, on her way to the concentration camps, where almost certain death awaited at the hands of genocidal anti-Jewish Nazis perpetrating what they named 'The Final Solution to the Jewish Question' which consisted in exterminating as many Jews as possible, systematically killing harmless civilians, she sees a white line in the sky and takes that line as a sign that she will survive the death camps. She lived to tell her story.
Her experience can be seen as evoking the question of the relationship between the physical world, the self that perceives that world and the effects of that perception on the life of that self. Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning describes his constant visualisation of his wife's presence as well as visualising his life's ambitions for a future beyond the death camps as being central to his survival of the Jewish Holocaust. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I think, quoted in Cohen and Phipps' The Common Experience, describes how a fellow inmate of his in Soviet labour camps, an astrophysicist, kept his spirit alive by reflecting on the immensity of our space, on the revolutions of the celestial bodies, on the immense distances travelled by light as it traverses space.
"[Vincent ]van Gogh utilises endless permutations of colour, shapes and lines to extract truly harrowing or consoling metaphysical statements from natural phenomena- Soyinka from "Drama and the African Word View" in Myth, Literature and the African World View."
The sky is one of the recurrent motifs in human thought and is particularly associated with freedom. The experience of Asimov's 'Nightfall' may be related to the possibility for an expansion of awareness of the possibilities of nature or dread at exposure to those possibilities. The story shows the appearance of dread.
The imminence of death and the hope of life are evoked in the story 'The White Line' from the Jewish Holocaust collected by Yaffa Eliach in Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust in which a woman, on her way to the concentration camps, where almost certain death awaited at the hands of genocidal anti-Jewish Nazis perpetrating what they named 'The Final Solution to the Jewish Question' which consisted in exterminating as many Jews as possible, systematically killing harmless civilians, she sees a white line in the sky and takes that line as a sign that she will survive the death camps. She lived to tell her story.
Her experience can be seen as evoking the question of the relationship between the physical world, the self that perceives that world and the effects of that perception on the life of that self. Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning describes his constant visualisation of his wife's presence as well as visualising his life's ambitions for a future beyond the death camps as being central to his survival of the Jewish Holocaust. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I think, quoted in Cohen and Phipps' The Common Experience, describes how a fellow inmate of his in Soviet labour camps, an astrophysicist, kept his spirit alive by reflecting on the immensity of our space, on the revolutions of the celestial bodies, on the immense distances travelled by light as it traverses space.
Moving from the most distant stars to earth, the light finally reaches our eyes at the conclusion of a journey that began at the emergence of those stars in the relatively early years after the creation of the universe. Projecting himself imaginatively to these awesome cosmic events, the prisoner escapes in spirit from prison, musing on what 'time and the passing of time really are'.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
No comments:
Post a Comment