cornelius
i love your writing. let's come back to the idea of a memoir that you write?
ken
Sent: Saturday, July 28, 2018 11:47:03 AM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Diaspora home away from home, is it possible?
Recently, spent a week with eleven members of my lovely Swedish family, in the fabled Stockholm Archipelago, on the island of Nåttarö which is about three times the size of the idyllic Bakana island ( Kalabari land) where I lived in Nigeria, 1983-1984. Bakana = Nostalgia though different, without roots to the epic degree of Walcott's Isla Incognita
This year it has been the closest to living in Africa. Perhaps the heatwave sizzling through Europe, radio TV, media, the neighbours, everybody saying, mostly complaining, dear Gad , that it has never been so hot, not since the beginning of the ice age, that these days you can boil your eggs or the water for your coffee by just leaving the pot or mug on the windowsill or on the balcony for the sun to peep in, everything sizzling, the kind old sun, frying everything in sight, everything that it beams upon all the way from down south in Denmark, through Stockholm which is North of Scotland and this it is that has something to do with the back home in Africa feeling, except that today in Stockholm even Africans are complaining about the heat and that includes me, although I still joke with my neighbour that I was born with a sun tan.
In "Away We Trot" Carl Michael Bellman could have well inserted this line " Is the sun too hot? Than take a dip! "
But don't get me wrong, Stockholm is not the hottest I've been in or seen. The worst so far has been Cairo – which some people forget is slap bang in the middle of the desert and this I found out after two months in Alexandria , that wonderful Mediterranean City located in Eastern Egypt - Alexandria-by-the-Sea. If not Philo of Alexandria then The Alexandria Quartet should provide enough motivation for a visit. In my case after two months there I boarded an air-conditioned bus for Cairo and when we arrived in Cairo and I got off the bus, the first heatwave hit me, I could see it coming, a viscous current moving in the air, with great force, hissing and simmering, coming straight at me. When the first punch hit me I almost fainted, dizzy and swaying, but still managing to stay on my feet, struggling heroically, had to grope on to something like the ropes in a boxing ring, not to fall down and out for the count of more than ten, maybe even out and dead.
In Stockholm right now they have stopped selling bus and train tickets for long journeys, they say that the air-conditioning in Swedish trains and buses was meant for the usual Swedish Climate, not these hellish temperatures. Worst of all, the fires. Have never seen such fires not even in the Harmattan season, in West Africa...
Nåttarö : Wide open spaces for camping, a total of 50 little cottages, we occupied two, numbers 48 & 49 for a week of communal living, no cars, not even motorbikes, just bicycles, all combustible forests and woods, a very dry season, picturesque beaches, altogether for a week of communal living, like plebeians living in a third world/ developing country, the same village life, having to fetch our own water , several buckets everyday, water from a tap about fifty yards away, breakfast, lunch, dinner at a big table , unders some trees, the toilets, like the communal toilets in Buguma – but not quite, four outhouses to serve the community of about six cottages in our area (where everybody did the " big-business" like birds of the same feather , feel equal, was thinking of Fela ( "Na European man teach us to carry shit") not so many flies and mosquitoes but plenty of predatory wasps and bees..
As the discussion of Fulani Herdsmen rages , I often think of "The Parable of the Belly" in Coriolanus and that "The belly answered" could speak - that so far no one has proposed a boycott of Fulani beef, I suppose because of the dictatorship of the belly which derives a lot of satisfaction from Fulani beef, no matter what and no matter how, as long as it gets to the dinner table...
An uncanny experience: Well, just as Balaam's ass was made to speak , so too, wonder of wonders ( as in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts) so too out of the blue, about two weeks ago , out in the countryside an old Swedish monkey asked me, "Why don't you want to go to Sierra Leone?" I almost jumped out of my skin - a question that sounded frightfully like, "Have you stopped beating your wife?"
Have you ever heard a monkey speak? The question took me by surprise . Was the monkey actually talking to me or was I dreaming, with my eyes and ears wide open? I took a closer look and saw an decrepit, ugly, old , female Swedish monkey, long past her prime. The monkey – ugly as sin , spoke again , this time more imperiously : " Yes, I'm talking to you! Why don't you want to go to Sierra Leone?" Monkey was asking me in Swenglish, not Swedish. I could have sung to her in return, " Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?" But what do monkeys know about music? Poetry? Literacy? Even basic English? Philosophy? Anthropology? Racism? Inferiority Complex? I could have sung " Do you know what it means to Miss New Orleans ?" but for the fact that I could only surmise that it would be a waste of time since this old monkey in particular - not at all hip despite any pretensions to the contrary, doesn't have an ear ( not to talk about an understanding) of what jazz is all about, so instead of being smart, I thought that I would explain to her what Sierra Leone means to me , starting with my parents, grandparents, and other close family members and friends , but the ugly monkey didn't want to hear any of that. I wonder what she wanted me to say. Maybe wanted to answer the question for me? Or maybe, she thought that the people that I was talking about are or were all White monkeys like her very undistinguished Darwinian self?
It's a despotic question - behind which could lurk many erroneous assumptions that long-time African sojourners occasionally have to answer or are confronted with and of course the reasons can vary depending on factors such as time and place - how long you've been away, where you are and whatever fond or not so fond memories you have of the place that's really no longer there. A short answer could have been , " I have already bought my one way ticket and I will be leaving tomorrow!" but talking to a serious person one could discuss the proposition that, "Sierra Leone has gone to the dogs" assuming that an uneducated monkey would not possibly understand what it means to miss New Orleans. Most probably on hearing the phrase " gone to the dogs", ugly & decrepit old monkey would probably wanna know - if only she were capable of that kind of intellectual curiosity, " Who are the dogs?"
Joni Mitchell appeals : Help me !
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