Since there is a time difference of six hours between Stockholm and New York ( eleven hours between Stockholm and San Francisco , it's always midnight in Stockholm just around the time the sun is setting over Trump's Tower and CNN is waking up, so, whilst waiting for your latest response I had better add another two cents worth to mine ( and I would write more confidently and more boldly if I had talked to Baba Kadiri one of the walking encyclopedias about the Biafra War in all of its complexities, with regard to the time frame, chronological order/ disorder, not to mention the post-mortem of its aftermath, and talking about the culpability of guilty intellectuals so called, standing to the left or right and those of no position, as Baba Kadiri has often pointed out in those heady disputes with Obi Nwakanma, the stubborn and dedicated Biafran leader Chief Ojukwu who if he had more compassion for the people in his heart could have ended the war much sooner and saved his people from much of the unnecessary suffering even while he and his upper classes fed fat whilst the Osu plebeians had to forage for food , General Ojukwu who ultimately fled to the Ivory Coast , leaving his people in the lurch and peace negotiations and the terms of surrender in charge of / in the hands of his second in command, Major-General Philip Effiong - the also disputed Biafra surrender
We may consider it immaterial whether "Conversation at Night with a Cockroach" was thought/ written/ composed before, during or after the Chief Awolowo's strategy of bring the war to an end as rapidly as possible by a policy of food sanctions on the Biafran army who I suppose he believed should at least be able to feed themselves if they wanted to fight on interminably, saying like Churchill, " We Shall never surrender "
We may also concede that anti-war poems – like Wilfred Owen 's are universal and timeless, even though situated in any particular time
Re- your words and your central theme and you do grind your axe relentlessly,, even mercilessly, the word "genocide" surfaces eleven times in those your four short paragraphs " I believe that Baba Sho was referring to the shiny boots of the goons of genocide that the poet witnessed and heard...", " the Yoruba, had no record of genocide prior to the imposition of a genocidal identity culture by slavery and colonialism/neocolonialism " / " genocide is always deserving of condemnation "/ " Genocide denialism is always beneath contempt ..." /"...poem written in solitary confinement by an activist who opposed genocide. " / " the hegemonic interpretation remains the condemnation of a genocide that actually took place ..." / " the genocide against the Igbo ..." / " I do not believe that the reason why Yoruba and Middle Belt Christian intellectuals and army officers led the genocide against the Christian Igbo was because they had a history of genocidal identities. " / " you do not have to be Igbo to condemn the genocide against them "
Adumbrating that word "genocide" – itself a loaded gun and in the instances in which you use this contentious word, pointing at this unresolved issue, it's more of a loaded question or the complex question fallacy nevertheless aimed at
succeeding in giving a false if not mistaken impression that genocide is at the forefront of Soyinka's anti-violence contention in that particular poem even if arguably / unarguably hunger and starvation brought the Biafra War effort to its knees and to ultimate surrender not because of or in spite of any supporting or contrary evidence from the contention/s in that poem or indeed the thrust in any of the other poems , lectures, gospels, epistles, other scripts including from A Shuttle in the Crypt - from which everyone is at liberty to quote most profusely
Sierra Leone intellectuals, non -intellectuals most of whom do not speak Igbo ( but many of whom speak Yoruba) were among the first to sign a petition spearheaded by Professor Eldred Jones the release of of his dear friend ( our dear friend) Wole Soyinka when he was arrested and detained in 1967 ( You may ask Kenneth Ofodile about this )
On Thursday, 6 December 2018 00:09:30 UTC+1, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:
Dear Biko,
Please bear with me as I ramble on disjointed, not anointed: Just this one point :
Who cannot be wrong about the banality of evil ?
Place I'm coming from right now , given to me by an Algerian brother ten days ago: Seeing God Everywhere: Essays on Nature and the Sacred. If only we did and not just talked about Wahdat al wujud
Back in the days when Baba Muktananda was my Siddha Guru (1976 -1981) , if I remember correctly, the essence of his teaching ( Kashmir Shaivism) was written on the mantra card : "See God in each other : God lives inside of you as you" If only we could. See Jesus in Pastor Adeboye.
For over a week now I have been mulling over your reply in which you lay so much emphasis on "Cockroach" which appears exactly once in the poem and which you say is capitalised throughout . My main worry is not merely about the guilt of those of the left and of the right for shirking their responsibility, those who kept and still keep quiet in order that evil may prevail, not only that but also what sticks out in that commentary which seems to have cynically, exclusively selected Soyinka's Yoruba people in this sentence which still grates on many a conscience:
"Much of the violence in Nigeria during the time Soyinka was writing was done in the name of lofty causes such as the preservation of Yoruba identity."
OK, so the context of that poem is the Nigerian Civil War/ Biafra War and we all know where he stood then, but sometimes some people read too much (history, politics , even mental abberations) into a poem and that includes poems allegedly written or inspired by God the omniscient Himself , whose ideas, diction and grammar in the holy tongue could be beyond reproach and by definition, thereby the greatest poet when He chooses to do poetry and have you sing it if you want to...
I can also understand that even today, there are Nigerians who want Nigeria to continue as one country and for that reason do not entertain the idea of a separate country to be carved out of Nigeria and known as Biafra or the New Sokoto Caliphate or in the name of replacement theology an Islamic State of the type envisioned by Boko Haram to be imposed over the carcass of what was once Nigeria.
So, I asked before and ask again, with so many tongs in the fire - the various actors involved, the many forces at play , in what way could the subject matter - violence, the Biafra War , man's inhumanity to man, hunger, starvation death and destruction , all or any of this be attributable to " lofty causes such as the preservation of Yoruba identity."? Sarcasm, ethnic animosity and nihilistic irony aside how could the idea of Biafra in any way challenge "the preservation of Yoruba identity." ?
Interesting BBC Hard talk today - about identity - with the marvellous Kwame Anthony Appiah
On Sunday, 2 December 2018 00:14:45 UTC+1, Biko Agozino wrote:Rabbi the Wise,You are missing something in the capitalization of Mr. Cockroach with a capital C throughout the poem. This was a deliberate personification of the pest. I read this as a reference to what the Yoruba colloquially refer to as Olopa or Mr. Blackfoot Policeman with polished boots that shone like the Cockroach. I believe that Baba Sho was referring to the shiny boots of the goons of genocide that the poet witnessed and heard marching condemned political prisoners to the gallows without a word of protest from opportunistic leftwing and rightwing intellectuals despite the clanging noise of the chains that trailed them.You are also mistaken in assuming that Brer Rabbit is only demanding blood money when he observed that Nigerian culture, including the Yoruba, had no record of genocide prior to the imposition of a genocidal identity culture by slavery and colonialism/neocolonialism. In my view and, if I may speak for baba Sho, in the view of the poet too, genocide is always deserving of condemnation irrespective of whose ox is gored. Genocide denialism is always beneath contempt for the holocaust is a crime against humanity, all of humanity.Ken Harrow, apparently responding to a private communication, said that the conversation should not be read only at the political level even if it was a deliberately political poem written in solitary confinement by an activist who opposed genocide. I concur. When I pointed out that the leftwing and the right wing of Mr. Cockroach combined to carry it away from the critical sight of the poet, I was not just scoring a political point. I believe that I was revealing a poetic symbolism that literary critics are yet to appreciate in the poem when they read the wings spreading without acknowledging the truism that the rightwing could not do the job without the leftwing. Baba Sho brought out this symbolism more clearly in the very same Cryptic collection when he talked about the leftwing and the rightwing of the genocidal Soviet jet bombers that delivered death to the innocent. In any case, to say that the poem is more than political is far from denying that it was a political poem. I agree that for it to work as a poem, the bard had to employ literary allusions, meters, diction, metaphors and similes to allow possible competing interpretations but I insist that the hegemonic interpretation remains the condemnation of a genocide that actually took place for which the poet suffered in opposition without so-called leftwingers and psuedo intellectuals saying pim in opposition. What sort of intellectuals would do that? Rabbi the wise said that we should only ask questions, even if they are rhetorical.Ken was also mistaken in mythologizing the poem by invoking the drunkenness of Ogun as the explanation for the slaughter of the innocent Igbo masses by those who were power drunk and with the support of fellow masses and even with the cheerleading by intellectual Cockroaches just because the victimized spoke a different tongue. In the case of Ogun, the slaughter was that of his followers who probably fell to cholera after drinking contaminated palmwine. That myth of origin is common in other cultures when epidemics were common and when the cause was always attributable to some angry Orisa that needed to be appeased as was the case in Oedipus Rex or in Okonkwo's consultation of the Agbara Arusi to divine the causes of his misfortune in life. In the case of the genocide against the Igbo, Baba Sho was joining his friend, Ola Rotimi to scream that The Gods Are Not to Blame. I do not believe that the reason why Yoruba and Middle Belt Christian intellectuals and army officers led the genocide against the Christian Igbo was because they had a history of genocidal identities. Baba Sho leads from the front by demonstrating that you do not have to be Igbo to condemn the genocide against them: injustice anywhere is always a threat to justice everywhere. No be so?BikoOn Saturday, 1 December 2018, 15:58, Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:
In this court of public opinion, about this too one can only ruminate, ask questions, not submit an answer for professorial judgements"I lit a thin green candle to make you jealous of me,But the room just filled up with mosquitoes, they heard that my body was free" (One of us cannot be wrong)I am familiar with Soyinka as the chronicler of various points of view and this his dialogue at night, with a cockroach is just one of many points of view, this time disguised / conveyed in not such straightforward poetry.Unfortunately, Kofi Swegbe Ignoramus read the explications and discussion that have surfaced in this thread so far, before reading the actual poem Conversation at Night with a Cockroach by Wole Soyinka.It is a difficult poemDo you identify the "I" - the " I murmured to their riven hearts:" with the murmurer, Wole Soyinka ?Is it a soliloquy?There's always a point of intersection , the confluence where poetry / point of view /propaganda /the personal appreciation of any given poetry meets, I am not happy with this sentence: "Much of the violence in Nigeria during the time Soyinka was writing was done in the name of lofty causes such as the preservation of Yoruba identity." Does history bear this out as the truth? I don't know, and tentatively, I don't think so. It is a mischievous sentence of insidious intent which must not be swallowed unawares , much as the subliminal messages in adverts are swallowed, mostly unawares. Somebody could please explain to those of us who do not understand the import of that sentence that the Yoruba - at whatever specific period of history or historical events/ incidents the poem is said to be alluding to, spilt blood for "the preservation of Yoruba identity."And not unexpectedly, trust Brer Biko Agozino ( like Samson Agonistes ) not to fail to seize the momentary opportunity standing not on shifting sands but on higher moral grounds, to engage in some more of the inter-tribal ( Igbo-Yoruba ) recriminations about that ancient genocidal claim and the longing for apology , maybe what the Saudis would call "blood money"/ reparations for the victims of Biafra secession .A recent survey in Sweden showed that on the whole old people are even worse than the younger folks when it comes to distinguishing between news and advertisements. It's another instance of innocent people falling victim to the authority of the printed word - sometime the misleading word, believed in as another Gospel truth inspired by the inerrant AlmightyA little incongruous to have a hapless cockroach sharing some of the attributes of Ogun , unless it could be said, so are we all, cockroaches who"peep about,To find ourselves dishonourable graves" -even given that all are mortal and that some of mankind's deities have been fleshed out with human qualities, so that we may better understand themBut what does Kofi Ignoramus know about cockroaches , anyway, apart from this Krio proverb that , " When kakroach wan die ee kin go fen palmain bottle " ( When the cockroach wants to commit suicide it goes looking for a bottle of palm oil in which to drown itself) and that fateful evening Gaddafi's son Saif Gaddafi using the same inauspicious term "cockroaches" and "rats" to describe the alleged troublemakers that they were going to wipe out in Benghazi ( according to the al-Jazeera translation of his venomous Arabic ) causing some reaction from concerned NATO quarters : they swung into action overnight, established some no fly zones, with the effects of that initial move to be seen up to this very day.
On Thursday, 29 November 2018 17:27:12 UTC+1, Oluwatoyin Ade-Odutola wrote:"Conversation at Night with a Cockroach"
Karen Van Ness '92 (English 32, Spring 1990)
Soyinka discusses the problem of stopping violence in his poem "Conversation at Night with a Cockroach." The situation in Nigeria probably influenced this theme. The Nigerian Civil War, the election of 1965, and following riots, and the general corruption and violence that had plagued Nigerian politics all fit into the theme discussed in the poem. Soyinka structures the poem by means of a dialogue between a man and a cockroach. He gives the human speaker a voice representing his own; the speaker's statements can be assumed to be Soyinka's. The cockroach speaks for the encouragers of violence, it tells humanity to kill for profit and to continue the violence by using lies and treachery. The cockroach replies to the man's protest that too many have died by saying:I murmured to their riven hearts:
Yet blood must flow, a living flood
Bravely guarded, boldly splitMuch of the violence in Nigeria during the time Soyinka was writing was done in the name of lofty causes such as the preservation of Yoruba identity. The cockroach's argument represents these rationalizations for continuing violence. Soyinka finds these words "stale deception, Blasphemer's consolation." Soyinka suggests a force worse than anything humans could produce plagues his nation, thus he uses cockroaches to symbolize this evil. The human speaker claims "Not human attributes were these/that fell upon us". Both the man and the cockroach are aware that the violence is unstoppable due to the cockroach's actions and man's weaknesses. The poem opens with the man addressing the cockroach and lamenting the fact that all of his people's plans for peace have been ruined by the cockroach. The cockroach acknowledges its fault and laughs at the useless attempts by the humans to cleanse their land.Half-way up your grove of union
We watched you stumble-mere men
Lose footing on the peaks of deities.Man has given into and joined with evil, according to Soyinka. Although the human speaker condemns the cockroach's falseness, apparently many others have believed in it. A third voice which seems to be an impartial narrator enters the poem and describesA round table, board
Of the new abiding-man, ghoul, Cockroach,
Jackal and broods of vile crossbreedings
Broke bread to a loud veneration
Of awe-filled creatures of the wild.
Sat to a feast of love-our pulsing hearts!Soyinka's picturing of man at a love feast with cockroaches and ghouls shows his belief that man has compromised with evil, forming an unnatural, frightening alliance. After witnessing the corruption of the rulers and the nightmares of the violence in Nigeria, it might well have seemed as if man had aligned with some unnatural force.Throughout the poem, Soyinka uses imagery and symbolism to express his ideas and emotions. In addition to the symbols of the image, Soyinka uses images of the land to help establish the ideas in the poem. The human speaker describes the land asNo air, no earth, no loves or death
Only the brittle sky in harmattan
And in due season, rain to waken the shurb
A hailstone herald to the rouse
Of hills, echoes in canyons, pastures
In the palm of ranges, moss horizons
On distant ridges, anthill spires for milestones.This image brings out the desolation of the land as well as the mindset of its inhabitants. For example, the phrase "anthill spires for milestones" shows both the flat emptiness of the land and suggests that anthills may be made mentally into milestones. The poems ends when the cockroachSpread its wings in a feeble sun
And rasped his saw-teeth. A song
Of triumph rose on the deadened air
A feeler probed the awful silence,
Withdrew in foreknowing contentment
All was well. All was even
As it was in the beginningThe most prevalent symbol in "Conversation at Night With a Cockroach", is of course, the cockroach. At once it brings up feelings of subversion, obstinate survival, and disgust, all of which are appropriate associations for the evil that it represents. Fire, another important symbol in the poem, stands for the attempt by mankind to purge the land of evil. The human speaker claimsIn that year's crucible we sought
To force impurities in nation weal
Belly-up, heat-drawn by fires
Of truth.The crucible may stand for the elections of 1965, the first free elections held in Nigeria in several years, or it may stand for the combined attempts to purify Nigeria. The cockroach picks up on this symbolism and statesYou lit the fires, you and saw
Your dawn of dawning yield
To our noon of darknessThe election failed to halt the corrupt practices of the ruling party and ended in riots that were to develope into the Biafran War. One of the most striking symbols in the poem is "a mine/ Of gold-filling the teeth of death". This image refers to the perpetuating of violence for personal gain by Nigerian leaders.Thus Soyinka's poem "Conversation at Night With a Cockroach" paints a bleak picture for mankind. Soyinka finds the actions of mankind to be worthy of cockroaches, not men. The fact that the conversation is at night as suggested by the title furthers the idea that humanity is lost in darkness. Soyinka shows no solution to the problems he presents, probally because he had seen the same cycles of violence repeated over and over again. He sums up his resignation to disaster in the prayer of the men in the poem: "May Heaven comfort you;/ On earth, our fears must teach us silence."On Thursday, November 29, 2018, 9:59:22 AM EST, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@ googlegroups.com> wrote:Strange to know that, instead of writing a rejoinder, some leftists who suffered from what Lenin diagnosed as an infantile disorder wanted to beat up Comrade Eskor for challenging them to go beyond armchair leftwing communism and engage in the national democratic revolution.Yet no leftists threatened to beat up the military dictators for suspending the constitution and ruling by decree. Some even rallied behind the military during the genocide against the Igbo under the petty bourgeois ideology of national defencism.Soyinka said it best in his dialogue with the Cockroach poem which ended when the left wing and the right wing of the Cockroach spread to carry the pest away.--Biko
On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 5:07 AM, Chido Onumah<con...@hotmail.com> wrote:--
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