Thursday 29 December 2011

The Quest: Genesis and before.

It was just a few metres now separating him from the gentle rise, the more reason Kate thought it weird that he should stop and refuse to approach it. Fine, the rise was bare and not what one should have hoped for, but there seemed to be no other way out, that's if the possibility of turning back is not considered.
Quietly she walked up and leveled up with him. When she was about two feet ahead she turned towards him and asked to know why he refused to proceed.
Saul looked long at her, his eyes feebly roaming from her hair to her dress then back to the rise and beyond. There were footsteps approaching from behind them, some stopping right behind, some running eagerly towards the rise, scaling it and disappearing behind.
"It's night here", was the only response she got from him. Of course, it is, but then not such a dark night. There is a light ahead beyond the rise, filtering through from time to time. The more reason we should scale the rise and approach the town. That's the only thing stopping us from..."
"No, that's not what stops of us", he cut in, his gaze still fixed on the hill in front.
Kate turned it over in her mind whether to move on and leave the strange man behind. But there was something about him that got her curious. She looked at him more closely now and managed to read his name tag in the darkness. Saul. He was wearing an old brown shirt with two or three of the buttons gone the way of time, a matching brown trouser ragged but rugged. His shoes too were brown, and so was the hat hanging over his back on a thin black string around the neck.
"What do you mean, that's not what stops us?" She said as she frisked through a hand bag she was carrying. She brought out a water bottle which she promptly downed. With a gurgling sound she asked if he minded sitting down awhile. He said no, she might sit but that would be a mistake.
"I really could use some company on the way, but you apparently are determined to remain in your frozen stance... Alone."
Saul looked at her, again from hair to dress to shoe. "Who talked you into the quest?"
"What do you mean?" She replaced the bottle inside the bag, and produced a handkerchief to wipe the invisible sweat on her face and neck. "What are you talking about?"
"You know." Saul fell silent again, and with the same grave demeanor turned around to look at the other quest seekers settling down all around them. Some group of seekers not too far away were apparently holding a meeting with a massive-looking man speaking to the rest-about 10 in all. He was wearing the same brown outfit like Saul, and like the rest of the people listening to him. He, however, seemed to have found away to make the wretched clothing bearable, even presentable. Kate and Saul were too far to hear what he was saying or to explain why his audience would suddenly stand up, run to the gentle rise and back to him without actually scaling it. After about twenty minutes of watching without a word from either of the two seekers, Kate spoke up contemplatively,
"I do not see why this gentle rise should prevent anyone from moving on."
"Neither did I", was his response.
"But why should you be prevented?"
"By this rise?" He asked pointing feebly at the bare-topped hill, about three metres high with well-trodden path on its gently rising side. "Not so, this rise has never prevented me."
She decided she would fair much better to proceed on the quest, and so she bid him farewell hoping that he would someday have enough strength to join her in the town. With that she took her leave.
Saul watched her walk decidedly towards the rise as someone abundantly prepared to overcome any invisible challenge the rise must be throwing at the other seekers. Then, with a loud voice, he called after her after she had started climbing,"You were also deceived! We all were! But never be deceived to sit on the way...rest if you must, but that standing!"
She momentarily stopped to listen to his words after which she continued on the quest. The people sitting around looked at him with irritation,how so unmannered he was.

Wednesday 7 September 2011

Nigeria, our house of anaesthesia.

My first instinct should have been to commend your style of writing, but for fear that I might by so doing triviliase the grave issues your writing raised I shall steer clear of praising your writing for the time being. And now to the title, a few years ago I might have declared how unnecessarily pessimistic your title was. Or I might have feigned clueless-ness and asked you for what you in your opinion thought the way out was. But now I believe we all are past such attitude of anaesthesia. We all know what should be done, no one needs a doctoral degree to figure that out.
The ills of our society have never at any time defied defining, which also means we have all along been aware of what should be done ...for instance to make living a little less degrading and a little more human. We simply are not doing it. As you rightly pointed out each man does everything for himself and his family. He digs himself a well, he fills the 'hell' connecting his homestead to the remaining slum of a society to make it more motorable for his 4th-hand car, he is the vigilante of his street,... in short he is the remainder of the semblance of government in his own experience. At the head in the Rocks (Aso) the lucky opportunists run a different kind of family business.
But we all know what is right, what is deserving of our humanity however vague that sense of
our basic basic human and national right is. But then our religions teach us to accept what the
government we have as having divine support. We pray for them for wisdom and health and they
busy themselves digging private wells into the remainder of our resources. Religions again tell
us our prayers aren't enough, we should include a little bit of fasting. So the poor man live his life fasting (his national service) and the politician his feasting (his national service???) with cries and mournings and deaths trailing the path of his action and inaction. It's a way of life our fathers got used to. The way of life we inherited. The way of living we consider normal.
But until the religious preachers start preaching the right side of the holy books we as citizens of this raped nation will keep believing the right way to be patriotic is by praising the loot-fattened public officers/politicians and by granting them right of way to the future of our children. And why do I keep mentioning religion? Anyone who grew up in Nigeria will immediately understand how this foundation is the spring of our national life. How our sense of rightness has been redefined inside our religious palaces. How the harbinger of our woes receive endorsement inside our religious palaces, and we the congregation celebrate them as chosen of God to lead us into the promise land. How the 'chosen of God' rise up from the altar of approval, climb the Rock of Aso, loot and loot, and sleep and sleep, while the preachers children and the congregation of the children of Nigeria get robbed, and raped, and murdered first in their fatherland, then everywhere across the globe... And the chosen of God continue unhindered. After he has run down the economy he again returns to the altar of approval and again we clap and raise him a prayer of approval. For he is chosen of God.
Oh Nigerians, who has bewitched us!
The foundation is falling in several places. We have inherited a culture of indolence that breeds corruption. The students progress on the back of 'orijo', the civil servants spend the working hours sleeping, or making small talks, a doctor leaves a pack of gauze inside mummy Akin's stomach, the policeman robs under the mid-day Sun at gunpoint collecting N20 from the driver who also volunteers a grin and a joke to entertain the robber, the IG sits on his stomach pathologically extending. "Up NEPA", adults rejoiced as kids, power has been restored for 7 hours in a week and at the end of the month the toiling Nigeria scavenges every nook to pay for the electricity he never used.
At the end of 4 years, the ruler that divides us is again brought out from behind our collective amnesia and dusted... We must vote the man from my part of the country into office regardless of the fact that he doesn't even qualify to run his own family. I wouldn't entrust my pet into his hands to manage (had a pet) for he has no clue how to manage anything. But he's my man and that settles it. At the end of 4 years the Churches and Mosques again sing their fast that God will send a savior (as long he's from my tribe, he's a saviour, rigging or not)...
Who has bewitched us!
Until we make the matters of our land our individual priority we are only joking. It is sad but true, that we have exactly the leaders we deserve. Democracy was never meant to function outside the active participation of the citizens. In our model of democracy, the citizens sleep and pray that God we catch the thieves that we in the first place invited to rob us.

I really wish more people we respond like you have done, Abiola, to these problems and say it's
NOW enough.

Response to the post by Abiola Olaifa at http://www.cp-africa.com/2011/08/09/opinion-i-give-up-on-nigeria-part-1/

Saturday 13 August 2011

Death from the podium

On Madison Street a girl hugs the street lamp
On Wiseher Street her light dies from the pastor's blowing
A lectern, a thick lectern, a rich lectern
Jesus' voice prisoned inside the chained tome.
Psychology and philosophy strut on a brightly lit podium,
They sing and clap and make a celebration out of Christ

Woe is me, Jesus raised me and my pastor killed me!

On Madison Street our pastor commissions a revival
On Wiseher Street a hall is decorated with clapping, with whistling
He took the voice of Christ and parades in costly ties and a vacant heart
Winged on jets and choppers and the hunger of a fasting Mary:

Tithe, oh tithe, a thousandfold tithe!
God is working and the bowls are filling!

But
Jesus bleeds on inside the ancient tome watching
Mary clap to the crash of her lamp and the silence of her murdered light
To the growth of her penury, and the
Rising cost of her pastor's ties.

in love he died

He scoops and lifts up his handful of vanity
A knee bends, petals wither under Katherina's table
Candies and a box of pain
Solitude, a stifling hug
Solitude of a dancing moth
Evenings thin as folly thickens on the he-brow

Passion crawls down the lifted hand
His heart grows weak, his frame ill
The pate,
His pate quivers as a sparrow beneath a threatening sky
Plastic roses and chocolates and wines,
Pizza, ice-cream - vanilla flavoured,
Stroll on the beach, hands locked, jaws locked
More ice-cream, more plastic, more wines
His pate heats up with pulsing febrility
Kathrina's cavern grumbles loudly from stranded moths
More plastic, more wines, more folly!
And a ring.

A ring?

Blood crawls down his frozen hand
The knee rises from the finished grave
Candies and a box of pain
Astride the distance she watches with her stuffed moths
In his hands rests a remainder of vanity and
love.

Saturday 28 May 2011

Lunchtime Dilemma-Part 3

"Now there was this Croatian lady that came across one of her dead friends on the way to the supermarket one sunny afternoon". Tim noticed the frantic clatter of cutleries against the plates had stopped. Right, it worked again, it always does. Start a story with an impossible concept and you get your audience quiet. Except that some of them are refining some dangerous posers in their minds.
He looked at Claire and hadn't she been her supervisor he would have been forced to manually rearrange her face and make her look less serious. Yeah, there it is, I said it-anyways in my mind. She frightens me when she's that serious...
"Now this dead friend was sitting on one of those weather-beaten benches erected beside the roads for, well I suppose, retirees...when Miss Croat came along..."
"Who's that?"
"Who's who?" He looked at Ohrft for a minute pretending he didn't understand why they wouldn't find it self-explanatory to know who Miss Croat was. Of course, they ought to know, he had only mentioned two characters in his story, only one of which happened to be a lady. It's really tiring how a scientist's mind works needing to explicitly declare all variables.
"That's the Croatian lady, the friend of the dead guy who was waiting there on that weather-beaten seat that I will hence refer to as WBS. Okay?...Super"
"You could also say, 'Genau'", everyone looked up to tie a face to the self-announcing voice. Everyone, of course except Claire who happened to have lived for the past few months under the overwhelming field of that voice, Tim later gathered. And except, Lee who had quickly built a complex algorithm for handling that voice consisting of quickly stuffing whatever remained on his plate, looking for the salt and listening to his teeth slowly grind the complaint of the content of his mouth into subjection... And except Steffen who simply ignored the voice, or then exploited it on the very few occasions when silence became more unbearable than the voice.
Well then Tim was the everyone.
"Pardon!"
"Super could have genau replace it". He sat down heavily on the cringing chair, looked around for salt which he promptly shook without looking on his fries but most of which ended on the food tray. "And actually the S is not S, it's a fat S, to get it right I first swallow the American S, and then replace it a dampened Z..."
Steffen looked up briefly from his battle with a crusty pizza and injected, "American Z". Then a returned to his war, scratching and cutting and digging into the soft inside of his lunch-crust leaving the newcomer to sustain the talks.
"Yeah, American Z which in actual fact is different from the German Z. The Germans always keep a T somewhere in the side of their mouth when saying a Z, which for an American is really annoying"
"But technically you're not an American and your getting annoyed with a German Z is inappropriate" That was Ohrft looking all benign and desperate to have an unyielding voice stuffed, permanently, this time.
"Yes, well...well, you could... but really.." That was the non-American American stuttering.
"Also, English as a language inherited its substance from Deutsch," Steffen again turned his back on the battle of his plate to fan this ember of...well, Tim had no word to describe that yet. "And, if there should be any annoyance it should be a right of the Germans at how the English have so badly altered the pure form..."
"American, not English" That was Tim's nameless newcomer. Should he still be called newcomer seeing he already spoke more than all the people he met at the table. Tim at first had expected someone introducing him but now he dreaded it. Perhaps that could be postponed till when he was ready to leave the office and an unspeaking eve would resuscitate him ahead of the second day.
"What!" Steffen.
"You had referred to English and I corrected you that it's American" Nameless suddenly buried his gaze inside the fries he was stirring furiously as the little salt particles that gained footing jumped off the edge of the dish scared by his fury. But he needn't stay buried inside the fries as a malignant Steffen soon gave way to an indifferent one saying no more than a psst before returning to the battle closer to his stomach. He admitted his surrender there, pushed the plate away, scratched something onto his PDA and then sat back, smiled under this glasses at Claire who appeared torn between being amused at the development and being left alone to enjoy the pleasant meal.
"He didn't allow you complete the story of Miss Croat," She was trying to return Tim to the story but he thought Mr Nameless had just killed the excitable part of everyone's senses so it's better to wrap it up in a sentence.
"Actually, she got killed just minutes later on a plate of fries". It's also not bad to borrow some smiles in the present imbroglio. The amusement went swiftly round the table, got to Nameless seat and turned back with a frown.
"American fries." Steffen.
The amusement again went around the table and again got its butt kicked back at the dish of fries. So Tim took him back in into his breast pocket.
"And actually that's correct," Nameless again."Fries is American"
On hearing that every stood up deciding to save that line of argument for the next lunch but allow what's left of digestion that their systems could yet perform.