The Example of Mandela
Amatoritsero Ede
“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him…” So proceeds Mark Anthony’s famous funeral oration in honour of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar who has just succumbed to a bloody palace coup. The speech is also a backhanded slap at the guilty conspirators, Caius Cassius and the brutish Marcus Brutus – both “honourable men” who, despite being politically ambitious regicides in this matter, ironically justify their murderous act by accusing the deceased of diseased ambition.
Although, unlike the fictional Caesar, Nelson Mandela escaped the political assassin’s dagger at the end and peacefully faded away in his sleep, his demise also inspired valediction as well as disguised malediction when his immortality is set against the corpse of those living, mostly sit-tight, corrupt or inept African leaders like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or Nigeria’s Goodluck Jonathan, who have the vision of maggots. That valedictory speech was given by a real life orator with skills equal to that of Mark Anthony – by no less a skilled public speaker than American president, Barack Obama. He gave, measure for measure, a high-tension Shakespearian delivery with all the appropriate crowd-cues and necessary rhetorical flourishes compared to Anthony’s.
The Place beneath Falling Stars
Shannon Joyce Prince
My grandmother stood differently after she saw the world end. Those who remember say before, my grandmother looked as though she were a fairy merely alit upon the earth who might be blown away by the next breeze. Only one foot would anchor her – the other seemed always to be drawing patterns in the dirt. Her fingers even fluttered a little as they hung at her sides as though the wind had the power to stir them.
But since then, she stands solidly in place, both feet flat against the ground, both hands at her hips, her head always raised; eyes watching the horizon. She looks to the distance then looks at me, looks off to the wayfaring sun then back at me, considers the quickening moon and studies my face. For sixteen years, I’ve grown up watching her gaze move fluidly from tender, when I’m its subject, to fiercely alert when she looks off into tomorrow.
An Anglo-Saxon Tale
Poet, Amatoritsero Ede in Conversation with Tom Howell, ‘recovering’ Lexicographer and writer of the Genre-Queer
Amatoritsero Ede: Tom, it is a pleasure to discuss your hilarious work, The Rude Story of English, and the vision behind it. How would you categorize this work’s genre? Creative nonfiction does not quite do it for me. Please, be elaborate.
Tom Howell: How generous of you to say, ‘be elaborate’! The story itself elaborates on the simple premise that English began one day. That’s directly opposed to how the history of English has been told to me by experts. They present the origins of this language as complex. The more sophisticated the expert, the more complex the origins are explained to be. My complaint is that such a complex start produces a very simple conclusion: there is no ‘story’ of English. The less expert the teller, the closer we get to a tale in the traditional sense. But even the most popular versions missed the mark, or so it seemed to me. I reasoned that a highly simplistic beginning to the tale would evolve into an answer that was complex and lifelike and, you know, more awesome. ‘Elaborating on a premise’ probably isn’t much use as a category, but maybe it gives a rough idea?
