Harry Oludare Garuba

Harry and The Boys 

Yes. All my names are stretched out here in this byline – much “like a patient etherised upon the table” as T.S. Eliot would have it. “Etherised” – in this case, not because I am incapacitated by a surfeit of that romantic love that is the subject of Eliot’s Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock or that I am comatose due to the oblivion of sleep but because I am not physically here. I have gone to another place, to other dimensions. Disembodied. So, I have decided to inhabit you like a medium, Godwin, and type with your hands but speak in my own voice. You do know my voice very well since I am in your head. You know its timbre, and tremble; its measured nuance and halting cadence; you know how to intone, name, noun, pronounce and parrot my cigarette-piped, smoky syllables. I must warn you that I am going to ramble. It is hard to capture a whole rich life in one short conversation. So I will just let my thoughts roam. 

I will refer to you as Godwin; abeg no vex – I am just used to calling you by that – according to you –  ugly colonial name. You know as e be, ehn?  Of course, like most departed I am now stretched out thin as air from ear to ear, from earth to heaven upon a table that is the spirit, such that you cannot see me and I am not anymore physically amongst “the boys.” I become an ancestor in true animist fashion.  Henceforth, we can only commune in dreams. Chew seeds of alligator pepper and a bite of bitter kola nut, slug a mouthful of hot gin; do not swallow! Do not be like the swallow bird and digest but  blow the brew into the air; call me in a whisper: “Harry G!” And you will hear me whisper back to you in the language of tree foliages waving in the wind; spit it into the air and intone: “Harry G”, and you will see me in the winking of a sunbeam across your work table; smack your lips against the sharp taste of bitter kola nut swirling in a mouthful of hot burning gin: “Harry G”, and you will see me in the smile of a cat across your path; in the murmurings of flowing rivers or – bookworm that you are – you will see my face peering at you in the tiny script of printed lettering in a book; letters that will defy logic and gravity and jump off the page to suggest esoteric meanings to you. These are omens that you should prepare for me a corner of your room for my silent, wordless dawn visits where we will commune in the language of poets and continue those University of Ibadan Student Union Building intellectual beer-laced discussions… But without the beer. Here in these new bodiless realms, I can only feed the soul not the body. And if you look up at the dark night sky sometimes, you will see my soul in the form of a star winking and lighting up the winter or tropical night. 

But make man talk true; I did enjoy myself on earth, perhaps a bit too much. You know what I mean – the great intellectual company and camaraderie for example…I remember the first time I met you, Godwin. It was probably when I was in the process of gathering poems for the first anthology of its kind in Nigeria – a generation-defining volume that became the book, Voices from the Fringe.  This was in 1986/87 before the compendium itself came out. It is important to note that Odia Ofeimun doctored that book in his frenetic and insistent near-crowd-sourcing financial and organisational energies as the General Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors. He was the doctor and I, the midwife. Or well, the wife; he inseminated with project ideas and organisation, I sourced for submissions, edited and birthed the book. You were not yet a student of the University of Ibadan at the time. You sought me out I think because you had submitted your work for the forthcoming anthology, which became Voices From the Fringe. I was ensconced at one of the Bars in the Student Union Building (SUB) at the University of Ibadan (UI) campus as usual. Emma Oga and Eghosa Osaghae were with me, I think. And as usual we were having some refreshments and, great intellectual discussions; I was imbibing, drinking in the muses from the bottle. The Shakis flowed and the calabash in my stomach was open. It was a jolly table and an enlightened company. I cannot remember everything that we talked about really. But I  do recollect that I told you that I liked your poem, titled “Song,” so I was going to  include it in the forthcoming anthology. I would need a bio. It was a bright afternoon further sharpened by the buzz of shakis. But you were a beam of fluorescent light shooting through an already bright day. 

“hey, how na; how are you?
“I am fine”
“I beg, remind me of your name again”
“Godwin; ‘God’ for short!”

I remember chuckling at that one. 

“oniyeye!, I laughed. ‘God for short’! ”

And you grinned mischievously.

“I love your poem – whats the title again”
“Song”
“yes. I like the appeal to the primordial in it.”

Back then, I  had a feeling that you did not immediately intuit the indirect primordial import I was referring to in that simple short poem. This is because I could see you looking at me with surprise. But it was fine with me because historically writer and critic never really fully agree on the meaning of a text, anyway! This is why Alexander Pope in an “Essay on Criticism” chastises the critic in relationship to the writer: “Cavil you may but never criticise!” However and beyond obvious generalities, there are as many interpretations to a text as there are readers of that text; it is totally out of the writer’s hand, out of Alexander Pope’s writing hand… I was reading it as a critic, not as a poet – or perhaps as a poet-critic. But that work spoke about the “psyche [striking] up its serpent head.” I read unconscious  primordial instincts into that. Anyhow, I noted to you that there was an  avalanche of material submitted for the anthology and that in fact a lot of them were from first time never-heard-of names and even by much younger emerging poets. Surprisingly for such a mature project, It even included submitted work from two high school girls, one – at the time –  Nina (Chika) Uniqwe; and a classmate  of hers. Both were students at the Federal Government Girls College, Abuja.  You marvelled. Nina’s poems made it into the anthology, while her classmate’s did not. Nina is, of course, now the famous novelist, Chika Uniqwe. Her promise as a writer has flowered; my editorial instincts were right. 

I think shortly thereafter – after our first meeting, that is – no, actually that was three years after – you began to work at Spectrum Books in Ring Road, Ibadan, as an Editorial Assistant and made sorties into UI with your company’s chauffeured  book delivery Kombi bus on one errand or the other – usually to make photo copies of especially unwieldy manuscripts at the private secretarial pool that served UI’s student population. You would come and sit with me and the boys at the SUB, shoot breeze and then go back to work later. And you became an informal member of the Thursday group of poets at UI, sometimes coming from town to attend our poetry readings on beery Thursday evenings. And when in 1991 you decided to formally begin studies at UI in the German department as well as in English, you simply also formalised your relationship with the UI poetry club, alias  the “Thursday People.”  And so did you become a Thursday people yourself and properly came into my orbit and we circulated amongst a constellation of like-minded bookish but jolly writerly characters, either students or faculty, and sometimes, like me, writer-faculty, within the UI community.

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