<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/em>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. <\/em>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. <\/p>\n “hey, how na; how are you? I remember chuckling at that one. <\/p>\n “oniyeye!, I laughed. ‘God for short’! ”<\/p>\n And you grinned mischievously.<\/p>\n “I love your poem – whats the title again” 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Talking of war, Godwin, you were bad once. You actually went to war alongside UI students against the Ibadan Polyethnic students, who dared to destroy some faculty property located far from campus centre at the border between both schools. I know you did it because property belonging to innocent faculty were targeted. That afternoon, I think we were in the SUB drinking and discussing this and that. The noise about the now two-day disagreement between students of both schools was heated. You excused yourself and disappeared. I did not see you till the next day when you came to the SUB and sat there innocently chugging beer when one student came in, saw you and turned in admiration to hail you as “commander”! The previous night, he had lain in the underbrush by your side when the Polytechnic students rushed and breached the border gates and were upon you all. He recalled how you had calmed him and asked him to lie low like an envelope under the darkness in the undergrowth till the wave passed. This was when Duke chastised you for such dangerous escapade and warned you he never wanted to hear that you ever partook in any student bickering again!<\/p>\n I am afraid we do not keep secrets in these outer-worldly realms and I must say this. Your poverty as a student was legendary! Of course you made up for it in intellectual wealth. But I remember having to call you aside from Alhaji’s Bar ever so often and secretly press a 100 Naira note into your hands, while apologising that I knew it was small fare given the prices of goods and also that it was hardly enough to stretch out through the hungry semester. Moreover, my own salary as a lecturer was not just mine but always shared out. But you were a good sport as you ‘oh’-ed in surprise like a fish gasping for embarrassed air. Anyhow, you would intone that you could manage what I considered a paltry hundred-er and supplement it – as you had a good hustle editing manuscripts for BookKraft and Kraft Books, as well as Heinemann Publishers. And you wrote the occasional TV script. All that while being a hardworking student. I was not even sure if you were hardworking; I just knew that you got your papers in and seemed to progress easily through your studies. I think you took only one creative writing class with me in the English department. Otherwise your lectures were on the other side of the Faculty of Arts Quadrangle in the German department.<\/p>\n So, our relationship was informal, more or less that of fellow poets and tortured souls, whose political and existential sensitivity within the Thursday group intellectual circle was a kind of “social cement.” And whose irreverence and disregard for material things was a bafflement to those adjacent to the group – like my cousin Theo who was undertaking graduate studies in Economics. He loved to drop in intermittently at Alhaji’s bar to banter with us and make fun of us: “you these poets’! – in a manner of speaking, you these happily penniless poets! And there was Mike Diai, who worked in administration. He loved to sit with us and have a pint or two. He did not care for poetry and was impatient of any formal rigid intellectualism. He derided us endlessly for writing poetry only meant to ‘woo women and steal people’s girlfriends.’ He did not see the practical use or need for poetry in a tough economy. We humoured him, exchanged conspiratorial looks and laughed it off. Duke also worked in administration and was our beloved boom companion at the jolly table. He had no use for our poetry either and seemed to shake his head at us in disapproval before buying a round for everyone. There were a lot of people, scholars – both international and local; other writers from out-of-town, students, businessmen, who over the years were revolving shadows around the Thursday group’s intellectual table. As a matter of fact, it was an academic guest from the USA who first used the expression “tortured souls” to describe some members of the group. I promptly adopted it and used it liberally – especially to capture the hypersensitivity of these frail souls – like Chiedu Ezeanah, incredible master poet but scatter-head eccentric, who hides his powerful lyrics as a squirrel hides nuts and refuses to publish and disseminate to a larger world. I hope he has changed his ways. <\/p>\n I was talking about tough times back there. But somehow you financially clawed your way through the studies. You reminded me of an image in Eliot again. Somehow your existential struggles made me think of the desperation of the poet persona in “Prufrock” and imagined you being similar to that character, who wanted to be like “a pair of ragged claws \/ scuttling across the floors of silent seas. The seas in this case was the body of obstacles in front of you as you tried to wade your way towards Germany for further studies. I have never seen such long-suffering in one so frail! And I remember sitting with you at the SUB and ruefully advising that since you have decided on the path of exile, you cannot look back. <\/p>\n “You cannot put your hands to plow and look back” But then I did not realise that social media and telephony would explode around the world and draw in Nigeria – especially with the advent of the cell phone. MTN came into Nigeria from South Africa and universal communication became global. Years after you left, I got tired of a Nigerian system that limited research and intellectual material. Despite my great reluctance to leave the intellectual nurturing grounds of a UI that produced Woe Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, J.P. Clarke and a host of others, like Dambduzo Marechera, “I picked up my bag and left.” This is despite the fact that it was hard to tear myself from the nurture of an environment where I studied up to the PhD level and finally became a faculty member. The leave-taking seemed not to have ended for me because from South Africa I went to the extreme and left the planet entirely, finally going back to the source – from where I am now talking to you. I am sorry that I warned Remi Raji not to inform you of my imminent permanent departure because I knew that you, poet of the empathic steeped in the body and language of the emotive, would not be able to take it. I had to sneak away. Stay well Godwin; know that I love you as always. My regard to the boys wherever they have all scattered to; it seems to be a season of migrations. I am very much alive here and waiting for all of you to come home and have a drink with me here and talk celestial poetry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4058,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":103,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4706,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions\/4706"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n“I am fine”
\n“I beg, remind me of your name again”
\n“Godwin; ‘God’ for short!”<\/p>\n
\n“Song”
\n“yes. I like the appeal to the primordial in it.”<\/p>\n
\n
\nThe SUB was our unofficial watering hole. So respected was our space – which changed proprietorship several times but became “Alhaji’s Bar” – that even when UI male cult-member students belonging to different secret fraternities – the Pyrates Confraternity, Eiye, Buccaneers, Black Axe and so on – were on the rampage warring with each other for juvenile respectability and street credibility, they never ventured near our hallowed drinking place as we sat there in our own mental worlds as they warred outside all over the campus, while others students were in hiding in their hostels. We refused to ceed our own intellectual stomping ground and retire with tails between our legs for them to carry on their bloody gang fights. The rowdy crowd knew well enough to respect our hallowed poetic space. You would always tell me that it is because they saw us an intellectual equivalent and ally of the streets. We were completely anti-establishment and, egalitarian. You would note that I, for example, did not oppress students as a lecturer or wield the usual hierarchical oga-at -the-top mentality prevalent amongst some faculty. And as a group we did not see these troubled kids as hooligans even if they were anarchic against an oppressive government and society. They were the dark side of our bright table. On one occasion , some of these boys even ran into the SUB, only to stop by for a chug of beer at our jolly table before racing out to war. <\/p>\n
\n“I understand”
\n“And you have to keep writing; you no say that’s the only way we will be able to keep in touch – through our writing.”<\/p>\n