Thursday 21 April 2022

Lamentations by Funmilayo Omoniyi

Lamentations

Honesty is an essential quality 
But oh, what a rare commodity
In my community!

Violence, I'm told, is vice,
But it is as common as rice
In my community!

Wisdom is for the don,
But every dunce,
Lays claim to it
In my community!

Our value system,
Has gone topsy-turvy,
The good is seen as bad
And the bad, good
In my community!

The foolish is wise,
And the wise, foolish.
The honest is poor
And the poor, dishonest
In my community!

Funmilayo Omoniyi was a principal in one of the secondary schools I'm Lagos, Nigeria. She has a Master's Degree in Education. Her teaching subjects are English and French languages. She loves children and she is concerned about the deplorable moral tone of the younger generation.

Saturday 9 April 2022

The Cry Of Orgasm by Esiaba Irobi


The Cry Of Orgasm

She was a Mauritius woman
who sold spicy grocery at Leeds
open market and spoke demotic English
even on the phone that evening
she told me to come over for a chat.
I won't tell you exactly where but
just know it was somewhere in Headingly.

The lights were on to show me the window
of her house and her door. On all fours,
furs erect, like a Yorkshire cat starved
of pudding for two years, I crept in.
The door purred, closed quietly
so as not to wake the neighbours.

She said her husband had a timetable
for beating her, so they were now separated.
We watched Ruby Wax on the coloured 
TV for three minutes then went upstairs,
her blue sleeping gown spiralling behind her
like my lust. Up there, in that grey bedroom,

It was sweet, it was swell, it was juicy;
la cr�me de la cr�me, her olive thighs
squeezing honey on my ever-green cucumber
and, inch-by-inch, devouring it, enjoying it,
relishing it. Dear Reader, I won't tell you a lie,
it was sweet, I lay there, on my back, furs erect,
pawing the air, a lucky cat dissolving in ecstasy,
crystals of sugar forming in my mouth, my brain,

my heart. But just as the tremors were coming,
the tremors of our earthquake, memories
of her husband rippled through her mind, and,
suddenly, like an olive leaf, she wilted.
Instead of a cry of orgasm, she swallowed
and sighed; her eyes scanning the room and 
windows  with fear. The fear got into me too
as she climbed off like a disheartened jockey
who had failed to win the prize at the races

While I lay there, an empty saddle, with no foot
In the stirrup and no kick at the side to spur me on.
Since that day, the condom of our love
Has been broken. And now when I go to the market
I avoid her stall of spices and go to another
Laden with peaches and fresh strawberries
All of which are red and also very sweet.


� 2002 Esiaba Irobi
Esiaba Irobi - a poet, playwright, actor and scholar was born in the Republic of Biafra on October 1, 1960, and lived in in exile in Nigeria, Britain, United States and Germany where he passed away on May 3, 2010. He studied at the Universities of Nigeria, Sheffield and Leeds, and held a B.A. in English/Drama, M.A. Comparative Literature, M.A. Film/Theatre, and PhD in Theatre Studies. In 1992 his play, Cemetery Road won the prestigious World Drama Trust Award. His books include Nwokedi, The Colour of Rusting Gold, Cotyledons, Hangmen Also Die, and Why I don't Like Philip Larkin and Other Poems. He leaves behind a wife, Uloaku and a son, Nnamdi.

Arboreal by Esiaba Irobi

Arboreal

(for Obi Maduakor)

 

                                                Master,

It is only the pigeon who has left the loft

and journeyed forth and has been brained

and bloodied in wing, beak and claw, who

returns to recite anew the myth of the land

 

I am winging homewards now.

 

The homing pigeon is winging homewards

now. I am nosing homewards now.

Wending southwards towards the equator.

From the North! But the landscape

has changed.  The pools of water have dried up.

 

And from these heights, even when

I bank low like a jetfighting plane

scraping the leaves on the tree tops

avoiding the jagged edges of the mountain tops

I cannot tell the landmarks anymore.

I cannot see the milestones anymore.

Cannot see the tarmac or the anthills.

 

The trees we planted, the branches

wherein we nested to be nearer to the sun

have been caterpillared; bulldozed

by the beasts, trodden under by the cloven hooves

of donkeys and camels and lame horses…

 

Once more I have to live in a church,

under the ceiling of an undertaker.

Once more I have to live in the village council hall

Under the roof of a thief and sorcerer

Where are the landmarks, the crossroads,

Where we used to wing rightwards

To the farms to share the final cornseeds

From the harvest with ants and weaverbirds.

 

Where are the little pools of water

In whose liquid mirrors we could see ourselves

In flight, diving homewards with glee

Feeling the strength in numbers, undaunted

By the smoke and cannon balls they are firing

Near the village square to celebrate the death

Of a thief who was christened and crowned a chief.

 

There are no more streams I hear

To drink from after the feast of grubs

And worms. The earth has crusted over

They tell me, and the sunbaked mud

Speaks like a traitor eager to trap my claws

In its fissures concealing the dirt, if I land.

 

There is, as I understand it now,

No rest for the wicked in this country

And its polluted provinces. So I am turning back

To where I came from, North, to find a nest

Somewhere on the sixth floor of a building

Along Broadway in New York City,

And wait till it is safe to travel South again.

 

Master, I am winging Northwards now!

But I shall return. Yes I will return

When the nsa-nsa smiles again and the cockerel

Begins to crow at dawn again. Meanwhile,

I nest here sharpening my tool in this workshed

You helped build, knowing, like all exiles, that:

 

It is only the pigeon who has left the loft

and journeyed forth, and has been brained,

And bloodied in wing, beak and claw,

Who returns, to recite anew the myth of the land.

 



Esiaba Irobi - a poet, playwright, actor and scholar was born in the Republic of Biafra on October 1, 1960, and lived in in exile in Nigeria, Britain, United States and Germany where he passed away on May 3, 2010. He studied at the Universities of Nigeria, Sheffield and Leeds, and held a B.A. in English/Drama, M.A. Comparative Literature, M.A. Film/Theatre, and PhD in Theatre Studies. In 1992 his play, Cemetery Road won the prestigious World Drama Trust Award. His books include Nwokedi, The Colour of Rusting Gold, Cotyledons, Hangmen Also Die, and Why I don't Like Philip Larkin and Other Poems. He leaves behind a wife, Uloaku and a son, Nnamdi.

Laura by Esiaba Irobi

Laura
(For Laura Posta
 

May the future forgive me, Laura,

for what happened to our love.

 

I am holding its bleeding carcass

in my hands as I intone this elegy

 

in an evening of rotting rose petals

and dead flowers. Like the drystalks

 

of the 'Orphan's hair', that rare plant

whose leaves you plucked and gave

 

to me on the banks of the Danube. I have

preserved, in the vase of my memory,

 

the stanzas of the love songs you taught me

in Budapest, on the banks of the Danube.

 

Tavaszi szel vizet araszt, Viragom viragom

Minden madar farsat valaszt, Viragom viragom...

 

Forgive me, Laura. My Hungarian love, forgive me,

you who could speak the five languages of love

fluently, forgive me. It was my fault. The phone

calls I never made. The cards I should have sent.

Letters I did not reply in time. The silences. How sad.

How very sad. How still sad after all these moons

and the eclipse of the sun we swore would never set.

 

O! if only I could reverse the rotation of this confused

universe or rewind the video tape of our love, erase

the tracks of my betrayal, and replay, as I keep

replaying, again and again, the track, "Laura"

by Charlie Parker on this CD I bought in that cinema

shop in Budapest on that night we missed the film

and dined instead in that fake Indian restaurant

on what street now, perhaps we could,

like deciduous trees, begin again:

 

Hat en immar kit valasszak, Viragom viragom

Te engemet en tegedet, Viragom viragom

 

But it is too late now. Too too late. As you wrote in

your final card, 'The Titanic has sunk!' and forever.

 

Forgive me, Laura. Someday I will learn to love

with the steadfastness of the stone, not the wind.

Forgive me.

 



Esiaba Irobi - a poet, playwright, actor and scholar was born in the Republic of Biafra on October 1, 1960, and lived in in exile in Nigeria, Britain, United States and Germany where he passed away on May 3, 2010. He studied at the Universities of Nigeria, Sheffield and Leeds, and held a B.A. in English/Drama, M.A. Comparative Literature, M.A. Film/Theatre, and PhD in Theatre Studies. In 1992 his play, Cemetery Road won the prestigious World Drama Trust Award. His books include Nwokedi, The Colour of Rusting Gold, Cotyledons, Hangmen Also Die, and Why I don't Like Philip Larkin and Other Poems. He leaves behind a wife, Uloaku and a son, Nnamdi.

Where Is Our Government? by Niyi Osundare

(From a survivor of the Abuja-Kaduna Train bomb; Mon., March 28, 2022)


Too many ills do a nation kill  

     Ills just as many as the corpses

That clutter every gutter

     Of our callously mis-governed country


 

The roads are slaughter slabs

     The rails only take us on terminal journeys

Every coach is a waiting coffin

     The nation’s graveyards puke from unspeakable excess


 

“Bandits”, “terrorists”: a tardy government

     Plays name-games while criminals 

Rampage without restraint

     Different name, same Nemesis


 

What do you call a nation

     Where food is scarce

And peace is scarcer; where 

     Life sells at a thousand for one kobo?


 

Bandits raid the homestead

     Bandits raid the streets

Bandits raid the schools

     Bandits raid the temples


 

Bandits rack army barracks

     Bandits pummel police stations. . . .

Our government fled long ago

     Without leaving a forwarding address



Niyi Osundare


Niyi Osundare was born in 1947 in Ikere-Ekiti, Nigeria. He is a prolific writer and highly valued literary critic. In December 2014, Osundare was awarded the Nigerian National Merit Award (NNMA) for academic excellence.

Monday 4 April 2022

Next Door by Uche Nduka

Next Door (For Esiaba Irobi)


like pageant

like cheerfulness

and wantonness


                         every kind of way

                         of overdoing it

                         pleases us


enticements of utterance

everything but arrival


                         perplexity devouring

                         our retinue

no interlude,no vestige of a fringe

                                 **


to this sacrifice

you bring mirth and pigment

to this shadow

you bring a scythe

a bristling hulk

                   is what you owe gravity


A Nigerian by birth, Uche Nduka migrated via Germany (where he taught Literature at the University of Bremen) to New York where he has  lived since 2007. His books include Eel on Reef (Akashic Books, New York, 2007); Heart's Field (Yeti Press, Bremen, 2005); If Only the Night(

Seven Stations of The Cross by Olu Oguibe

Seven Stations of The Cross

(For Esiaba Irobi)

                              



From Leeds to Liverpool,

Liverpool to London,

London to New York,

New York to Towson,

Towson to Athens;

The beaconer takes his bow in Berlin
And the exile becomes Myth:

Seven stations of the Cross.

I leave to live, said he
I exit to exist

Olu Oguibe is Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Connecticut and Associate Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the same university. His books include: Uzo Egonu: An African Artist in the West(1995) and The Culture Game(2004). He is also an award-winning poet and occasional electronic music composer.

 

Helen, Not of Troy by Esiaba Irobi


Helen, Not of Troy
    (For Helen
 

When we met, suddenly, in the School Office,

that evening, after winning the research fellowships,

our over-activated brains fizzling with dreams

and illusions of becoming great scholars,

you were dressed in shorts and black stockings,

a white blouse, rings on your fingers, but no lipstick on,

how could we have known that as we jaw-jawed

about teaching in Russia and holidays in Hungary,

 

Nigeria or Ghana, that I was undressing you mentally,

inch by inch, from crown to toe, peeling your dress

with my mind, your skin, with my tongue, and with my

teeth, the buttons of your blouse? I imagined,

with a palpitating heart, and as things popped out

or simply exploded, how we could start our mornings,

if we lived together: Bakhtin as foreplay, Althusser

as main course, and Derrida as dessert.

Recalling your picture on the glassed board,

in the corridor, your lipstick bold and strong, your excited

mouth nearly open, the genital echo of your red lips

beckoning like Susannah Moore's platform shoes - as

Germaine Greer, gifted scholar of sexual semiotics, read

it from a Barthesian perspective. I felt spring stirring

in my groin. Am I coming on too strong?

 

Mesmerised and bewitched by that fresh painting

on my mind, by the oil's resinous and intoxicating scent

on the cream-coloured canvas, I followed you like a fool,

down Rodney Street, turned right at the post office

down Bold Street then turned away into Pilgrim Street,

as you asked me, rather foolishly, I now think:

'Have you been walking just to have some fresh air?'

 

Now, Helen, you know why I walked, keeping up

the elliptic conversation, thinking of your clever

intellect and the ripe mango hidden somewhere

between your thighs waiting to be squeezed

and tongued by my sunlight.

 

Some day, Helen, if you are

lucky, you will see my tiger

tiger burning brightly into Troy

and you will giggle with joy.

 


Esiaba Irobi - a poet, playwright, actor and scholar was born in the Republic of Biafra on October 1, 1960, and lived in in exile in Nigeria, Britain, United States and Germany where he passed away on May 3, 2010. He studied at the Universities of Nigeria, Sheffield and Leeds, and held a B.A. in English/Drama, M.A. Comparative Literature, M.A. Film/Theatre, and PhD in Theatre Studies. In 1992 his play, Cemetery Road won the prestigious World Drama Trust Award. His books include Nwokedi, The Colour of Rusting Gold, Cotyledons, Hangmen Also Die, and Why I don't Like Philip Larkin and Other Poems. He leaves behind a wife, Uloaku and a son, Nnamdi.

Yale by Esiaba Irobi


Yale

(for Fanny Singer)

 

I keep thinking about you.

Those eyes. Those wrists

twirled in the halflight

of the Union league Cafe

like fine calligraphy.

That intellect. Fierce,

in its desire for life,

like red wine on Chapel Street.

Those breasts. Peeping like

Hellenic masterpieces at the dumb,

pretentious, museum crowd,

forever fixated on free food.

 

Fanny, I dreamt last night

that we were somewhere in Paris,

near the Seine, holding hands

like two statuettes come to life,

learning the geography of love

in Hemingway's moveable feast,

along Avenue Montague, amidst

the fake art shops and ceramic

joys of a decrepit art world.

(Have you seen the video:

"Who the Fuck is Jackson Pollock?)

 

There was jazz music in the air -

Sur Les Quais Du Vieux Paris by Guy

Lafette - I think, we were kissing,

Then I woke up in Norwich, Vermont

And remembered I had to attend

the opening of an art exhibition

at the Hood Museum in Dartmouth College

New Hampshire. It was raining.

Leaves of all colours were falling.

 

So, I crossed the Connecticut River

only in my mind, just sat there

on my bed in the loft of 90 Huntley Street

ruminating about you, listening

to the leaves and raindrops dancing

on the tiles above, wishing you

were there in my arms, your head on my chest,

your hair on my breast, your soft,

eloquent, voice pouring your love

and other sweet nothings into my ears

like a slow obstinate honey.


Esiaba Irobi - a poet, playwright, actor and scholar was born in the Republic of Biafra on October 1, 1960, and lived in in exile in Nigeria, Britain, United States and Germany where he passed away on May 3, 2010. He studied at the Universities of Nigeria, Sheffield and Leeds, and held a B.A. in English/Drama, M.A. Comparative Literature, M.A. Film/Theatre, and PhD in Theatre Studies. In 1992 his play, Cemetery Road won the prestigious World Drama Trust Award. His books include Nwokedi, The Colour of Rusting Gold, Cotyledons, Hangmen Also Die, and Why I don't Like Philip Larkin and Other Poems. He leaves behind a wife, Uloaku and a son, Nnamdi.

The Kingdom of the Mad by Esiaba Irobi

The Kingdom of the Mad

    (for B.J. alias Biodun Jeyifo

I

B. J., as you know,  poetry, 
        for all exiles, 
     begins in Flight

The British Airways plane hovered over Lagos, 
like a wounded albatross, then, headed North, towards 
Ibadan, emitting its jets of smoke over smaller cities:

Ife, Ondo, Abeokuta, Ekiti, and the green forests, 
the markets, rivers, lakes, valleys, plains, mountains 
and the smouldering savannahs of the hunch-backed  

landscape we once called our country;

over the kingdom of the mad, and its greedy, 
corrupt populace grinning gangrenously, below, 
like wounds on a punctured, suppurating heart;

over Nigeria, a fiction on the edge of extinction.

It jetted round the neck of Olumo Rocks 
like a curse, straightened its neck, blessed the skull
of the earth with its urine-streaked droppings,

then, banked westwards, its iron wings 
scizzoring the wind and the clouds and the light with fury
like a hurricane nicknamed the tail of the devil. 

Airborne, now,  I look down.  How secure 
and powerful it makes one feel to look down, 
from these heights, and see one's own country 
and people as damned,  see them as toothed vulvas 
waiting to bite off  and chew into pieces whatever 
you put like a bone between their gaping, yapping, 
flapping, oversized, omnivorous lips: food, foolishness, 
manifestoes, your penis,  even urine from an aeroplane, 
raining down their open-ended throats like a sad, 
lugubrious poetry ; the poetry of power� 
And suddenly, it dawns on me that this must be 
what it feels like, I mean the ecstasy of  power. This is what 
seduces us all. This feeling that one can soar above it all, 

and feed on it, alone, like a gifted vulture, 
like our late president who, it has now been confirmed,  
died from an overdose of viagra pills. 

Had esoteric tastes in women. Every hue and colour. Every shade 
and shape. Every style. Every position. Including `The wheelbarrow'
which dumped him into his shallow worm-cushioned grave. 

And so , B.J., from the comfort of this seat, 

empowered by the cheap red wine, 
the distance, the height, the British Council fellowship, 
and, the dazzling, blinding light, 

the country spreads out below like the carcass 
of a gigantic cow rotting in the sun, its future, a capsized canoe 
on the ox-bow loops of the river Niger crawling below.

I survey all, like Ozymandias, and smile. 

One day, this country will explode, 
with a terrifying  force, 
the force with which the engines, 
like the imagination, rage 
against the fuselage's and the wings' 
craving for the earth and gravity.
It will explode! In the hands and faces 
of its makers. It will explode! Like a crude Biafran bomb!

  II

And now, as the plane begins its cruise, in high altitude, 
across the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert, towards the tropic 
of cancer, towards England, on a clear September day
I take a final glance at what was once my country, 
and sigh, as all exiles always do, and begin to sing, inwardly,
without words, in all the colours of sorrow, about the destiny  

of my country and of all exiles like me, who leave never to return:  


I spit upon the laws that thieves have made
To give the crooked the strength to rob the straight.
I spit upon a country so full of wealth
Yet millions wallow in squalor and in want.
I spit upon the flag that flaps like a rag
On an iron pole  planted on the vision of pregnant generals.
I spit upon rabid religions that defend a hell on earth
and preach a heaven beyond this  mire
I spit upon the education that turns into stenographers
A generation that could have been philosophers
visionaries and revolutionaries. Upon this whole damned
nation  of mine do I spit. And while I spit, I weep.

III

Join me, B. J.  in this epic of a cynic, 
our nation's nunc dimitis, my ballad 
for her rigor mortis, which I  sing 
on my way into exile, and while I sing I weep.

Join me, with your baritone, brandy-mellowed voice,
even from across the Atlantic, from the other shore littered 
with exiles, like  beautiful seashells on a tourist beach. 

Join me. I didn't know you too had fled.
Some omniscient African-American egghead at Harvard told me. 
B.J. I can hear you from here.  My sorrow is oceanic. 

Join me from Cornell! Nothing will stand between
You and me and the pain of history this song contains:
The cruelties of history. The fangs of our history,

As sharp as the jaws of the desert 
and vast as the Sahara. As deep as the Atlantic
which, now, cannot stand between us 

and our demon song! So, B.J., join me 
in this Booger Dance before the cortege arrives 
and we become  another shard amidst a pile 

of shattered shards in an exploding continent.

And do you notice, B.J., how, as one escapes 
further away from the boundaries of our nation, 
the surreal reel of the iniquities of our history 
begin to unfold faster and faster in the memory  
like slides from Shoah? B.J. do you realize as you read,
that I am what I have always been: a student of holocausts,
a scholar of genocides, a professor of pogroms; 
a research assistant of exterminations,  ethnic cleansing 
and all other exciting atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries�

IV

Ah,  my compatriot, B.J., do you remember the beauties  
of nineteen sixty-six exhibited as  the masterpieces of our history 
in the galleries of the North? Do you or do you not?

The human heads baked in an oven before they were fed to dogs.
The female breasts sliced off with axes and scimitars. 
The vaginas and male genitals scalped with rusty scizzors;

The spoils of an incestuous war. * Skulls trepanned
with swinging axes. Necks chopped off on auction blocks. 
Eyes roasted  like groundnuts before they were fed to vultures 

and other fowls of the air. * The human brains 
used to repaint the dirty asphalt of the one road 
we have traveled since nineteen sixty-six.*

Corpses tipped into mass graves, some left to the caress 
of hyenas, the delight of vultures and the phalanges of the wind. 
The valley growing with bones and rotting flesh.* 

The bodies of little children floating down the river, 
clutching , like tiny green-white-green flags, the fragments 
of our future. * Do you recall the memory of the Igbo woman 

who brought home, like a trophy, in a suitcase, 
across River Benue, across the river Niger, by donkey 
and by  bicycle, by head and by train, 

the quartered pieces of her husband's body. * 
It is happening again, B.J., it is happening again.

At the turn of a new and doubtful century, 
it is happening again and of course, you sef can see 
how we have been standing here for half a century , 

knee-deep in ashes, like embalmed sentinels, 
waiting  for the sign of a new life, any green thing 
that can sprout from this valley blooming with bones,

blooming, like Malagatanas paintings,  with its harvest of skulls.  

V

Yes, B.J., the iniquities of our history will shame Mosseley, 
shame Mussolini, shame Hitler, shame Enoch Powell, shame the Roman Arena, shame Carthage, shame  Rwanda, shame even History herself.

I spit upon the laws that thieves have made
To give the crooked the strength to rob the straight.
I spit upon a country so full of wealth
Yet millions wallow in squalor and in want.
I spit upon the flag that flaps like a rag
Above an excrement  of pregnant generals
And the new monkeys with the conductor's stick. 
Upon this whole damned nation of mine 
do I spit. And while I spit, I weep.

Look at them, B.J.: The whirling dervishes of our history, politicians 
of the third and final republic, with their spin doctors 
and dream makers, sorcerers and shrinks all spinning round 
and round like the possessed prophets of Baal, 
stabbing themselves, cutting up their bodies, out of whose holes 
nothing flows, neither blood nor water, nor any juices 
of the spirit, since these animals are meat, mere meat,
fit only to be barbecued  or roasted or baked or even cremated.
I mean the leaders. Since they are by their nature, toxins, 
inedible, and for the sake of their immediate humanity, 
should be handcuffed, shaved, upstairs and downstairs, 
put in a leaking boat and pushed into the Atlantic Ocean, 
where they will find, among the monsters of the deep,

the bones and relics of their ilk,

snorkeling among the ocean floor, among 
the polyps and corals , the skeletons of a drowning history! 
Here they come again. Here they come! Look at them. B.J.,
International Thief Thiefs. See their eyes? And their stinking arses, 
their balding patches and trembling eyelids, (See, they are making 
juju with their eyes  now) puckered faces and leprous hands cradling 
their crystal balls,  their luminescent balls. Hear their grand epics, 
their chants and great incantations�The prisons have been emptied, 
the parliaments are full�The donkeys are neighing, the horses braying, 
the bulldogs roaring,  the hyenas throwing up�Meanwhile the hen 
returns to roost  without her brood of chicks because a python  lies 
at the threshold,  his stomach bulging with eggs and the bones 
of the only cockerel left. The compound walls are falling. 
Creepers crawl over  our homestead.

But I continue to sing, 
B.J., because, as you know so well,  it is only the homing pigeon 
who has left the loft  and journeyed forth, and returned, bloodied 
and brained  in the skull,  pebbled in wing and beak,
who recites anew the myth of the land.

VI
Join me Odia Ofeimun, you who were once a poet,
a fine poet, whose favourite poet  is himself .
You promised us , at the Anthill,  to write us an epic titled:
Go Tell the Generals. Where is that great epic?

Who are the publishers? Why do I not have it in my hands?
Reciting it like a mantra  with a rage and an energy 
close to violence could have saved me this labour, 
this despair, since I know the power of your gifted hand.

Odia, where is that great epic? Or have you  published 
and launched it between the thighs of a thousand white women 
across whose smiling thighs, thumping groins and 
applauding pelvises we all seem only able  to writhe these days?

Join me Benjamin Okri, you who refused to send me a little money 
out of the Booker prize to pay my rent in Liverpool.
Ah, the brotherhood of man. My bank manager was looking
for me all over Liverpool with a shot gun and two men
wielding lead pipes at the time I sent that SOS. 
So join me in this incantation that wards off evil spirits at home 
or in exile: In London or at Cambridge. The flames of the torches 
we once carried in our hands are now succulent scallops 
in which the wind dips his magic tongue again and again 
and smiles and smacks  his lips  so redolent with sweet pussyjuice.

Join me Femi Osofisan, from your office in Ibadan.
As I told you at Leeds, the Monsters of the Deep 
are still feeding on my soul like the teeth of a thousand 
piranhas. Femi, I hope when I die,  someone will stand 
at my graveside and recite  with a tremulous voice, 
this  epitaph: We have gathered here today, in Aba 
to mourn a stubborn poet called Esiaba, who deeply believed 
that there comes a time in every poet's career when he or she must
have the guts to call a cunt a cunt even if it is his own fucked-up cuntry. 

I spit upon a country so full of wealth. Yet millions wallow
in squalor and in want. I spit upon the flag that flaps like a rag
above the kingdoms of the mad. And while I spit, Femi,  I weep�.

Kole , I hear you are now in South Africa. 
Doing great adverts for mobile phones from the USA.
How will Karl Marx feel in his grave now that you appear
On billboards for conglomerates, how will Trotsky feel? 
Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao, how will they feel?
Have we betrayed them, compesino and comrade, have we ? 
"But what else could we do? Afterall the Berlin wall had fallen 
and we had been hoovered out of our country like crayfish 
in a trawler's net sweeping the ocean floor. Uprooted
like tender cotyledons by a whirlwind,  the tenants of the desert." 
Kole, I too have joined the rat race , running my own race 
through the academic track. Reading  and writing and teaching 
by day, playing the lottery at night in crowded malls.  Dreaming 
like Sampson and Salubi, about becoming a millionaire!!! Waiting 
for my first million. To build a library in Aba.  The second ?  To marry 
seven wives. Father seventy children. Form a new Marxist party! 
Overthrow the government.  Bring you all home. Make you ministers! 
Ministers of culture! Ministers of the Future!!! Future Prime Ministers!

Join me, Afam Akeh, you who chose the path of a different truth
The road to the cross, on our way to Golgotha.
Join me, as I exorcise, in words and songs,
the terror at the heart of this epic, the eternal  fear 
gnawing at the sinews of my soul. Join me as I begin 
to dirge and redream for the future of our children 
who may return to a no man's land, a home happy with 
the laughter of gunfire whose national anthem is a twenty-one 
gun salute and spurts of human blood jackson-pollocked 
on that rag, that everlasting rag:  that green white green rag.

VII

Join me, all you who are the remains of what remains 
Of my generation.  We are those the future forgot. 
Beleaguered and despised, banished and dispossessed. 
We who were blinded  before we were born. And branded 
thereafter.  Friends, you who were once alive and happy 
and writing,  I just want you to know that before we return 
from this interminable exile our country may no longer 
be on the map of the world. It  may have been erased, 
its dross, the ashes  and the dust a military priest flings 
into the graves of  pregnant generals who died fucking up their country

So, join me, Ossie Melody, you who thought you had 
found the final metaphor for our country, broken pots.
Crouched in that industry you believed would make you 
immortal, how could you have known that we would 
all become, in the end, the pieces of the pitcher at the riverside, 
fragments from that singular fall! Shattered, we cannot go home 
with the water neither can we return to the stream with the waterpot!

Laa n'udo; laaa n'udo, nwannem nkem huru n'anya�

B.J. I dreamt, last night, that I was journeying 
through North America (I have already urinated 
all over Europe) And somewhere near Cornell, 
at John F Kennedy airport, some monkey-faced, 
caucasian  immigration officer said to me, staring 
at my green passport, Republic of Maicuntri?
This country no longer exists. Like Biafra, it has 
been wiped off the surface of the earth by the Beasts 
of Sandhurst and the Demons of Democracy. 
What remains are the marks of their paws.
The milestones smell of blood. And the children learn 
to count 123 as in Uganda and Rwanda, with their fathers 
bones and skulls. Stringing them like numbers on an abacus.  

Join me Professor Emmanuel Obiechina, you who 
taught me how to tell poetry from prose, the essential
difference between ethical morality and literary morality,
who also showed me how to shape and sharpen a lance 
and plant it like a flagpole between the ribs of your nation, 
hurl it into its distended belly like an Olympic javelin
and watch from a safe distance, the pus oozing out 
like jets of crude oil from its contused abscesses, 
The horror O the horror. Join me, my beloved Prof. 
The baton you wanted to keep on the floor of scholarship, 
I have taken up and I vow the relay will continue forever. 

And tell Chinua Achebe, whose own song ends this book,
That I want you, my fathers, to know and remember and recall,
that at this point in my life and career, that I despaired. 
That as I write, something more profound than pain, more 
primordial than mud, more destructive than rage or angst, 
more orgasmic than sex, something beyond words, some deep 
seismic force, beyond the subtle serenades of the wounded heart, 
and the thousand agonies of exile, propelled this hand
and heart to the dirges and funeral  songs emitting  like  sparks
from a flint, a whetstone worn out by the knife's persistence 
on  stone, some primal power beyond my intellectual pretensions, 
something some poets claim is the well-spring of verse, masters, 
let me call whatever it is that fuels this feeling of anarchy 
and bitterness, and despondency about everything we left behind, 
everything we lost, the decimal humiliations that sweeten our exile, 
the memory of our dear dear ones, all those we left at home, 
on this journey of damned and damaged souls, 
let me call this elusive thing, this feeling: Love.

Kingdom of the Mad was first published in Sentinel Poetry Online in July 2003 

 


Esiaba Irobi - a poet, playwright, actor and scholar was born in the Republic of Biafra on October 1, 1960, and lived in in exile in Nigeria, Britain, United States and Germany where he passed away on May 3, 2010. He studied at the Universities of Nigeria, Sheffield and Leeds, and held a B.A. in English/Drama, M.A. Comparative Literature, M.A. Film/Theatre, and PhD in Theatre Studies. In 1992 his play, Cemetery Road won the prestigious World Drama Trust Award. His books include Nwokedi, The Colour of Rusting Gold, Cotyledons, Hangmen Also Die, and Why I don't Like Philip Larkin and Other Poems. He leaves behind a wife, Uloaku and a son, Nnamdi.

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