A Letter To Lynda, a poem by Funso Aiyejina

A Letter To Lynda

But today I would join you, travelling river,

borne down the years of your patientest flowing,

past pains that would wreck us, sorrows arrest us,

hatred that washes us up on the flats;

and moving on through the plains that receive us,

processioned in tumult, come to the sea.

– Edward Brathwaite

Dear Lynda,

What is incalculably far from us

in point of distance can be near us.

Short distance is not itself nearness.

Nor is great distance remoteness . . .

Martin Heidegger

We who have been separated into one

by the troubled waters of the Atlantic ocean

and united into two by our uncommon pasts,

we must learn with those who have travelled

the snail’s trail with the tortoise

that those chased into rocky limits

must grow to pelt boulders at their assailants;

that seas reflect only objects above their surfaces,

none but divers may perceive secrets buried in their wombs;

and that those abandoned to the mercy of water

must practise to swim like the fish or perish.

I who have wandered across mountains

and across valleys in search of history,

I have recognized myself in the scars

of those who have survived the misdeeds

and the greed of our common ancestors,

ancestors who pandered to the passions

of pale gods from the Atlantic and the Sahara,

ancestors who grovelled after beads after mirrors and

after liquid fires with which to prop their sagging genitals,

ancestors who fashioned crude tools with which they punctured

our radiant early morning dew-drops

so that today our twin summer noons

embrace the same mad ocean of our related pasts.

Now I dip my soul into the ink-well

of our past and write to you

across the virulent atlantic pages of our separation;

I sing of you, muse with the full-moon face,

the magic egg of my many journeys,

native of the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago,

the terminal colon that stands your archipelago

in anticipation of future explications.

Lest we should forget so very soon

why progenitors of thunder-wielding ancestors

now chew grass beneath our ghettoes’ dirt heaps,

let us remember our related betrayals:

the chains the whips the sea and the sun,

let us remember your stray islands

which are bracketed between two visible Americas and appositioned to an invisible Africa

and a far Far East;

let us remember so as never to forget.

Antigua

where if you ask what the Kings chamber pot has

in common with the Princess who,

virgin no more, came on honeymoon in the sun,

you will be told by a proud black guide

that they both shared Clarence House on

Shirley’s Height which overlooks an English Harbour

away from the shores of England;

where too, at their Carnival, men reverse ancestral taboos

as mere mortals whip bull-homed masquerades

to the tune of God Save the Queen.

Barbados,

the nearest to and the furthest from Mother Africa,

where the apoplectic froth and foam

of Bathsheba Beach mock the complacency of the populace

(Bathsheba, concubine to King Solomon, Bathsheba, Mother of the Lion of Judah, the Jah in Jamaica,

I celebrate your anger;

if the Pacific so desires, let it stay peaceful,

it was never baptised with the blood of slaves);

and at Bridgetown’s Harbour,

overseen by Admiral Horatio Nelson,

you can watch the beach boys dive adroitly

for coins tossed by sun-hunters

from abroad the Jolly Roger

into the dark muck of the harbour,

and when the winner surfaces with a large grin,

he is greeted by the silver flash of the cameras

that mask the faces of the offspring of our past massas,

(but some day, dem beach boys going to dive

deep down, deeper down than dem tourists’ copper coins,

into the womb of our past to bring alive skeletons

that name the nameless names whose sweat

built these islands in the sun;

but until then,

let dem tourists keep on tossing dem coins

in the name of God, the Father,

God, the Son, and God, the Holy Ghost);

Amen.

Amen to Grenada

(the youngest cousin of Cuba, Cuba, that gonad

of our thunder), Amen to Grenada

where the little people of a little place

have shown that to be grenade-shaped

is not in itself enough for those

who wish to say no in thunder

from under.

Guyana,

(the home of Pat, the widow of our Walter),

Guyana, the land of failed leaders

and evaporating hopes,

we await the fulfiIment

of the thunder in your clouds.

Jamaica

gateway for Jah, the King of Kings,

where we went to the super –

market and found nothing for supper,

a nation under siege from itself,

a mecca where not even the gods are safe

as macho-men replace their manhood with guns

and advance the background sound of war

in their reggae to the frontdoors of their lives,

a haven where the failures of Man

have led the women to invite the Sea

into their thirsting wombs.

St. Lucia

Fair Helen that is fair no more

now that redeemers of every persuasion

go dim once they have become popular

and the fires of your fire-eaters are no match

for Soufriere’s spit-fire and the lightning thunder

that heralds the hurricanes into Castries.

Trinidad and Tobago,

the last of the archipelago,

a land muddy with the rust of several pasts,

a nation where the leaders start every race

as loud and clear as the cascading water of Maracas

but soon grow slow and devious like the Caroni river

which, navigable no more, now teams up with the Orinoco

to turn the blue of the sea

into the brown of barren deserts.

But above all,

I celebrate the one who says that inspite of all,

let there be a new beginning;

I will strap her like a diver’s goggles

and go in search of the clues

to our future imperfect

so that, as the Niger flows into the Atlantic

that washes the early morning face of the Caribbean,

we shall flow together to create new lives

who will swing no more between two extremes

like strung-up hammocks

still only when dormant,

they will learn neither the language

of the ancestors who sold us

nor that of those who bought us,

they will learn only the language

with which the land communes with the sea

such that they will grow to know

if one conspires to offer them

as sacrifices to the other.

Extend

my warm regards to Mum and Dad

brothers and sisters and our mutual friends;

may history preserve us together into the future.

Fondly yours,

Funso Aiyejina,

Ile-Ife,

January, 1981

Funso Aiyejina

Funso Aiyejina (born in 1949 in Ososo, Edo State) is a Nigerian academic, poet and playwright. He graduated from the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife where he lectured. He also lectured at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago and at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri.