Wild Things by Femi Osofisan

(for Baroness Blixen)

ONE

Beautiful

& very touching

a lady fell in love with Africa

& made it a porcelain of her youth

scripting her adventurous life

into the yielding loom of the forests

lavish, breath-taking landscape

& always, in the background—

huge shadows—

walk the owners of the land

tamed

unlike the royal elephants

unlike the buffaloes

the numerous birds—

tamed

to serve the white lady

with their ever grinning teeth

TWO

The beautiful film is a hymn to wild things

to the white lady, refusing to bend to the male

commandments of colonial rule

or to the diktat of husband

in the conscripting laws of English marriage

or the shame of venereal disease

near fatal

always holding her head high

holding firm

even after the capricious betrayal of a safari lover

(who has to die later in a plane crash

so as to further test her dignity)

apt too, that in the end, the film tells us

that lions camp over the lover’s grave

(in tribute)

he who had always hunted them

paying homage to the kindred spirit

of this wild stranger in a wild land

even if he hunted and killed them

THREE

Oh all the beautiful things are wild

The lions as well as the unending plains

The water that will not be damned

But must return to Mombassa

The woman that will defy her womanhood

To pursue her husband into the very face of war

(& bring death back with her, in her vagina)

who would raise coffee beans

on highland, against the tested

(but obviously foolish) wisdom

of the native Kikuyus—

FOUR

Yes, Kikuyus, my Africans

not even a note for you in the lady’s last lament—

her poem is for the land forsaken

her two closest Africans being the boy

she healed of sores and taught to cook

(and then left behind)

and the faithful houseboy

so obviously lost

in a love that if spoken

would have begotten a scandal

FIVE

She left—and never came back, we’re told—

(what’s left to return to?)

This beautiful lady

who caught so much of the poetry

of Africa

and schooled the natives so well

in the art of bending

that many decades afterwards

after she and her countrymen have departed

black colonials now rule in Kikuyuland

served by bending servants,

black men armed with the same whips

well cut for black flesh

with the same half-literate cooks

decorating their kitchens, and

with the same mute lips, taught that

to speak of the love of freedom

is to be chased into the wilderness

or to shallow graves unknown to loving lions

unknown to the songs of today’s other

Blixens…

SIX

Yes, all the beautiful things are untamed

The beautiful life of a woman is

a paean, untamed,

to the goddess of wildness

& abandon in a wild colonial land

Some lives are as free and fierce as the lore of lions

(some lives, armed with guns…)

so fierce the film

so fierce and shattering

surging in ancient truths on the love of a woman

like the resurgence of ancient myth

the vast landscape

reminding us of Africa’s beauty

(especially where the natives have not been

trespassing)

& of Africa’s loss…

SEVEN

But why despair?

we’ve always been in the background

in the wild adventures of their books

Films such as this prolong the pain:

but do not despair—

We haven’t the means ourselves to show our lives

at their stark & grandiose moments:

but the day will come—

Moments when we are alone by ourselves

& are just being beautiful, by ourselves…

but the day will come—

No weapons of our own to show our pure sufferings

those moments when our faces are not just masks

but sensitive skins & tender voices:

Moments when our wounds bleed blood, red like

others, red like all blood…

but the day will come—

Ase, Edumare…

EIGHT

Here in Limoges

I mourn Africa

I mourn myself

in the mirror of strangers

I feel pain on behalf of all of us

who have remained nameless across the ages

like a vague and formless ghost

in the mirror of our guests

the shadow

against which the white man defines himself

NINE

Yes—our land is beautiful

even if, as they say,

we are mere receptacles of history

onlookers, who carry the bags

while the white men tame our lions

& our land…

That is the story they tell us

& our children:

but the day will come—

when Okinba will no longer

be mourning,

& history will be awake in our hands,

oh the day will come—

when Okinba will be singing

in his own voice

oh the day will come—

telling our own stories

singing our own songs.

Femi Osofisan 

Babafemi Adeyemi Osofisan is a Nigerian professor and writer born on June 16, 1946 in Ogun State, Nigeria, who is well-known for his literary works that criticize societal issues and incorporate African traditional performances and surrealism in some of his plays. His plays often revolve around the struggle between good and evil. He is a didactic writer who aims to rectify the decaying state of society through his works. Additionally, he has written poetry under the pen name Okinba Launko.