The Power and Glory of Memory by Funso Aiyejina

Death, awesome in its totalitarian amour of conceit

Throws arrogant affronts in the face of humanity

Ignoring the power and the glory of memory

Our immortal antidote against the sting of mortality

Our invincible armour against all doctored history

The gentle fingers of dew drops forming before sunrise

On whose invisible wings the promise of bloom rides

Over generations of sand dunes, along the primal path

Of Ogun, pathfinders and pathmender, to an oasis of hope …

Today, men of iron have banished past truths and deeds

And decreed their hirelings into new royal legends

To be installed in bunkers inside custom built palaces

Fitted out with regulation pools, overflowing with milk –

Human milk; protected by blind, deaf and mute walls

Designed to shut out the babble of the market place

Insulate their royal highnesses within a magical comfort

From which, unhindered, they continue to mastermind us

Into the holding bays designed into their castles.

For consolation, let us tickle the armpit of memory

Awake, into gentle horses of speech on whose back

We may ride triumphant into the eternal city of hope

Submerged somewhere inside our past ruins and scope

And beyond to when kings kept faith with their subjects

and watched over the teeming masses in the markets

Listening intensely and always to bold human voices

Intuiting muttered hopes into fulfilled prophecies

Such that the people saw and hailed them as wise

Prostrating themselves, before and after, in gratitude.

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.

Before They Came Calling in the Middle of the Night by Funso Aiyejina

Way back when, before chickens became toothless
And turned champion devourers of back-up grains …
Before drunk agents came crashing into our dreams
Armed and ready to arrest metaphors in our streams
On the orders of a General high on syndicated acclaims
Galloping full-speed ahead of our children’s fervent pleas,
I believed with the innocent citizens of our nation
In the open-arm one-on-one embrace of salutation.
But after seeing wily foxes at work in our forests
Spiders spinning deadly webs in and out of contexts,
I now know why, even as they bury comrades freshly killed
Fists of the children of Soweto remain forever clenched.

We have always had their likes: inheritors and usurpers
Who, too cowardly to confront the truths in our songs
Would don the dirty garb of aberrant masquerades
Determined to waylay and strangle singers of tales
Long before the ascension of this General Tortoise.
Today, descendants of those same insolent renegades,
Protected by the anonymity of their choice profession,
Courageously finger the homes of witnesses of truth
Forgetting like their ancestors now condemned to oblivion
That the outstanding relatives of a condemning finger
Are inevitably aimed back at the heart of the pointer.
Whatever darkness conceals, dawn is bound to reveal.

Why argue with men who insist they are really clad
In exotic robes when it is too dark to investigate?
Let them dance. Let them prance. Like the intoxicated.
Daylight, when it arrives on the silent wings of dawn
Will reveal them as wearers of rags before the town.
Men like them are not new; we always had their kind:
Men who conveniently forget that when an order
Fit only for slaves is forced on us we must deliver
Such with the wisdom and courage of the free
Instead of kicking in wide open doors with glee.
To such men our ancestors sent collective ritual curses
Causing them to die abominable deaths, swollen with greed.

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.

The Dialogue by Funso Aiyejina

Perched on his balcony of pleasure,

beside a range of gifts,

the King asked the Poet

who stood below to pay homage:

“How are my people faring

on this beautiful day?”

The Poet stretched his ostrich neck

and readied the traditional trick

of “We thank our God and our King by whose twin grace

our heads still sit on our necks…”

but the lie choked his weaverbird throat,

and instead he answered:

“Your Highness, your people are too hungry

to see the beauty of any day;

things are getting worse by the day

as we wait for the better days

which you promised this time last season,

the same promise we’ve always heard

from the echo of every voice

that has ever occupied that throne

upon which you sit”

Livid, like a seven-baralled thunder

the King withdrew with his gifts

and the Poet starved with the people.

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.

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.

When The Monument... by Funso Aiyejina

For Walter Rodney and Ngugi wa Thiong’o

When the monuments to our past

are whittled down by new facts

and our dew drops of change

are sacrificed on the altar of state security,

we awake to the knowledge that

pebbles lodged in muddy ponds

must grow muddy with time…

Now that our messiahs have chased our dreams

from the sacred corners of our hearts

into the blind alleys of our ghettoes

where they proceed to slaughter them

before our astonished imagination

summoning history to witness their feast,

it is time we rejected those who

have severed the link between prayer and miracles,

those who mock our voices with great signboards

which proclaim only fairy-tale projects

and those who make us build the podia

on which they stand to salute our misery

on every anniversary of the revolution.

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.

To Ararimeh at Two by Funso Aiyejina

Blessed are they who know how to deploy anger

In the defense of dreams; against nightmares.

They shall inherit futures brimming with life

Forever succulent like the flesh of the cactus …

Blessed are they who know how to deploy anger

Against sages who boast of knowing the prayer

With which to embrace the baobab tree of wisdom

But who, come mid-night, sneak off to the vulture

With multiple offerings – escorts to secret requests

For instant cures for their hereditary baldness …

Against those quick to arrest whispering leaves

But never deem it fit to question raging storms

Which alone sow the seed of recurrent restlessness

Among the virgin branches of our forest of a thousand dreams.

You point angry fingers at their stars

Whenever they crash into our laughter

Via their channel 9 at 9, every night.

Does their rank arrogance recall those nights:

Your pre-conscious encounters with their agents

Who embraced darkness, made it their garment

And were guided to us by hooded informants?

Do you wonder why as one of their many victims

I do not join you in pointing my rage at them?

Do you wonder what has become of my gift of anger?

The well is silent: The well is shallow: A child’s logic!

I am pointing. I am angry: If only you could see into my head!

But not at those who hold the yams and the knives. No.

They are well out of it. Even as they sign our death warrants.

Look beyond them, beyond their thrones, to aide-de-camps

Stiff with the anticipation of a future to be measured in gold:

First ladies lodged in the sanctuary of State Houses

Concubines recruited from virgins’ pools by trusted aides

At home in safe houses and unlisted official annexes

All equipped with state of the art basement chambers

Designed for the ultimate comfort of those parrots

Who are too daft to learn from the three wise monkeys.

Blessed are they who live to celebrate their dreams

They shall not number among the framed and accidentalized.

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.

Memories of Three Months by Funso Aiyejina

When April ends, armed with its seasonal overnight kit

Loaded with intense and brief lilies in fill bloom

The fragile glow of the cassia tree lining the roads

To proclaim the beauty and brevity of human life,

I recall the nightmare of my brother’s death in his youth

On the last day of the month labeled cruel by the poet …

When April ends, armed with its seasonal overnight kit

I seek solace in the already evident month of May:

The birth month of our hopeful future continuous

When the flamboyant tree rooted in one of our pasts –

Constantly a target of elemental and human decrees –

Blooms forth in all its glory, paying no heed

To the presiding clusters of campus intellectuals

Who, borrowing a leaf from the resident colonies of bats

Ravage our green fruits long before the harvest season,

Blindly out-doing each other like crabs in barrels

Struggling for vantage rungs on the ladder of escape …

After the brief lilies and the fragile cassias of April

I seek solace in May with its flames of the forest

Which tower defiantly above cretins who have adopted

The belly-to-earth pose of the Ile-Ife campus lizards

Permanently glued to ground dirt in hopeful obeisance

When they should stand up, bloom and be counted as

Contestants for the flaming crown of struggle, as

Members in a procession of satiated priests in worship

As followers of Ogun returning triumphant from battle

With the palm fronds of peace in his left hand

And in his right the steaming sword of conquest

His carpet of glory leading into fields of hope

As a guaranteed link with the month of September:

The month of sunshine: the sunshine of harvest time

When the miracle of May is doubled and re-confirmed.

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.

Aftermath by Funso Aiyejina

(For Fatima Vatsa)

Each new life is a descendant of a graying form

Every new season a rebellion against an older norm

But the cactus survives the swing of the pendulum

Not through the collusive allegiance of a chameleon

But through a tenacity of will and a clarity of vision.

Poetry is rebellion, insists Neruda. The poet in rebellion

Is a cactus in bloom, nurtured by miracles in the subsoil.

Was the warrior-poet a desert cactus, a carrier of our anguish?

For you and others who knew them in less dangerous roles

As tenants, friends, husbands and fathers

Yours are grieving tongues and loving hearts

From which cynical questions may not be asked.

Mindful of your intense personal pains and tears

Over lost privileges, we join you in singing dirges

With which to coax them on to their now inevitable posting.

Blessed are they whose coups succeed:

They shall own the yams and wield the knives

And songs shall be erected naming them saviours

Until after the next night of the long knives …

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.

May Ours Not Be by Funso Aiyejina

May ours not be like the story

of the Ear and the Mosquito;

but if it is, remember, o plunderers,

the Mosquito’s eternal vow of protest,

for we shall become like lice

forever in your seams,

ant-heads that even in death

burrow deep into the flesh,

chameleon faeces that cannot

be wiped off the feet,

and regenerating earthworms

that multiply by their pieces;

if there is no rainbow in the sky,

we know how to create one

by splashing water in the face of the sun;

if sleepers’ hands protect their ears,

mosquitoes must learn to bite at their legs

to awaken them into their broken pledges;

if treasure hunters disturb our Orukwu rockhill,

thunders will break behind our tongues of lightning

like arrows in flight…

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.

The Baboon on the Swing by Funso Aiyejina

Because the night is dark with no stars in sight

The baboon boasts he’s clad in the finest velvet

Forgetful of dawn – the epilogue to nightmare

Our charm to dispel the hold of evil nights

Invocation to affirm that no matter its flare

A lie will always remain a lie, destined

Like a false masquerade, to be unmasked.

Not really; history does not repeat itself.

Men do

And are thus repeated on history’s shelf

Like Onitobi of the skimpy loin-cloth

Champion wrestler in the riddle who

Wrestled his challengers to death

And dared harmattan to a final duel.

Now, who amongst us needs to be reminded

That one who throws such affronts at the wind

No matter the magnitude of his past miracles

No matter the number of stars on his epaulets

Such a man must come away from such a contest

Badly bruised, lock-jawed, needing treatment?

No, history does not repeat itself. Men do.

If therefore, the clay-god craves a dance of shame

Persistent in his demand for extended prime time

In the rain; oblige him, turn on the spotlights.

If the baboon insists, in spite of honest protests

Let him swing low and high, secure in his might.

Let him swing sweet chariot amongst the branches

There is a dry one lurking within the green foliage.

Remember the bullock who craved a round-trip aboard?

Didn’t he return as corn-beef, cured and packaged

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.