by Chris Abani
Chris Abani
SAQI
For
John James, cellmate, friend, brother,
tortured to death, June 1991, aged 14
and
Obioma Nzerem, Valentine Alily, Jacob Ross,
kindred spirits, dreamers, fools.
Acknowledgements
There is no way I can thank those who gave their lives so that I could live to tell this story. But there are people I can thank. Kwame Dawes and Bernardine Evaristo for their generosity, and critical and editorial feedback. Jacob Ross for initiating me into the final levels of my craft. Adrian Dutton for the amazing paintings that began it all and for the opportunity to be part of Still Dancing. My family for supporting me always – my mother Daphne and siblings Mark, Charles, Gregory and Stella. My father Michael, whose inability to understand me has led me to seek deeper and better ways of saying things. Pamela Osuji for always being there. Jillian Tipene for her help in developing my reading and performance skills and for that special friendship. Victor Okigbo for my first lessons in the art of poetry in 1987. Adam Pretty whose craft and patience in teaching me the saxophone has changed the rhythms of my writing. Delphine George who has made me a believer again. Helena Igwebuike and all my friends. John Moser and David Rose – men of honour. Juris Iven and deus ex machina in Brussels, without whom I might be dead. Patrick Galvin, Pat Boran and everyone in The Republic of Ireland – especially the Dublin posse. Harold Pinter, Moris Farhi, everyone at Saqi Books for believing, and everyone who has helped and supported me in the development of this work and my art in general – you all know who you are – thank you.
Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction, by Kwame Dawes
Portal
Portal
Mask
Old Warrior
Rasa
Oyinbo Pepper
Chain Reaction
Ahimsa
Passion Fruit
Concrete Memories
Tequila Sunrise
Roll Call
Job
Killing Time
Jeremiah
The Box
Eden
Paper Doll
Tattoo
An English Gentleman
Waiting for Godot
Casual Banter
Boddhisatva
Koro
Mephistopheles
Good Friday
Ode to Joy
Caliban
The Hanged Man
Buffalo Soldier
Heavensgate
Mango Chutney
Rambo 3
Passover
Still Dancing
Birds of Paradise
Square Dancing
Stir-Fried Visions
Egwu Onwa
Terminus
Smoke Screen
Reflexology
Solitaire
Mantra
Dream Stealers
Nirvana
Moby Dick
Six Ways to Deal with It
Articles of Faith
Epiphany
Jacob’s Ladder
Postscripts – London
Postcard Pictures
Things to Do in London When You are Dead
Field Song
Haunting
Easter Sunday
Returning From Croydon
Babylon
Changing Times
Days of Thunder
Not a Love Song
A Definition of Tomorrow
Author’s Note
This collection of poetry is based around my experience as a political prisoner in Nigeria between 1985 and 1991. My first experience of this was the result of the publication of my first novel when I was sixteen. Two years after publication, in 1985, I was arrested as my novel was considered to be the blueprint for the foiled coup of General Vatsa. I was detained initially for six months, in two-three-month stretches. Released, I hid the details of my arrest from my family. This initial brush with the government was not deliberate on my part, but having once been brushed by the wings of the demon, I became a demon hunter. In 1987, when I entered university, I joined a guerrilla theatre group which performed plays in front of public buildings and government offices. The government wasted no time in re-arresting me. This time I was held for a year in Kiri Kiri maximum security prison.
In that year, I came to question everything I had believed in before. The only thing I never gave up on was the conviction that there can be no concession in the face of tyranny and oppression. I also learnt how truly ephemeral our mortality is. Released with no explanation, I returned to university and between studying for my degree in literature and developing my love of jazz, I wrote a play for the 1990 convocation ceremony for the university. The play, Song of a Broken Flute, led to my third and final period of incarceration for eighteen months, six of which were spent in solitary confinement. I was sentenced to death for treason – without trial – and held on death row with murderers, rapists and other convicted criminals.
In the last eighteen months, I shared a cell with a fourteen year old boy, John James, and twenty other men. John James did not leave Kiri Kiri alive. And there were many others. I have tried to represent those men and boys that I met, including the guards, as best as I can, without idealising anyone. The most difficult thing about my whole experience was not being able to share my pain, having to hide it from my family for their own protection and from my selfish need not to be talked out of doing the things I felt I had to.
And now? Every day is a careful balance fought between the despondency that threatens to swamp me and the incredible joy of living. I think that my art, my poetry, prose and music come from these cracks in my being, these ley lines where spirit is said to reside. I have come out of the horror of that experience having lost my faith in the inherent goodness of humanity, yet curiously appreciating even more the effort it takes to be good. I also kicked a bad smoking habit! If in reading these poems you can see the courage of the men and boys I write about, if you can feel their essential humanity, and realise that the best things in us cannot die, then I will have succeeded.
But remember always, that freedom, love, kindness, honour, justice and truth are never to be taken for granted – but worked at, struggled with and fought for, at whatever cost. For it is this that makes us human and builds a bridge to our true nature, which is spirit.
Baraka Bashad
Chris Abani
London, June 1997
Introduction
The alchemy of transforming terrible tragedies of human experience into art, into music, poetry, dance, sculpture, film can be an unforgiving vocation. Human tragedy is naturally compelling and the telling of human pain has always had an insidious attraction for human beings; yet after a while, a tale poorly told will grow tiresome and the listener numb to its details, to the pain. Such tales tend to fade away, to be put aside. The ones that last are those that transcend the pain. Yet, for the artist, a strange conflict remains, for if the artist has suffered, if the artist has seen the brute behaviour of other human beings inflicted on him, if the artist has felt the blows of another’s hand on his or her body, blows meted out as punishment for some noble act, some act of righteous and moral defiance, some act of ideological fortitude, he or she does not want the art to be read simply as art, as something that transcends the details of its history, the details of the moment, the details of the cause. How do craft and content meet, how do passion and the ordered consideration of craft work hand in hand? How does one speak politics and yet contemplate such articulations as art? To answer such questions, we must assume that the artist is an artist regardless of where he or she finds him or herself. The artist will define his or her existen
ce largely on the compulsion of making something extraordinary out of the mundane – it is a terrible compulsion that the artist avoids and ignores at his or her own peril. If this is true, then the artist will sing anyway, and will find ways of making song regardless of what the song is about. But not everyone succeeds in dealing with the conundrum of content and craft. Not all artists find the aesthetic that allows them to treat the political convulsions of these last hundred years in ways that do not make us question the very validity or relevance of art. But a handful have managed to make us believers – believers in the power of craft.
This month, I was drawn into the simple dialectics of four different artists – four poets from different times and places, all of them working their way through this dilemma of content and craft, and each emerging with songs of such beauty and force that they make me a believer. I was teaching Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ to a first year English class, and as we began to explore the tragedy that he describes and the strong polemic of his message, I began to feel that there was something almost callous about the stylistic control exercised in the crafting of this poem. For this poem is one of impeccable rhetoric – the rhetoric forged by structure, by form; and yet straining against this control, this order is this incredible and angry narrative of a brute and ugly death – a certain nightmarish reality that crawls in and out of the frame, but seems compelled to return always to the safety of the frame. It was here that I began to see an answer, that the poet turned to form, turned to the ordering of verse to manage the disorder of his vision of a fellow soldier drowning in a sea of noxious gases. The craft was his saviour, his calming moment. The craft allowed him to speak, to determine a discourse of ideas, a discourse that would emerge as a polemic, but a deeply musical polemic. Yet this was not enough for me. I still had not answered the question of whether this poem shone purely on the basis of its gruesome and realistic content, its emotive surface, or whether it was art in essence. I was not sure that the poem’s success did not rest on Owen’s special access to suffering. But was I using a misguided paradigm of art?
My attempt to define the Blues aesthetic to students on another course offered me a way to understand this dialogue between art and suffering, art and pain, art and politics. The Blues is first form and then passion. The form is powerful, compelling and heavily present, compelling the artist to work within a framework that maintains a fairly constant template for which experience must must be shaped. Prompted by smart people like Houston Baker, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes and Kalamu ya Slaam, it occurred to me that the act of formalising experience, the business of taking pain and making it into something manageable, something that comes under the control of the artist and then the listener, is the fundamental aesthetic shared by people who write out of suffering. I saw then that perhaps I write out of a need to find order in the midst of disorder, driven by the compulsion of self-preservation. It is cathartic because one is busy imposing something like order on the chaos of existence, and in doing this, one is giving life to the moment, to the experience one is managing. The Blues triumphs not because it is a clever song, but because it is. The very existence of the Blues represents the moment of craft, the moment of artistic expressions and the moment of possibility. It offers a way to cope with reality; as Ma Rainey argues, in August Wilson’s play about her, ‘You sing ‘cause that’s a way of understanding “life”.’ She continues, ‘The Blues help you get out of bed in the morning. You get up knowing you ain’t alone. There is something else in the world. Something’s being added by that song. This would be an empty world without the Blues. I take that emptiness and try to fill it up with something.’ Here, what is being celebrated is the art piece, the finished crafted piece. It never changes the void, but it fills the void.
And so even when a poet like Bob Marley tries to chart a path of righteousness for the nations, even as he attempts to be a prophet, declaring, predicting, preaching, praying, worshipping in his songs, we are unable to avoid the fact that all of this is riding a rhythm, locked into a form that is tight and steady, that is comforting and a safe place in the chaos. His declaration in ‘Trench Town Rock’ is perhaps then his most profound and most decisive articulation of his craft: ‘One good thing about music, when it hits, you feel no pain’. It is not so much what it teaches, but what it fills, and how it manages to touch us in ways that are only explained by the beauty of the crafting of the words. To teach this to students is sometimes difficult for they want answers, they are not always interested in finding a salve for souls through the music of words placed beside each other or the tenor of the sounds that emanate from the sound system in the lecture hall. I would have to lead them into a dancehall and let the music consume them. I would have to assure them that sometimes just hearing the words emerge and carry their own music is enough to say that you have understood, even if you have not grasped the poem, its semantics, its ‘meaning’. These three preoccupations, with Owen’s war poetry, the Blues and with Marley’s reggae prepared me to read and read again the poetry of Chris Abani. For Abani has written a series of poems that present us with some fundamental questions that go to the heart of the meaning of this word art.
The poems in Kalakuta Republic are not the first poems by Chris Abani I have read. About two years ago, I was sent a thick bundle of poetry in preparation for a workshop I was going to do in London with groups of poets including Abani. I read his work quickly, noting the pieces that were strong and skimming quickly over others. I was looking for high points, moments of illumination, and above all for ticks, little habits that would annoy anyone who read poetry a great deal. Abani’s verse was competent, at times strong, but not especially compelling. There was a kind of calm, a playfulness, flirting around promising ideas, but I was not comunicating with him as I read. I was skirting around a person, a voice, sensing obvious talent, but one without an agenda, nothing desperate in the work emerged. So it was a lesson to me when I read some months later the poems that would become part of the Kalakuta Republic anthology. I read the poems quickly and was shocked. I started to wonder about what was happening to me. My first reading suggested that these were stunning poems, but I quickly grew sceptical. I had to to ask myself what was moving me. Was it the content, the ideas, that I was staring into the graphic details of someone’s incarceration? Was it because I was touching sheets by someone who had watched others die cruel and useless deaths? Was it because I felt no sense of authority to question even the whole business of poetry in the face of such themes? I also had to ask whether there would be anything wrong with being moved by the themes, the stories, the horrors. Would it be wrong, a compromise of art to say simply that the poems were good because they were about moving and tragic things? I allowed these questions to rest on my mind during the second and third readings. And when I turned to write to Chris, I had to take the poems one by one and find out what he was doing about transforming tragedy into art. How was he doing his Blues, his Reggae piece? I realised, the poems would soon lose their weight, their force, if their shock value was all that sustained them. So I returned to the manuscript and began to test, defying my awe of his pain, my tendency to be mesmerised and sometimes muted by his struggle. I asked him to think about cutting this or that, to add that or the other, despite the danger that I might be trampling on his nightmares and his memories. The reader of this collection will invariably be faced with the same challenge, for to approach this collection dispassionately would be inhuman, perhaps impossible. But there is something about the audacity of rendering experience into verse that requires something more from the poet. There is a tyranny that undergrids the poem, which rests in this notion of craft. The poem must exist for its own sake. What a daunting challenge.
It is especially gratifying to be able to say that by the time Chris Abani was through his multiple nightmares with the making of these poems, he had emerged with a work made up of graceful pieces of art, almost ready to be hung in a gallery for others to come and enter them and rest and weep
in them, and to admire.
The narrative of Chris Abani’s encounter with the military system that inflicted itself on him, as it has on thousands of other Nigerians, is a disturbing one, and eloquently captured by the poems in this collection. The details of Abani’s several arrests, his efforts to be a voice of protest in Nigeria and the suffering that he went through as a result of these imprisonments are outlined in fittingly sardonic prose at the beginning of the collection, witness to his capacity to manage his struggle with wit and honesty. It is the honesty of the individual trying to fathom the motivation for martyrdom, the motivation for being a young rebel who will then be shocked into incarceration and encounters with death, and it is powerfully evoked. Abani’s capacity to suggest that there is a quest for some kind of fame through even legitimate protest renders the experience frighteningly true, for it confesses a secret of those who lead in struggles, it confesses that there is an ego that walks hand in hand with the generosity of protest. The meeting of the ego and the suffering – the degradation of imprisonment and pure abuse – represents one of the most striking and moving elements of this collection. These nuances recovered from the memory of watching others die and Abani’s own time in confinement or in that notorious coffin of a box, represent the heart of the poetry of this collection. There is nothing more poignant than the brief dialogue that ends the frenzied orgy of murder in the poem ‘Mango Chutney’, so tidily drawn in those two-line stanzas of almost courtly finesse, belying the shock of the subject matter: