Known and Strange Things

by Teju Cole

  Awoonor, widely considered Ghana’s greatest contemporary poet, was a member of the literary generation that came of age in the fifties and sixties. Many of these writers were published in the Heinemann African Writers Series, the tan and orange spines of which could be seen on the bookshelves of homes across the continent. The series, under the editorship of Chinua Achebe, was the first flowering of African literature in English. Awoonor shared with many of his illustrious contemporaries an intense engagement with both African tradition and African modernity. The influence of T. S. Eliot was strong, and Awoonor’s poems are often dense and mysterious. But, like Achebe, he also gave voice to a culture under rapid and destructive change from colonial influences, and he expressed a disillusionment with the violence that marred the postcolonial project. From “This Earth, My Brother”:

  The crackling report of brens

  and the falling down;

  a shout greeted them

  tossing them into the darkness.

  Like his late friend Christopher Okigbo, he was invested in the ritual and chthonic possibilities of African vernacular languages, in his case Ewe. From that Ewe tradition came the feeling for elegy, which he applied with seriousness and dark irony to the serial crises of post-independence Ghana. The Ewe language also gave his poetry strong musical cadences, so that even when the meaning was opaque, the lines were fluent.

  On Monday, on the third day of what would prove to be a four-day siege, about 150 people made their way across uncharacteristically empty roads to Nairobi’s National Museum. An impromptu memorial had been organized for Awoonor. Kwame Dawes, the Ghanaian Jamaican poet, spoke warmly about the man he considered an uncle. On Friday, Dawes had shown me the first volume in a new series on African poetry. That book (which Dawes edited for publication by the University of Nebraska Press in 2014) was an orange-colored, handsomely designed hardcover of Awoonor’s The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems.

  “It’s got to be good,” Dawes had said of the design. “It’s got to be good because it’s intended to last.” His pride in the finished project was justified. Now, at the memorial, I asked Dawes if Awoonor had seen the volume he showed me.

  “I showed it to him for the first time here in Nairobi. I told him, ‘This is it.’ ”

  “And what did he say?”

  Dawes smiled. “He said, ‘This is good.’ That’s what he said. ‘This is good.’ ”

  Awoonor’s son Afetsi had accompanied his father to Nairobi, and we’d all been at the same hotel. Afetsi was injured in the attack—shot in the shoulder—but he came to the memorial, with a white bandage slung across his right arm. He had the same serene and easy smile as his father, and we embraced warmly. The Ghanaian high commissioner was there as well, as were three other members of Awoonor’s family, who had flown in after the tragedy. (Awoonor had served as Ghana’s permanent representative to the United Nations in the 1990s, and he’d come to the Storymoja Hay Festival at the behest of the Ghanaian government.) One of the authors at the festival, the young Ghanaian poet Nii Ayikwei Parkes, during his eulogy, referred to Awoonor in the present tense. As he corrected himself, replacing “is” with “was,” grief took sudden hold, and his voice cracked.

  After Parkes’s eulogy, I read out Awoonor’s short poem “The Journey Beyond”:

  The howling cry through door posts

  carrying boiling pots

  ready for the feasters.

  Kutsiami the benevolent boatman;

  when I come to the river shore

  please ferry me across

  I do not have tied in my cloth the

  price of your stewardship.

  The most resonant moment of the evening was the least anticipated: someone had made an audio recording from the master class that Awoonor had given at the festival on Friday. And so, in the silence of the auditorium, we listened to about a minute of his final lecture. And there he was, speaking to us in his own voice (how startling its clarity), as though nothing had changed: “And I have written about death also, particularly at this old age now. At seventy-nine, you must know—unless you’re an idiot—that very soon, you should be moving on.” Then he added, with both levity and seriousness, “An ancient poet from my tradition said, ‘I have something to say. I will say it before death comes. And if I don’t say it, let no one say it for me. I will be the one who will say it.’ ”

  Captivity

  THERE ARE VAST distances between the cities. The terrain is varied. Forest gives way to savanna with scattered trees (shea, locust bean), and then to drier Sahel landscape. On these journeys one forgets city life, enters into something more delicate and more fragile.

  Girls walk by the side of the road, a cluster of bright patterns. Boys play in the dusty fields. Every now and again, a church flashes by, whitewashed or with a plain mud façade. Ways of life mix here in northern Nigeria; there are many Christians and Muslims, and many languages. “The Christian south,” it is often written, “the Muslim north,” but the country’s truth is coexistence. This is true of the so-called Middle Belt, and in Kaduna, and Jos, and, continuing in the northeast direction, beyond my journey, in Borno.

  In the town of Chibok, the girls, mostly sixteen or seventeen, had been cautious. They knew, as everyone did, that schools were being targeted. About forty boys had been killed at a school in Yobe last July. They’d been lined up in their dorms and shot. In the same state, twenty-nine others had died in February, their bodies burned, the culprits never found. And so the girls had come back to Chibok only for their exams—a quick, calculated risk before they returned home.

  Where are they now? The shock of a sudden captivity will have given way to other fears. There are more than two hundred of them, Muslim and Christian. Nigeria’s northeastern border is massive, porous. They don’t know when they crossed the border, or if they crossed the border. They could be in Niger, or Chad, or Cameroon (these three neighboring countries are impoverished states with weak security). The girls know only what their captors say. They have lost track of time. But they feel, in their bodies, the distances covered by the rumbling trucks. They cannot imagine what the world is thinking about them, or if it is.

  And what are they themselves thinking of, huddled in their dozens, warned to stay quiet? Not of the murders of Boko Haram’s founder and some of his followers by Nigeria Police five years ago, which sparked the violent phase of the group’s campaign of terror. Not of the thousands killed during that campaign, in suicide bombs, attacks on churches, and shootings at restaurants, a frightening catalogue of atrocities. Not of the Global War on Terrorism, or of America’s strategic goals in that war. (Already, in Niger, a drone base is assembled; already American specialists are on their way to help the Nigerian government.) Not of Baga, some two hundred miles from Chibok, where last year government forces massacred two hundred civilians, or of Maiduguri, where, in mid-March this year, more than five hundred men were executed on suspicion of being terrorists. Not of Abuja, where bombs now explode with unnerving frequency. Not of next year’s elections, which the president wants to win at all costs, or of the corruption fueling his reelection bid.

  They are not thinking of Twitter, where the captivity is the cause of the day, or of the campaigns on the streets of Lagos for a more competent and less callous government, or of the rallies in front of Nigeria’s embassies worldwide, or of the suddenly ramped-up coverage by international media, or of how this war will engulf even those who are only just beginning to hear about it, or of those who, free for now, will someday become captives.

  They are perhaps thinking only that night is falling again, and that the men will come to each of them again, an unending horror.

  In Alabama

  WHEN I WENT down to Alabama, I listened repeatedly to John Coltrane’s “Alabama.” The introduction of the song has a discursive quality to it, like a black preacher’s exhortations. And that, it turned out, was what it was: the keening saxophone line, built over rolling piano chords (like a congregatio
n’s murmuring), was a paraphrase of the eulogy Martin Luther King, Jr., gave after a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four girls.

  Alabama’s earth is red like West Africa’s, dusty, unpromising. On this earth one expects nothing to grow, and on it everything grows. Kudzu and Virginia creeper run riot. This is fertile earth. William Christenberry likens it to brown sugar. James Baldwin wrote: “I could not suppress the thought that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from these trees.”

  I was sad all the way to Selma. We drove from Gadsden, where cattle prods had been used on protesters in 1964, down through the counties and across land that had known human love and life long before the white man’s arrival. Selma’s not much, a main drag, Broad Street, that chucks you out of town via the Edmund Pettus Bridge almost as soon as you arrive. The town is much smaller than those others in whose company it evokes the civil rights movement: Montgomery, Birmingham. In the hot sunshine of a Sunday, it was stunned and quiet, with the fable-like air of a crumbling movie set. Selma is named for an Ossianic poem; to my ear, it seems to meld “soul” and its Spanish cognate, “alma,” into a single moody word. Selma’s shops are closed that day. Pedestrians are few and drift about in the sun like people in Google’s Street View. But if you take a left some crossings before the bridge, and a right, you come around to a housing project and, across the street from it, the clean and well-kept Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, the starting point for those marches fifty years ago.

  Long after history’s active moment, do places retain some charge of what they witnessed, what they endured?

  On Sunday, March 7, 1965, six hundred people, led by John Lewis, marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Just after crossing the bridge, they were met by Alabama state troopers and local police. The men in uniform wore masks, and some of them were on horseback. They gave a brief warning, and then shot tear gas and charged into the crowd with billy clubs. They rolled through undefended people with a sickening carelessness for human safety that the corresponding scene in Selma—Ava DuVernay’s necessary and otherwise fine film—failed to match. That’s the point, perhaps: that what we watch from the safety of a movie theater cannot, and should not, relay to us the true horror of things. For how would we bear it?

  But watch the original footage. These Americans brutally beat unarmed women and men, thorough in their mercilessness, cheered on by other Americans, sending more than fifty Americans to hospital. The footage made the difference, and shocked the nation’s conscience. It accelerated the passage of the Voting Rights Act. How not to link it all together? Selma and Ferguson, New York City and Cleveland, torture by the CIA and mass murder in Gaza, the police state and slave patrols: no generation is free of the demands of conscience, and no citizenry can shirk the responsibility of calling the state’s abuse of power to account.

  Selma was a small town then, and is a small town now. On Sunday, December 7, when I visited, the headline of The Selma Times-Journal was SURPRISE AT PARADE: FIRE DEPARTMENT MASCOT SPARKY MAKES RETURN AT CHRISTMAS PARADE. The lede: “Sparky the Fire Dog has returned and he made a grand entrance the morning of the Selma–Fallas County Christmas Parade. The dog costume was stolen from a vehicle parked at the Station 3 firehouse on Oct. 20 and found weather-damaged, dirty, torn and missing pieces behind the old Pancake House….”

  I walked down the Pettus Bridge alone. I thought not of Sparky but of John Lewis, whose face and whose spirit I like so much, his light brown trench coat, his backpack, the concentrated dignity in his small frame. I felt these things in my body, tried to honor with my solitary stride the bravery of those women and men, and, in the silence of my walk, the steep drop of the Alabama River to my left, the clear air ahead where there had been smoke and atrocity, I began to hear again Coltrane’s “Alabama,” not a melody but rather a recitation delivered with the saxophone.

  Then the drive down to Montgomery, winter’s dry bright landscape flicking by. This bitter earth, these crumbling signs, the things that may have happened in these woods: in this place, I touched on a fissure in America’s unfinishable history. Selma to Montgomery on U.S. Route 80 is an hour’s drive, some fifty-four miles. It was a walk of four days in 1965, and on that third and successful march, many thousands walked together, 25,000 of them by the time they surged into Montgomery and rallied at the Alabama State Capitol. Around those days, some died. Klan work.

  “These children,” sings Coltrane’s line in 1963, “unoffending, innocent, and beautiful.” McCoy Tyner weeping on piano. “Were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.” Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. After Montgomery, after the memorial to the many murdered during those years, the placid-looking Court Square where tens of thousands had been auctioned into slavery, Dr. King’s church, the Rosa Parks museum and the woman who was so much more—so much smarter, so much wiser, so much more tactical—than her best-known act of refusal: after all this, we went to Birmingham. And Birmingham was heartbreak, too. At the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, my soul took fright. How could humans?

  History won’t let go of us. We’re pinned to it. Days later, after my return to New York and with “Alabama” still in my ear, I’m in the crowd of tens of thousands for a march that takes us some miles through lower Manhattan. The language is close in its keening, “I can’t breathe,” “Black lives matter.” The raised voices echo down the caverns of the city’s streets.

  Bad Laws

  NOT ALL VIOLENCE is hot. There’s cold violence, too, which takes its time and finally gets its way. Children going to school and coming home are exposed to it. Fathers and mothers listen to politicians on television calling for their extermination. Grandmothers have no expectation that even their aged bodies are safe: any young man may lay a hand on them with no consequence. The police could arrive at night and drag a family out into the street. Putting a people into deep uncertainty about the fundamentals of life, over years and decades, is a form of cold violence. Through an accumulation of laws rather than by military means, a particular misery is intensified and entrenched. This slow violence, this cold violence, no less than the other kind, ought to be looked at and understood.

  Near the slopes of Mount Scopus in East Jerusalem is the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Most of the people who live here are Palestinian Arabs, and the area itself has an ancient history that features both Jews and Arabs. The Palestinians of East Jerusalem are in a special legal category under modern Israeli law. Most of them are not Israeli citizens, nor are they classified the same way as people in Gaza or the West Bank; they are permanent residents. There are old Palestinian families here, but in a neighborhood like Sheikh Jarrah many of the people are refugees who were settled here after the nakba (“catastrophe”) of 1948. They left their original homes behind, fleeing places such as Haifa and Sarafand al-Amar, and they came to Sheikh Jarrah, which then became their home. Many of them were given houses constructed on a previously uninhabited parcel of land by the Jordanian government and by the UN Relief and Works Agency. East Jerusalem came under Israeli control in 1967, and since then, but at an increasing tempo in recent years, these families are being rendered homeless a second or third time.

  There are many things about Palestine that are not easily seen from a distance. The beauty of the land, for instance, is not at all obvious. Scripture and travelers’ reports describe a harsh terrain of stone and rocks, a place in which it is difficult to find water or to shelter from the sun. Why would anyone want this land? But then you visit and you understand the attenuated intensity of what you see. You get the sense that there are no wasted gestures, that this is an economical landscape, and that there is great beauty in this economy. The sky is full of clouds that are like flecks of white paint. The olive trees, the leaves of which have silvered undersides, are like an apparition. And even the stones and rocks speak of history, of deep time, and of the consolation that comes with all old
places. This is a land of tombs, mountains, and mysterious valleys. All this one can only really see at close range.

  Another thing one sees, obscured by distance but vivid up close, is that the Israeli oppression of Palestinian people is not necessarily—or at least not always—as crude as Western media can make it seem. It is in fact extremely refined, and involves a dizzying assemblage of laws and bylaws, contracts, ancient documents, force, amendments, customs, religion, conventions, and sudden irrational moves, all mixed together and imposed with the greatest care.

  The impression this insistence on legality confers, from the Israeli side, is of an infinitely patient due process that will eventually pacify the enemy and guarantee security. The reality, from the Palestinian side, is of a suffocating viciousness. The fate of Palestinian Arabs since the nakba has been to be scattered and oppressed by different means: in the West Bank, in Gaza, inside the 1948 borders, in Jerusalem, in refugee camps abroad, in Jordan, in the distant diaspora. In all these places, Palestinians experience restrictions on their freedom and on their movement. To be Palestinian is to be hemmed in. Much of this is done by brute military force from the Israel Defense Forces—killing for which no later accounting is possible. Some of it happens in the secret chambers of the Shin Bet. But a lot of it is done according to Israeli law, argued in and approved by Israeli courts, and technically legal, even when the laws in question are bad laws and in clear contravention of international standards and conventions.

  The reality is that, as a Palestinian Arab, in order to defend yourself against the persecution you face, not only do you have to be an expert in Israeli law, you also have to be a Jewish Israeli and have the force of the Israeli state as your guarantor. You have to be what you are not, what it is not possible for you to be, in order not to be slowly strangled by the laws arrayed against you. In Israel, there is no pretense that the opposing parties in these cases are equal before the law; or, rather, such a pretense exists, but no one on either side takes it seriously. This has certainly been the reality for the Palestinian families living in Sheikh Jarrah whose homes, built mostly in 1956, inhabited by three or four generations of people, are being taken from them by legal means.