Dear blog

So sorry, this is where I pull the curtains.

I don’t know where I am. But I’m not at home.

Like shit, this happened.

Cheers.

I'm not so bad, after all

I never liked going home for break during my university days. I’d prefer to stay on campus after everybody had left. But some people hated the idea.

My siblings.

I used to think it was strange how they always looked forward to my break. Even strange-r was that they knew my school calendar.

I used to feel somewhat guilty anytime I got home, which was rare – and usually unannounced. My siblings will start telling me how they had anticipated my coming. My kid brother, especially, will revel in how he had replayed some fond memories in his head and had expected new additions to his memory bank. But then, I always disappoint. I think I still do.

As much as I enjoyed hanging out with them, it was always impossible to lure myself away from the sanity of the university community (during break) – the sprawling trees waving hands at passers-by, the sight of birds cavorting in the air, the panoramic view of busiless roads, and the few passing faces of those enjoying the fecund freedom.

And so I was at home and kid brother thought it was time to SCATTER my life.

I was so shocked when he uttered those words. But I feigned my emotions.

How the words linked with our conversation is beyond my conception. Before that defining moment, our discussion had bothered on his newly-mastered piano and drumming stunts, on why he thinks Mozart is overrated, on his dream DVD collections of Jazz Greats, on why his friends cannot understand his obsession - as a science student - with the arts.

Today, I remember those words again. Those words still haunt (and hunt) me, as ever.

“You know you’re my role model.”

I was dead for about three minutes when those words hit my ears; my brain ran a quick nanosecond scan.

Me?

Me?

Wait, me?

The conversation continued. However.

Mischievous as ever, after saying those words, he looked up at me and added… “that does not include certain habits.”

Unbloggable habits ;)

He clocked a new year, yesterday. And yeah, I played the big brother. Time to surprise him.

I gave him the package. Three wrapped DVDs.

I saw the glow on his face.

The first two says, The Complete Jazz: Volume 1 and 2

The second says, Piano: Play like the Masters

And then he jumped at my lanky frame, almost breaking me and embarked on a long singsong of Thank You.

He won’t read this though… Happy B’day lil’ Bro.

No matter what the outside world thinks… I think I’m a good guy at the home front.

Lost

maybe I’m the one left behind
as the world moves in hurrying paces
or am I the first at the seashore – the
lone survivor of this mammoth wreck?

maybe I’m just another grown toddler
who marks time on wobbling feet
perhaps I’m an adept swimmer
who glides ahead of the herd

giddy. these sands are shifting.

am I a tossed coin on a gambler's table or
another Gulliver who lost his map?

Lagos, and more...

Lagos. One can hate the city, but can never love it enough. It’s a strange romance. And lately, I have been so caught up in this romance, being an unfortunate lover, that I can’t yet divorce myself form her lustful grip, if at all possible.

Plus every other thing, the ttttrrrraaaaffffiiiicccc in Lagos is killing me.

I have been away from blogging. I haven't resigned. A friend called and said he has a feeling I landed a job in Barack Obama’s campaign team. Very funny. But sincerely, the after-effect of writing his speech sure feels like an after-sex exhaustion.

Things have been crazy lately. And fun too. From defending myself for writing “as sexy as hell” (a poetry line I wrote and meant to be understood in the context of the poem) to futile attempt to find a place where I can purchase the season one compilation of “Everybody hates Chris”. From engaging in some corporate bickering to missing the theatre to watch Wole Soyinka’s “Madmen and Specialists”. From attending a programme at the Teslim Balogun Stadium and listening to brilliant speakers – Funso Philips and Toyin Subair – to attending the christening party of a boss’s baby and resisting every temptation to spend that evening in Femi Kuti’s shrine instead – somewhere in the neighbourhood. It’s called respecting the baby.

I paced up and down in front of the shrine, secretly relishing one of Fela’s songs as it played in the background. The ambience was somewhat riveting – the smell of tobacco and ganja mixing with Fela’s saxophone, men and women – some of them with heavy swathes of locked hair, pacing up and down, some with cupful of alcohol, some with cigarettes expertly placed between their fingers and occasionally sandwiched between their waiting lips. Puffs! Whiffs! Salutation to Abami Eda. I don’t smoke. But I kinda like the smell. Quirky?

Well, during the past week, I resumed my multi-book reading habit – reading six to seven books at a period – dropping one and getting bored, picking another, starting from the centre, getting distracted, stopping, reflecting, admiring one author, disliking the other, going back to the first book, picking a new one, restless anticipation of humour in some of the pages, reading the blurb again, switching between radio stations, the TV remote very close, forgetting to dog-ear where I stopped, blablablablabla… I’ve been reading all the books for about six months. I’m an incurable slow reader, with a low attention span. What’s the cure for low attention span? Anyone?

Besides, my naughty friend is temporarily back in Lagos, after some months-long hideout in the North. I’d thought we were going to resume our evening-long hanging out. The yeye boy lured me into making preparations for his visiting Yankee girlfriend. Every preparation possible. “Do this”. “Don’t do that”. “She would like this”. “She won’t like that”. “Blow her head off” (whatever that means). Rehearsals. Cautions. And internally, I was warning myself to keep a distance from them, knowing how much they will frustrate me with their public show affection.

And help. Help. Help. I think I’ve lost my collection of poems. It’s driving me mad. I just don’t know where I dropped them.

In another related news, I’m on a bet with a fellow blogger, TosynBucknor. I'm on a mission to be the first to make comments on her next five posts.

For all those who cared to know wassup with AlooFar, thank you. And for those who keep yelling at me…. Your time is coming.

Obama's Speech on Nigeria

Once again I’d like to show my appreciation for everyone who stood by us over the course of our campaign. Indeed it’s been a defining moment, not just for our party but for our country.

I want to specially thank the men and women who have been walking with me in my journey to become the 44th President of the United States.

I understand the importance of America’s democracy to the overall welfare of our planet. But I haven’t known until lately the extent which the world has shown great interest in our affairs.

Just yesterday, I watched on the television the rousing ovation that accompanied the announcement of my nomination, not only in the United States but especially in the farthest regions of the world. What that tells me is that our neighbours, far and near, are interested in the kind of change sweeping across the American nation. What that means is that our message of hope resonates beyond the geographical boundaries of this country. And that is significant - because it also means the rest of the world endorses my candidacy. I’m humbled.

But I must not pretend that I accept all the congratulatory messages without some misgivings. Pardon my impoliteness, but I’d wished I’d not received some messages from certain quarters of the world.

I love Africa. I love the Nigerian people. But certain observations call for serious concern.

I’ve been reflecting over the possibilities of my emergence as president, if I’d been a citizen of the world’s most populated black nation. For obvious reasons, I’ve not been able to curtail my amusement at such misguided reflection, knowing well the odds stacked against such ambition.

I will be 47 this August. And this November, I’ll be marching up to become the next Commander-in-Chief of the United States. If this were Nigeria, I would have been told to wait and allow older people to run as though the amount of grey hair in ones head translates to the person’s level of political or moral maturity. Moreover, its present president is its first graduate president since independence.

More surprising is that his victory during the elections has become a classic illustration in the textbooks of fraudulent electioneering. It will be unfair to bother you with the fact that many Nigerians never knew how their present president looks like until the morning of inauguration day.

American politics is definitely not perfect. But the American people sure have a lot to teach the world in matters of politics. And the Nigerian nation has even more to learn. Our candidates here move from one constituency to another to woo voters, to sell a vision of leadership. But in that West African state, it is the responsibility of a powerful oligarchy, party chieftains, self-appointed godfathers and their band of thugs to impose candidates on the party and the people. The American people definitely understand that a nation is best governed by laws, not men; that we are all equal in the eyes of the laws; that we can be free to say what we want, write what we want – after all the law is there to defend our freedom of expression under reasonable conditions.

Nigeria is a republic – at least that’s what the books say. Sadly, that’s where it ends too. Ones political success is directly related to ones affiliation to established dynasties: tribal dynasty, family dynasty, business or religious affiliations.

The significance of my candidacy has been highly trumpeted – and hasn’t been made less phenomenal by the media - a son of a Kenyan father married to a white woman - a black man who is now riding on the horseback of the American Dream. I guess I owe my late father a lot for successfully planting me in the belly of a white woman. Maybe it’s my mum that I should be grateful to for accepting a black man’s romantic advances. Now my dad has become a source of inspiration of some sort - a source of inspiration to all would-be immigrants to the United States. I guess the chase for the elusive US immigrant VISA has just been heightened. However, let it be known now that the US immigrant VISA will not be any less easy to acquire when I become president.

Mrs. Clinton has fought a good fight. Among other aspirants for the Democratic ticket, she has traveled the farthest. She has made history as the woman who has done what no woman has done before. What are her chances of coming this close to the presidency of her country if she had been a Nigerian? If she ever dared to announce such an aspiration she would have only succeeded in waking up the demons of sexism, and waking up the monster of a culture that says women are to be seen, not heard. She would have been reminded that women are to remain in the background because men, only men, have been destined to occupy the open space. Certain societies are adverse to female dreamers.

Mrs. Clinton proved to the world what it means to lose politically. She didn’t talk of joining another party or even registering another. She has a strong guiding principles and her declaration of support for my campaign is a demonstration of her bravery even in the face of defeat.

I hear Nigeria makes a metaphorical claim as the giant of Africa. That claim, I make bold to say, is not only unfounded but absurd. Forgive my observation, that country’s claim of gianthood is only proved by the relative size of its population. 48 years after bidding farewell to colonial rule, that nation is still struggling to get on its feet, like a toddler. Nigeria has clearly failed to be the beacon of hope for other African nations.

Will the Nigerian people ever speak of their country as that where leaders make unselfish calculations that prepare them for the challenges of the global economy? Will they ever speak of a nation where every child, male and female, has a right to achieve his or her dream? So long as people are trapped in poverty, so long as there are evidences of gross marginalization of certain regions, so long as opportunities are opened but not for all - the dream of a true nation will remain out of reach.

Not too many countries are as religion-loving as Nigerians. On a more ridiculous note, Nigeria also ranks high on the list of corrupt nations. Too much spirituality. Too much corruption. I dissociated myself from my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. I condemned the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused controversy, statements that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate the greatness and the goodness of our nation. But I still respect him. How many Nigerian clergymen, considering the size of the followership they command, can bluntly condemn unpleasant activities of the government? Bloody hypocrites.

Let’s leave Nigerian problems for the Nigerian people.

The American people deserve change. They are tired of politics and policies that do not address their immediate challenges. They now have a choice to determine whether they will recycle the same of the same or will give the leadership of this nation to a man who will give them the future – a man that embodies hope and change.

One thing though… when I become the president, will the White house be called the Black house? And I’ve promised myself not to allow the Obama girl to come close to the White house. I’m afraid she might be my administration’s version of Monica Lewinsky.

I’m grateful for your attention. I’m more grateful to the writer of my speech. He sure deserves to be a part of my administration.

Thank you. God bless you. God bless America.

Disclaimer: You read this speech before it's been delivered.

Please note...
This writer acknowledges the input of others knowing well that the essence of this speech will discourage a possible lawsuit.

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What if seated in Heaven is the Devil?

I made this post last year. It has since been attracting some misgivings from some people, who, in their respected opinions, consider it “sensitive”. I have declined every urge to make a post on their rejoinders. I still wonder why they couldn’t drop their comments directly on my blog instead of emailing me.

One of them, a well-known blogger (no, I won’t link him), stumbled at me on yahoo messenger. Before then we’ve been having some nice chats on about anything. Little did I know I was about to abort our correspondence when I posted this poem. On that faithful day, I logged on to my messenger, only to be welcomed by a long and anxious queue of offline messages.

"Spam!" I thought.

But to my surprise the messages, minus two, were a chain of biblical verses filled with curses, yes – CURSES! My blogger friend had leafed through his bible to fish out portions of that holy book that seem designed as suitable words of retaliation against a perceived sacrilege.

"What a joke!" I thought.

By coincidence, he was online at that time. And then I asked him, “Mr, to what do I owe these prayers?” I guess he must have been pissed off by the cheekiness of my question. He replied with yet another stretch of biblical passages, the difference only being that, this time, they came so hurriedly that most of the words were misspelt. How else was I supposed to understand the depth of his anger? I didn’t even bother to reply. All the while the chat box was busy saying #### is typing a message …until he signed out.

Just few days ago, I got a text from a friend who, after visiting my blog, ordered me, I mean ORDERED me, to retract (his word) that part of the poem that reads, “What if seated in Heaven is the Devil?” because, his reason – it is blasphemous. At that point I went back thinking about how far I’ve come with this poem, and who knows – how far I’ll go.

I wrote this poem during my undergraduate years. I still remember the rabid feedback I got courtesy of that part of the poem. A classmate of mine will look at me then and say, jokingly… You are the anti-christ! And then I would smile. One actually told me she has stopped reading the departmental press board because an “unholy poem” was once glued there. To quote a lecturer-friend, Your case is a sorry case. I avoided arguing with him by replying with a smile too.

But of course, I got some interesting and encouraging comments too.

Let's see how many blog friends I have (or will remain as friends). This is the poem, titled “What If…”

What if…

What if everything is but a dream
cast nude on this jagged plane, unreal?

What if the silhouette is but the real thing
and the substance is its shadow?

What if sight is but blindness
and voice is but dumbness?

What if that animal perceives you as "animal"
itself- human, created in His image?

What if the womb is our grave
and the grave is but the cocoon pregnant with life?

What if white is but a precious gloom
and rose is but the embleem of death?

What if it’s not sleep after all
but Death tickly calling?

What if it’s foolery finely cloaked
masking as Love?

What if seated in Heaven is the Devil
and fanning Hell’s furnace is The Lord?

What if righteousness is but a sin
and Sodomy, the Hallowed?

What if we are just characters
existing only in the dreams of some gods?

What if…?

Just Images

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Writer’s Block or Writer’s Cramp?

These words are just spilling out. I'm not sure if this will turn out to be a sensible piece. I'll follow the drag.

Most times I get nudged to write, either by some experience, or just by the common writer’s need to give a disturbing thought a lettered face. In some cases, it is the struggle to marry conflicting views together, and writing becomes the only leeway for a settlement.

This often comes with its misfortune. I realize that while employing writing as a means to resolving the conflict, I end up inviting some other voices, different shades of perspectives, of voices once muffled, or once inexistent. Of course this is good. But first, I’ll pause, aghast at my self-infliction. Should I continue to write? Should I just give up? Should I just engage someone in a discourse instead of resorting to writing? Questions. Probings. Doubts. And then, the words will take a life of their own. As they begin to spill out from their enclave, I’ll negotiate my way through them, and then some kind of light - a strange glow of revelation, will bear on the naked slab. Thoughts will begin to interact with one another: agreeing, disagreeing. Before the first yawn sets in, I would have written a piece. Before I know it, I would have dotted the last sentence.

Now I have to digress. It’s often the lot of a writer, especially when what is to be written is yet unformed in ones mind, that funny situation where thoughts fly mischievously, playing hide and seek, resisting every attempt to strewn them into sentences; if not to make a sense out of them but at least to ease the writer’s unsettled mind. Even when the thoughts are well formed, ready to be typed out, they start another form of mischief, this time confronting the writer with where and how to start. This is a familiar terrain.

When nibbled to write, I do not wait for long, before I resign into calmness, into a state where I’m likely to be uninterrupted. And if that occurs in the morning, the better for me, since it appears I’m mostly alert during that part of the day. It’s usually a strange bonus if I get to write anything at all before night calls it a day.

Now, I’m supposed to write. The impulses are right. I just don’t know how to start. This is it! That dreaded state. Writer’s block. A distracting clog on the wheel of invention.

"Maybe there is no such thing as a writer’s block," I ask myself sometimes. Maybe it’s just ones perfectionist tendency pressed beyond tolerable limits, and resulting into some kind of cooling down after a tenuous mental exhaustion.

All the same these are not the words I planned to put down, I think I’m blocked.

But this is a blog post, isn't it? ;)

Asa, Mama Waidi, reviewed

I love Asa. By the day way, who doesn’t? Here is a brilliant review of Asa, her eponymous album. I hope it will be a first-time consideration for any recognition the album might be up for.

Asa's voice. She works it delicately it threatens to break at every high pitch-- but it doesn't; and the listener's racing heart takes a reprieve. Until the next crescendo, that is. But the message she delivers is arresting hundreds across the world.

Of course, as some have agreed, Bob Marley will love her. Fela will see hope again. Wyclef Jean will be impressed. And she might make friends with such atypical performers as India Arie and Macy Gray. She performs moving poetry on love, human rights, the ordinary life. The manner in which she handles the songs, the reverence, suggests that she didn’t know what she was on to until it arrived fully formed, the mixture of reggae, soul, hip-hop, folk, and rock. And she is left with the enormous challenge to name it, although it appears she won't be able to.

The music is bigger than the musician. Asa stands, maybe, 5ft. She doesn’t at once look like superstar material. Her voice, well, is unusual. Strange. Yet her virtuosity outpaces these distractions, even though she sings like an unpolished village girl, with heavy stress points on her consonants and an attraction to accented English. Her 11th-track, Beautiful, for instance, consumes a great number of songs-for-mother that came before it. Presenting from a refreshing perspective, her flow reflects a robust emotion deserving of a tribute to one who made the giving of life possible.

If the comments on her website and YouTube channel are to be believed, the 11-track CD, Asa, captivates audiences everywhere on earth. The appeal in Europe, America , and Africa is tremendously promising. At home, since the album arrived with the single, Fire on the Mountain, it might have achieved this huge popularity for its significant difference in tone and content, threatening to remove the ground from under what Nigeria was beginning to accept as its own voice: Afro-hip-hop, the standard.

Over the years, from her days as a university dropout who took to the guitar, a weird girl guitarist on the streets of Lagos, to the troubled days with former associates, Question Mark Entertainment, Asa's art has grown up. She is adding frills to her stage performances, too. She can now tour the world as her own woman, not an inconsequential opening act for other people.

Will she win a Grammy? Will she merely be nominated? It's a question that has been asked. If she does win a Grammy or something very prestigious, then it confirms the widespread belief that Asa is world class indeed. If she doesn't, it may not reduce from her magical attraction.

Her drawback, eventually, maybe in the showmanship she puts into her stage performances. That she can conveniently hold concerts for hours has not been convincingly projected either. And, most importantly, how long will this type of music enrapture the world? Some have said it will soon fade away, being a distraction from the dominance of hip-hop and rap. If it doesn't, it's on Asa's shoulder to prove that her first album didn’t happen by luck. She needs to show, in her future work, that she won't cut and paste the rhythm and melody from this one.

And the voice. God don't let it collapse. It's the witchcraft that holds all these in place.

© S.A

And I strongly think Amy Winehouse comes second after Asa ;)

Dele Giwa: Born to Run

I love reading biographies. I remember my childhood days when I used to pick those big hardcover books from the shelves and leafed through them with infant glee. I’ll bury myself under the bedspread, against the chattering of my siblings, just veering away into the lives of some great guys.

Just recently a colleague of mine asked if I have read Soyinka’s You Must Set Forth at Dawn. Of course I have. He recommended that I read Born to Run: The Story of Dele Giwa. And notwithstanding my hiccups with NYSC and some other personal scuffles, I had to create the time to read the book. I bet it’s a very touching book. I particularly resent Dele Giwa’s dysfunctional romance with Florence Ita-Giwa. Gush! That woman na War. True, True No Woman No Cry!

I commend the biographers’, Dele Olojede & Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo, efforts for their brilliant narration of the life of “a shoeless boy of a washerman” who became “the undisputed number one investigative journalist in Nigeria”.

Most striking was the way the book ends.

The bereaved grieved. The mother expressed her sorrow with funereal, haunting sounds from deep in a mother’s heart.

The mourners moaned. Traditional burial rites were conducted for a man who had little patience for tradition.

The actors talked, with impressive grandiloquence. The sun grew weary and the sun went down. Dele Giwa, shut away in a black casket, went down into the grave.

Forever.

Alone.

Love?

Love!
Stares at me with gleaming glee
Fluttered, my heart flinches at its summons.
’Wish I could stay aloof like a slumbering sea,
Unyielding to its suspicious beckons.

Love,
Seems to me a shard of mirror under an ocean
Unclouded, but to what purpose is its reflection?

Tribute to an Insomniac Poet

This is about someone whose poetry I like to relish. I had it in my plans to meet him someday. But as death will have it, that plan never materialised.

Tribute to an Insomniac Poet

I got Ebereonwu’s anthology, "The Insomniac Dragon" as a gift from a friend. My friend had wanted me to see that there are Nigerian writers who employ poetry as a medium to express their zaniness. He must have burdened himself with the task of browsing through the Literature section of the University of Ibadan bookshop to fetch out that beautiful piece of unusual anthology in order to refute my claim of a dearth of such poetic content in the Nigerian literary landscape. A few days before, we had argued over the proliferation of ‘political’ and ‘African’ poems in the country. I was emphatic in my assertion that as much as I do appreciate poems with such content, that it was high time we started reading poems with real existential leanings… with a stress on an individual’s quest for meaning in life, an individual’s struggle against life’s strange tides, an individual's rebellion against the conventional etc., etc.

Sooner had I leafed through The Insomniac Dragon, than my hunger for existential poems (from Naija) was satisfied. I think Ebereonwu was mad. If death had not callously taken him away from us, it might have been necessary to request for a psychiatric examination of his brain. I oftentimes find myself captured in awe of his crazy ideas and also wonder that his inspiration cannot but be from anything less than the bottle. No sane man could have chunked out such screwy lines. Or what shall one say of a poet who wrote:

The cobra’s venom is my cough syrup

(“Mankind”, The Insomniac Dragon)

or of these poignant and depressing lines:

I have drowned a river in the ocean

And buried the night in the dark

I am my parents’ unrealized ambition

My lover’s promise never to be fulfilled

(“Next door”, The Insomniac Dragon)

As though this were not enough, Ebereonwu sequeled "The Insomniac Dragon" with yet another outlandish collection aptly titled "Unpublishable Poems". If I were to offer a change of title, I would have suggested Unpalatable Poems because if poetry is meant to be savoured, the poems in this collection are definitely too tart for the tongue.

In this new collection, one either gets stunned by his personal jabs on erstwhile president of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Odia Ofeimun in the “Ode To The Odd Man” or totally gets knocked away by the rather cynical poem, “SINFUL WORLD” where he wrote:

Judge me not so that you shall not be judged

You don’t have to break your own law

Just to see me punished for getting involved

Throw me not into the lake of eternal fire

I wouldn’t do that to you if you were a sinner

(“SINFUL WORLD”, Unpublishable Poems)

Ebereonwu’s poems are particularly disturbing. Well, maybe to a reading audience that is constituted of religious bigots and fanatics. He is daring in his ideas. They are unconventional. Pretty wonder that he wrote that:

My poetry is the graffiti

On the trunk of a jacaranda

(“Just a poet”, The Insomniac Dragon)

I wish I knew more about Ebereonwu’s personal life beyond what is profiled in the blurb of his books. He cannot be any less different from his poems.

Ebereonwu, in your demise I found muse.

HERE

Your spittle harpooned the shark of bigotry and norm

Your voice unsettled the moon even in its abode up high

In your mortal strides, you caused cherubs to fret and sigh

You’ve gone, leaving behind your prepuce and venom

THERE

It isn’t the fool anymore, let them know

It’s the wise and strong that treads where angels fear to go

So with your pen, cause ripples over there

Unsleep their slumbering stare