ktravula - a travelogue! » Art

5 Good Reads

Kola — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:56:43 +0000

1. The English Language Test

2. 25 things writers should stop doing

3. Banished and Revived

4. Diss “Like”

5. Center of the Universe (via The New Yorker)

We Got Snow!

Kola — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:23:36 +0000

Two days late still, but, yes! Winter is here.

Greetings.

Kola — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 23:07:11 +0000

For your readership from the beginning of the year, for comments, word of mouth compliments, blog/twitter/facebook following, and support, here is wishing you a very happy holiday season, Merry Christmas, and a happy new year in advance.

The card was made from a picture of the first two carvings I brought with me to the United States in August 2009.

On Poetry as Science

Kola — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:53:19 +0000

One piece of prose floating from the fading memory I have from reading Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay occasionally come back to haunt me in my still moments. It asks amidst a whole lot of other questions what the purpose of words are beyond their ability to convey meanings. In one recent interview with Stephen Colbert, Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson compares the inconsequentiality of our presence on this planet to that of a billion (and some) bacteria living in the walls of our intestines whose number is equal to almost three times the number of all human life that ever existed and died. Like those bacteria, he suggests, who live without the mental capability of understanding the dimension of their inconsequentiality when compared to six billion other intestines walking the earth (with the multibillion units of bacteria they carry in them), we may not possess the mental flexibility to understand our insignificance (along with our equally possible random relevance as evidenced by our current existence).

Milosz asks as if to himself what makes it so that words, in their utmost insignificance beyond immediate use, lends themselves to entendres, rhyme and poetry. Did there exist on some magical plane a predestination for the word “apple” to become the symbol of ultimate taboo, pleasure and sin? In which realm of serendipity did “gain” and “pain” acquire the paradox of their rhyming complementarity. Sure computers may not write poems now (and I have no doubt that this is false), but the lexical matrix of today’s world endows us with a gazillion ways of expressing thoughts in inventive ways. The order in which I have written the last couple of sentences in this post (with almost a 100% certainty) is an order in which these words have never ever been arranged and never will anymore by anyone else. There is something to that. The process of writing poetry, for me, taps into the science of this randomness. The art resides in the chance of success – that moment when meaning, form, and words meet at the tip of the writer’s hands. See below:

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

from W.B. Yeats’ An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

This concise beauty, and an underlying deceptive simplicity that wows, has always defined for me one of writing’s unreachable bars; the place where science, art and meaning collide with the earnest needs of the present.

Fun Stuff: Google Ngram

Kola — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:44:30 +0000

Google has just come up with a great product called the Ngram Viewer (discussed in this equally fascinating TED video). What the Ngram Viewer does is to give users around the world the ability to sit at home and search through a database of billions of texts. These texts have been scanned into the Google database from all the books published in the world to date. Among other things, what this gives us is the power to discover the rate of occurrence of certain words, phrases or names in publishing history. Extremely fascinating, right?

I have been playing around with the program and here is my first experiment: to figure out which of these men in Nigerian political/social history is most frequently referenced in text, and since when. The men are Olusegun Obasanjo (who ruled the country for a record 11 years and played a crucial role in its political history), Chinua Achebe – Africa’s foremost novelist whose first 1958 novel Things Fall Apart is the most widely translated texts in English literature from Africa, Wole Soyinka – the continent’s first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and finally Obafemi Awolowo – nationalist, politician and visionary. The result is stunning and will offer nuggets for discussion among people who have argued (many times without proof) that one person was more famous than the other.

There are a few more I have tried out. This graph showed that the word “nigger” got more usage in the mid 1800s (just after Lincoln set the slaves free, which made sense), dropped in usage in the 1980s, and is now coming back into use after the year 2000. Go figure. The word “nigga” however is a totally different matter. The word “Republicans” was initially more famous than “Democrats” but eventually fell around 1900 and has remained stably lower ever since. And what about languages/cultures? This graph shows how much the African languages/cultures Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Swahili, Twi, Edo, and Zulu have featured in texts through time. Fascinating result, and not only because Yoruba leads the pack with a clear margin! Yoruba is not the biggest language/culture in Africa. The word “Nigeria”, according to the Ngram has been in use/print since around 1860 (contrary to what we have been told) although it finally gained currency at the beginning of 1900s. Finally, I did a search on my favourite comedians: George Carlin, Bill Cosby, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor. The result puts Bill Cosby on top and George Carlin at the bottom. Oh well.

What Google has done with this project called the Ngram Viewer (I say again, an extremely fascinating project) is to endow the world with a new great tool to do anthropology and study history with nothing but access to the internet. Life, and history, just became even more enlightening.

Poetry Reading…

Kola — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 12:56:10 +0000

Hanging out with writers and poets at a cafe downtown last night…

The open-mic poetry reading was sponsored by the English Language and Literature Association. Poets and readers include Jason Braun, David Rawson, Geoff Schmidt and others. Earlier in the day was a similar event at the school library featuring Eugene B. Redmond, the Poet Laureate of East St. Louis.

I read four unpublished poems.

Evening in Edwardsville

Kola — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 09:47:49 +0000

I took these series of photos in April.

The flatness of the land here makes it easy to have some of the best sunset views I’ve ever seen. My current apartment also overlooks an expanse of westward land that makes it a very delightful place to be relaxing between five and six during summer and fall evenings.

How I Earned the Right to Speak about Anything

E Iduma — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:08:27 +0000

By Emannuel Iduma (Also published on Blacklooks)

It is hard, as I am sure most writers know, to efface the person, render it impotent in the face of the writing life. Who I am always haunts my writing; and this is why and how I argue that I have earned the right to speak about anything – and you might want to consider this word ‘right’ as encompassing as it is in the legal regime. To make this process easier (this essay is a process, every word builds into revelation), I have charted two layers: Identity and Ethnicity. You might have to be dishonest with me – you might have to forgive how I render myself so bare; all writers eventually do this, pushing themselves, in fiction, in poetry, to the place where there’s no telling what is reality and what is not, because everything is reality, everything written is real. Helene Cixous says this ofClarice Lispector, for instance.

I should give a background. I was born to an itinerant preacher – when I was born my Daddy was an employee of the Scripture Union, an interdenominational organization with offices around the world. His job description was ‘Travelling Secretary’; clearly, he ‘traveled.’ So, I begin my questioning from this point – I was born fluid; I was not to stay too long in one place, my Present was always in motion.

Of identity, I ask myself: Am I or aren’t I? How do I begin to define myself? What is the crack in the surface in which Me leaps into visibility? You should know that I do not feel Ibo enough, because I can’t speak the language well, because I respond in English when my Daddy speaks to me in Ibo. So, I am not keen to identify myself as This or That. In my case, there is no This, and no That. Perhaps it’s a This-That.

Which is why, in December 2009, when we were moving again, I wrote: ‘Who am I, after this transition?’ I cannot think this irrelevant – I am a borderline person. I have transited too much to be just one person. It is simply a question of identifying myself. What I want is to be able to say, This is Me, when a million others stand beside me, with me, in a crowd. So far, I should tell you, it has been difficult.

The antonym of ‘easy’, Anne Berger says, is not ‘difficult’. It is ‘impossible.’ If then it is not easy to define myself, is it perhaps impossible? Will I, as I remain on the border of who I am and who I can be and who I am meant to be, never identify myself in the crowd? I cannot tell if this is a shared feeling – but when I am in Ile-Ife I am not Yoruba, and when I am in Umuahia, I am not Ibo. I am simply, perhaps, Emmanuel, a person, but not the kind of person who feels ‘Emmanuel’ enough. Not inferiority, of course. It has never been a question of being less; perhaps it is that I am not ‘more’ enough, that I have ascribed too much to Being, and I am yet to meet up with that definition.

Speaking of Ethnicity might make this clearer. You see, I am an English-only onye Ibo who can comprehend Ibo spoken at any speed but is reluctant to utter any word of it, for fear of sounding incorrect. In fact I can comprehend Ehugbo, the language of Afikpo, which Ibos from other parts cannot comprehend. My Daddy wanted us to speak English first, in Akure, because he feared that we might become mischievous urchins, too ‘local’ in an urban space. So, we lapsed into an Anglo-consciousness. I do not blame him; I should not blame him. You want to blame him? English is a ‘lingua franca’, isn’t it? He remembers being mocked when he was a little boy of his inability to speak English – he remembers desiring to speak English like his brother.

But I realize that no matter how loaded, conflicted and difficult the word may seem to me, I am Ibo. By heritage. Perhaps there is some new meaning I can confer to it. I am, like, Carmen Wong, “A mishmash and hodgepodge of conundrums and contradictions.” I am ready to stay hyphenated, to add a dash to my personality, something like ‘English-only-onye-Ibo.’

Let’s imagine that there are others like me. Let’s further imagine that these others are – because this is the occupation dearest to my heart – writers. What will happen to their writing? Will it embody the same mishmash of their borderline personalities? How will they speak true to their sense of ethnicity? What home could they define for themselves, what sense of place?

Yes, I speak about myself, asking questions that bother my art. And there’s a sense of urgency, too. There is, for instance, a Facebook identity, a Twitter narrative, the acculturation that comes from being an internet user. Should we only consider the internet as utility, not as lifestyle? Isn’t the internet a border, a separate identity, part of the dashes I’ve acquired?

I’ve decided to be a writer, which in itself is an acceptance of the Borderline, an acceptance of staying a hybrid, remaining fluid, accepting that one word cannot define your process, your heritage. How do I come to the point where I am not simply termed as an ‘African writer’? I do not fear this label because I am not from Africa, or not black, or because Africa has been derogatorily called blah blah blah. I fear it because it is, somewhat, a closed parenthesis. I want to work within an open parenthesis. I want my definition to start from ‘an English-only-learning to speak Ibo-onye Ibo-internet-using writer’ with a […] around the term, leaving space for more dashes. Because I am always more; and my writing will always be bothered with this More-ness.

Hence, it is this fact that gives me the right to plunge into uncharted courses, to use unused language, to speak about anything, because there is nothing like This or That in my head. There is the possibility of everything and anything.

But this is not, cannot be, the subject of a single post. I’ll publish a Kindle e-book with the same title in January 2012. I hope my ranting is heard.

Office Space

Kola — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 02:15:14 +0000

Have I told you something personal lately? No. Alright, here is one: I got a new office space. Not really a new office, but a set of new furniture that makes my space in our language laboratory look like a serious, distinguished spot.

Like I quipped on Facebook a few days ago, this new set of furniture seriously seeks to make me forget that I am, in fact, a student. On the bright side, here’s to more pensive moments within my new space, to reading and to writing.

Ibadan: An Evening, A Movement

E Iduma — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 20:35:26 +0000

By Emmanuel Iduma

Perhaps the objective of this post is to signify a clarion call against what I shall term literary amnesia, that lapse in the collective conscience of writers where we do not speak to our generation. It is a journey, this movement against literary amnesia; and I draw relevance and strength from what has been called an institutional amnesia – where diplomats, journalists and anyone who has been dipped into the current of a hoax (say, the Sudan crises) has no idea about its root cause. And when I speak of journey, I speak in both abstract and tangible terms. In relation to the former, I speak of the objective of ensuring that, as writers in this generation, we define ourselves, our art, speaking to our time so that in retrospect our essence can be identified.

In relation to the later, which is the tangibility of my journey, I speak of a recent trip I made to Ibadan. This journey, in hindsight, seems to have begun the movement I speak about. I will, for sake of space and simplicity, create sub-headings, speaking about my encounters, the thrills, challenges; I shall speak of the aesthetics of the encounter. For, it is this word – aesthetics – that seems apt as a definitive word, concept and (if I may be ambitious) narrative tool.

Tade

I set sail with Damilola Ajayi, my dear friend and brother (who, heavens be praised, officially became a child of Hippocrates last Thursday). Our mission was simply to see Tade Ipadeola, poet and intellectual property Lawyer, who heads the Nigerian PEN chapter. We had prepared not to meet him even before we left Ife, for we had been unable to reach him on phone. And, indeed, we did not see him, for he had to be home with his Mum.

Tade’s name falls easily in my list of supporters of a movement against literary amnesia because he was the first person to review my poetry aside my close peers, in public space. I quote him: “We have a young metaphysical poet in Emmanuel Iduma, whose offerings leap upon the imagination from past, present and future. His handling of space and time is remarkable and a comfort to those wondering where the next great poets of this continent are hiding.”

He spoke of Damilola’s poetry in a different fashion, and of Adebiyi’s. It seems, then, that our generation needs to be spoken about in terms of what we are doing at the moment, how we are writing at a time of less renown.

Prof

Remi Raji, who heads the English Department of the University of Ibadan, has warmed his way into my head, and heart. Given that it was unlikely that we see Mr. Ipadeola, Damilola contacted Prof. Raji, who gave us a description to his house. The house was nearly habitable, and he informed us he went there on weekends to supervise the work being done.

We spoke on several matters; an anthology in the works, which is to include our poems, and the poems of a number of young poets that we had either suggested or confirmed their artistry. But what dominated our conversation was the attempt, in various ways, to define what our generation was, and what we should be concerned about.

There were, of course, questions about the social media revolution, the sheer amount of information available and the falling standards of education. I made the point that it was necessary to put all the cards on the table – social network, post-colonialism, ease of access and availability of information, the publishing hoax – and see if there is a pattern of redemption that jumps at us. This pattern, I argued, would ensure that we can cross the borders of our peculiar challenge. We agreed, standing beside Prof’s car, that our generation was peculiar in certain respects, although Prof had stated that this peculiarity was not necessarily opposed to the challenges of the Soyinka generation, for instance.

Prof will turn fifty in November, and there is a program of events lined up to mark his jubilee. While looking forward to the events, I state that Prof’s willingness to engage with us, struck me as an important stimulus, and an indication of his range of vision. We have had, as a continent especially, a hole, a lapse of consciousness, an absence. There has been a disconnect between the formed and the forming. The discourse tables have been empty for a long while. But Prof, by engaging us (we spoke of language, Saraba, a paper he is writing) has begun to negate that absence that exists. We need to learn from those above us, as fast as we can, for they would not be here forever. And we will not, too.

Benson; Rotimi

Damilola referred to Benson Eluma and Rotimi Babatunde as the intellectual thugs of Ibadan. His choice of words couldn’t have been more apt; their private library proved this acceptable form of thuggery. When we entered the University of Ibadan Staff Club, we saw two men. Damilola walked up to one of them and asked, “Are you Benson Eluma?” He said, “Yes.” And later, Benson said that was the most foolish thing he had ever done – for an age where the fear of Boko Haram is the beginning of long life, one cannot be too sure of who is asking. The other guy, Yomi Ogunsanya, whose fine poetry we had discovered for the first time, seemed to be Benson’s cleansing fire, in a way that cannot be explained.

We danced to Fela; Benson has a huge collection, and when Niran Okewole joined us we argued about books, spoke of the influence of booze (I was nagged for being a teetotaller, Niran called me ‘Emma Malt’), and Benson let us on into his life, frustration and iconoclasm.

Once, before Rotimi Babatunde’s arrival, Benson spoke to us as though a parent. He advised us to read, read, read. He noted that we were doing well, but that we needed to read. It is difficult to forget his voice as he emphasized the advantages of scholarship, calling to note the work of Teju Cole, and warning that what he spoke of did not necessarily connote name-dropping, but the pointers in a text that emphasizes wide scholarship.

When we left Ibadan I caught the flu from sleeping under the fan, and, I believe, from inhaling too much nicotine. Cigarettes came with the Ibadan package. Yet, what I held onto was the dialogue we established. The guys we met, and spoke with, were ahead in terms of scholarship and depth. We might share positions in this generation, or not. We might be peers, or not.

What I think we were doing – listening to Fela, sharing links, drinking together, sleeping in the same rooms – was an attempt to herald a coming pattern of definition. Questions will be asked when we are gone, or when we have sagged. The foremost question will be: how did they speak to their time?

And if we are found wanting, what will be said about the Ibadan evening? It will, of course, be said that we have lapsed into a literary amnesia, a generation that slept away its definitiveness.

ktravula - a travelogue! » Art

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