reflections on the world
I saw this picture on the wall of the Meridian Ballroom where the African Night Dinner took place on Sunday. It shows the writer Maya Angelou in one of her animated moments, and I couldn’t resist taking the picture. It was definitely one of the liveliest portraits on the wall that night.
My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors. - Maya Angelou
The only reason I can give for the title of this post is a recurring thought I have when entering any structure that is higher than a leaping distance from the ground. Saturday was one of them, and you already know what I was thinking while looking down from 630 feet. A few months ago while flying from Lagos to London, similar thoughts entered my head at some point during the long flight, and from London to Boston. What are my chances of survival from this height of over 60,000 feet? There is a kind of surrender that inevitably accompanies a decision to take a plane flight. Our lives are in the hands of the pilot whom we never ever get to see.
About two and a half weeks ago, there was a major news item about a pilot on the London-Boston route who was caught drunk just before take-off. Just two and a half weeks ago! The plane was grounded and the passengers resettled into another plane. Sigh. I mean, it could have been any of the planes that I have been in. And what are the chances that the pilot of my plane from London to Boston wasn’t equally drunk? Come to think about it, I kinda felt the plane shake and wobble one too many times during the flight. Or not. Well, one of the reasons Maya Angelou gave when she came to Edwardsville in October for buying her travel bus instead of travelling on a plane was a plane trip of hers in which the pilot, just a few seconds after take-off – even before the plane reached cruising altitude – came out of his cockpit and meet and greet “the distinguished Maya Angelou” who he had learnt was on board. Ha! According to her, she knew then that it was time to change tactics before someone got hurt from the effect of her star power. Those were not her exact words.
I can say also that one of the reasons for my choice of writing as a hobby, pastime, vocation or whatever one can call it is – not really a fear but – a preemptive strike against the eventuality of death. And no, I’m not depressed at the moment. Not even as bored as I might like to think. I’m just taking liberty with my ability to imagine.
Whenever I sit and stare at an empty page like tonight, my mind wanders to the the many things I could be blogging about besides the adventures of class and teaching. Earlier today I tried without luck to write a poem about the foods I eat with names I can’t pronounce. I failed. The reason for that, in my opinion, is that I was hungry. I had the image I wanted to portray in my head, but my stomach hurt a little from not having eating in the morning so I couldn’t get my words out in the particular order of my choice. Feeling deflated, I went out and got myself some really nice microwave-ready food which was ready to eat in less than ten minutes. But by the time I got well fed and satiated, the muse had left. I was left only with desires of different kind so I went into Facebook to stare at pictures instead. When poet Maya Angelou came to SIUe in early October, one of the poems she read was called The Health-Food Diner, a satirical response to a particular occasion when she was stopped from smoking in a public restaurant. In the absence of a own lyrical response to my particular situation at the moment, I will leave you with Maya Angelou’s words. It’s certainly one of her funniest poems.
| The Health-Food Diner |
No sprouted wheat and soya shootsAnd Brussels in a cake, Carrot straw and spinach raw, (Today, I need a steak). Not thick brown rice and rice pilaw Or mushrooms creamed on toast, Turnips mashed and parsnips hashed, (I'm dreaming of a roast). Health-food folks around the world Are thinned by anxious zeal, They look for help in seafood kelp (I count on breaded veal). No smoking signs, raw mustard greens, Zucchini by the ton, Uncooked kale and bodies frail Are sure to make me run to Loins of pork and chicken thighs And standing rib, so prime, Pork chops brown and fresh ground round (I crave them all the time). Irish stews and boiled corned beef and hot dogs by the scores, or any place that saves a space For smoking carnivores. -- Maya Angelou
Culled from http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/383.html
There was a fore-warning that there would be no question and answer segment, but listening. Only listening and laughing, for the poet is one who commands her audience in charm, and holds them spellbound as soon as she steps onto the stage like an acrobatic masquerade. She was introduced by poet Eugene Redmond who calls her his sister, and the audience rose in applause. Maya had come.
She came in a coach, a large bus that also functions as a mobile house, with bathrooms and other conveniences. According to the poet, she stopped flying in planes about nine years ago when she found it impossible to go out in public without someone pulling her clothes, making an embarrassing scene that often bothers on the ludicrous. She gave an instance of someone screaming above her lungs as soon as she saw Maya get out of her car somewhere in Arkansas. “Maya Angelou is getting out of her car,” the stranger yelled. And the poet pulled her close and asked why she was screaming towards a set of (white) people a few feet away who didn’t ask for it. “Because they don’t know you,” the other replied, to the poet’s amazement and everyone’s rounds of laughter as she relayed it. But we knew she was serious, lending needed credibility to her preference for road trips within the United States rather than air plane flights. She had been on the road all the way from Carolina to Illinois, and she would be going straight to New York, also by road. She also joked, and took time to correct news stories that she was sick and dying. “Don’t believe them,” she said. “It’s not the truth.”
Then she read from her poem, “The Health Food Diner”, a poem she wrote in response to a diner in Mississippi where a staff had warned her not to smoke. And then she told stories from her past, in a husky voice that bellowed around the room. She told of discrimination, and hope, and joy, and rebellion, and progress, and love. “We are all rainbows,” the author said, “placed in the clouds to make some other person happy. And we’ve all been paid for,” she continued, “with either blood and human excrement from the slave ships from Africa, or the blood and brine of fleeing Jews from the camps of Eastern Europe, or the sweat from the brows of the Asians who came to this country in the 1800s to lay the railroad tracks, and buy properties so that their descendants can lay claim to the new nation.” Each one of us has an ancestry of brave people who have suffered so that we may enjoy. And so when we go out in the morning, just a little word of hope, of compliment, can always, always make a difference in some other person’s life. Speaking about the racist N-word, Maya made an allegory to poison pills in a labelled container. Putting the pills into a nice plate of gold would never make them less poisonous, or less potent, she said, in response to today’s youths (take that, Jay-Z!) who present new filmsy reasons in the entertainment circuit as justification for the continued use of these words. Poison is still poison, Maya said, no matter how it is wrapped, and I agree. And then she sang, beautifully. Pleasantly. At her age, one would expect brokenness. But no, she definitely didn’t sound coarse or broken, but rather mellifluous. She let it be known that she had written a couple of songs for some of Roberta Flack’s albums, and she sang one of them today as well, to rounds of laughter and applause. She is also a script writer, having written Down in the Delta, and acted in a few other films about African-America life. Then there was Roots, a tv series made from Alex Haley’s 1977 best-selling and Pulitzer-winning book.
The Traveller did get the photos he had hoped to get, but could not get the desired autograph from the visiting writer, at least not immediately. Like he had dreaded, the 81 year old woman had sneaked out of the hall before anyone else could, immediately after her completing her reading, and got onto her big dark coach before any member of the audience got there. That was such a lesson in humility, nil-expectation and obedience to the inner voice. (For on approaching the venue of the programme one hour earlier on a bike before the event began, I had noticed a big black coach bus in front of the library. But being quite a strange vehicle never before seen on campus, I’d wanted to check it out. After all, it was in that library where the photo exhibition took place on Friday. I didn’t. I had a seat to reserve. And this turned out to be a wise decision as well, in retrospect, because one hour before the start of the programme, half of the auditorium was already filled completely. However I was still able to get a seat in the front – which is usually not my style. It was then such a sigh to find out later that she it was indeed who was in the Library, inspecting some of her photos on display. Well, shtuff happens! A bigger conceit for me however is in another kind of pleasant waiting. Poet Eugene B. Redmond has taken away with him my new copy of Maya’s last autobiography, All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes, to be duly autographed by the author, and returned to me. Within its pages is something that I had slipped in, with his collusion, brought all the way from home: a compact disc of songs and poems from Yorubaland, signed in my trembling student ink: “To Maya, With Love.”
This is how the story goes: Every human being on the planet is closer to any other person in any other part of the world by just 6 degrees, or six human beings. According to Wikipedia, ‘it refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth. It was popularized by a play written by John Guare.”
In the begining, there was just me, going to a University in Ibadan, Nigeria. I had gone through all my primary and secondary education in this same city, so it was just as well that I never knew – nor would have given any thought to – the reality, fact or fiction of the phenomenon of “six degrees of separation.” There was no way in the world that a little boy from that ancient town could relate to the likes of Martin Luther King Jnr, Roberta Flack, Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Coretta Scott King or Toni Morrison, even if by chance I knew a few of their names back then. The first American I could say I warmed up to was James Hardley Chase, and I didn’t know if we’d have gone along well if the chance ever presented itself for us to meet. Then there was Denise Robbins, whose many novels I read before I completed secondary school. The likes of Mark Twain, and Alex Haley came much much later, as did Toni Morrison, Eugene Redmond and Maya Angelou. I remember seeing Maya the first time while browsing through the now rested Microsoft Encarta Africana CD of 2002, and watching her read her poem, “Still I rise.” I was enchanted immediately, and while reading more about her, I realized that it was impossible not to be, considering how much of stories her life embodies. She was born in St. Louis, grew up in Southern California and Arkansas, then moved over to Ghana with her African Revolutionary husband whom she had met in the United States during the anti-colonial movement of the fifties. She returned to the States after her first son to the African, became a dancer, writer, teacher, public speaker, novelist, poet, film director and movie producer and later Inaugural Poet, the first African-American so honoured to recite for the in-coming president. She read her poem On the Pulse of Morning for the Bill Clinton in 1993.
Now here I am in Illinois, less than ten years after that memorable introduction, now meeting the icon face to face in a campus auditorium. Looking at a slide show of pictures taken from the Eugene Redmond collection of photos of Maya Angelou on the big screen, I see a shot of her once with Coretta Scott King, the widow of the slain Civil Rights Activist, then another with Toni Morrison, then Oprah Winfrey, Eugene Redmond, Amiri Baraka and very many other famous names in African-American culture, and I remembered the rule of separation. If only because of this enchanting day, this time and this moment of fate, I can say that I may have finally connected my last branch of life’s six degrees, joining imaginary hands with all of the rest of the world, with everyone just six persons – or less – distant from me, no matter where they are. Oh how I like the sound of that!
Okay, it’s not as if Maya Angelou needs any more publicity. At eighty-one, she probably has achieved what many in her generation only dreamt about. Therefore, this will be last post I will make about the writer, until I finally meet her on Sunday. As I tap this out here, I do not yet know what I want to tell her if the chance ever comes. She’s old, I’m young. She’s American, I’m African. She’s a writer, I’m not, and it is most likely that my best of charms will fail if our promised meeting fails to occur in a place devoid of the tension of a gathered University crowd all beaming to see and have a piece of their icon. I can only imagine Wole Soyinka at a Nigerian campus and a Ghanaian scholar trying to get access to him. Well, maybe that’s not a most appropriate analogy, but it is somewhat similar, and in the two cases, it might equally be a difficult task to achieve.
Now here’s something else I found strange: the last time I checked on the website of the campus magazine for the news about Maya’s coming to campus, I was surprised at how much venom some students spewed as comments on Maya’s personality, talent and politics, and some expressed the wish that she should be stopped from coming to campus because of what they called her racism, anti-Semitism, and a few other isms. This was definitely strange to my ears as I have never read traces of any such opinions in any of her works that I’ve read. Her autobiographies are mostly stories of triumph over personal difficulties of race and gender. But what do I know? Here are students venting their rage and sometimes ignorance in response to a news story. Today, when I checked the news story, I found that comments have been disabled, I guess so as to prevent a bigger rancour that was surely becoming a sort of distraction to the news of the visiting novelist.
I have now returned from Dunham Hall, where I had gone to obtain my tickets to the programme, and where I discovered to my amazement that all the tickets have sold out. Completely. The organisers have just made arrangements for a hundred more seats, and I was lucky to get two of those. My hosts at the Office of International Programmes who had promised to get me tickets into the show are now nowhere to be found. If they ever come forward with any more tickets, then maybe I can afford to take someone else along to the show. But a most unfavourable part of this visit of the American Poet Laureate is the news that she might not be staying long after her talk to sign books or take pictures after all. Now this, if true, is just horrible, but I understand. She’s probably too old for all that stress of sitting though signings and photographs. But being young and tenacious, I’m probably too heady as well to let her go without a fight. Come, come Sunday!
ALONE
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
‘Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Maya Angelou
I stumbled onto a photo exhibition on campus on Wednesday, after a very stressful day of two classes. If not for a chance meeting with retired Professor Eugene B. Redmond as I headed home from Pizza hut, I definitely would have missed out. I had first met EBR last in Ibadan in 2003 or so when he visited the University campus there on an exchange programme, and to present new editions of DrumVoices Revue – a quarterly publication of poems from all over the world. I was with him and another professor from Ibadan when he visited the palace of the Ooni in Ife – which was the first time for me at the time. I have not been successful in getting him to grant me access to my digital copies of those photographs. Maybe they will end up in an exhibition someday. It will definitely be a pleasure to see them for the first time in over five years.
Eugene Redmond’s reputation doesn’t always reflect on his regularly meek appearance, but he has travelled far, met notable people, and contributed so much to the development of the arts and the African-American culture. On Wednesday, he was in a kente jacket and a matching cap, covered with an dark coat. He is most likely to be seen with at least two cameras on him at all times. Till date, he is reputed to have taken at least 150,000 photographs of people from all over the world. He was named the Poet Laureate of East St. Louis in 1976, and he boasts of a long time of frienship with very many leaders of the Black Movement, past and present, in literature, music and the arts, from Henry Dumas to Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Katherine Dunham, Oprah Winfrey, Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou, all of whom he has captured with his camera lens at one time or the other.
The exhibition was titled “Eighty Moods of Maya”, and it features eighty of the pictures taken of the poet and novelist Maya Angelou over several decades, and in many moods, some serious, some trivial, some private and relaxed, and some public and tense. Eugene Redmond has worked as a poet, journalist and photographer as well as a critic, academic and publisher. He first attended SIUE as a student. He was a student journalist with a camera at the 1963 March on Washington as an editor of The Alestle, a student publication here on campus. He has also taught many times at SIUE before he retired a few years ago. On retirement, he donated a collection of his photographs to the SIUE Library, and thus became a patron of the institution.
The exhibition which took place in the library also featured little speeches, food, and conversations among all present. We all knew we were waiting for Maya Angelou who is coming to campus later this week. The exhibition was just a teaser. There will be a long crowd on campus on October 4th to listen to the 81 year old poet and novelist who made history when she read “On The Pulse of A Morning” during President Bill Clinton’s Inauguration in 1993. In my case, I look forward to presenting to her something (I won’t tell you what) that I brought from Nigeria, getting a book signed, and getting a nice picture in my camera. Wish me luck.
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