I could have missed it had I not 
mistakenly pulled my curtain apart when I noticed that the colour outside was not what it was less than an hour earlier. In any case, I’m glad I pulled back the curtain because the snow, even though not as much as in the other parts of the country, was a wonderful reminder of the seasons, and why it is called a White Christmas. I’m glad that we don’t have a blizzard. It’s little enough to impress, so far, and plenty enough to look like a real White Christmas. Here are a few of the shots.
Browsing ktravula – a travelogue! blog archives for December, 2009.
May 31: Short Story Behind the Door first published on Story Time
August 10: Made a first post on this blog. Well, not technically on this blog. It used to be this blog.
August 13: Arrived in the United States for the first time after travelling for almost twenty-four hours, and had my sorta first culture shock.
August 15: Discovered that America had mosquitoes too, and at first thought it had been sent after me from Nigeria.
August 16: Left Providence, Rhode Island for St. Louis Missouri, riding a Cadillac to Boston Massachussetts somewhere along the way.
August 17: Arrived at Edwardsville Illinois, and experienced my first and truly memorable power outage in America that lasted more than 12 hours.
August 18: Found out that I could be Jewish, after all.
August 21: Met Papa Rudy, my colleagues at the Department, and got a bicycle as a gift among many other surprises.
August 23: Visited Six Flags at St. Louis where I lost a camera.
August 25: Discovered the value of a quarter.
September 10: Moved from ktravula.wordpress.com to ktravula.com
September 29: Met Frank Warren of PostSecret.
September 29: Began writing Home Alone, Traveller, a poem.
October 3: Showed off my new camera.
October 5: Met Maya Angelou when she came to campus here at Edwardsville.
October 15: Visited Principia University. Became an American.
October 23: Wrote “America Tonight,” a poem on returning from a walk in the rain.
October 24: Visited the African American museum at Carbondale
October 27: Got news that short story Behind the Door will be published in an anthology in the UK in 2010.
November 11: Wrote my name on the “Berlin Wall” on Campus.
November 09: Published my translation of Richard Berengarten’s poem Volta online.
November 14: Visited Chicago, the windy city. Went to the Sears Towers, among other famous places.
November 21: Visited the museum at Cahokia, Illinois, and had my first taste of pounded yam at Nubia Cafe in St. Louis.
November 23: Visited the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and its Museum of Westward Expansion.
December 1: Wrote an unpublished poem titled This step, This spot.
December 2: Got a Secret Santa.
December 4: Found out that I couldn’t donate blood if I wanted to.
December 6: My poem Home Alone, Traveller and a few others published on Africanwriter.com
December 7: Fried Dodo to class for my students to eat on their last day of class.
December 10: Arrived in Washington DC where I’d gone to attend a Fulbright Event. I toured the city on foot, visiting the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, the Washington Monument and the White House, taking pictures.
December 11: Published the 200th post on KTravula.com
December 12: Went to the White House, again.
December 15: Visited Howard University, Washington DC in the rain.
December 15: Visited Maryland, where I met a few Nigerian bloggers, and ate food and drank wine like no man’s business.
December 15: Poem America Tonight and a larger Home Alone, Traveller published on Canada’s Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue 5.
December 19: Found out who my Secret Santa was.
December 20: My short story Behind the Door reviewed for Critical Literature Review.
December 25: Saw real snow.
I’ve never received so many cards and gifts in my adult life as I did during this Christmas season. The last time I felt this special, I think I was really very young. Reham bought me a very cool branded shirt. Yvonne a professor sharing my office got me a cordless mouse. At the office party last week, Professor Doug Simms gave me a very thoughtful Christmas card and a surprise monetary gift, among the many other things received from friends and colleagues in the mail. Yesterday, I received a chapbook from Richard Berengarten whose poem Volta I translated into Yoruba in November, along with other Christmas cards.
Here then is a collage of my Christmas greetings and postcards, some received, some given. Merry Christmas to you wherever you are. May the happiness go around.
With love from KTravula
I have a problem reading myself for a second time. I can barely read it for the first time at all. I write a piece of work, I try to read it again with an editing eye and I get strangely disgusted. I can barely make it through to the end. When I eventually do, I see only the things in my head, and not the words on the sheet, and I find that I have not edited it at all, but just endured another needless ordeal of re-reading.
I am lazy. With fiction, I fail with imagination but succeed somewhat with memory. I may thrive on details but sag on the fictive dexterity of their expression. I’m not a writer, and I know it. I am only a bearer of stories. With poetry, it becomes a little different. The muse descends, rides me roughly like the spirit in a possessed body, and leaves, leaving something pretty behind that I sometimes like to read again and again, although it scarcely leaves space to take full credit. So I can’t write a poem on the spot to save my life, or so I like to think. I will find out perhaps when there’s a gun to my head and an loud order to “Show me you’re a poet. Write something before I waste your brain on this concrete floor.”
Knowledge is for philosophers. Imagination is for writers. Only one of them changes the world, and -hint, hint- it’s not knowledge. Really. So as soon as I can exchange my junk of knowledge for liberty of imagination, I will be a writer. Until then, let me just be me, the quiet observing traveller in this American wilderness. Perhaps also, a bearer of stories.
(Picture credits: A fridge sticker at the house of Nigerian writer Ikhide Ikheloa, taken in Maryland on the 14th December 2009)
I was not too surprised when a fellow FLTA from France said to me two weeks ago over dinner at the Union Station in Washington DC that the city was developed by a French person. She is french, and, as she said so, everything had just fallen along the line of positive French stereotypes in my mind. They designed the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty, they must also be the big brilliant brain behind the planning and beautiful layout of the country’s capital. It was my first time of hearing the story, and though she didn’t have the name of the said designer, I believed it.
Today, I had a different conversation with Papa Rudy who says the city was developed by a black man. Now I’m confused. I told him of my discussion with the French girl, and he insisted that a black man did the city’s design. And somewhere in the conversation, the name Du Pont came up. Now I am familiar with a DuPont Circle in Washington DC, and reading more on it this afternoon showed me that it was named after a man Samuel Francis Du Pont (from the famous Du Pont family who really were originally from France). However, he is neither black nor an architect. He was a rear admiral during the Civil War. The wikipedia article on the beautiful Paris-like city does not say much about the “designers” of the city, so I’m giving up.
Or not. I have now come up with my own theory, that the person who conceived the brilliant layout of the city with the Washington Monument obelisk standing almost in its centre, could only have been the son of Oduduwa (the fabled progenitor of the Yoruba people). That’s the only explanation that can suffice to clear the air on the similarity between the Opa Oranmiyan obelisk in Ilé-Ifè and this Washington Monument obelisk. The Opa Oranmiyan was erected at a spot once believed to have been the burial site of Oranmiyan, a grandson of Oduduwa. Archeological evidence has now shown it not to be standing on any burial spot at all, but to be just a visible memorial to the fabled progenitor whose name it bears on it’s body. On the Opa Oranmiyan, as has been since its (undated) erection is an inscription in middle-eastern letters that archeologists have accepted as corresponding in sound to “Oranmiyan”.
It’s not the same in height and size as the Washington Monument, but that’s beside the point. The only other way to look at it is that Oranmiyan himself walked over to Washington DC from Ile-Ife with the Washington Monument on his right hand as a staff of office, and planted it firmly at the centre of the city as an artifact for future generation of archeologists to behold. What about that?