ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Academic category.

East St. Louis

My visit to the East St. Louis Centre of the University yesterday was memorable although very short. It was preceded with a short trip into the neighbourhood of what used to be one of the most prosperous cities in the Midwest. Now it is littered with decrepit houses and abandoned factory warehouses. Many of the abandoned houses had been tagged with graffiti and street art which reminded me that I was in a neighbourhood that is now home to some of the most impoverished, yet resourceful citizens of the state. For a moment while driving through the government housing projcts, I thought I was in one of those Brooklyn type neighbourhoods I’ve seen so many times in movies, with wall art, basketball, fast trains, and violence. There was no violence here. Only silence, from the passage of time, and migrations.

At the Charter School where we had gone to watch a Portfolio presentation by graduation students (all within the 18-19 age range), we met some of the most talented students. The presentation/performance was like a final year project where they had to face a panel and talk about their ideas, motivations, and achievements. Each one of them, as young as they were, brought a very dynamic angle to their presentation and some of them were very emotional. At such a young age, it made me proud that rather than being distracted or going into bad things common to people of their age in other cities and towns, these children were working hard to secure a good future. One of the students was an eighteen year old boy whose fraternal twin brother was already incarcerated. “People think we’re opposites,” he said, “I am here trying to make a good life for myself while he is there in jail.”

We watched each powerpoint presentation narrated by the student and gave valuable suggestions. We also asked them questions on every aspect of their presentation that wasn’t clear, and they answered.

The Charter School is fully funded by the government and serve as a support system for parents who can’t afford to send their children to private schools. The only thing that runs through these students however is not poverty at all, but ambition, skill, hope, brilliance and confidence.

It just happened yesterday that we were in time for the Portfolio presentations. The University Centre is used for several more things than just the Charter School. It houses the Eugene Redmond Writers club, and they meet there regularly for poetry readings, spoken word performances, dance, drama etc. East St. Louis itself is just a riverside city of over 31,000 people. It’s called East St. Louis because it is the last part of Illinois bordering on the eastern part of the River Mississippi just before the city of St. Louis itself that lay on the other side, in the state of Missouri.

Good Friends We Lost

I never met him in person, but his spirit reached out to me from as far back as 2000 at such a distant place as a negligible classroom in the University of Ibadan when I first read Nwokedi. The play featured blood, gore and very very angry philosophical retorts to life. I do not remember any of the lines in the play now, but I still carry its name in my head everywhere I go – was one of my first books to challenge my self-inflicted limits of playwriting imagination. My eyes hang heavy now. Esiaba Irobi, the roaring poet and playwright, has gone to be with the elders. He was greatness personified. I feel as pained to think of him in the past tense as I write a tribute to someone that I got to know only for a fleeting moment, but not nearly enough.

Rarely have books moved me the way Nwokedi did. Perhaps it was my innocence, or my search at that time for meaning and answers, or perhaps the mixed feeling that overwhelmed and sustained me from page to page as I pored over a work nuanced in poetry with satire and anger. I had always wanted to know who he was. Thinking about it now, it must also have been from the amazement that someone with that firebrand imagination and craft could have eluded popular discourse for so long. All we heard then was Wole Soyinka and Femi Osofisan in the field of playwriting. Where was Irobi when these great names were compiled? And why was I discovering this gem only in a first year course in my first week in the University? I forgot about the first year drama class, but I did not forget the name.

And then in 2006 or 2007, I joined the Wole Soyinka Society Yahoo group and was happy to find the man in the same creative space as I. We did not become friends, but we did exchange ideas about so many things. That group owes the robustness of its archives to that man. He was frank and unpretentious, and he was as fiery in his thinking as he was gentle in his appreciation of the little things of life. He wrote love poetry. (Who could tell?). He missed Nigeria and he reminisced about the frustrations he had while living there. At a point in 2008, he volunteered to donate his books free to people in Nigeria who were ready to start a reading club. On his own expenses, he was ready to ship as many as fifty books to whoever had asked for them. I asked for some on behalf of the Union of Campus Journalist in the University of Ibadan whose president I was for 18 months before I left the University, but I didn’t follow up on the request. He promised many other people as well.

A few months later, I learnt that he was fighting cancer. His participation in discussions on the forum dwindled until it was finally nil. And yesterday, I heard of his passing – a very very terrible loss. Those who know him will say how cerebral, and how genuinely personable he was. I can’t say as much, but from the snippets from his brain and person that I met through his novel Nwokedi and another one I read shortly afterwards, and from testimonies of his teaching style, fervour and humour, I wish I had met him. This Facebook Group made for him had celebrated his life for a couple of years now. Now, only tributes mark the wall.

Rest in Peace, oh great intellectual of repute; a joyful fellow, playwright, poet, educator, lover of all things good, storyteller, and in the words of tribute by one of his students in Ohio University where he finally got tenure after years of working, “the most brilliant teacher I’ve ever known.” Sleep well.

Now I have to go find Nwokedi to read again.

The Class Project

Last year, at the end of the semester, my students all had to write short stories in English with Yoruba characters and sensibilities. It was a way for me to have a peek into their knowledge of the language and cultures so far and see what they’ve gained from the class and from their own research. Their stories all surprised and impressed me, individually and I will cherish the scripts for as long as I live.

This semester was different. The class project this time was that they had to pick particular songs in Yoruba and learn to sing it within three weeks. To do this, they had to work with a student tutor who is also a from Nigeria who came to train them every Wednesday. He also found them costumes. I had told them the meaning of the songs in class before handing them over to the tutor, so all I had to do next was just to wait for the final presentation which was set for the final day of class. I invited the head of department and a journalist from the Alestle to come on that day to share in the surprise. I had only heard of their progress and how much fun they had rehearsing for the day. I had not seen them sing before, and I had a feeling that some of them were nervous. At the end of the day, this happened: I was very impressed. From the following video made of their presentation, you will see why the class presentation was the best final class I could ever have hoped for, as a goodbye to a great teaching year.

Following Lincoln

On Thursday last week, I went to Springfield, the capital of Illinois to see sites around the life of one of America’s greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln. I was in company of my host Prof Wilson who was visiting the place himself for the eighth time in company of visiting students and scholars.

(African students and visiting scholars to SIUE have had this 75 year old retired professor to thank for his effort in bridging the knowledge gap between the two sides of the world. For years, he has taken it upon himself to make sure that visiting students/scholars visit sites of historical and cultural significance in the United States, most times out his own pocket. In his company, I have visited the schools in Principia and Carbondale, and now the Lincoln home, Presidential Library, and tomb in Springfield. “Remi Raji was here too,” he mentioned as we were heading out of the Lincoln’s burial crypt, referring to the Nigerian poet and writer whose book Shuttlesongs America was written on his return from the United States in the summer of 1999. “And it was all too emotional for him. Here was where he broke down and cried”, he said, pointing to a spot near the exit out of the president’s burial crypt.)

Here is a short video I made of the visit. I’ll put up some pictures soon when I can.

For me, it was a moving, enlightening experience living through the life of one of the defining figures of modern America. – a complex, fascinating historical figure whose life, death, and legacy made a lasting mark on not just the country, but the world at large. The Presidential Library & Museum itself was a tribute to history, archaeology, and architecture – befitting of an uncommon man and a great president.