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.
The highlight of the talk was a chance for audience members to express themselves back to the speaker, and many used the medium to tell secrets never before revealed. It was such an emotional moment, listening to the women especially, who mostly couldn’t complete their confessions without bursting into tears. A student confessed that she blamed herself for the death of a baby boy because she couldn’t get to him on time. Another one confessed to having felt better after sharing an earlier secret about sleeping disorders. The one that got the most laugh and applause was from a confessed kleptomaniac who confessed to having obtained all of Frank’s books by thieving. One other student confessed to having used a fake ID to come to the event, while another one came out just to express his deepest wonder at why God would spare his life from a horrible car accident and take that of a friend of his who died in a similar but different accident. In a response to a question about whether he ever thought that some of the secrets sent to him are untrue, sent only to manipulate, the visiting author replied that he saw all the postcards on which the secrets were written first as artworks, then later as medium of communication.It was a nice show, which I’m glad I attended. I got one of his books, titled “The Secret Lives of Men and Women”, and I also got it signed.
Jazz has taken over my life.
I can only blame adrenaline because there was no reason why I should have been speeding so much at the time, or standing up on the bike while riding, or – as I discovered while laying flat out on the grass – stretching one hand instinctively and without need to touch an overhead tree branch as I rode under it. By the time I brought my hand back on the bike handles, I had lost total control and was doing a 360 degree tumble from the bike track/road onto the nearby grass – luckily. The lake was still a few feet away, and I had a helmet on. There were no cuts or broken bones, but there was a little bruise, and a dirty spot on my cream chino’s trousers. It was some relief to find that there were no passers-by at all – male or worse female students – who could have had no choice but to laugh or giggle at me as I tried vainly to pretend that all was fine and I didn’t have grass slivers somewhere in my mouth. The supernatural almost always kicks in to save me from undeserved embarrassment. I’m grateful.
“Do you still have kings there?” Another one asked.