Browsing the archives for the Art category.
The four of us who left our little sleepy town yesterday have now landed safely in the bosom of the Windy City. The journey from St. Louis to Chicago only took five long hours on a double decked megabus that offered a beautiful view of the pitch blackness of the road and only a little compensation of little street and vehicle lights. A journey during the day might have given a little more to rejoice for as far as road sight-seeing is concerned. It was something to be thankful for however that it provided a few pockets of sleeping time for us who had spent an earlier part of the evening riding in a private van all the way from Edwardsville. The bus which left the St. Louis Union Station pulled over at the Chicago Union Station a few minutes after six this morning, and we the travellers stepped into the cold wind with gigantic buildings blocking our view of the beautiful morning sky.
We are Reham, Audrey, Mafoya and I: two males, two females; three Africans and one French; two Fulbrighters and two International students; two and a half speakers of French, one of Arabic and one and a half of Yoruba; one moslem, an atheist, one Christian and one composite. In short, a United Nations of sorts. We have so far visited a few fun places, and as I lay here typing after a long day, I don’t know just where to start. The day had definitely been fulfilling, from getting lost on the streets, to getting shoved within a crowd of busy pedestrians going and coming without a discernible pattern of intentions. From becoming the centre of attention on the corner of a busy street because of a heady insistence to consult the large city map right there to the long, pleasant ride up into the Sky Deck observation area of the Sears (Willie’s) Tower to get an aerial view of the whole city, and to learn more of the very much cultural import of this city that has defined America in more ways than one. From a long walk on Adam’s street coming from the magnificent Sear’s Towers to the enchanting awesome experience of the corridors of the Art Institute of Chicago – an experience of a lifetime that requires a long post of its own. From sitting at Starbucks on an early Friday morning observing people getting their morning beverage ritual to returning home tired at night to this five star hostel that had put up no big public sign of its name and had got us a bit wandering. From the ups and downs of this exhilarating day, here we are, bushed from a day on a town that never stops demanding, yet bubbly with a kind of sweet miserableness.
One of the other guys in this large room for ten where Mafoya and I sleep talks a little too loudly on his phone to/about his boyfriend/admirer in an often not too discreet manner. Sigh, will we survive it?
The free coffee provided in the first floor of this almost ten storeys building is one of the crappiest in the world. But since I’m not such an addict in the first place, I should survive, I think.
Our room – a ten-bed suite for the males – for a reason beyond my explanation bears the number 419, a curious number to have as two African students in a foreign land as this. For now, it is our inside joke. And so, we will survive.
Tomorrow will find us back on the streets, seeking out the treasures of a place that could boast of the likes of Barack Obama, Ernest Hemingway, Jeniffer Hudson, Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Louis Armstrong, and yes, Kanye West among its notable citizens. The city has welcomed us with open arms. Its time to ravage it. Let the day break.
All my students agreed, to my utmost discomfiture, that the Nigerian musician Lágbájá reminds them in some way of the Klu Klux Klan, even though his costume is neither white, nor as creepy. I wasn’t aware of this, and I had come to class with his most recent video, and a few others, as pointers to an authentic Nigerian musical art form popularized by this masquerade of a man.
“Does he ever show his face?”
No.
“Do people know who he is?”
Yes.
“Is he ever going to take his mask off?”
I don’t know.
And in actual fact, I didn’t. The brand that is Lágbájá has come to be defined by his invisibility, woven into the Yoruba’s mask as a form of cultural expression, along with the namelessness that Lagbaja represents. Lágbájá is a placeholder in Yoruba that means anyone of “anybody”, “nobody”, “everybody” and “somebody”.
In the end, all that mattered was that the students were exposed in some way to a form of artistic expression that both Yorubas and non-Yorubas are proud of as representative of creativity, and art. But that reference to the KKK, by both White and Black students of the class flipped me, and got me wondering just how much we take for granted because of our distance from the scene of events. It wasn’t so much of a consolation that the concept of Lágbájá is the farthest possible kind to that of hate-mongering, racism and intolerance.
I miss her when she’s gone. She has the shrillest voice around
A smile so piercing, laughter so fluid, and a most charming sound.
There she is on the white wall, like a doll, staring my cold away,
and texts, like words, move my stone mind like music did today.
And not just flesh at this moment, a virtual soothing thought
stares gently back, half removed by not just a large pond, but like a dot.
I will put my feet to test, seeking the corridors of a winding maze
to bring her out. It is lonesome now without the thrill of her chase.
Without the petting that I seek, without the pat of her doting hand,
I swoon only with her stare from this wall, her charming face, and
the only thing I hold are rounds of rumbling laughter – it is the joy
but it is also a peeping-eyed hug of a less harming kind. She’s the coy
muse of my long distant nights. She’s the round and wingless muse
of lines that form with one closed eye. A love from the depth of snooze.
Today, after a spell of indecision and procrastination, I finally got the spray paint and headed to the Wall to make it mine. It didn’t take too long, and it wasn’t too hard. And in the end, I didn’t get any more creative than I already got before. As none of the readers of the last post gave me sufficient ideas, and I never successfully resolved my language conflict, I ended up writing it in German, in the shortest possible way as allowed by the thinning white paint.
A few other words already sprayed on the wall include: “Palestine,” “JFK war hier,” “We love our troops: Bring them home,” “Love”, “Chelsea”, “Revolution”, “SPEAC”, and a moving, notable one: “Wir sind ein folk”, which means in English, “We are one people.”
And thus today, the Berlin Wall, also became mine. But at the end, I wished that there was something else less vain than “ktravula war hier” that I could have written there. Maybe simply, #lightupnigeria, or “Jolaadé”. Oh well, that’s an idea for another day. Time to pack my bags. Chicago calls.