ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Art category.

Sailing Young Imagination

When I started teaching in Lagos, in 2012, on return from Edwardsville, one of the things I had in mind was finding a way to combine my passion for literature with my training and vocation as a teacher and linguist. First through a series of “Meet-A-Writer” events where we brought practising writers to meet and interact with the students, and also through excursions to events to fire up students’ artistic sensibilities, I succeeded to a reasonable extent. One of the highlights of the last Ake Arts and Books Festival, for me as a guest and as a guide to the students of mine that I brought along, was the ride home listening to the literary and creative aspirations of the students and their prospects for the future.

Gradually becoming disenchanted with the overall purpose of teaching English language as a compulsory subject (and a medium of instruction) in a post-colonial society, the idea of literature as a flight of fancy and a window into the mind and creativity of young adults became something more interesting, and certainly more rewarding than teaching grammar in a language compelled by law, sustained by an illusion, and limited in the true sense of the capacity to genuinely express the true identity of the continent. There’s an irony here, of course, in the fact that these literatures, for now, are also expressed in this same “limiting” language. But that’s a story for another day.

Last year, an idea I’ve had for a while on the possibility of harnessing students’ creative energy in a book form found enthusiastic audience with the school administration. The result is an 86-paged anthology of students’ work in poetry, prose fiction, drama, essay, and visual arts, published by Whitesands School and Feathers & Ink publishing house in Ibadan. Along with the privilege of being in the book, a few of the students are also being rewarded with positions when their work is compared with the others. We were also privileged to have prominent literary practitioners in Nigeria read and judge the prizes beforehand. For this first edition, these judges were Chika Unigwe and Tade Ipadeola, both previous winners of the Nigerian Prize for Literature (worth $100,000). In short, it was a thoroughly emotionally and intellectually stimulating experience for the teachers and the students.

The book was publicly presented on June 25 at the school, with parents of winning students present. The book is also being given to all the over 400 students in the school as an incentive to working hard to be selected for the next edition. From what I’ve heard, it is having precisely that effect. For the students whose work appear in it as well, there’s an obvious air of pride and accomplishment. In the next couple of weeks, the book should also be on Amazon and other internet outlets for free download. From what I’ve heard as positive reviews of the project, even the idea itself is ripe for scaling. Given adequate sponsorship, there’s plenty more dimensions in which this can go. For now, however, the pride of being able to accomplish something this little with substantial impact is unquantifiable. Read Tade Ipadeola’s review.

Here’s one anecdote that almost brought me to tears. Yesterday, the vice-principal of the school called to tell me of the decision of a parent of one of the students to pull out the child. As a dual citizen of the United States and Nigeria, the parents thought it was time for the child to relocate and join his other siblings. Not having told the boy before now, he was devastated, but not for an obvious reason. According to the father, the child expressed regret that having missed a chance to be published in The Sail: Issue 1, he had already started working towards entering as many creative work as possible so as to get a chance for the next issue (due January, 2016). Now, that dream is being taken away from him, without an agency to influence the process.

I have been dejected, and then extraordinarily buoyed, by the sadness of that story for the last 24 hours. It’s almost enough to compensate for everything else wrong with the compulsion in English language learning.

New Project: A Yoruba Names Dictionary

Hi Blog Readers,

Happy new year to you! I hope that you’ve been busy. I have.

IMG_6258 - Copy Along with a few researchers (and with anticipated support from a few institutions), we are proposing to build a multimedia dictionary of Yoruba names. It is a project that has been dear to my heart for a while now, and a continuation of an earlier project from university days. As the name suggests, it will be a dictionary. And being a dictionary, it will have a number of important linguistic, cultural, and artistic resources attached to each entry. We envision a cross between a wiki and a dictionary.

I wrote more about it on the Indiegogo campaign page. Please donate and help make it happen. (UPDATE: I hear that the previous link wasn’t working. I’ve fixed it now. Thanks @hardcorekancil on twitter)

It’s been ten days so far, and we have already been featured at Tech Cabal, WeRunThings and The Cable, and in countless retweets and words of mouth. We thank them! We have also raised about 30% of our target, which is incredible considering the period (after a major spending holiday). We have 50 days to go, so there is still time to chip in no matter how little.

Many of you readers have already heard about the project, and many of you have donated. Thank you. If anyone of you are interested in joining in the campaign in any way (or supporting it in any other non-financial way), please drop me a line at kt at ktravula dot com.

So, what have you guys been up to?

Memories from Ake (i): Okey and the Students

Last week, between November 18 and 22, writers and thinkers converged on Abeokuta for the second edition of the Ake Arts and Book Festival. It was also my second time of participating in the event, but the first as a guest. For some reason, the organisers thought it important this year to involve a linguist with but a finger or two in the literary pie in a festival of poets, writers and other makers of creative ideas. (Fake modesty out of the way, it was a beautiful, engaging, and stimulating event of which I was glad and proud to be a part). On Thursday the 20th, I gathered fourteen students from Whitesands School where I currently teach English, along with a colleague and award-winning journalist Bayo Olupohunda, into the school bus and headed to Abeokuta.

10443236_885590758127197_8532045416560099830_o The drive to the quiet rockhill town north-east of Lagos has always been a delight, at least the second leg of the journey that begins on the Abeokuta-Owode Road. The Lagos-Ibadan expressway is still under construction and subject to surprises in the form of potholes, narrowed lanes, broken down vehicles, and diversions. For someone meant to host a Book Chat at 10.30 am on that same day, the choices are limited. One either leaves Lagos as early as possible so as to avoid all traffic-related delays, or sleep in Abeokuta in one of the luxurious hotel rooms already booked for guests at the Festival. If one is a teacher in a high school, traveling with students who have been brought to school by their parents and need to be returned to school on the same day; and particularly if one is a husband of a working wife, with a nine-month old baby who one would terribly miss if one were to take the second choice alone, the choices become hard.

We were supposed to head out of the school by 8.am, but by almost nine o’ clock, we were still stuck in Ikoyi traffic. By even the most conservative calculations, we were starting to be late. I began to worry that I might miss my session. The author I would be chatting with, notable columnist, journalist, professor, and novelist, Okey Ndibe, had just returned from the United States a couple of days earlier. How could someone from the US arrive earlier in Abeokuta than someone who lives in Lagos? How disappointing. Lola Shoneyin (poet and author, organiser of the Festival) would be even more disappointed, I thought, as I urged the driver to speed up as much as he could within sensible limits. By 9.30, Lola started tracking me via text messages. I assured her of my location, and pleaded that if I didn’t show up on time, my panel be swapped for someone else’s. She assured that if the worst happens, we’d postpone it for an hour. A few minutes later, a tweet went out that our book chat would begin at 11.30am. That was a relief.

We arrived at the June 12 Cultural Centre, venue of the event, at about a quarter to eleven. Fifteen minutes later, I was in the hall meeting Okey Ndibe for the very first time. Weeks before, I read everything I could find about him on the internet. Some I’d read before, some I was reading for the first time. His life, work, and opinions have made him an interesting person and personality in the Nigerian literary and political space for a very long time. Conversations with other friends and colleagues about him have also guided me into a number of relevant points of inquiry. Our Book Chat was going to be one hour of conversation in front of a room full of writers and festival goers. Okey is a simple but dignified man, as his poise, dressing, and personality immediately showed. While he chatted with a few other folks around the hall, I glanced at a few of the questions I had prepared. His latest book Foreign Gods Inc is a fast-paced thriller of many layers of social and political commentary. I had two copies, one on my kindle, and one hard copy which a couple of my students had developed an attraction for on the way to Abeokuta. On arrival at the venue of the Festival, Lola Shoneyin hinted to the students that two of them would win an electronic tab for thoughtful questions.

One hour went by like a flash. As I’d been told of him, Okey Ndibe engaged each question with the thoughtfulness and breeziness of a seasoned professor, with humour, friendliness, tact, dynamism and thoughtfulness. Why did he dump on James Hardly Chase so much? What does he mean by Achebe saving him from Chase? How did he meet Chinua Achebe and what was the relationship over the years? What does he mean by Nigeria not having a real national character? What is “an ethnicity of values” anyway? What influenced him to write Foreign Gods Inc.? Any influences from the real life event in Soyinka’s autobiography of having to sneak into Brazil so as to kidnap a supposed stolen god? How would Professor Ndibe like the book read: as an ethnographic material on African people, or as a migrant literature, like Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah? How has the reception been so far? Would he like to read a part of the novel to the audience? By the time it was over, the seats had been filled, and the applause was genuine. I had a great time, and so did the students. Questions were asked, by the students and by other members of the audience, and we were done. Two students won tablets for their questions (and the rest were mad at me for not calling them when their hands went up. We resolved it on the way back to Lagos).

***

A few other questions went unasked, because of time: What’s the relationship with Christopher Okigbo and his family? He was afterall the keynote speaker at the Ohaneze Ndigbo event in Belgium in honour of that important poet about two years ago. Okey, being a young boy during the Biafran War, remembered a little of it, detailed in his essay My Biafran Eyes, how deep was that experience in shaping his upbringing? What does he think about language use in African literature? As a child of a culture with dying languages all around, how does he think that this can be reversed? Which writer in his generation does he consider an influence? What of older generations? And younger ones? He’s working on “An African Doing Dutch in America” – a memoir. What can he tell us about that? When will it be published? What was his experience as a Fulbright scholar teaching at Unilag? What inspired his first novel Arrows of Rain? He currently teaches fiction and African literature at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. What’s it like there? Has he stopped being harassed by the SSS at the airport?

***

FB_20141129_15_27_57_Saved_Picture The students split up and attended one more session. In the session involving the president of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Professor Remi Raji and author Yejide Kilanko, which was well attended, one more student won a tablet for his thoughtful question to the author. He seemed very pleased. Their day being sufficiently made, not only by their winning of electronic tablets but the idea of meeting and chatting with world-famous authors and learning a few things they hadn’t heard about before, they headed to lunch downstairs by the festival bookstore before heading back to Lagos. There a few of the students met with some other writers, chatted them up about stuff, took autographs, bought books, and generally took in the festival air.

In the bus on the journey back, conversations ranged from the shock of realizing that their English teacher was a relevant enough person to have been invited to take part in a book festival (“You never told us that you were a writer! What book have you written? Aren’t you Mr. Olatubosun? Why does it say Kola Tubosun on the guest list? How did you know Okey Ndibe, Lola Shoneyin, and all these people? Do you know Wole Soyinka too? Where is Wole Soyinka anyway? Why isn’t he ever here when we’re around? among others) to the choice of theme in writing (“I write too, you know, but I never knew that one could be famous by writing African stories”, “Are you serious that people will buy your work if you set it in the Nigerian environment rather than abroad?” “I never knew that. All my characters have English names.” “How do I get published?” “Would you read my work?” “Can I come next year? Alone?” etc).

The most heartwarming comment followed later, halfway into the trip homewards when lethargy and torpor had us all but sprawled around the seats: “If I don’t make it into the final list of students coming here next, or after I leave school a couple of years from now, I’ll try to find my way to the next Ake Festival, or another one in the future.” Seems like a comment that the organisers will thoroughly enjoy. In the end, the decision to bring them along seemed like a great idea.

____________

Photos courtesy of self, Akefestival.org, and Chidera Ezeokeke, and Tamilore Ogunbanjo

At Work with Tunde Kelani

I have admired him from afar for a very long time, especially since he blossomed into our television screens towards the end of the last century as the director of Mainframe Films (Opomulero). However, his work and reputation extend way back to the history of television in Africa. As he told me recently on the movie set of a series of multilingual recordings of Public Service Announcements (PSAs) on the Ebola virus raging around the continent, he was there near the beginning, in Ibadan, when the then WNTS (Western Nigerian Television Service) was established. The station was founded in 1959, when he was still in primary school.

At that time, when the foresight of Western Nigeria’s first politicians brought television technology into the continent and sited it in Ibadan, a new industry of imaginative artists was created. And years after that innovation, the first set of broadcasters, technicians, scriptwriters, stage workers, costume and set designers, etc went on to become innovators of their own in various fields of endeavour. (My own father was one of those, joining the Western Nigerian Broadcasting Service (WNBS) in the late sixties as a reader and later, producer). Tunde Kelani became employed at the station as a trainee cameraman on September 20, 1970. According to him, that was when his career trajectory began. He later went to a number of film schools around the world in order to gain sufficient experience. In 1993, his first film as the director of Mainframe Ti Oluwa ni Ile, a trilogy, was released to critical acclaim.

At his Mainframe office in Oshodi, Lagos, the feel of a decent but relaxed artistic environment is prevalent. In a house that doubles as a studio with an editing room and other offices, TK holds court, providing needed input during movie shoots, and coordinating artistic directions where necessary. At 66, he shows no signs of slowing down. On this set, I’m an almost invisible adjunct, present to provide input about the multilingual scripts I worked on translating into the various Nigerian languages, while the actors come in and out to interpret and act their roles on set and against the blue screen. And while the recording goes on, and in-between takes, other light-hearted discussions take place. On set on these couple of days of shooting were Toyin Aimakhu-Johnson, Femi Sowoolu, Joke Silva, Kunle Afolayan, Yomi Fash-Lanso, Tonto Dikeh, Kabirat Kafidipe, among many others.

But being around this legend of Yoruba cultural expressions in film, animated conversations ensue, taking us from one fascinating subject to the other. It has been said, for instance, in western media that Yoruba (or Nigerian) movie industry grew “out of nothing”, or out of little. That reiteration brought out the strongest rebuttal from TK who pointed out, correctly, that the Yoruba culture carried with it an element of theatre that thrived way before television came, and continued through the TV medium in the 50s to the current day. After all, there was Herbert Ogunde, and Moses Adejumo (Baba Sala), and Adeyemi Afolayan (Ade Love) way before the current crop that made what is now called (not to everyone’s satisfaction) “Nollywood”.

Animated even more by the presence of my British-Jamaican friend, psychologist and filmmaker visiting from the University of London, Dr. Julian Henriques, conversations moved from the challenges of movie production on the continent to the inevitable transition from old recording equipment to today’s modern cameras. Julian who was visiting Nigeria for the second time had, earlier in the day, visited with me the Kalakuta Museum in Ikeja, sharing an afternoon of conversation and wonder in the court of the late Afrobeat founder. His interest, Dr. Henriques, in sound as well as cultural movements and productions collided perfectly with the Kelani encounter, as their short but substantive conversations showed, and a happily saturated guest went home with a signed poster of the host’s new production. Julian’s feature film Baby Mother (1998), co-written with Vivienne Howard has been called a “vibrant and delightful” work, buzzing “with vitality and colour.” Baby Mother refers to what Americans call “baby mama”: women saddled with the responsibility of raising children from their unwed partners. The film is more than that though, touching on a number of relevant themes in black, British, and Caribbean popular culture. Here’s a brilliant YouTube clip.

One of the other gems dropped in the conversations is the news of Tunde Kelani’s new project: a theatrical adaptation of Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard into Yoruba as Lanke Omu. According to TK, it is one that carries, for him, an immense personal satisfaction for its transmission of the text’s original intent into a new cultural medium. But that is not the only project on his hands. He had also just recently completed work on a film adaptation of a novel Dazzling Mirage written by Olayinka Egbokhare, which has already been screened for selected audiences. From his reputation and the artistic scope of his earlier works (Koseegbe, O Le Ku, Ti Oluwa Ni Ile, Saworoide, Yellow Card, and Thunderbolt come to mind), these two new projects promise even more, cementing a career that is as dynamic as it is emblematic of the best of African artistic and cultural expression in a world dominated by other global influences.

Though meeting him this time for the first time at close proximity, conversations illustrated that the trajectory of my creative and professional life has passed through courses in TK’s neighbourhood. I remember, for instance, his presence at the launch of the African Language Technology Initiative (ALT-I) in Bodija, Ibadan, in 2004 where my friend, mentor, and occasional collaborator Dr. Tunde Adegbola, burst into Linguistics all the way from Engineering, in a public way, during the WALC 2004 conference. It turned out that the link between Dr. Adegbola and Baba Kelani went even further back to many years pre ALT-I days in Lagos. Another friend, teacher, and mentor, Dr. Larinde Akinleye (now deceased), was a prominent cast in many of TK’s earlier movies. And the author of TK’s recent work, Olayinka Egbokhare, is a personal friend, as one of my teachers of Communication while in the university. It was like a reunion with a friendly but famous uncle you never knew you had, in an environment of mutual respect and admiration.

Also, a fascinating encounter.

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[Watch the newly released Ebola PSAs here.]

On Saraba’s Solitude

In one of the stories in the latest issue of Saraba Magazine (#16), the author goes to movie cinemas because of the opportunity provided by its dark and quiet space to rest hands on his partners’ laps. In another, a writer paints a harrowing picture of solitude expressed best through “writing her bones”, as she puts it; a painful but therapeutic process where every experience is an opportunity for reflection as well as escape, and where artistic output and expression is a solution as much as a problem. In another, a writer describes the haunting experience of a domestic accident with a little child that ends with a quirky and sardonic anti-climax, while another piece recounts, in a series of verses like enchanted incantations of many stories, a journey through a writer’s head during “a decade of madness”. And through the work that populate this edition of the magazine dedicated to the concept of solitude, the reader is taken in a multiplicity of mental directions.

That is the fiction.

In the poems and accompanying artworks, the editors’ selections show adherence to the widest interpretation of the theme. A disabled on woman on a wheelchair, with sample selections of food recipes all around her (Rosi Martez) portray solitude as much as a middle-aged black man sitting on a distant chair in an otherwise social environment (Moustapha Dime). So does a young man holding an open book, and a pen, pondering what next to write in an inconclusive paragraph, or a gypsy woman with a musical instrument or walking staff. What they have in common, beside their aesthetic appeal that invites the beholder to further exploration of ideas beyond the first contact, is a simplicity that complements everything else in the issue. This is a familiar style for Saraba issues: a minimalist approach that projects brilliance in its modesty and understatement of its internally throbbing energies.

To have put this together as the editors have from across their physical distance from each other is a feat creditable to today’s electronic bridge of solitude: the internet. Dami Ajayi is now a jobless medical doctor in Lagos, while Emmanuel Iduma is on the road with the Invisible Borders roadtrip from Lagos to Sarajevo. Together, they have created a thriving brand and a viable platform for new voices in creative and artistic expression around the continent.

I skimmed the poems, but not all. Even a most perfunctory glance, conditioned by a short attention span, or a recent conditioned apathy to poetry reveals gems in stanzas like this:

To ask a poet about solitude
is to speak about lost moments
and untold stories of life
scribbled on brown sheets, old letters
hanging on the wall

As he plays the piano for his departed lover
in a room where cobwebs hang like portraits on old walls;
where cockroaches exchange dreams with old manuscripts

beneath the mattress where
a suicide letter lies
waiting to be read:

only the words survive
as time carries the burden
of memory like a scarf on a cobra’s head

(Gbolahan: 8)

And with that, the feast is complete, deliciously served. Not in the least diminished by sharing, the rest are thus left, best repackaged as it should be, by the selfless re-gifter of all good things. You will take it slow, as I did – to the consternation of my pressuring editors, and enjoy in soluble bites. There’s something for everyone.

The Issue can be downloaded here.

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