ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Observations category.

Home Alone, Traveller.

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for October – an excerpt.


The heavy hum-dum of numb dumbbells lazing on a dirty rug

does not rise above this state, nor do the electro-carts that tug

in whimpers at his idle mind. There stirs and falls in random beats,

like hearts half-baked in a searing whirlwind of summer heats,

doses of silence, filtered in cold, frittered in the evening eye.

“It will not be tonight when the world ends.” Only a cycle crawls by.

 

A new man peers across a ledge, pondering time, pondering faces;

and only a thicket of quiet responds, louder than a din of dank spaces.

It bobs, it weaves a yarn of times. It reeks of a kind of cold, sour breath,

of stories told again and again; a non-listening ear. A certain death.

It is silent here now, as memory plays roughly along the helm of choice,

heaving noise: “It will not be tonight when the world ends,” in a low lone voice.

Home Alone, Traveller. was published on September 29th, 2009, with the tags , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently 12 comments on this article so far.

Ìyeyè

Ìyeyè

Nigerian Ìyeyè

A while ago in Ibadan Nigeria, before I began my Fulbright programme, I’d shared my fascination with the ìyeyè with friends on Facebook, and the response was enlightening. A few of them hadn’t seen it before nor enjoyed it’s delicious taste. I was discovering for the first time that the fruit which looked like a juicy berry that as little children we enjoyed picking up from under its tree as it falls down ripe during the summer was not as popular in all of Yorubaland as I had previously thought. There were some people who grew up in parts of the country without even ever having heard of it.

I’ve now developed a similar fascination in the United States when I discovered the fact that not as many people as I thought know what plantain is or what it tastes like. Interestingly, even Reham the Egyptian has displayed a similar kind of ignorance which is understandable when I put it in mind that Egypt is in Africa’s Sahara region, perhaps not a place conducive to growing such food crops. At the get-together we had at Rudy’s house on Tuesday for my birthday, we inevitably got around to discussing food, and I made another startling discovery that America has no such food as yam. What they called yam here is actually Irish potato, which I’ve had the pleasure of having as a good meal of potato salad.

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American Red Grapes

Now grapes. It has been a good pleasure first to discover that one could buy and enjoy a bunch of red table grapes here for a far, far less amount than one pays for it back home. The first (and inevitably last) time that I asked how much a bunch of grapes cost in Lagos Nigeria, I believe it was between $10 and $40, which is only understandable when I know that we neither plant nor “produce” it there. They are imported. And secondly that no matter how hard I try to shake the thought, I can’t but conclude that the American grapes are a sort of distant family to my Nigerian ìyeyè even though they taste a little differently, and the ìyeyè has a seed in its core which the grapes don’t. They look much alike, and they both are berries with a juicy inside and a soft covering. I don’t know much of Agriculture, but I won’t bet against the fact of this similarity. Help anyone?

Ìyeyè was published on September 26th, 2009, with the tags , , , , , , under the Observations, Opinion category. There are currently 6 comments on this article so far.

Vistas

“Age is just a number, and mine is unlisted.”

Seen on a vehicle’s throw pillow. Here are some nice photos for your viewing delight.

Vistas was published on September 24th, 2009, with the tags , , under the Observations category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Eid El-What?

Unlike my Nigerian folks, I did not have any holidays on Monday and Tuesday to celebrate the end of the Moslem fast. If I was back home in Nigeria, I’d be home resting on Monday while I ran late trying to meet up with a class. Reham the Egyptian celebrated her Eid festival in the quiet of her flat while all her folks at home stayed back from work to rest and feast. In Nigeria, there is a public holiday for every religious holiday from Christmas, Easter to the two Moslem Eid festivals in the year. On a curios but worrying note, there is no public holiday (yet) for any African traditional religion!

Playing games on a work-free dayThere are no Eid holidays in the United States for obvious reasons: it is regarded more as a Christian state when it’s not being seen as secular. The actual reason is that there are too many holidays every year in the country, and none of them have to do with religion. That’s what I think at least, because Christmas is all about the festival, the movies and Santa Claus, and less of the birth of Jesus Christ. No one knew when Jesus was born precisely anyway. The December 25 date was only arbitrarily picked by one dead pope to signify a day of the year for followers to remember. Neither is Thanksgiving any more than a celebration of life, health and family. The formerly large purpose of gathering to praise God for a bountiful harvest must have been overtaken by the fact of growing skepticism in religion and belief in God, and the decline of subsistence or commercial farming based solely on the variables of nature. Science has ultimately come to the rescue, and I have a feeling that the God of thanksgiving may not be as large a guest at the dinner table as he used to be.

Now, let me say here that I haven’t had my first Thanksgiving in the US, and I’m looking forward to it, especially the holiday it provides. The above thoughts are merely random, perhaps reflective of the state of belief, religion and God in today’s America. Ben, my flatmate, doesn’t know whether an afterlife exists, nor does he put much thought to its existence, or that of God, because to him, it will be worse if one does good only because of a selfish desire to be accepted in the afterlife than a genuine willingness to help other people. I find this reasonable.

In my country Nigeria on Monday and Tuesday, there were days of rest from work. I like to see it as a much deserved holiday for the hardworking citizens, and not just a sacrifice to some God after a thirty days ritual of fasting. But if it makes people happier to believe it to be just so, I possess no right to deny them the privilege. When Christmas comes in December, there will also be a holiday season for the Nigerian Christians to have their own moments of feasting and sharing, which is another component of religious holidays in Nigeria. Will America learn anything from the demarcation of holiday days for religious breaks in Nigeria? I doubt it. I seriously doubt also that it ever needs to. If permitted in America, every known and registered religion will sue for its own holidays and there’d be no days left to work. Let us do with Martin Luther King Holidays, Halloween fun shows, July 4th holiday, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Labour day, and a few other distinctly American holidays, and we can all go our ways. Problem is, once in a while, a yet unadapted foreigner from a multi religious country like Nigeria will show up in America, and come late to class on a normal American Monday, thinking all the while that because his folks at home are on break, he should also be too.

Eid El-What? was published on September 23rd, 2009, with the tags , , , , , , under the Observations, Opinion, Soliloquy, Travelling category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

The Fifth Class

My fifth class was short, but only because it never took place. I’m blogging about it only because it has taught me another important lesson in my American experience: be punctual. But first, I should tell you why my sleeping pattern has become so irregular. Two words: time zones.

By the time it’s midnight in Illinois and I’m ready to sleep, a chat box beeps open on my laptop and someone in faraway Nigeria has woken up and wants to talk to me. It is six am their time. A little “hi” gradually turns into long phrases and sentences, and by the time my eyelids start closing by themselves, they somehow get the idea, and we part ways. It is not their fault but mine, for staying up beyond eleven pm when I should just shut down the blooming laptop and close my eyes.

"Good day class!"In today’s case however, it was none of the above reason. I was working on a translation task that took much of my time. I slept at twelve, woke up at two and slept again at five thirty. By the next time I woke up, I was thirty minutes late for my teaching class. I have never rode by bike as fast as I did today, and I got to campus panting like a deer. And silly me, I was still expecting to find the students waiting for me in class. I met only one of them the lobby, and I hurried up into the class to find an empty set of seats. Perfect. Back to the lobby, there was Bre reading, and waiting for her next class.

“Hey, where’s everyone?” I asked.

“We left.” She replied. “You weren’t there, and so we left.”

It was as simple as that.

It was another sharp reminder for me to wrap myself around the fact I’m no longer in Nigeria where students have to wait until the end of the hour for the teacher to show up in class.

The Fifth Class was published on September 21st, 2009, with the tags , , , , , , under the Academic, Observations category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.