ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Observations category.

Two Poems for Wenger

I wrote this poem last January for Susanne Wenger when news broke that she had passed, and sent it to a couple of friends and a few listservs. Friend Benson Eluma was one of the people who wrote a response in poetry to my offering back then. Click here to read his poem, now published in Nigeria’s NEXT newspaper. The poetic meeting of Benson and I on the campus of the Ibadan University is a long story for another day.

Here below is the final version of what I wrote back then, thanks to a few suggestions from Lola Shoneyin.

Like Chalk in the River

For Susanne, Olorisha!

They said it rained when Suzanne was buried.
It poured.
They spoke of a rumble of the heavens
as the Orisha Osun swam back, again, to her pristine source.

They talked of art.
They spoke of beauty.
They mentioned hands
That sculpted spirits.

But now when the forests have stopped dancing with the rain,
See the wind escape from that storied grove.
Look, amid the hallowed haze,
at a turning twirl of her spirit gaze.

Gone is the eye that looked out for the standing stems
When greed called for arms, and men scorned sense, and all she wove.

Today, the Spirit it was that left, again,
To return. To return: a time-bound god, or else a travelling dove.

NOTE: Susanne Wenger was the Austrian artist who lived most of her life in Osogbo Nigeria as a priestess of the river Osun. Born in Austria, she met and married the German artist Professor Ulli Beier who brought her to Nigeria in the 1949. The couple quickly assimilated in Nigeria, he as a teacher and she as an artist, but they moved from Ibadan to the nearby town of Ede in 1950 to escape what Wenger called the “artificial university compound”. In Ede, she met one of the last priests of the rapidly disappearing, ancestral-based Olorisha religion. She quickly became engrossed in his life and rituals, even though at that time she spoke no Yoruba. “Our only intercourse was the language of the trees,” she said later.

Her work in Osogbo for the many parts of her life included an enormous effort to protect the sacred grove of Osun, a forest along the banks of the Oshun river just outside Osogbo, which she turned into a sculpture garden filled with art made by her and others. The sacred groves of Osun are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites thanks in most part to her efforts. (Read more about her life here).

She died last January in Osogbo, her adopted home, at the age of 92.

Ask Me! An Update

Since I have held you in suspense long enough, let me tell you what it was all about.

I had looked at my blog stats earlier in the day to discover that we had already almost a thousand comments, so I had this little idea of giving back to my commenters. It was also a way of marking that interesting landmark of 1000 comments. Well, technically, the comments are not all from you readers. Some of them are from me as well, responding to you. Therefore technically, we’re still not up to a thousand reader comments. About nine hundred would be more like it. But, we have reached and passed a thousand comments on this blog that started in August in Lagos Nigeria so I thank everyone, from Aloofar who left the first comment, and “Meee” who left the 1000th. I would kiss you both, but one of you is a guy and the other is anonymous. Sorry folks. Maybe next time 😀

It was interesting though, that Ms “Mee” also had one of the most interesting questions I received on that post. All she asked was “Will you marry me?” What can I say? It’s a woman’s world, and I lead an interesting life. 🙂 For readers interested in the development of that question, I’ll let you know how that goes. Ask me again in five years 😉 So, to reward these wonderful readers and commenters, including those of you who were the 1001st, 1002nd, 1003rd etc and are interested, I am going to go out and print a series of postcards made from my photos taken all around Illinois, and branded ktravula.com. They’re going to be nice, and I will post them to you wherever you live around the world, as soon as you send me your postal address. Send it to kt@ktravula.com. “Mee” also gets a branded bag from my department or a ktravula.com t-shirt only if she lives in the United States. If not, she gets postcards. It’s funny though that she was leaving a comment for the very first time. Interesting.

Thank you everyone who sent me questions. If you have any more questions that you haven’t asked, you’re still allowed to send them, and you may get souvenir postcards too. I’m printing out quite a number.

On severas apres, then folks! I’m feeling cold, and this dinner of freezing lemonade and schogetten milk cream chocolate with vanilla sliced loaf cake is not helping at all. 😀

How I Became An American (2)

One thing I never quite understood when I first landed here was the extent of choice available to the shopper. Why, I wondered, were there sooooo many things to buy. My first attempt to buy toothpaste almost ended in a disaster when I stood there in the aisle for minutes trying to decide if I preferred Colgate Total Advanced Whitening, Colgate Total Advanced Fresh, Colgate Total Advanced Clean or Colgate Whitening Oxygen Bubbles, which are real Colgate products for your information. (Read the entry here). How do these people make their choice, I had wondered, and concluded within myself that they didn’t really put their mind to it. They probably just went into the store, picked one out of a hundred beckoning choices, and left. I have discovered how wrong I was in that assumption. A few days before Christmas, Papa Rudy and I had gone to shop for groceries and his wife had stressed more than three times on the phone that what we had to buy for food was small red beans. SMALL RED, she stressed, and I wondered what difference it could make to make such a distinction. When we got to the aisle for vegetables, I found out why. There were green beans, red beans, small red, canned green, baked beans, baked beans in chilli, etc. We got her the small red, but when I ate it later as part of the dinner, I still couldn’t tell what was different about it than the other kind of beans I’d eaten before, so I decided that maybe it was a good idea that women did the cooking in the homes because I could never imagine the kind of argument that might have ensued all night if he had done the cooking with his own preferable choice of beans. For sure, she wouldn’t have liked it.

In the olden days when I used to go shopping at Walmart and Aldi with Reham the Egyptian, I never quite understood why she spent so much time shopping. The pattern always repeated itself: she would agree with me, nodding to my every word right before entering the store, that “at around 5.25pm, we must both be done shopping, and must proceed to check-out no matter what we’re doing, do you understand? The bus to campus is scheduled to be here at 5.30pm and I will hate to miss it. We’re clear, right? Look at your watch, it’s 4.30pm right now,” and she would say “Yes, yes, I understand.” By a quarter to six, when the bus would have long left, leaving us behind, I would be sitting at the exit door, angry and out of my wits, wondering why in the world I had to deserve that kind of torture. She would come out later and say “Oh I’m sorry. What do you want me to do when I couldn’t find what I wanted?” Couldn’t she have just asked an attendant? No, she would rather look at everything, spending quality time to decide if she wanted the extra large, jumbo size or the family size, among many other variables. Hmmm… I don’t have to tell you why it’s been such a long time since we both went out shopping anymore. 🙂

But being such a brisk shopper has not altogether being without its disadvantages for me as well. The first time I made such a brisk purchase was at the Reagan Airport in Washington DC, and I was lucky because it was just for gum – Orbit, I believe. I never even knew until then that there were so many kinds of flavour. I took the one that looked the finest, and regretted it afterwards because it was also the harshest in the mouth, and I had bought three. But I can’t blame brisk shopping for that, since it isn’t possible to have a taste of it beforehand anyway. So far, let me just say that I believe in my guts when it comes to making a choice out of a horde of beckoning options. I may sometimes regret it – as was the case with the impostor potatoes, or the winter jacket I got at Khol’s that almost didn’t fit me again when I got back home – but mostly, I’ve had much success. Even if not, I’d still take that over missing the bus and keeping myself in the harsh evening cold for far longer than necessary.

Take that Reham! 😉 🙂 :D.

What Else Is New?

Q: How do I prepare for teaching class, usually?

A: I don’t.

Well, that’s not true, technically. It’s just a short response. I spend all waking hours, especially at weekends usually mentally mapping the format of the next class that by the time it’s Saturday evening, I’m in an almost panic mode, worrying whether I’ve done enough even though I’ve been noting things down and recalling examples that could help pass the messages across better. But I don’t study much just for the class. I follow relevant links that I find online or offline, and I follow up on new and old leads. Yesterday I looked through the first chapters of Je Ká Ka Yoruba, the text for the language teaching again, and tried to see if there was something there that I hadn’t seen before or taught before. I needed to cover much of the weekly syllabus because of the Martin Luther King holiday that fell on Monday, effectively reducing my week by half.

Before I went to bed at 3am on Sunday night, I managed to read the first chapter of A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt for the very first time in one sitting. Last semester, I had only just glanced through that chapter because I had too much to read then. I got much of the ideas of it from the students’ summaries and what we discussed in class. Lazy, I know. But after reading it yesterday, I understood why anyone could be forgiven for trying to avoid reading it. For an avid reader, each sentence is a treasure of lore. It tells of some thing or the other that the author has either not talked about before earlier, or that he wants to say again in another way. I agree, the chapter could have been a little shorter, but you should read it. You should read it. It brings memories of things parents talk about. Reading it, I felt like I was listening to a seasoned elder speak of his childhood in a closely knit extended Yoruba family. If I could meet the writer, I would ask him too many questions. Or I would just sit at his feet, just listening to him talk. He is a good writer. He’s a good story teller too. Why is this book not read in Nigerian schools? Oh, I forgot, Wole Soyinka’s Ake has already taken control of that spot in autobiographical narratives in colonial and pre-colonial Nigeria. Their experiences are not the same, but they are similar, as I pointed out in class, lest they get the idea that everyone of us in Nigeria – just like this writer – do not know our exact date of birth. Alright, go and get the book, and read.

There is nothing new I want to tell you about today’s class. It stated on time and it ended on time. No other student has dropped off beside Gretchen who had dropped out after a first class. She left us for a class in Finance, so we’re nineteen now. Still, the textbooks are not sufficient. Many will have to share. We can’t complain. Now we can greet, introduce ourselves, respond in Yoruba and ask few introductory questions in Yoruba as well. It’s a start. These students are more agile, a little faster to learn than the last ones. I think. I could be wrong. They got the “kp” and “gb” far easily, for sure. Maybe it is because of the size of the class that gives this positive feeling and active participation. It is turning out to be a blessing after all. We may not be able to joke around as much as we did last semester, but we will try. I may find it harder to learn everyone’s names on time as I want to. It will take a while, but I’ll get there. Today we met esu, ifa, Obatala, and Sango. Next week, we’re meeting Wole Soyinka, and maybe later Suzanne Wenger. Maybe it’s not a bad idea to have such a large class. It feels warm enough. I love it.

I think that the most memorable thing I have found as a pattern is that I usually wake up early whenever I have to teach a class, notwithstanding when I go to bed. It’s a good thing. Maybe that’s why I’m tired on Thursdays…

Memories of Washington

Today is Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr Holiday in all the states of the US. It is a public holiday so school is closed. I don’t know if I like holidays a lot, but I can’t complain that I have got a chance to rest in preparation for work on Wednesday.

Today in memory of that youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and civil rights activist whose words, deeds and activism has challenged so many people across races, beliefs, age range and countries towards harmony, peace, quest for justice and non-violence, I am putting up these few photos that we took on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in December while we were in Washington.

It was on those steps in August 28, 1963 where Dr.King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. (See last image, obtained from Wikipedia images.)

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