ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Soliloquy category.

Ramblings: On A Few Personal Things

Hi Blog,

It has been a while, or has it? In-between worrying about the direction of this darned thesis (which is as interesting/exciting as it is burdening), and looking all around the internet for good English teaching opportunities in East Africa after this long American adventure winds up in a few months, and managing a language lab that caters to all students of foreign languages in this university, you have been a consistent friend. Even while worrying all through the last couple of weeks deciding which photographs to enter into that Juried Show, and eventually, the little details of its presentation, you have been here. Here’s my hug to you. Hold it tight. You deserve it.

Do you also remember that new position that was tossed on my lap from those brainy folks at Nigerianstalk? Adding a literary component to the already popular site of Nigerian news/thought aggregation, a LitMag was debut with a purpose of harnessing the strength of new literature on the continent and I was made the editor. Tell me, how easy was the task of transitioning from a distant critic of Nigeria/Africa’s new writing into an influential hand in its new directions? The first published pieces came from people we already had close by. I have now discovered Facebook – and twitter – as a treasure trove of other new writings while still unrelenting in trawling the web for as many more as one could find. Young/Old Nigerians and non-Nigerians are writing new, brilliant things. If we can use the LitMag to bring them to the attention of the world, and produce one or two best-selling authors (and maybe a Caine/Booker prize-winning author), that would have been a success, wouldn’t it? For now, I invite you over to read short stories by Anja Choon and Olumide Abimbola, poetry by Benson Eluma and Kolade Ajayi, reviews by Adebiyi Olusolape, and a delightful non-fiction by Temie Giwa. All delightful, really.

Yesterday, I played around with tumblr. I have been told consistently that it is a better portal for photo exhibition than Facebook or twitter. I didn’t pay attention to it much because – frankly – I wasn’t really ready to deal with the work of pruning a whole photo database of thousands of pictures for weed and tare. Now that some of the work in that department has got some attention, it might be necessary to take these advice seriously. People who access the tumblr page would be able to see my works-in-progress, and photos that I would rather not have to delete. After all, Facebook has now been fully privatized. Giving hard, creative work to Mr. Zuckerberg for free will bring neither pleasure nor profit. One could suggest that artists/writers who use that platform for exhibition of their work should get something back from the pool of advertising revenue that Facebook rakes in everyday… but one would be but one voice in the wilderness.

Valentine’s Day always reminded me more of that old picture I took on the way to campus in the winter of 2009/10: a student couple staring idly at the restful lake. There were just three shots, and only one of them became the super great piece that it eventually became. Sometimes I think of them. Would they recognize themselves in the photo today if presented with it? All the viewer sees is their backs turned to the photographer. Ahead of them is a serene lake disturbed only by the restless geese. Another thought: if that picture were to make it to a great exhibition somewhere in New York City sometime in the future, how much would it fetch? And, how does one quantify the value of being at the right place at the right time with the right kind of camera, and stealth?

The day, of course, always reminded of that one last year that ended with a speeding ticket on my driver’s license in St. Louis. Somehow, in spite of my enduring affection for that riverfront town, we always managed to run headfirst into each other’s restless ego. Last year was also memorable for a very remarkable congress of us five student friends watching the Grammy with wine, chips, food, and class homework. A year later, we are all mildly dispersed in all directions of the state. Next year will surely find us in even more disparate circumstances. As the Yorubas say, “twenty children will never typically play for twenty straight years.” (Good luck explaining that to a monastery).

The curator of the art show slated for Friday told me that the opening day is the only day that I am obliged to show up – in order to meet with other artists, and to talk to the guests. For the other days of the one-month event, visitors and guests will just wander around observing, reading artist statements, and pointing to particular artworks that catch their attention enough to bring out their credit cards. The long nights between now and Friday will hopefully be filled with more productive endeavour. (I really hate bringing up thoughts about this thesis, as much as I have enjoyed working on it. I’m guessing that this is what a pregnancy feels like). As usual, there are a few new, and a few incomplete, novels all around my bed. None of them will be read to the end at the moment. Maybe this is a good time to return to editing that copy of Headfirst into the Meddle which my e-publisher has requested for a re-issuing. This year might be a good year for creativity after all – in spite of that damned blessed thesis.

Thank you blog for being there. I love you too. If you remain good, I promise to spend a lot more time with you when the thesis is over. Deal? I also have a story I want to tell you. Many stories, in fact, but there is this one about a personal brush with Intellectual Property violation on the internet. Will you still be here?

Sincerely Yours,

PS: Supervisor just sent me a mail that began with the following: “Something else I forgot to mention… You will probably need to develop some facility at multi-tasking…”

Village Boy

Evenings come with breeze, silence and dust. Across the sky are slivers of brown rustiness finally settling on the town after a long day’s work. A road passes in front of the wooden shack where men young and old sit down to banter in merriment, often with their shirts off. The women sit in groups petting children. When darkness falls and all that lights the day is the moon up in the sky, voices move up and down in modulations that carry the weight of their vain deliberations.

The village is a study of contrasts. On the one side of it is a sprawling mass of huts covered with brown rusted roofs. In the middle of this side of town, also called Aba, was the Christ Apostolic Church – perhaps the only modern building there. Aba burns the eyes with the brown of its thatched huts and of its children’s feet. In a bustling afternoon, the sound of goats and chicken compete with the trail of their smell from one street to another up until the foot of the agbalumo tree…

One hour of traipsing around these edges of the village eventually finds a seven year old boy back at home – a different part of the town. The house overlooks a long equally dusty street that runs from a clinic down to the right hand of the observer to the other part of the village where the barber lives. There is a certain magic in living around here. Grown folks played practical jokes on little children and on each other. A day earlier, on his way back from wandering around the village, he was stopped on the pavement of a certain house where another young boy was being shaven. His head was already bald.

“It’s your lucky day, young man.” A man volunteers. “Stay right where you are. What are you doing around here all by yourself?”

“I was coming from around there. I am going home over there.”

“Why were you staring?”

It is always hard to know where adult conversations were leaning.

“I wasn’t staring. I was on my way home.”

“Like I said, it is your lucky day. All young men your age are being circumcised today.”

What?

“You look frightened. Come closer and sit down here. We’ve been told to go around circumcising all young men like you around town.”

It took a whole minute, then he took off as fast as he could. He never looked back until he got home, panting like a dog. For a long time that evening, he would wonder how grown people managed to make such brutal jokes that seemed at the expense of poor helpless kids scared half to death. And for a longer time after that, he would begin to take a different route home while wandering around the village, but always with a lingering fear that he was not totally out of the grip of mentally bullying elders.

Kano, Nigeria.

News from the BBC, and Reuters, at the moment says that there have been about 20 bomb blasts in the northern Nigerian city of Kano. A phone call to a friend in Kaduna confirmed the story of smokes and gun fires in police stations. The culprit is Boko Haram, the shadowy terrorist group mortally opposed to everything western, except guns and explosives.

Just a week ago, the federal government had sent soldiers to the streets in many cities to prevent the peaceful “Occupy Nigeria” protesters from becoming a nuisance to government business. This news of renewed violence by the real threat to the nation’s progress only highlights the negligence that everyone have long decried. It shows the out-of-touchedness of those that sleep in the government house in Abuja.

Whatever happens as that country goes through this violent wringer of a reform, here is hoping that what remains is still recognizable to those of us who still call it home.

Monolingualism Worries

This article in the New York times examines the oft-repeated claim that Americans are mostly monolingual, monolingual by choice, and fare worse in the world precisely because of it.

The claim, it seems, is the same as (or similar to) an old argument between whether literacy equals sophistication, or whether someone without (Western) education in a developing country is smart enough to correctly adjust to the complexity of the (21st century) world. There is no substantial evidence to support the “for” argument, of course, as those with brilliant, sophisticated yet uneducated grandparents will attest, but the discussion is one that underlies much of today’s governmental and social intervention in local, traditional ways of life.

I am a linguist, however, and thus will remain on the side of multilingualism – and multiculturalism – as an important, yet fascinating, catalyst of social change.

The Whole Picture

The last couple of days has brought a record number of new visitors to this blog. That brings with it a certain kind of delight. (Welcome people!) I may yet resume a regular dump of my thoughts on you once again as I have been doing for the past two years. Sitting here for the past few hours has brought me into a few ideas none of which have furthered the work into my thesis beyond a few sentences. On one screen is my twitter feed that shows me diverse opinions of trending topics, from the Golden Globes to the Fuel Subsidy fights in Nigeria (in which my heart absolutely resides), and the Republican Primary fight in which another video has shown up with frontrunner Mitt Romney offering an unbelievably cold response to a sick man who had asked for his opinion on medical marijuana.

As I have discovered many times over, coming back to the empty page of a new blogpost always brought words back to my fingertips, bringing me back to a required level head to continue my work. In any case, here is what I thought: a solution to an old puzzle. All the (about three thousand) pictures that I have taken since this travelogue began need to go somewhere. As from today, I will be putting one (or two) of them per week out on the blog’s Facebook page with a little back story. If I never eventually make it to writing/completing that travel book of all those experiences, pictures and short back stories would have to do. Of course, you would be missing out on this if you are not already following the page.

Alright, that is out. Back to wondering how to successfully measure the progress of second language tonal acquisition, and communicate same to a thesis committee.

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