ktravula – a travelogue!

In Defense of Engagement: KABAFEST, Literary Festivals, and Bad Faith Protest

Op-ed first published on Olisa.TV in July of 2017.

___

By Kọ́lá Túbọ̀ṣún

Earlier this year, when Hassan Minhaj was invited to perform at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an annual event in which the sitting president was always a notable feature, there was some suggestion that he boycott it. After all, as a Muslim comedian, this was a president who had shown nothing but contempt for not just his religion and his race, but for the press itself. Why was the White House Correspondents Association inviting a bully and a racist president to grace an ostensibly ceremonial occasion set up for those entrusted with the responsibility of holding leaders’ feet to fire? Hassan’s response, which ultimately prevailed, was that there was no better chance of speaking truth (and satire) to power than a pulpit a few feet away from the most powerful man on earth, and at an event watched by millions of people worldwide.

In the end, it was the president who flinched, choosing instead to appear at a public rally hastily organised in a different state but at the same time as the dinner that held so much embarrassing potential for his fragile ego. And in his absence, the comedian delivered as much of a fiery performance as was expected, not just of the absent president, but of the ideology that produced him and the media that failed to hold his feet to the fire.

I’m not Hassan Minhaj, a disclaimer that is quite useless at this point, but I’ve had course, over the last couple of days, to consider that event and its significance, in the face of a certain bad-faith response to the first edition of the Kaduna Book and Arts Festival, a privately organized* event. The argument, similar to that against the American comedian, was that the partial support of the Kaduna State Government for the literary festival taints it enough to result in writer boycotts. Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, the governor of the state, it is argued, is a problematic political figure who had looked the other way when innocent civilians were killed under his watch, among other inadequacies. Therefore, he is not worth associating with in any way by writers who care about justice and accountability.

On the surface, the argument is sensible. After all, who wants to sit and dine with a politician who seemed unfazed by the violence meted out to a religious minority group under his watch.

Except that, first of all, the festival is not a “wine and dine”.

It is a gathering of people with diverse thoughts and opinions sharing ideas and their love for reading against the background of books and other artistic productions. I have been invited to conduct a book chat with author Laila Aboulela who was the first winner of the Caine Prize. Her book, The Kindness of Enemies (2016) examined the emotional and human origins of modern extremism through the story of Imam Shamil, a warrior from Dagestan during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II in old Russian Empire. The writer, a muslim Sudanese writer, will also be organizing a two-day workshop for 22 women selected from over 40 applicants.

Those who have attended the annual Aké Festival will testify to its setup as one facilitating conversation as much as disagreement. At the 2015 event, I remember clearly the moment when President Olusegun Obasanjo’s demeanour changed from a feted guest to one of a cornered politician when a young girl took up the microphone and challenged him on the failure of his role so far in the Nigerian experiment. In a follow-up session later in the evening, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka piled on by describing the former president as an unrepentant liar. In 2016, during a book chat between Helon Habila and Teju Cole, moderated by journalist Kadaria Ahmed, most audience reports of the conversation focused on the way the anchor challenged the writers to justify the usefulness of their work on the Chibok Girls if it did nothing to better inform the reader or improve the situation on the ground. In short, like most book and art festivals, it ends up as a space for a cross-fertilization of ideas, in as many necessary directions as necessary.

I have been privileged to have attended these events yearly and I’ve been impressed by the renewed focus they have put on books and literature as important entry points into social and political discourse. But Aké Festival, especially, also does something more. By taking invited writers into town to interact with young school students, and endowing book grants and scholarship opportunities for students to attend, they sow a seed towards a more robust culture of reading. As a high school teacher from 2012 to 2015, I often travelled to Aké with dozens of my students, to listen, learn, and interact with writers many of whom they had only read about or seen on television. The power of that kind of on-the-ground interaction can not be overemphasized. From what I see on the KABAFEST website, I have no reason to doubt that this maiden edition, made even more special for holding in Northern Nigeria where the literacy rate leaves too much to desired, will have the same influence on students and writers privileged enough to attend, or to have writers visit their schools.

But it is this dimension of engagement that seems most befuddling in what the critics suggest should be the response of writers in all cases to issues with which they disagree. Is it to be believed that packing up and leaving is the right way to address anything considered objectionable or staying and speaking? It can’t be that only one way is right. It would be in anyone’s right to choose either, as long as it is based on principle rather than force or in service of a political agenda of a different kind. But to say, as Ikhide Ikheloa did last week on twitter that those who choose to stay and speak “do not care” about political oppression is both a weak and sanctimonious intervention, not in the least helped by the fact that the writer himself had not been shy to take sides with more despicable political leaders when it fit within his ideological bent. To take it a step further by publicizing the headliner’s agent details on his facebook page in order to embarrass her from attending the festival is nothing short of despicable. What if someone did that about his own place of work?

And so, if the question is in whether or not by associating, even by the mere fact of attendance, with a festival in which a government has input, one is condoning everything that that government or its governor stands for, the answer is easy. Government funds do not belong to one man. It is possible that Mallam Nasir El-Rufai is a despicable human being, a weak leader, and one with animus against a group of people over whom he has power. If so, then what better way to let him know than to attend a festival in which one will get a chance to challenge him face to face. We are writers, conscience of society. Our role is to hold the feet of powerful people to the fire, many times to their face, and even at the risk of personal or professional loss. Many of the Northern-Nigeria-based writers that will attend this book fair have strong opinions about El-Rufai’s tenure as Kaduna State governor and will be expected to express it in as forceful a way as possible. I haven’t read enough about the man to have an opinion, but I intend to do so. But to insinuate that all attendees are “indifferent to oppression” is in a bad taste, and in bad faith.

Like the journalists, artists, and comedians who have attended the White House Correspondents Dinner to challenge the president of the United States to his face, the presence of writers in the presence of power is often actually the protest. It is the politicians who should be afraid.

——-

* I have since found out that the Festival is a Kaduna State Government-sponsored event, but all the points still stand.

Reading JP’s America

It’s amazing to think that an African writer/journalist had the kind of access that Nigerian writer JP Clark had to the corridors of US power in 1962 during the Medicare debates, and some of the most high-stakes political period of the country’s history. The writer, then a playwright and journalist working in Nigeria, had won a Parvin Fellowship which, at the time, had been set up to bring young African professionals to the US for one year in order to interact, socialize, learn a bit about the American political system, and gain some skills to take back to their young countries. The result of that experience, and the subsequent fallout from his abrupt ejection from the country, was his 1964 book America Their America now re-published in a 50th anniversary edition by Bookcraft, Ìbàdàn (2015).

At that time in the 60s, all of the countries on this continent had either just gained independence or were in the process of doing so. The coup d’etat hadn’t started rolling in (as they did in Ghana and Nigeria in 1966). The CIA hadn’t started getting too involved in the political process of new states that turned away from the western-type ideals enough to start helping to assassinate them. Names like Wọlé Ṣóyínká had not become household names yet, and Chinua Achebe himself was still in the United States on a different study programme. In short, it was the golden years of statehood of many African countries on the world stage, and this benefited students from the continent who took adequate advantage of America’s attempt at a global outreach through soft diplomacy. It was also during this time that Barack Obama Sr had found himself in Hawaii as a father of a new American son, Barack.

And there was JP Clark, a young and boisterous playwright and journalist from Nigeria with, not unlike what has been described of Obama Sr, an acerbic voice, a confident gait, and a snarky outlook at the elaborately choreographed introduction to the American experience, which the Parvin Program had packaged for him. Even in his own accounting of the times, he was a rude, and unfiltered guest, willing to poke where the society he found himself had decided needed to be left alone: religion, politics, and race. He spent most of his time pursuing his own creative and personal haunts than spending time participating in the rituals required of the scholarship that had brought him to the United States, and he did these all while throwing his weight and sometimes solicited opinion around, often to devastating personal consequences. In the end, his host had had enough, so they kicked him out rather unceremoniously.

The country had, until then, seemed never had such a caustic guest. It certainly had not expected it from this African, half expected to be grateful and obsequious for the privilege that the opportunity had brought, and certainly expected to take the opportunity as one that may never come again. They, apparently, hadn’t met Mr. Clark, the saucy poet, who traipsed around America among some of the most influential members of that country’s society, in culture, academia, literature, and government not quite like he owned it, but like his critical opinion should matter as much as any man, intellectual, and journalist of his competence. And why not? Was he less of a journalist because he carried a green passport or a black African skin? Is America, a country founded ostensibly on the freedom of speech, not naturally best suited for, and welcoming to critical engagement by all that live in it towards “a more perfect union”? At the time, it certainly didn’t seem that any negative or uncomfortably frank perception or opinion was expected of this stranger, and he was informed of this, subtly and directly. He didn’t care. And, today, it is in that quality of brutal honesty and self-indictment that the book America Their America earns its stripe as a cultural landmark – a work of both political, journalistic, cultural, and literary value, packing an unapologetic look at the American political and cultural landscape with an attentive recollection of one man’s travels and travails through its corridors at a crucial time.

JP Clark (Author’s photo from the 60s)

I had moments of deja vu, while reading America Their America, not just because of the eerie similarity of those times and the depicted political realities and the current one, but also because of the similarity and dissimilarity of the visiting experience of Mr. Clark and myself. He had been invited into the country as a Parvin Fellow (a fellowship that was discontinued a few years later, perhaps no thanks to his fiery and bold-faced ungratefulness for much of the fellowship except for parts of it that allowed him the freedom to travel and experience America on his own terms) and I had made my first contact with America as a Fulbright Scholar in 2009 on similar terms. Except in the location of my fellowship and the teaching responsibilities expected of Fulbright fellows, we seemed to have been invited to experience the country in much the same way, through its generosity and openness to exchange of new ideas, and packaged through a rote of American perception of itself as exceptional.

Reading America again through his eyes brought moments of intense recollection, sometimes of nostalgia, but mostly of envy for the kind of access the Parvin Fellowship offered the writer and other fellow scholars. I certainly never got a chance to visit the Capitol building in order to watch legislative deliberations or have 0ne-on-one conversations with congress people. I did walk in front of it, but only because of my own restlessness. Neither, except for my own equally deliberate and constant rebellion against the constraints of a regimented school session, did I experience a year of such intense and colourful freedom. But it is the literary and historical value of the book that packs the most punch for an interested reader as myself committed as much to its contribution to understanding the 60s and early black scholars in and out of the West and the trajectory of the early African writers’ literary voice. Mr. Clark delights both as an astute storyteller of a tale in which he’s both the hero and the villain, and a travel writer experiencing reality through a fiery literary lens.

He complements the narrative with occasional poems written at moments of distress or contemplation. This one was written while thinking of James Meredith (the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi) and composing a letter to his brother in India:

Last night, times out of dream,

I woke

to the sight of a snake

Slitering in the field, livid

Where the grass is

Patched, merged up where it runs

All shades of green – and suddenly!

My brother in India, up, stick

In hand, poised to strike –

But ah, hiimself is struck

By this serpent, so swift,

So silent, with more reaction

Than a nuclear charge…

And now this morning with eyes still

To the door, in thought of a neck

Straining under the sill,

I wake

To the touch of a hand as

Mortal and fair, asking

To be kissed, and a return

To bed, my brothers

In the wild of America!

(page 56)

Of Washington DC, he wrote, a terse indictment:

A morgue,

a museum –

Whose keepers

play at kings.

(page 184)

In each poetic offering on the state of his mind at different moments, one glimpsed doses of frustration, mirth, mischief, inspiration, and more. It was a peek into the creative potential of the – at the time – 29 year-old author. The style, in which poetry and prose were effectively deployed to serve the purpose of memorizing, would also be deployed equally as effectively in Wọlé Ṣóyínká’s The Man Died (1971).

Politically, what impressed and fascinated me, even more, is the relevance of the debates that JP Clark diligently documented of the Senate debates surrounding the passage of the Medicare Act of 1965, and how little seemed to have changed. As I write this, the US Senate has just given up on their latest attempt to repeal the healthcare law signed into effect in 2009, a law that takes care of the most vulnerable in the society just like Medicare did in 1965. And watching the US media debates surrounding healthcare as I had when I lived in Illinois in 2009-2012, the following passage seemed very familiar:

“How are you sure he wants to follow in his father’s footsteps?” I asked.

“He darned well will want to,” the man said. “Why, he’ll all be provided for. I have built this business up for what it is today so no member of my family will lack for anything.” And here he brought out another photograph, this time of the entire family, even with the old parents included. Radiant in the centre with a strapping son and two daughters on her either side was his wife.

“Now, they’re pretty well taken care of, for now and the future as far as human hand can provide.” He congratulated himself and the American system of which he was a shining ‘success’ example.

“Don’t you think by all this provision and security, you deny them their great American privilege of paying their own way through life?” I asked.

“How is that? he showed genuine surprise and disbelief.

“Well, I can appreciate the point of your doctors when they say they want no medicare for the old,” I began.

“Go on,” he prompted me, calling out for more drinks for us both in the bar where we sat.

“As I see it, the doctors seem to be insisting that every American citizen should have provided for himself fully by retirement age. So why ask government now to pay their full medical bills?”

“That’s right, boy, you’ve been following pretty close our American debate,” he cheered me on. Until I added:

“Well, it seems to me you’re denying exactly that sacred principle the doctors are insisting on by wanting to lay on everything for members of your family.”

“Young man, are you calling all my life’s effort vain? No, no, don’t withdraw or make any apologies for beliefs you honestly hold to. But tell me, as a writer, of what I don’t know, don’t you want to make money?”

(page 182-183)

As a Parvin Fellow, Mr. Clark was based in Princeton, but the traveller’s gene in the poet carried him around the country, from New York to Boston, and to DC. As a Fulbright fellow, I resided in Southern Illinois, with aspects of my work taking me to Rhode Island and Washington DC. But much of my emotional connection to Mr. Clark’s delightfully addictive rant against his uncomfortable participation in American life comes also from my hitherto lack of sufficient time and discipline to put my one-year experience into the words and images, with diligent markings of its most notable moments, as the writer has brilliantly done. America Their America was published about a year after the writer had returned unceremoniously after being kicked out of the fellowship for failing to show up in class. The closeness of that recollection to the space and time of the event’s happenstance probably helped its acerbity. But its ability to endure, even till today, as one of the most honest accounts of an African writer’s sojourn in America is tribute to the writer’s impressive talent, creative fire, and artistic integrity.

Another part of the book caught my eye:

Americans, very true to their candidatural role, like being liked a lot by foreigners. The picture they cut is of a big shaggy dog charging up to the chance caller in mixed feelings of welcome and defiance, and romping one moment up your front with its great weight, all in a plea to be fondled, and in the next breaking off the embrace to canter about you, head chasing after tail, and snout in the air, offering furious barks and bites. “Where are you from?” they breathe hot over the stranger to their shores. And before you have had time to reply, they are pumping and priming you more: “How do you like the US? Do you plan to go back to that country? Don’t you find it most free here? In Russia the individual is not free, you know, he cannot even worship God as he likes and make all the money he should.” And from this torrential downpour of self-praise the American never allows the overwhelmed visitor any cover, actually expecting in return more praise and a complete instant endorsement. God save the brash impolitic stranger who does not!

Little wonder why his visit ended with such infamy!

But such a shame that the fallout from the perception of his “ungratefulness” for writing the book had coloured the author’s subsequent negative perception among Western gatekeepers of African literature from which he never recovered. Heck, it had coloured perception on the continent itself, allowing publishers (many of which had ownership in the West anyway) to distance themselves from it. The book, for all of fifty years, remained invisible on bookshelves, earning its reputation only by word-of-mouth while other memoirs that came after it (The Man Died; 1971, Second Class Citizen; 1974) had enjoyed multiple print runs. Hard to think of any other book of such fame/infamy not having a second reprint for fifty years.

“Out of Print-Limited Availability” on Amazon today.

Yet even if we ignore the much more fruitful contribution of the author to the African literary space, the service that the presence of a book of this nature offers continues to be relevant, not just for African writers, many of whom have found less assertive ways of navigating the American immigrant experience either through soft engagement (see: Americanah, Open City, Never Look an American In the Eye), or through silence (see: Ngugi, Achebe, Soyinka), but for writers in general and for people interested in the enduring power of documentation with honesty and verve. JP Clark won’t be with us forever, but many of the issues raised by the book continue to be a relevant mirror to the American society, just as valid as those by its own active citizens, from James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

To call it merely an “African” classic is to do it too much disservice. It’s a classic nevertheless.

—-

(Rating 5/5)

At Gowon’s Family House

Wusasa. The road in front of Pa Yohanna Gowon’s House

Kaduna seems to throw up more interesting discoveries during every visit. The first time I was there, in the summer of 2010, I had visited the old city of Zaria as well as the church at Wusasa, St. Bartholomew’s, which has the reputation of being the oldest surviving church building in Northern Nigeria, and whose history is tied to that of the region in terms of development.

On returning to the church in Wusasa again this last July, this time in the company of my wife and Kinna Likimani, a writer friend from Ghana, I discovered something else; something I’d known was there, but never had the chance or the guts to discover: the Gowon Family House. Both my guests and I were hearing of these two historical structures for the very first time.

General Yakubu Gowon is known primarily as the Nigeria’s longest-serving military Head-of-state under whom the Nigerian Civil War was fought from 1967 to 1970. Not much else about him has entered popular culture, with the exception, perhaps, of the fact that he was also the youngest leader. He was a bachelor by the time he assumed office in 1966. He got married in 1969. The general, as they know him in Wusasa, was actually born in Plateau State, but was brought, along with other siblings and family members, to this small missionary town when his father, Pa Yohanna Gowon was transferred there.

It is the story of his father that I have found quite remarkable.

Pa Yohanna Gowon (r) and his wife, Ma Saraya Kuryan.

Born in about 1889 in Lur, a famous Ngas town southwest of Jos, in Plateau State, Pa Yohanna, the crown prince of a prominent chief became interested in missionary work after meeting with the first foreign missionaries that settled in his community in 1907. Christianity, and in the knowledge that these alien settlers brought, fascinated him enough to give up the life of a crown prince and become an evangelist, becoming one of the first to be recruited in his hometown.

In April 1923, he got married and started a family with the daughter of another chief. Missionary work at the time was not very well-paying so he struggled and persevered. But thirteen years later, in 1936, new changes were being made to the structures of the church. One of the changes included the new rule that evangelists would no longer expect a stipend, and would now work as volunteers. He and a number of other Ngas evangelists protested. Some even left evangelical work and moved into the civil service. Pa Yohanna, disillusioned, decided to move his family to Wusasa Zaria, where a newly established mission station had been established outside the Muslim city of Zaria. It presented new opportunities. The Christians in the town had been evicted from the Muslim city of Zaria because of the threat their proselytism posed to the emirate. But at Wusasa, where they were considered outcasts, they would be able to make new Christian converts made up of the rejects of society, the sick, the uneducated, and those not considered worthy enough to live in the city.

It was there in Wusasa that Yohanna’s work as a Christian missionary, and reputation as a fervent and passionate Christian earned him a place in the people’s heart. Although his grasp of Hausa was tenuous, as observed by the people among whom he lived, he continued to work relentlessly as an evangelist until he was finally relieved of his job. But because he still worked for the missionaries sinking wells, digging pit toilets, digging graves etc, he was able to secure scholarships for his children from the Christian mission. He also took up farming, and thrived enough to acquire land right beside the St. Bartholomew’s Church, and build a family house. He died in 1973.

The gravesite of Pa Yohanna Gowon (1882-1973)

When I returned to Wusasa this time, I was content to spend just a little time at the church where, in any case, no one was around to show us around. But I was curious about the Gowon house so I headed there. A small gate led out of St. Bartholomew’s Church onto a small tarred road. Across from the road was the house I had heard so much about. Painted yellow, the sprawling edifice appeared both modest and tastefully ostentatious at the same time. But its short fence suggested that whoever built it cared as much about openness and accessibility as about aesthetics.

I had never been there before. I did not even know if anyone lived there. The compound was empty and the gates were open, so I helped myself in. My wife didn’t think it was a good idea.

To the left of the entrance was the gravesite of Pa Yohanna. His date of birth and death were written on the gravestones. The silence around the premises didn’t convince me that anyone lived there.

“Now that you’ve seen it. Can we leave now?” Said my wife from the safety of the road that separated the house from the church compound.

My friend Kinna Likimani, a boy, and Henry Nor.

“I think there might be someone inside.” I responded, half in jest. “Won’t it be nice to be able to talk to them?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea!”

But there was indeed someone in the house. Our loud conversations going back and forth over the house fence must have caught someone’s attention, and a young boy came out to inquire what we wanted.

I explained myself in the best way I could without seeming threatening. He suggested that there was another person indoors that we might want to talk to. I was more than willing, but my guests were a little wary.

We walked through a small parking garage into a clearing where we were met by a young man, a soft-spoken man of certainly younger than forty.

His name was Henry.

Henry’s mother was General Yakubu Gowon’s sister who had now passed. He had lived in this house for a long time, maintaining it as a labour of love. He was also very conscious of his grandfather’s legacy in the town and was willing to talk when we told him why we had come.

He informed us that the building we saw as soon as we entered the compound wasn’t the house built by Pa Yohanna. That one came much later, perhaps after Yakubu Gowon became the Head of State, and had the means to build a more befitting edifice. Behind the modern edifice that welcomes the guest is the original building, made of mud and other traditional building materials.

Like the Bartholomew’s Church, the Gowon House exhibited a kind of originality in both style and component. Sitting in it felt relaxing. It was about two o clock in the afternoon, with a scorching sun outside, yet the inside of the house felt perfectly insulated. And it had been standing at this spot for decades, with just a few cracks on the ceiling as proof of its advancement in age.

“The general himself comes here often, you know.” Henry told us. “And he also prefers to relax here in the back house and not in the main one. This feels more comfortable, you know.”

The general and a family mask.

On the wall of the house is a painting of Pa Yohanna. On the doorpost is a framed photo of the general himself, looking like the Head of State he was for nine long years.

We sat and chatted with Henry for what seemed like eternity, but was for shorter than thirty minutes. He appreciated our coming, and was very generous with details and stories of his nuclear and extended families. He is currently an art dealer, he said. A couple of the artworks he once took to the National Museum in Jos, obtained from his family collection, were declared lost and never paid for. “I have taken them to court,” he said, and showed me the documents. When I told him that I intend to write a travel piece about my visit to this historical place, he was glad to encourage me to mention how badly he had been treated by the National Museum. “I think they stole my art, sold it, and kept the money to themselves. Maybe calling them out will let them take me more seriously.”

Yet, for someone this upset at what appeared to be a slap in the face by a more powerful institution, he spoke with such soft and unassuming demeanour, matching the image I have in my head of General Gowon himself, and perhaps Pa Yohanna, the patriarch, whose evangelical vocation brought the whole family to this location.

“I will do what I can,” I said. “But what you have here is a historical property. I’m glad that you are here, and that the family cares enough to preserve Pa Yohanna’s memory by ensuring that his story continues to be told.”

“More needs to be done.” He conceded as we headed out towards our driver who was waiting for us within the compound of the church. “Writing about what you have seen is a good first step.”

“I will be back,” I promised. I hope you’ll still be here.

A Visit to Ojukwu’s Bunker

with Arinzechukwu Patrick

In 1968, in the second year of the Nigerian Civil War, the military leadership of Nigeria successfully repelled the Biafran government from Enugu where the new country’s headquarters had earlier been located. Desperate for a new staging post, the Biafran Army secured a building in Umuahia and built an underground bunker to be used for strategy and coordination, and a new HQ of the rebel government. It also became, in time, the location of Radio Biafra, a mouthpiece of the administration.

I visited this bunker during the week to see for myself what it looked like and to, in a way, relive the experience of what it must have been like during those precarious times. The building still stands, at Michael Opara Drive, Umuahia, a street so-named because the building used to belong to Sir. Michael Iheonukara Okpara, the first Premier of Eastern Nigeria. For many years, the building had been managed as an extension of the Nigerian War Museum. But today, it has fallen into the hands of those who call themselves the Indigenous People of Biafra, headed by Nnamdi Kanu. Much of the building has endured, including the famous bunker where photos of Biafran heroes of those times now line the wall. In front of the building are busts of Ojukwu and Michael Okpara.

With five hundred naira, a visitor gets a tour of the premises and the bunker itself. A video of the tour can be found here (courtesy of Naij.com). More photos from this twitter thread.

___

Arinzechukwu Patrick is a reader and a writer, when he isn’t writing or reading he’s hawking gala to fund his lifestyle and survive the harsh economy. He tweets at @nofstnme and blogs at www.rodneypatrick.com

At Titilope’s “Open”

When I lived in Ibadan, there was these jazz sessions at Premier Hotel which took place every weekend (can’t remember now if it was Friday or Sunday nights). It held in a ballroom on the ground floor of the hotel and featured an ensemble that played non-stop for about four hours, late into the night. The music swayed from highlife to jazz, and sometimes to juju, but always within a range of danceability. Guests who sat around the stage in different arrangements often got up from their tables to dance, alone or with their guests. There was always food and drinks.

Sponsored message: Before you plan your trip, check out Hotels.com voucher codes to find out what deals enables you to save on your reservations. It is always good to have prior reservations done to avoid sky-scraping prices later.

I attended a couple of those sessions while I was a student, with friends and colleagues from the university. It always provided a kind of relaxing end to the week. We had nice stimulating conversations, got our fill of good music and food, and exercised the stress away. The location, on top of the hill at Mọ́kọ́lá, also provided not just a beautiful overview of Ìbàdàn at night, but also a very relaxing access to cool breeze. By morning, one felt refreshed and ready to take on the next week.

Yesterday, I had an experience very close to that, which brought the memories back. It was at 16 Kòfó Àbáyọ̀mí Street, Lagos, on the eighth floor of a building I never knew existed there, with a relaxing view of the Lagos Lagoon, and a high-up-enough location to soothe a most exhausted traveller. The event was Títílọpẹ́ Ṣónúgà’s poetry concert event titled “Open”. Gate fee: 5000 naira. It is the first of a three-part performance show slated around venues in Lagos.

I don’t know if “concert” is the right word, because the poet approached it like a soulful conversation between an artist and her audience. But the word still closely captures some of the show’s best aspiration. In a space that felt intimate because of its size, the lighting, and the mood, an artist performed to an audience, and the result was delightful.

I haven’t been to many spoken word concerts. My contacts have been limited to more public spaces like the halls of the June 12 Cultural Center in Abẹ́òkuta where poets from all around the world have performed to a much larger audience during the annual Aké Festival, and to YouTube channels and TED Talk videos, where poets with verve, rhyme, and sass have dazzled with inspirational and stimulating turns of phrase and soulful rendition of their work. There are a few other avenues that have popped up over the years though. I know, at least of Taruwa, which (I believe) featured open mic events for amateur and established spoken word artists to come impress an audience. But this one felt different, perhaps because it also included an element of music necessary to move even the most inexorable skeptic of the beauty or relevance of poetry in performance.

Accompanying Ms. Ṣónúgà last night was a bass guitarist, a pianist, and a man on the drums, along with a certain Naomi Mac whose voice carried the soulfulness demanded of the intimate occasion with ease and grace. With their accompaniment, the show was fully realized not just as a celebration of the power of the word or Ms. Ṣónúga’s poetic capabilities but as a ritual of mass catharsis; an artistic triumph.

The poems performed came from some of Títílọpẹ́’s recent works, a few of which I’d read on other platforms or heard in other places. Perhaps it was deliberate, a way to get the works performed again in a perfect setting of her choice, recorded along with the audience reactions. Some I was hearing for the first time. What united them was the theme of the evening: an openness to possibilities, in love, in life, and in public engagements. Navigating the tale of personal heartbreak, the process of finding love, coming of age, political instability, societal dysfunction, naivete, lust, love, and consent, the poet details her personal artistic response in a voice and style that is as open as it is reserved. (In a notable poem about a seeming first sexual encounter, for instance, the poem ends “he knows the punchline to this joke, and I’ll never tell“).

In the end, it was as much a beautiful intimate gathering as it was a much needed artistic intervention in a city space much in need of a lot more events of this character. We need plenty more.

_____

More about the last two performances here. Títílọpẹ’s earlier work “Becoming” was reviewed here. Photos 1 and 2 from Titilope Sonuga’s Instagram page.

« Older Entries Newer Entries »