ktravula – a travelogue!

Interview With Ivor Hartmann

Have you ever been under pressure to let the politics of Zimbabwe reflect in or condition your creative process in any way?

Yes the current condition of Zimbabwe has influenced my writing. I am living in economic exile away from my home and this has many effects on me personally, which of course influences my writing. But to answer your question, no, I have not felt directly pressured to write about it, and even if I was I would probably buck it, like Marechera said, “If you’re a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then f*** you”. A writer must be free to write whatever they want to.

Read the rest of the abridged interview: here.

http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/ArtsandCulture/5582295-147/story.csp

Father’s Day

With poet Eugene Redmond. April 2010

Yesterday I had one of those long conversations with a friend about the strange nature of parenthood, and my participant observation on fatherhood and its many complexities, and how relationships with fathers inevitably shape our outlook on the world whether we like it or not. How could I have forgotten that today is Father’s Day?

There are many questions I would ask if I could sit my father down for one whole day in a conversation, many of them about his childhood and how his childhood adventures shaped his later preoccupations. I would ask for specific details, facts, and pointers, and I would write them all down because of a time that my child(ren) might want to ask me about their grandfather at a later time. I may not take all his advice on life, writing, broadcasting, women or children, but I would delight in listening to them for an umpteenth time while wondering, “What would I be like when I’m his age?”

This generation exists because of the last one, and the cycle continues. Happy Father’s Day to all fathers out there, including my own, and my adopted fathers, intending fathers, and to my brother, and to my brothers-in-law. You make the world go round. Or do you? 😉

His Remarkable Journey

It’s not always a bad thing to live in a town where electricity is barely on for seven hours a day. In two days, I have completed a feat I couldn’t while I was in Edwardsville. Larry King’s autobiography My Remarkable Journey. Covering adventures of the young son of immigrant parents from Europe, the book tells the story of how the Jewish kid Larry Zieger who never went to college made it through the very many interesting historical epochs of America to become the famous Larry King recognized worldwide for his voice, his show and his suspenders.

Like many autobiographies, there is the question of whether Larry the broadcaster was the same as Larry the autobiographer-the-writer who was able not only to remember in great detail many of the remarkable events of his childhood, but was able to write them in very fine prose in the 294 paged book. How much of it is fiction or embellishment of the ghostwriter, and how much is rooted in real facts of the broadcaster’s pen and memory?

He wrote of his first meeting with JFK, (it was a mild car accident in which Larry had run into the future president), he wrote of walking mistakenly into the full glare of cameras in the courtroom during O.J. Simpson’s trial without being a witness, how he won a lottery on just $2, and how he almost bribed the president elect Richard Nixon before the latter assumed the presidency. There are very many tender and happy moments in his life, and he recounts them with nostalgia. His many marriages (he was married eight times to seven women), his arrest and financial troubles at a time, his heart attacks and surgeries, and his relationship with his first son Larry King Jr. who he met when the latter was already thirty-three years old all took pride of place in the book.

For decades, the now seventy-seven year old man had helped people to open up themselves. In this work, he does it himself and does a good job of it. Fans and friends who would like to know his opinion of George W. Bush, Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton among others would do well to pick up the book. Talking about retirement, he hinted that his contract with CNN would be up by 2011, and he still doesn’t feel the need to retire. Hear him: “If I went off the air, what would it do to the ninety-nine year old woman who credits her longevity to watching my show every night?” That’s Larry King.

I’m now unto V.S Naipaul’s Miguel Street. This time, unlike the man making “a thing with no name”, I’m sure I’ll complete it in record time.

Corrigedum

When we were in the first year of university, there was this course in the Communications Department in which students had to read Nigerian national dailies and spot grammatical errors. For many of my friends taking the course for the first time, it was a great surprise to them to learn that Nigerian newspapers make grave grammatical errors everyday in their editorials, opinion and even education pages. Yesterday I had another one of those crazy moments of panic when I found out one of my own errors. My heart flew into my mouth and I feel almost like disappearing into the ground. I had been reading through one of the last posts on this page, when I spotted a sentence. The process was always the same: I’ll be reading through a line I’d read through very many times before without having seen anything, then something would strike me, I’ll look at it again, and see the error. And my heart would begin to race.

What I had written while composing the post at the time was “I greeted you…” then I remember going back to change it to “I used to greet you…”. But as it turned out, I had forgotten to remove the “–ed” at the back of the “greet” so the sentence read “I used to greeted you…”* Oh my!

I hate it when that happens, and it does a lot because writing a blogpost is always and trial and error thing. One would write something, publish it and then discover an error. One would correct it, publish, and see another. Sometimes I never see it until very many days later. Some I never see at all, and I have sometimes wondered how many new visitors had spotted it and gone with the first impression: “Oh, what an idiot.”

It’s not always funny when I think about it though. I spot errors easily in other people’s writings, even without looking for them, but not in mine. How does that happen? Is it a writer’s disease? (And has it had gotten worse since I took on Wole Soyinka’s play? Haha!) According to George Carlin, the reason why a writer would never commit suicide is that s/he would most likely spend the whole day, and following weeks, trying to write a perfect suicide note, and would never be satisfied with the wordings. Maybe Carlin was right, or not, but I know that he surely didn’t have a blog in mind.

Oh, how I miss the good old days when my dedicated editors Tayo, Yemi and Zainab used to read the posts before anyone else did. The point of this post is to apologise in advance for all past and future errors :). Maybe I should now throw my editor position available. Anyone wants to apply? Perfect candidate: an insomniac. Remuneration: US gold quarters 😉

On Wednesday

Silence all around the campus, three young men and a girl pace around the parking lot opposite the Arts Theatre, sharing jokes and catching up on old times. Amidst occasional passage of cars between them and the Theatre across the road, there were smiles and jabs. They were young, and happy.

Then two girls walk by. One of them was white, possibly American. He had been told that a few American students might have arrived on this campus for a few weeks of study. Could these be some of them? The one in front – if American – would not be older than twenty years. She had dark shades on. The other was black but could also be foreign going by their pesky walk and general attitude to the campus environment.

“Oyinbo, bawo ni?” Segun quipped as they walked by, half smiling but not totally with an expectation of a fast informed response.
“Hey Dudu, how are you too?” She responded, just as quickly, pronouncing the dudu like doo-doo. And she kept walking, perhaps even giggling with her friends as she went away.

She had won. It was too sudden for Segun to grasp, and the girl had already gone too far from him to hear whatever he had to come up with afterwards. “Touche,” someone said, laughing, and it was one of those moments of fun enlightenment.

His friends could only gape, giggle and to laugh at their own errant selves, and the young quick-witted foreign student now forever etched in their memory.

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