ktravula – a travelogue!

September 11, 2001 – a poem

Raining debris of a thousand dreams over Manhattan

And tears of pain, a gaping hole in the eye of summer.

The world morphed suddenly into dust and heat

and a flag-draped beginning of a new, frigtening day.

There we were, going our separate ways, waking.

Working, living, arguing – a usual rite of passage,

And there they were,  willing acolytes of a sad resolve,

boarding jetliners with armoury of a cultivated god.

 

Here we are, a decade away, still a bewildered folk.

Just a little step from the true vanity of all our pain.

So we hope, and dream, and watch, accordingly,

and live with the same wondering resolve: any lessons?

The world remains what it is – a weird blubbering ball

hanging in the daunting mystery of its core, warts and all.

 

Dedicated to the memory of victims, first responders, firemen and all other casualties of the 9/11 attacks and the war therefrom.

September 11, 2001 – a poem was published on September 11th, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Opinion, Soliloquy category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

Come September!

I resumed school as an undergraduate in September 2000. Sometime in early 2001, I took my first creative writing class in the department of English under a very brilliant professor (now author of several books). One of the first tasks he gave us in class was to write a piece of creative short fiction which we would eventually come to discuss with the whole class sometime before the end of the semester. I was barely twenty, and was just beginning to develop some of my political and literary sensibilities, so my first attempt at fiction was a combination of both in order to make a satiric point. The story was titled Sam’s Tragedy. It was a story of a fictional feud between two women, and the tragic way in which they exacted vengeance on each other mostly at the expense of the clearly incompetent husband.

A few months after I finished with the class with an excellent grade, I expanded the work into a play of the same name. This time however, the characters became less fictive and more resembling of real life characters in world politics. There was a Sadman, a Sam and a Chinese character whose name I’ve forgotten now. Sam was an oppressive landlord and Sadman was a neighbour – his nemesis – who also had his very disgusting attributes. The play – a quite anarchistic experiment – ended with an explosion that took with it all of Sadman and much of Sam’s very famed real estate in the neighbourhood. This must have been around June or July of 2001. I showed it to a few friends, explained a few of the conspiracy theories fueling my creativity, and expressed the desire to put more work into it until it became something more worthy of the stage. On the afternoon of September 11th of that year when I was called frantically to the tv viewing room of my hall of residence to watch the two airplanes crashing into the World Trade Centre, one of the things I remember my friend asking me about was “How much of this feeds into your gloomy prediction, Mr. Playwright?”

It was a sad day, one of the most horrible I’d ever witnessed. Human beings were having to choose between burning to death in a building and leaping down to their deaths hundreds of feet below. I remember feeling very confused about the extent of my own creative condoning of a sudden chaotic intervention in world affairs which had now come to pass, and the real life implication of a tragedy brought about by people far more sinister in motives than my fledgling creative mind. For many years afterwards, I read lines from the play occasionally and wondered if it was still relevant – first because the doom it predicted had already happened in a far more sinister way than the absurdist play could have predicted, and secondly because I grew increasingly discontented with my own playwriting abilities. America had fascinated me from then as I got increasingly removed from an ivory tower bubble that treated it like an isolated entity incapable of emotions. The movie 9/11 – the only movie I know that showed tv footage of the first plane hitting the building – gave distinct humanity to the residents of New York, particularly the brave fire-fighters that went up the stairs of both buildings as workers and other victims made their way out.

The world changed after September 2001, and so did I, slowly, and now here I am. Ten years after, it is hard to think back to that September evening in Ibadan without feeling just as overwhelmed as I did then seeing so much destruction the worst I had ever seen outside hollywood movies. Thankfully, the world has learnt some good lessons since then. Some of the evil political players of the days before and after the attack have become irrelevant, and some of the perpetrators have already been brought to justice. We will hopefully have all learnt to work for a world where such an attack and the responses to it would have become unnecessary. As for me, I have stopped pursuing a career in playwriting but will one day take a look at that script and see which part of it can still be salvaged. Not much, I’m guessing, especially since I can’t say for certain in what part of my room in Ibadan the script is now gathering dust.

It has been a very bumpy decade and I wonder if our obligation to the coming one might as well be to do everything in our power to never stop talking civilly to one another.

Come September! was published on September 9th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

On Vain Newspeaks

One of the few things that irk me the most about comments by American government officials from the Bush administration reflecting on their role in the post 9/11 America is the claim that they had kept America safe ever since. Watching an interview with Vice-President Dick Cheney with Chris Wallace on Fox today, I kept wondering whether the interviewers who endure this kind of response merely never think about it, are equally as blind, or just don’t care. The fact that such responses come when asked about the justification of heinous interrogation practices makes it even more disgusting. Let us see how the argument holds up.

Before 9/11, there was only one attack on American soil for fifty years, and that was the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Since 1945, there was no other attack on American soil until the World Trade Centre bombing in 1993. By that stupid logic of claiming to be a grand protector of the country just because the days of danger are far between one another, the Clinton Administration could have made a badge for itself for not having endured another attack between 1993 and 2001. But what sense would that have made? I have found it as laughable (if not naively tragic, and a stupid political gimmick) that the right wing commentators, particularly the administrative officials of the Bush administration, would claim this as their legacy: “After all, we have never had any other attack. We kept the country safe since then.” What kind of an excuse is that? Oh yes I let the house burn once, but look I have made sure that it hasn’t happened again since seven years ago. Don’t I deserve a cookie?  Or like the man in Yoruba fables who had just returned from a witch doctor and then claiming that he is now invincible from all bullets simply because he is wearing a juju amulet. The witch doctor may take credit for this “safety” from now till eternity and get paid handsomely for it too, but he would do well to warn the man to stay away from a shooting range!

I feel very strongly about 9/11. I never lost anyone there (a family friend was in one of the building earlier in the morning and left before the planes hit) but the enormity of the attack, the scope of the damage and the terrible fall-out from that heinous act changed me totally and the way I look at the world. The sight of brave firefighters going up the stairs as wounded and panicking people came down to safety is one that I would never forget. I watched the movie 9/11 some time in 2002 and was heartbroken. The movie examines the bravery and sacrifice of the firefighters from one of the fire stations in Manhattan and the way they gave themselves to save the lives of others. I have never been able to digest the magnitude of their brave sacrifice and commitment. And to think that some politicians in Washington almost totally dismissed the even braver commitment of living first responders by refusing to give them adequate medical care, one wonders where humanity is sometimes headed.

In any case, politicians never kept America safe. Former Vice-President Cheney certainly never did with his enhanced interrogation techniques that has put the country’s soldiers in more harm than ever before. (And he did manage to get an arrest warrant for himself in Nigeria albeit for a different reason). Ten years after the fatal negligence that caused the death of over 5,000 people, we would do well to work for a safer world than celebrate the mediocrity of vain chest-thumping. Mark Twain has one appropriate quote about keeping quiet when speaking would have an adverse effect on the perception of one’s wisdom. I’ll also add “a sense of shame”, and “humanity”.

I’m pissed. Can you tell?

On Vain Newspeaks was published on September 5th, 2011, with the tags , , , , under the Uncategorized category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.