ktravula – a travelogue!

Stoning the Devil

written originally for Iraq, and Mecca, and Amina Lawal about to be stoned: March 2003. Now also for Kano, and Afghanistan, and Mali…

A million march of contrite feet
Have trudged on these bright hallowed grounds
While rams of hate graze along in God’s own fields.

Heavy paces in annual contrition
Have trekked like peasant armies on a sea of evil heads,
On thousand squelching grains of stone
As small rocks of war.

Thousand heads have rolled in this dust
In mounds against target gods…

“We are stoning the Devil”
We are always stoning the devil.

Eternal zest with religious strength
Have pelted the Significant with harsh pellets
And a stone will to fiery extinction, yearly,
At varying levels of human will…

“Gbosa!”

Rocks have darted across in wilful spread
on evil personified ahead of the surging crowd.
Hate yet thrives in unnumbered axes
In rains and moulds, on hills and western skies.

So cast the first stone then
When evil remains in hearts across the open earth.
Cast a stone as hate grips like a fiery noose
Around a strained neck of drunken love?

Cast the first stone.

On a crooked way to light
Always lies this crude, black rock.

_________________________

Culled from Headfirst into the Meddle (2005)

(c) Kola Tubosun.

Stoning the Devil was published on January 12th, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Art category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

What I Learnt This Week

All my students agreed, to my utmost discomfiture, that the Nigerian musician Lágbájá reminds them in some way of the Klu Klux Klan, even though his costume is neither white, nor as creepy. I wasn’t aware of this, and I had come to class with his most recent video, and a few others, as pointers to an authentic Nigerian musical art form popularized by this masquerade of a man.

“Does he ever show his face?”

No.

“Do people know who he is?”

Yes.

“Is he ever going to take his mask off?”

I don’t know.

And in actual fact, I didn’t. The brand that is Lágbájá has come to be defined by his invisibility, woven into the Yoruba’s mask as a form of cultural expression, along with the namelessness that Lagbaja represents. Lágbájá is a placeholder in Yoruba that means anyone of “anybody”, “nobody”, “everybody” and “somebody”.

In the end, all that mattered was that the students were exposed in some way to a form of artistic expression that both Yorubas and non-Yorubas are proud of as representative of creativity, and art. But that reference to the KKK, by both White and Black students of the class flipped me, and got me wondering just how much we take for granted because of our distance from the scene of events. It wasn’t so much of a consolation that the concept of Lágbájá is the farthest possible kind to that of hate-mongering, racism and intolerance.

What I Learnt This Week was published on November 12th, 2009, with the tags , , , , , , under the Academic, Art, Observations category. There are currently 15 comments on this article so far.