ktravula – a travelogue!

Waiting for Maya (3)

Okay, it’s not as if Maya Angelou needs any more publicity. At eighty-one, she probably has achieved what many in her generation only dreamt about. Therefore, this will be last post I will make about the writer, until I finally meet her on Sunday. As I tap this out here, I do not yet know what I want to tell her if the chance ever comes. She’s old, I’m young. She’s American, I’m African. She’s a writer, I’m not, and it is most likely that my best of charms will fail if our promised meeting fails to occur in a place devoid of the tension of a gathered University crowd all beaming to see and have a piece of their icon. I can only imagine Wole Soyinka at a Nigerian campus and a Ghanaian scholar trying to get access to him. Well, maybe that’s not a most appropriate analogy, but it is somewhat similar, and in the two cases, it might equally be a difficult task to achieve.

Now here’s something else I found strange: the last time I checked on the website of the campus magazine for the news about Maya’s coming to campus, I was surprised at how much venom some students spewed as comments on Maya’s personality, talent and politics, and some expressed the wish that she should be stopped from coming to campus because of what they called her racism, anti-Semitism, and a few other isms. This was definitely strange to my ears as I have never read traces of any such opinions in any of her works that I’ve read. Her autobiographies are mostly stories of triumph over personal difficulties of race and gender. But what do I know? Here are students venting their rage and sometimes ignorance in response to a news story. Today, when I checked the news story, I found that comments have been disabled, I guess so as to prevent a bigger rancour that was surely becoming a sort of distraction to the news of the visiting novelist.

scan0002I have now returned from Dunham Hall, where I had gone to obtain my tickets to the programme, and where I discovered to my amazement that all the tickets have sold out. Completely. The organisers have just made arrangements for a hundred more seats, and I was lucky to get two of those. My hosts at the Office of International Programmes who had promised to get me tickets into the show are now nowhere to be found. If they ever come forward with any more tickets, then maybe I can afford to take someone else along to the show. But a most unfavourable part of this visit of the American Poet Laureate is the news that she might not be staying long after her talk to sign books or take pictures after all. Now this, if true, is just horrible, but I understand. She’s probably too old for all that stress of sitting though signings and photographs. But being young and tenacious, I’m probably too heady as well to let her go without a fight. Come, come Sunday!

Waiting for Maya (3) was published on October 2nd, 2009, with the tags , under the adventures, Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

Waiting for Maya (2)

300920091487ALONE

Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure  their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
‘Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Maya Angelou

Waiting for Maya (2) was published on October 2nd, 2009, with the tags , , under the Art category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Waiting for Maya

EBRI stumbled onto a photo exhibition on campus on Wednesday, after a very stressful day of two classes. If not for a chance meeting with retired Professor Eugene B. Redmond as I headed home from Pizza hut, I definitely would have missed out. I had first met EBR last in Ibadan in 2003 or so when he visited the University campus there on an exchange programme, and to present new editions of DrumVoices Revue – a quarterly publication of poems from all over the world. I was with him and another professor from Ibadan when he visited the palace of the Ooni in Ife – which was the first time for me at the time. I have not been successful in getting him to grant me access to my digital copies of those photographs. Maybe they will end up in an exhibition someday. It will definitely be a pleasure to see them for the first time in over five years.

Eugene Redmond’s reputation doesn’t always reflect on his regularly meek appearance, but he has travelled far, met notable people, and contributed so much to the development of the arts and the African-American culture. On Wednesday, he was in a kente jacket and a matching cap, covered with an dark coat. He is most likely to be seen with at least two cameras on him at all times. Till date, he is reputed to have taken at least 150,000 photographs of people from all over the world. He was named the Poet Laureate of East St. Louis in 1976, and he boasts of a long time of frienship with very many leaders of the Black Movement, past and present, in literature, music and the arts, from Henry Dumas to Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Katherine Dunham, Oprah Winfrey, Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou, all of whom he has captured with his camera lens at one time or the other.

300920091483The exhibition was titled “Eighty Moods of Maya”, and it features eighty of the pictures taken of the poet and novelist Maya Angelou over several decades, and in many moods, some serious, some trivial, some private and relaxed, and some public and tense. Eugene Redmond has worked as a poet, journalist and photographer as well as a critic, academic and publisher. He first attended SIUE as a student. He was a student journalist with a camera at the 1963 March on Washington as an editor of The Alestle, a student publication here on campus. He has also taught many times at SIUE before he retired a few years ago. On retirement, he donated a collection of his photographs to the SIUE Library, and thus became a patron of the institution.

The exhibition which took place in the library also featured little speeches, food, and conversations among all present. We all knew we were waiting for Maya Angelou who is coming to campus later this week. The exhibition was just a teaser. There will be a long crowd on campus on October 4th to listen to the 81 year old poet and novelist who made history when she read “On The Pulse of A Morning” during President Bill Clinton’s Inauguration in 1993. In my case, I look forward to presenting to her something (I won’t tell you what) that I brought from Nigeria, getting a book signed, and getting a nice picture in my camera. Wish me luck.

Waiting for Maya was published on October 2nd, 2009, with the tags , , , under the Academic, adventures, Art, News category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.