The Long Way, or Writing Exercise*

I took the long way, as I often do. There was no particular reason for this decision, though it was the more scenic route along Henderson Drive. The earth was soggy from a heavy thunderstorm, and the white of frangipani petals caught my eye immediately. I stopped to pick up a few strewn petals and then dropped them playfully, as I quickened my pace. The sun, once hidden, now shone with daring splendor, and I looked up to it, squinting with mouth slightly ajar, as if to soak in its rays. The dull sting of loneliness abated and ambivalence took its place, crowding my heart with a strange kind of emptiness. I was not sad; I was not happy either.

Up ahead, just past the mango tree, the tarred road disappeared, and a row of tall Eucalyptus trees rose to my left, partially obscuring the rows of corn in a field. I remembered Babushka and her rows of wheat in Ukraine. Had they hired the Combine yet? Or the horse and buggy to carry the freshly-cut bales of hay? I rounded the bend in a thoughtful mood, quickly making a mental note of the essay that I had to submit for Mrs. Okonkwo’s English class tomorrow. It was unfinished.

A chirping red bird darted by, then flew up toward the glistening green hill on my right. Dark, porous-looking volcanic rocks lay scattered upon the hill, reminding me of past eruptions. I was startled by how quickly I came upon the Ajullos’ home, a beige colonial bungalow at the foot of the hill. It would be the first of many houses, all of them encircling the hill like irregular beads on an invisible neckless strap. Then I gasped, stopping. I had forgotten about the Lamads’ dog, Bingo--the crazy, old German Shepherd who never failed to come my way during walks, barking and foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. I hated and pitied him with the same intense passion.

Hesitation overwhelmed me first. I stood for what felt like a long while; my eyes moved down to my feet. The bright yellow straps of my old flip-flops caught my eyes, and lifted my spirits for a quick moment. Should I turn back? What about the first draft of the essay which my friend Olu had accidently put in her book bag? I needed it today. Yet I was ambivalent, infuriatingly so, as usual. I remembered the repercussions of not completing one’s homework—a red and sore right palm and the humiliation of corporal punishment.

Suddenly, a car horn sounded behind me. I lifted my head, which felt heavier now, and then made a quick dash to the side of the road. It was the lightness of my feet that surprised me the most, not the snapping sound that came from my footwear. The car passed by; I sighed in disbelief. Now I was essentially barefoot.

I counted three valid reasons to head back home: Bingo, ambivalence, only one slipper. I felt the dampness of the dark soil beneath my right foot, its sole more vulnerable now, and I understood that not all was right in my world. Someone else, I thought, would probably have turned around by now. This was the most sensible thing to do. Yet here I was, counting reasons, weighing a hypothetical encounter with an old, aggressive dog against a familiar feeling, and ignoring reality. Then I did it. I turned around and ran all the way back home, quickly and carelessly, as if demons were gnawing at my heels.


*I wrote this short piece in a workshop that I took over the summer at Sarah Lawrence College. Although the focus of the workshop was nonfiction, we were asked to write about a walk which could or could not have happened. So ... I embellished freely.

Bending the Arc of the Moral Universe

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. – Martin Luther King, Jr.


The 2009 PEN World Voices event on Ken Saro-Wiwa’s life and legacy opened with a reading from his play, “The Transistor Radio.” Candor, humor, and conscientiousness leaped from the pages—and along with them, a dark glimpse into the despair and desperation in the lives of his Nigerian characters. An unrelenting grind is revealed, one that is probably unfathomable to many of us. Imagine a day, or three, without enough food—or with just a cup of tea.

Almost fifteen years have passed since writer-activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by the Nigerian military government over trumped-up murder charges. But not much has improved for those in the oil-rich Delta region of Nigeria, Saro-wiwa’s homeland. In fact, it has gotten bleaker.

As one of the most vocal critics of the actions of government and oil companies in the region, Saro-Wiwa was compelled as writer and activist to “speak for the little people,” said his son, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Jr., a panelist at the PEN event. Poised and articulate, Saro-Wiwa, Jr., spoke fondly of his father as a renaissance man, who “always carried a book and pipe…and within whose life ran a sense of injustice that often produced sadness.”

For Saro-Wiwa, this sense and this emotion collided powerfully within, resulting in a remarkable legacy that involved, as second panelist and writer Richard Patterson said, a passionate, nonviolent struggle against “a terrible reality of economy and indifference.”

During the event, a brief documentary by PEN spelled out what many of us already know about this reality: the environmental devastation wrought upon the Delta by reckless oil spills and flares, and the painfully inadequate infrastructures in the region, despite the large sums of money procured by the Nigerian government and foreign oil companies.

Sadly, this reality continues to grip the region, immorally perpetuated by those caught up in an unending cycle of corruption and greed. Patterson, whose novel Eclipse is loosely based on the life of Ken Saro-Wiwa, also marveled at the scant US response to this travesty, calling it, essentially, a “failure of empathy and imagination.”

But the arc of the moral universe, as we know it, might actually begin to bend toward justice. Next week, a court case opens in New York, finally bringing to the fore a lawsuit that has been lodged against Shell, Inc. for, among other allegations, its complicity in the silencing and untimely death of Ken Saro-Wiwa. We must await the outcome now, hoping of course that MLK, Jr. was indeed right about that moral trajectory.

And the Band Played On

During a recent visit to New Orleans, I attended the funeral of Antoinette K-Doe--she had passed away on February 24th, the first day of Mardi Gras this year. Owner of the popular Mother-in-Law restaurant in Treme, one of the oldest African American neighborhoods, Ms. K-Doe was a well-known and much-loved figure in her community. Inside her restaurant, she had erected a shrine for her late husband Ernie K-Doe, a musician of the hit song, “Mother-in-law,” who, as the story goes, she saved from a later sad, somewhat dejected life. Additionally, she took twenty-seven foster children under her care and was indeed a fixture on the Krewe de Vieux floats during Mardi Gras parades.

Although funerals usually offer us a good reason to pause, reflect on living, and give due respect to the departed, I have also found them to be uncomfortably solemn events with little or no room for levity. Not so at Antoinette K-Doe’s farewell. That warm, drizzling afternoon, standing with a dear friend in the street, as musicians played on trombones and people swayed to jazzy melodies, I found myself light-hearted and in the mood to dance. At a funeral, yes.

And I had never seen anything like it before.

About fifteen minutes after we got there, a horse-drawn hearse pulled up and waited outside the entrance of the small church. Wearing pink-feathered hats, three young women, dressed in black pencil skirts and high heels, wandered about the crowd. And it all grew especially interesting when a mannequin was carried out of the church—a life-size Ernie K-Doe, dressed to the nines in white and wearing a long wig! Hilarity. He was placed in an open carriage that had pulled up behind the hearse and fitted with a white top hat. Apparently, if I had seen one of the Krewe de Vieux floats during Mardi Gras, I would have understood more fully what I had just witnessed, as this Ernie K-Doe often accompanied Antoinette K-Doe on it.

And the band played on, while the crowd grew larger by the minute--and when the coffin was carried out of the church, the crowd became more chaotic and rather animated. People jumped about almost gleefully with umbrellas and danced even harder. A man with a brown, furry Mardi Gras suit danced the hardest, his headwear inches taller than everyone and bobbing up and down wildly yet rhythmically. A woman in a purple Babydoll costume appeared with the coffin, then led the procession while dancing in step with a few others.

We followed the funeral procession as it snaked its way noisily toward K-Doe’s restaurant. The opulent sounds from the trombones prevailed. People continued to dance and sing. I didn’t see one tear shed—however, I did notice some solemn faces. At the restaurant, the coffin was pulled out of the hearse and lifted three times to hearty cheers from the crowd. “Ernie K-Doe” got to go in first; then, Antoinette K-Doe was taken into her brightly-painted restaurant for the very last time. A well-dressed man then stood guard at the entrance, and the rest of us milled around outside, even as the musicians finally took a break.

Thirsty now, I went around to the other side of the restaurant to see if could buy a bottle of water and came upon a colorful, crowded garden, filled with flowers in purple and yellow bathtubs and a shopping cart parked at one end, decorated with Mardi Gras beads. A small dried-up Christmas tree stood atop the cart. I noticed a number of plant beds, displaying colorful flowers, many of which were not real--and underneath my feet, patches of green carpeting unfolded everywhere.

For a fleeting, disorienting moment, I had no idea where I was—and how I had found myself there. Like Alice, had I indeed fallen down a wondrous hole? And when I came back to my senses, I realized that I had forgotten yet again, as I would over and over that afternoon, about mortal endings, now obscured by a fervent celebration of a fascinating life. And that was precisely the point of all this merriment, I thought, as I caught a gentle smile from the woman in purple Babydoll costume and then slowly made my way back to my friend. Behind me, someone started up a soft tune on a trumpet--yet another reminder that day, of course, that life inevitably goes on.


[A new version of this piece will appear in the April issue of Wild River Review with additional photos. Please look out for it.]

Tea, Winter Friend

"Ecstasy is a glass full of tea and a piece of sugar in the mouth." -- Alexander Pushkin

Cropping Sentiments from Sierra Leone

In “The Development of Sierra Leone Writing,” an essay [Eustace] Palmer wrote in 1975, he finds it puzzling that Sierra Leonean artists, a small crop of intellectual elite of the 1950s and 60s, did not display a strong sense of African consciousness, a trait he had discovered in the work and impulses of artists such as Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye. Because the krio community identified more with the British colonizers (in their eyes their liberators from slavery) than with the indigenes of their new country, the community, not surprisingly, produced an artistry that reflected its sentiments.
--Iyunolu Osagie, "Theater in Sierra Leone," forthcoming from Africa World Press


Today, I am proofing a collection of five popular plays from Sierra Leone, edited by Iyunolu Osagie--it's a beautiful, short volume of emotive, thought-provoking breadth.


[Photo of Freetown, Sierra Leone]

The Politics of Imagining, Subversively and Otherwise

No doubt, I remain an avid reader of the works of Bessie Head and those who critically engage her novels. See the highly academic work, _Living on a Horizon: Bessie Head and the Politics of Imagining_**, by Desiree Lewis, one of my very own authors. A fairly recent article in African Studies Review (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4106/is_200804/ai_n27997181/pg_1) underscores not only the subversive relevance of Bessie Head, but also the beautiful critical mind of Lewis herself.

**I've also been informed that the book has been nominated for an award in South Africa. We await even better news.

Reality, Altered Negatively