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| SPM PUBLICATIONS Poetry. Fiction. Drama. | ||
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Afam Akeh
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| LETTER HOME& BIAFRAN NIGHTSISBN 978-0-9568101-5-1
There is the sense in this work of an involved and inclusive poetry, revelling in the humour, play and beauty of experience but also revealing moments of heart-rending loss and unfulfilment… a sense of poetry as story, constructing meaning and plot from the connected roles and all-significant affairs of its staged players. The poems go beyond their detailed representations of dislocation, personal and collective conflicts, to point a determined finger at the fragile moments and relationships which enact them. There is here not so much faith in the untainted breath as assurance in the possibility of recovery. In the cast of vulnerable human – and occasional animal – characters we soon recognise the dog across our street or someone we know. We catch glimpses of our own dramatic and unsettled lives.
1970
And you the child saw that change had come, the adults like children bouncy with wellness, hugging and shouting ‘Happy survival! Happy survival!’ Folk, singing all the time. What else could it be but that bread was back. Life could eat without guilt, school as before the convoys passed and everything changed. Boom! Bang! Hunters saying it with guns, saying yes to hope, but nothing fired in anger, no one bleeding.
Families festive with homecoming, life retold as fable. A time of journeys and reunion. You heard… So-and-so has been found. So-and-so is coming home. My son! My love! Feed him. Clothe her. He needs a shave. She’s got lice. It’s the tapeworm eating his food! Give them time, people, give them space… Markets alive, the first fishes swollen with history. People fearful of fat fishes, wondering which fallen soldier they ate to grow so large. And all that before the season of rains.
Then the laughter went. And you the child saw that change had come again, people keeping to themselves, not telling. Even the children were no longer children. Too much memory, some said, the dead returned to steal voices and minds from the living. But the sun was up. People farming their soil. And you the child, with a catapult, risking snakes, setting traps, separating herb from poison, hiding under leafy boughs, aiming at the odd bird. In all that green loveliness focused on food.
Role Play
As in a cluttered shop or teenage lair, posters on wall, stuff every space, and in that muddle her confectioner’s smile. We came to hear this report she reads like a list. About a boy who knows he is not a chimp.
He does have a way with words, and is a flash with Minute Maths, but will not croak or hop like a frog, or let his inner monkey show. He hates to spread his wings, flap his fins. ‘I am not a scaly fish,’ he says, ‘not a car or choo choo train.’
We know a role he plays but won’t say. The boy at home is his teacher at school – the voice, the face, her confectioner’s smile. It is always encore when he says Sit still everyone. No noise. Now, let’s pretend we are crocodiles!
Letter Homea life in four journeys
One Where the largeness of the dream is touched by the smallness of one’s footsteps there is travel guilt shed like loose feathers or discarded skin.
The flight so far is full of fret, this island a perch for many birds, home of sorts to the travel worn, storied swallows in transit, between inclusion and exclusion, as spoiled for options but without choice.
I list losses, claim gains, in places where memory is always loud, between the present and past elsewhere. One day grown is soon a decade, what was closest becoming distant, what assumes presence by its absence. The longing glows for the woman who was my beginning, and her man my familiar flesh. One thinks mostly of smells and touch, Spring on treetops, radio voices from a childhood of dream – their broadcasts through an uncivil war assurance that peace was English, life English as the rhymes one clung to, beyond the carnage hugging the promise of an English day.
And England is not unloved. To kiss the nipple of an English dawn is betrothal not betrayal, is memorial, the heart romanced, disarmed by birdsong.
Pies, ale, but also carnival. England is not only the English. Think of Summer blown across the seas, bringing the sounds of other climes, not only birds but also loss, the routes from which some come, bearing their gifts and so much grief, a vision of London distant from Trafalgar as the Trafalgar Square. Punt life, pub life, “inn-keeping with tradition”. Living on promise and Earl Grey tea, discounting day trips to the regatta, castles, races, football at the terraces… En-ger-laand! En-ger-laand! That fabled land and the other Englands.
Tropical feelings wrapped in winter wool, perfecting manner, decoding conversation, language milked to the bare teat for meaning, laughter in all its vices, what is not said saying all.
To the weather then those who care, to safety in rains and heavy coats, lightning flashes over Dover muffins in mornings of cappuccino, that common refuge in weather talk.
But always an ear to distant voices, desire for primary colours, children playing, mothers calling, whole streets loud-speaking their wares, a carnival one grows an ear for. This dream unspoiled until waking to reports. Then broken people, lost causes, the stories one mulls over tea and croissant and tears.
Let it be told how the gecko seeking warmth behind shut doors, clambered to its new perch, dreaming of home in another life. That familiar dream a constant lure, many roads after still distant as at the beginning.
So sometimes you think you know, sometimes you know you don’t. That rhythm of journeys and beaten tracks, its plot of entrances and exits, the old woven tale and its sandwich lives bridging the distance between the pie and the burger,
history on the road wild at heart like travel piss, or leftovers in a transit camp, belonging to all and no one, the spit of all in it.
…
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Letter Home & Biafran Nights has been longlisted for the $100,000 NLNG Nigeria Literature Prize 2013.
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