Three chis to an Okwonkwo

With Smitta  Smitten

Last Friday, Chinua Achebe, modern Afrika’s first great novelist, passed away. The trybutes have been pouring in, all talkin’ about watt a great novelist Achebe was — which is true. And how he passed on at the flowering of the pwomise of his youth, which dude, @ 82, just ain’t true!

Thing is, no one seemz to recall or even know that Chinua waz a poet too.

So on this Good fridae, I’ve decided to create n dedikate one poem to the great man … then throw in some of my oriji ones just so Bomu Fo toiz on April holidays can kumbuka how cool Lit can be, anyhoo; and not just the ‘meeehhh’ of boring personas:

Poem I:  Achebe in Africa

Achebe plays with dragons at three, and later tells us mythical tales of Ibo fabulosity. He formed a bond with the dragons before he was born.

Achebe, where were you when we went to Lamu, where the sea sits still, like a glass of whisky?

At the British museum, you were more donkey than dragon, hard-slogging, with Mandela-like eyes. In Africa, during the wildebeest migration, thousands, perhaps millions of these thundering beasts,

Stampede across the savannah, and the rivers of the Maasai Mara, and the Serengeti, running rogue, across a croc, lying in ambush, underfoot.

Below hoof!

It behove you to stride around that circle of fire, breathing fire, like a dragon.

In Lamu they have a festival now,

In which grass-thatched skirts on little girls, keep tearing around their waists.

‘A man may be destroyed but not defeated,’

said Hemingway, writing about snow leopards on Kilimanjaro. You thought of grey wolves, brown bears and green dragons, and intro’d us, to the arcane world of the arcadia. You wrote poetry in the middle of the trees and those poems were best read in the dead

Of a St Petersburg white night, with its unending sunlight, or under the cosy canopy of an Abedare forest.

Chinua Achebe welcomed us all with a bowl of yam foo foo; and a calabash,

Gourd-full of illegal Okwonkwo brew.

We will form an Afro-jazz band, and call it ‘Achebe’. We will wear ‘Bob Marley’ T-shirts, not smoke dope, drink lots of Vodka, eat crisps. We will breathe in the fire you breathed out; Chinua, then exhale what is left of you, so the planet may share what we had of you,

Chin up! We will play with all your chis,

 

Till the day breaks.

Poem II: W…XYZA

At the end of the school term,

After the ‘Monopoly’ mornings and before the ‘Wanted’ beatings in the play ground, that settled semester long scores…………..

There was the grim reading of the report form order scored starting from ‘Number One’ to the most daft,

In the primary school pecking order.

Always at the top ‘Wandera’, forever flying. The academic bendera in flying colours and then — ‘Mbato, Mochama, Achieng,’ — with Wanjohi, always the fifth ‘W’ in the whys and where’s four?

 

And then, finally, always the same three names lying at the bottom of the bin alternating rubbish like mulch ‘Waithaka, Zimbo, Ayayo’; or, ‘Ayayo, Waithaka, Zimbo’, or ‘Zimbo, Ayayo, Waithaka, the three Musketeers, fighting the akademic relegation trap door — and the threat of the menial future that awaited them.

 

-Mayhap one day I’ll role down a car window, and the maize vendor will be Ayayo. Or, I’ll hoot at a slow car, infront of our Wish, and the mkokoteni handler will be Zimbo. Or one night a thick thug will hit me with a fimbo, and before the night watchman blows the final whistle,

and I’m shot dead for having recognised the assailant,

my last word, delivered with, incredulous astonishment,

 “WTF? Waithaka?”

Poem III: Asante: Marco Polo, does not require Sun Tan

In the attic of the neurotic my gal Chechislavia, sang to the fringes of a kid’s DVD, detailing every lyric in her young amyglada, la-dee-da,

That, being young, recorded every last clef of the experience, and so, the more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seemed to last. This is why, one night in Venice, looking back over her shoulder from the corner

Of a gondola, she will remember — Amy II arriving in Italy at the Airport Marco Polo. Coveting the life of an intellectual, unwilling to be an explorer — not willing to die alone in a dark corner of Russia a la Livingstone… The poet is finally ready to atone, turn to salt, turn to stone,

Recall Amy and Caroline, and the way,

that night in nineteen ninety nine

Sharon Stone in ‘Silver’ turned us on.