Ko Ko Ko Kongí ò! | by Oyin Oludipe

for Wole Soyinka, poet, dramatist, barman

You must set forth at dawn—but
Kongí, must you? That wilderness
Of mist, of stamens fissured in
Lacquered dregs embrace you
As woodsmoke. How vile is the warp
When it is done—strange camaraderie of
Shadows, and weed-fingers drawn from
Vow to grain, to stalwart furrows
On your teeth, a veil of execration
Around your mane. Name? Ah no!
Syllables lurk beneath the anvil of gods.
Sage cadences of that sort break
The squalid tongue—but Kongí, must you yours?

For your tongue is gold
Kongi, your tongue is gold,
Whose crescent glow round the realm,
Salt to withered stars, turning rafters
Lodged in the armpit of a bygone rot.
Your tongue is light, cosmic dare,
A roar of drums upon whose echo
Our multitudes drift, decades lacerate
As weary foretaste to the death we bear
To bugle wonders for a “third world thud”!

Ko ko ko, Kongí ò! The door is stiff
As my shock, which perhaps is yours also.
Stiff? Stiff. Why? Each rap recalls,
Unearth past heaves from your chest
And I cannot bear to watch it dance
From this open air alone—ko ko ko—
Let libation from an alien horizon
Collide your eaves, bartering torment
With bold infinitudes of a regal dawn.
Let palm shreds, a nation’s music, quiet
Satiation from succoured cavern of bones

As this gorge, grimly gauged, yet clay
To the touch of fingers, deft as severance,
As tentacles of voice, as the truth…
Alas Kongi, for a renaissance, we
Enthrone you saint of shapes,
Guardian of troves, unbidden,
Doling their pity by the wait…
I do not dare to think tomorrow is
Abode for the estranged.

Ko ko ko, Kongí ò!
I merely await your glance
Time appoints you priestly sage,
Imhotep of our season, shut of breath but—
Unseen are the pliant shoulders, grime on wrists.
Their ache is the flutter of memories—behold
Eyes in awe from this enclave’s delirium
While rites recede to grey waters

Still, Kongí recedes not,
Whose soles wield blisters
To the weathered mount of truth,
Whose night-webbed brows have cast
Twilight’s tepid trance upon a veil
Of human sufferance, rage and gore,
The rift and midnight rave even as
Ages fell and lineages tell

But—yes—the fall never bent
Your world. I know your heart
Sweetly spawns as webs respun
On dawn’s epiphanies, borne in tapestries
Of seasons, of visions against
A dogged decree of decay…
Why must you set forth? The human breath
Of things? A morning feet plowing
Life’s seamlessness? Whisper, Kongí
This door; is it your deliverer?

Ko ko ko, Kongí ò!

Winds | by Oyin Oludipe

After Wole Soyinka's "Ploughshares"

Mañes Rubio

This is against all fierce obsessions of ideology, the murderous demeanour of a ruthless incarnation. They are winds of our modern decay.

A vibrant arc rages to bullet,

Rages arc bullet into winds

In fears from bullet and rage

And winds enslave, and winds unearth the heave

Of futile rites, winds exalt

The gory feast of throats, exhume

Concealed hate as foolishly sprung.

Winds hoist proud voices of folly,

Fury leap of urea conceit, track demise

In repute, prescribe on lichen-earth

Of vain blood. Winds may warp

In strange litany, pray sanctions from

Ethereal lust – an eye for a myth

Mourning loss in spite, graveyards

For a mass crusade – the consolation

Of a silent table is broken by thirst

On pillage wells.

And winds enchain, and winds enact peals

Of accord, winds deform

Paths of a lost traveler.

WS80: One Hasty Photorama

Today flagged down the count! Home to a series of activities to venerate Kongi's ideals — in a fair of talks and oils — part of the 5th edition of the annual Wole Soyinka International Cultural Exchange Programme finally climaxed into a plethora of perfomances and exhibition-viewing at the Cultural Centre, Kuto, Abeokuta.

 

Warped in a long organized blend of essay contests, stage plays and advocacy lectures, there is a sparking essence to the revel. It is this: since ever, Soyinka has been performed than merely admired!

At Herbert Ogunde Theatre Hall, children spilling panegyrics

Today, well, I took it upon my 'burdened' self to chop out three hours for a quick appearance at Kuto. What I met was a brief phase of the big moment. Unfortunately, I did not meet The Man. The Man was 'in his forest'...

I would later hover round the portrait-festooned corridors, share public thoughts on the celebrant, enjoy a few short stage presentations and have perky small conversations with some of 'em high school essay finalists. . And afterwards, exiting, have the nicest shortest time I could ever had longed for in a season of side-tracks!

 
Here are few photos from the hastened experience. 
  

The '80 Children of Soyinka': High School WS Essay Contest Finalists

Who is this Eniyan?: Canvass Concept by Lanre Tejusoso, mirroring the intricacies of the diversity of humankind

Jamaica's mighty poet, Mutabaruka (left). He came barefooted!

Oh please! :) Dude hardly even pronounces selfie rightly *tongue out*

Happy Birthday, Pa kongi
Like tendril dew, live long

Beautiful Lines From Aké

So on a tepid morning, I am rereading Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters, feeling dumb and stupid, again. A futile nerve to seep through those thunder-phrases. That such enrapturing volume could, in no time, take on a bellicose repute stuns the more. I'm saying to myself: oh the thrill is in the attempt.

Tomorrow, I am staring at his Years of Childhood. The book is full of attractive earlies, of the transparency. There is a simple patchiness in it, the one a child's chaste memory spawns. It is unsuspecting, luminous and promising. It allows anyone in. It allows me in.

Film adaptation set for release this year on the Laureate's birthday. Voice-over narration will be by Soyinka

Much of Aké is exotic — one cosmic fastness of idioms and songs and Egba food, customs and rituals — as is the discoveries that ensue, that enchant. Sometimes trivial, others yet rhetorical, that journey into the child adventures of the brilliant bearded Laureate gets exciting as you know that young Wole was infact an addict incurable of tin Lactogen milk, a severe daydreamer, walked miles alone to a next town following the festive voices of a marching band, and almost went eye-less when once he ran into the "upward stroke of a cutlass", the day "blotted out in a flush of redness."

You would later discover also the brave child when he takes part in a snake hunt. The untamed when he declares the intent to marry the "most beautiful goddess in the world" Mrs Odufuwa and become a pastor. The humane when he's most startlingly saddened by the death of little sibling Folasade. The wilful when he confronts an Isara chieftain and says: If I don't prostrate myself to God, why should I prostrate to you?

Much of Aké reads like poetry. Much of it is lyrical and much of it tells you nothing in particular and yet tells you everything! Below are some of its beautiful excerpts I have come to relive in my head from time to time.

 

"On a misty day, the steep rise towards Itoko would join the sky. If God did not actually live, there was little doubt that He descended first on its crest, then took His one gigantic stride over those babbling markets — which dared to sell on Sundays —into St Peter's Church, afterwards visiting the parsonage for tea with the Canon."

"Even the Baobab has shrunk with time, yet I had imagined that this bulwark would be eternal, beyond the growing perspectives of a vanished childhood."

"But the walls have retained their voices. Familiar voices break on air, voices from the other side of the rafters."

"This guava tree had an affinity with the rainy season, nothing really tangible, except that it did not seem to be itself in the rainy season. Under brooding clouds it performed the double feat of existing yet retreating into an inner world of benevolent foliage spirits, moistly filled with a crisp vitality, silent yet wisely communicative. It was also without time."

"A man cannot argue with his soul. Ibanuje, ko m'agba, ko m'omode."

"And then Sorowanke's stomach began to swell. It grew bigger and bigger and Sorowanke talked less and less, even at night, sitting on her haunches among the roots, drawing deeper and deeper into the shadows. No longer ranting to the universe as she was wont."

"Change was impossible to predict. A tempo, a mood would have settled over the house, over guests, relations, casual visitors, poor relations, 'cousins', strays — all recognised within a tangible pattern of feeling — and then it would happen!"

"Bukola knew how to be silent. Even when she spoke, she transmitted a world of silence into which I fitted. She picked up pebbles and weighed them in her hands, thoughtfully. She ate as if she ate with other people. I watched her intently, seeking something that would answer barely formed questions. She glided over the earth like a being who barely deigned to accommodate the presence of others. With her, I found some peace"

"The file of solemn weeping women and their stiff companions broke formation and spilled over the streets in ecstatic dance. . The women's lungs were the more powerful, pumping energy into the singing without diminishing the manipulations of their buttocks"

Aké is a memoir of an African childhood from Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian novelist, playwright, and poet Wole Soyinka. He turns 80 on the 13th of this month. To get a PDF, EPUB, EBOOK or AUDIOBOOK, visit this link 

Abipa, Are the gods to Blame?

Rotimi's plays are full of rewards for the seeker of history patterns that elevate consciousness. Collage from scattered pieces of time.

Ah Ola Rotimi, that mind arrests. After The Gods Are Not To Blame, I was, for some days, going to displace Jero's Metamorphosis as a favourite play. Of course, I couldn't!

Photo by Sunmola Adegbenga

But you see, as far as world history is concerned, I believe the problem of man has always been man himself.  And although the eccentric Aristotle would think actions - and not character - the pivot of all human tragedies, till this day, something continues to strike me as a vague notion that it is while men are drunk with the vainglory of the present that they really fully exhume the gory decays of the past. Obsession, appetite, spillage. Something like that.

In Soyinka's Idanre, it is the elders of Ire who visit the god of war, Ogun himself to crown him as generalissimo of their clan (even though it ends up with them being slaughtered by the very god they enthroned as ally). And in Rotimi's Kurunmi, it is the people of Ijaiye who massage Kurunmi's war-shoulders to a fight with enemy-towns, a hundred over.

Odewale, the prophesied son of doom comes a year after Idanre is published. It was through this book that I first became acquainted with Oedipus' tale. What really stricks me about it now is the title Rotimi chose. 

 
Like any deeply original work is wont to, the play could communicate more than one meaning. One could tread the plot on a cause-effect notion of bereavement, that all tragic ends are a cycle of conscious denials against the caution of time, the oracle of mankind, and a human forgetting of that principle.

The misfortune that befell Kutuje took its turn after the coronation of Odewale as king by either Odewale or the people, without consulting the gods. In our days we make same conclusions when we make people who have helped us come through storms as Lord over our affairs.

Come to think of it, was it really bizarre for Odewale to have only acted original, being the typical insecure warlord in history, who clenched the gourd of power till it ruptured? I had even asked my literature teacher why, in the story, the gods - if they knew what Odewale meant to the future - still allowed his passage into the world of humans.

It reminds me of Abiku. The wandering child returning to torment his mother. Such as Odewale, only that he is not coming to torment with the sadness of death but to lay with his mother, there is a parallel essence to its signifying the rolling boulder of war and ruin which cannot, in time, unwind!

Abipa, I was drawn to his person. "Born to Kill". Sometimes, I wish I could encounter him in a dream and ask: how did it feel to become your own murderer in all your own innocence? Like mankind, after the war to the war after. I would imagine him replying:

Vain are the sun's sad songs

Vain earth's shiver, full of evil rites

Vain are cowries at my toe

Vain the cavern's arid throat

Shut, as years, drown

In sheaves of dark viper rein

Once and a tumbling path

Dirge, dawn, feast of passage

Vain grows finger of light

To track a skein of life through

Wine-scented tunnels, endure memory

On crossroads at the hunt

The knot is pardoned with retreat

And aged hairs of the wind

Breed ghost anthem, death tongue

To a vigil of seasons change

Must I grope for spells and fumes

For starlit cries of pulsing lust?

Abipa may not contest

Scars, retract ancient thirst

To drink the rain of ruin

So when this shrewd wind 

Throws me where I came

Know - the warmest cave was mother's